desert

It must have been the fifth day in the endless, swirling desert since I was called to the war effort. One could never know in this wretched place, where the stinking heat and the deleterious sun never falls. Even the relief of foul winds blowing from the hives came all too scarcely. There was nothing to do but continue on into the spiraling madness of the sands’ endless hissing.

It was some three days prior that dead-eyed, pallid one shambled across the sands, silent save for the gentle hissing of his serpent that would slither about his shoulders to stare hypnotically at those desperately trying to quell the brood, before returning to sink its dripping fangs into the supple flesh of his nape. For those of us who hadn’t succumbed to the madness of the sands, the neverending butchery of sinewy thorax and slimy carapace, it was simple to see—his lost gaze into the middle distance, the subtle quivering of his flesh—that he was no longer a man, but was instead slave to the snake. All the time it was inoculating him, flushing his veins with its hypnotic poison until free will left him, until he was nothing more than a corpulent automaton.

Unfortunately, so many of us had already submitted to the dementia of this scorched wasteland. Too many had already breathed the putrid vapors of the hives, trapped in the darkness of their depths being driven further into insanity waiting eternally for the cartilaginous sphincters within to ejaculate another undulating larva to slaughter. In their madness, they saw the snake-man as a god ascended—though his mind was perished, he held dominion over this strange land. They craved his madness, perhaps because it was preferable to their present state of derangement. Soon, they became cultists of that wicked apparatus, inviting the serpents to poison them, until the ambient droning of the brood that had become usual for us was overpowered by the sonorous hissing.

Sssssssss…

I was fortunate to never have been tasked with the labor of culling the immutable brood. I was sent to the stinking sands, but never called upon, so my charge was naught but survival, an arduous burden in such an aberrant landscape. I spent the perpetual days seeking mammoth burrowing worms, bringing my blades to them as they surfaced out of the dusty earth. I would carve their lissome flesh and consume it—a disagreeable, forbidden sustenance—before retching most of it back up in foul, rubbery chunks. It was all I could do to live, wander the labyrinthine sands, consume what I could of the worm, and rest under the bones of some long-dead colossus until I hungered again.

Only once, my lunacy caused me to wander inadvertently to one of the great droning hives. But it wasn’t the brood that inspired terror within my heat-addled mind and starving body—it was the snake-men. It only took one glance from behind the waxy lipid stalk, weeping with bile, that I took shelter behind once I became cognizant of where I was. There were hundreds of them, formerly men, all gathered and impassively slaughtering each other in the opiatic stupor of the accursed venom. I reasoned that perhaps the serpents had taken too many and needed to cull their engines of the damned. But at that moment, I was noticed. As one, the pallid snake-men turned to me and barreled out of the hive as the hissing reached a diabolic crescendo.

Sssssssss…

I narrowly escaped to return to my anguished gathering. Mindlessly I hunted the odious worms for a food I could barely eat in a land so wretched, one is forced to wonder if torturous starvation would be more favorable. But now, another looming hopelessness weighed heavily upon my already frail will to continue—the inevitable omen of the snake-men as the serpents continue their abhorrent proliferation. I wouldn’t be long—instead of enduring the agony of the subtle hissing erupting from somewhere over the horizon, I would instead join the serpentine chorus.

Sssssssss…