DESERT

"Martha must be with the church," Lukas breathes, churning his words in his worry. "It's the only reason they would have kept her alive."

"St. Edmeus' Cathedral." Ethen, with deliberate strength, sounds out the name. A lost relic, a ghostly monument wreathed in tales of the Mother-Goddess, now reduced to rubble, dust, and echoes of whispered prayers.

"We can't chase the Deluge. It's gone and it won't be back for another few days." They pause to long after its gentle thunder, quieting into the wild. "It's another few days once we're back on it until Bryceton. We're literally as far away from that gateway town as we can get." Ethen grumbles, kicking at the sand.

"Yeah, that's the good and bad of the storm." Lukas echoes, a tired sigh wrapping around his words. "Stuck staring at this godforsaken desert. Who'd be mad enough to go through this?"

Ethen mounts his horse. "We might be." His voice is firm, resolute. "Do you think whoever picked up Mom waited for the storm to come around again?"

Lukas scans the revenant knowledge latent in them from the Deluge. "I don't think so." He deduces the rest. "We got reports that they were only days ahead of us. That means they must have traveled the cycle just before us. If they had taken the storm back around to Bryceton, that would mean they departed the Deluge and headed back, leaving Sideria just as we were entering.

"If they didn't, they would have been traveling through the desert opposite to the storm as we were in it. We probably passed by one another."

"We would have seen them traveling the opposite way, if they came through the Deluge as partial cover on their way back."

"We know people have successfully done that maneuver before."

"Right… but they didn't. We would have shared their experience, known it was them and Martha with them. They are on a covert mission; they avoided it entirely."

"But how?"

"Dunno. But if they can do it, we can too."

Ethen imagines the mercenaries' perspective of the storm, passing them in the distance, him and Lukas within it, oblivious to the distant cargo. "They are still days ahead of us". His words are like tar. "We have to close the gap, go against the grain, against the elements. Because we don't have a choice... not if we want to find Mom."

Lukas huffs a laugh. "You're right, Ethen. We got dealt a lousy hand, but it's ours. We gotta play it. At least we have the kickstart of the night." The trip along with the storm had lasted most of the day. A glittering ocean of stars were already visible in the highest points of the sky. Their hope is a pocketed gem, sparkling with the hues of the implausible, yet they clutch onto it, letting its glimmers of light guide them in contemplation back towards Bryceton. Capture water, the mana of their journey, clings onto their sand horses, bulging like unborn promises.

"The water." Ethen reminds both Lukas and himself of it, nodding to the swollen containers tied to their sand horses. "We're going to rely on that captured rain."

"Every last drop." Lukas pats one of the bloated containers.

They gaze at the relentless force of the desert before them, the cosmic cycle that has just swept past, leaving them standing on the precipice of impossibility.

The one choice presents itself at a blaring volume — a path that stitches into the fabric of death. Ethen and Lukas kick their anxious horses forward.

Ethen snorts. "We're really going to do this, aren't we? Walk into this endless sandbox, against the advice of every sane person in the village."

Lukas turns to look back at the dwindling outline of the settlement. "Yeah, we are, Ethen. For Martha. For us."

They make headway in the nascent hours of the night, but are forced to dismount and tent, the piercing cold rattling their bones, a fire needed to stay away its deadly bite. A sleepless night doesn't prime the wee hours of the morning favorably. Despite, they do not delay; every moment fights against their survival with the incoming heat of the day.

Soon, the dawn breathes fire into the sky, their silhouettes etching themselves onto the vast canvas of sand, stretching towards the uniform horizon. Horses strain under the waxing sun, their gait sloshing the canteens, sounding a song of survival. A baptism of optimism gilds their resolve, casting their path in an unreal shimmer of hope. Step follows step, a staccato plunging into the desert's hardened heart. By mid-morning, the heat devours their strength, evaporating the marrow from their bones. The horses' rhythmic panting becomes a glorified death rattle.

Midday pierces the desert's mirage, igniting the surface like a giant mirror, broiling them and their mounts. Sweat pours out of them but their clothes are still nearly dry in the furnace. They can almost make out a sizzle upon their skins. Each grain of sand is a mountain under the invariant sun, and are lifted into pointed needles when flung by an occasional breeze onto their faces. Once filled with plentiful life, the water skins sag like withered lungs, barely holding onto their last breaths of moisture. Horses falter, their legs sinking into the shifting ground. Ethen slumps in his saddle, eying the long draw of his horse's slow stride, its rubbery hooves defiling virgin sand, leaving indentions that he imagines rain filling with puddles.

Their optimism exsanguinates, the mirage of hope eaten by the terrain and the spotless sky. The horses cannot continue. With the last of the mounts' strength, Ethen and Lukas have the steeds' stand idle, so that the men may at least rest in their shade.

Sunset drapes a blessed shroud over the desert. The horses finally collapse, their terminal sighs absorbed by the dunes, the air in their lungs replaced by a trickle of windblown sand. "Good boy." Lukas eulogizes his steed. He strokes the mane of his dying horse, each pat a benediction. Ethen and Lukas plod on, their feet sinking into the grains that lick and lap at them as if sampling for taste. They are marooned on an endless ocean of gold, each crest a mockery of their poverty and accelerating dehydration. The horizon blurs; ground and sky no longer differentiable in the haze of their depleting oxygenation.

Ethen and Lukas look back in shared moments of second-guesses and regret; but no traces are left of their journey, no echoes of their valiant struggle, save for the felled bodies of their mounts. All that exists is the metric-less remainder of their path, no end in sight. Beneath the healing canopy of an evening star, their voices rise, muted and humid, filling the silence as though it were a chalice thirsty for meaning. "Mom…" Ethen's voice trails, a wisp of sound swallowed by the expanse of unyielding sand, always before them.

Lukas muses. "In another world... she could have led the church to its true purpose. A sanctuary." The Deluge had imparted to them an ancient understanding of impossibilities and potential truths. It was less outright knowledge and more proprioception, like how space already occupied by an object is considered less extant than if it were empty. There were no artful conclusions from the Deluge's import, but a deep-baked awareness of what could and just couldn't be.

Ethen nods, silent contemplation lulling his voice to a whisper. "But the church... it turned." His words are heavy with understanding. "It shifted, like the sand beneath our feet, morphing from the womb of enlightenment to a monster feasting on its disciples' lusts. Mom... she knew. She never knew enough to speak or act on it, but something about the dogma she was raised in never sat right with her. As it didn't with me. As it never sat right with you, Dad."

His father's gaze meets his, their shared understanding weaving a connection. "Looks like our dissent has killed each of us." They sit in silence. Lukas streams his remaining consciousness. "We are cyclical beings. Like the Deluge. We start in poverty; an absence of morality and humanity. Like animals, we do as our urges direct. There is an interim of enlightenment and humanity, where we contrast ourselves to the beasts. And then, beyond that, we are looped into the same coordinates as before, back to the same place on the circle, but at a higher strata now. In all our elevation, we are still subject to the same beast-like urges at those spots. The human soul... always caught between absence and surplus."

Ethen, delusional, hallucinating, becomes captivated by the image of his mother as a dancer on the precipice of the human psyche. "It's a dance on a razor's edge, isn't it? Too much, and you bleed into obsession; too little, and you're left hollow. She is trying to help fix what she made overwrought, and top-heavy."

Their words are a shared catharsis beneath the crimson veil of the desert light. Their voices, whispering through the cooling air, become cold hymns sung in tribute to their journey, an elegy for their fading hope, and a shared prayer for salvation in the parting mouth of death. Father and son sit, their bodies hunched, silhouetted against the dying embers of the day. The sun has tenderized them into submission, melted their sinew into butter; now the chill night will take their souls and preserve whatever is left like meat in a freezer for the animals to eat. The desert winds, merciless, scrape against their parched throats, turning their voices into raspy whimpers.

"Doomed, aren't we?" Ethen's voice is as threadbare as his pulse. The question hangs in the air, the unadorned truth resonating like church bells.

"Seems so, Ethen." Lukas responds, his words infused with a tranquil resignation. His eyes reflect the twilight's last gasp. Their captured water, once a life-affirming companion, has now become a ghost, its memory haunting their scorched tongues. Ethen's hand scrapes the hollow gourd, its emptiness uncaring.

"You know." Ethen begins, his voice breaking, "I never...never thanked you." His voice is a frail bird, falling, struggling against gravity.

"For what, Ethen?" Lukas asks, the weary creases of his face softening.

"For coming with me. For... for sharing your strength when I had none. For understanding." The admission radiates a refreshing sensation, a droplet more precious than water. Lukas reaches out, a blistered hand resting on his son's. "There's nowhere else I'd rather be, son. I should thank you. For letting me be your father, again."

The tendrils of darkness creep closer, a shroud painted with the last strokes of their waning consciousness. Their confessions, the distilled essence of a lifetime that should have been shared, percuss as synchronized heartbeats into the sand, their ears to the shattered ground, an audience to their weakening amplitude.

Lukas murmurs, his voice gated by eddies of sand and dust, his lips cracked. "Just remember... we have lived, loved, lost... we have dared to seek. That is all that truly matters. Your Mother would be proud."

Ethen instinctively reached for his own tears, to take them onto his lips, but he is overwhelmed. He bleeds his last drops into the sand from his lashes.

Their shared silence becomes a sanctuary. The desert night swallows their forms, their voices, their last shared moments, leaving behind agonal breaths, a pitiful testament to their misguided journey. The maw of death, yawning wide, embraces them, the silent dirge of the desert their lullaby.

As their vision blurs and the universe blots out to a mere pinprick of existence, a figure emerges from the periphery. Ethen's limp body is pushed belly-up by a walking stick; prodded, examined, measured. An oil lantern dances in and out of their consciousness. A wraith swathed in ivory — only eyes visible, equally as white, cold as winter moons — examines their faces close. Ethen knows these eyes. The world reels as he places them — a Merope, High Priestess Gracie's phantom.

...

Ethen wakes.

Darkness.

Sand shifting.

Wrapped in white.

Bound.

Silent screams.

Lukas.

Close.

Unseen presence.

His?

Her's?

The unknown third.

Brushing shoulders.

Can't move.

Drifting again.

Light pierces.

A horse's silhouette.

Moving.

Lashed to wood.

Can't feel legs.

Can't... think.

Sleep returns.

Wake.

Whispers.

"Bryceton."

Movement ceases.

New direction.

A touch.

Cold metal.

Riding... something.

Heavier darkness.

Sleep.

Steel beast.

No more sand.

Concrete growls beneath.

Muffled voices.

Men.

Women.

Stampede of sounds.

Familiar.

Darkness.

Memory stirs.

Home.

Buildings rise.

Mother's voice.

Void returns.

Heartbeats.

The steady rhythm.

Opacity.

Engine hums.

Silence.

Metal.

Clanging.

Stop.

Dragged.

Rough hands.

Cold floor.

Church?

Oblivion again.

Mother's name.

Murmur.

Cough.

"Martha."

Angelic.

Blood.

Unconsciousness gains ground.

The black tide reasserts.

Abandonment to the relentless pull.