Marvelously Mundane Adventurer

The stiff cloth my uniform was made out of was ill-suited to the oppressive heat and dryness of the desert. The starch felt like it was seeping out of the fabric and into my skin. It wasn’t supposed to be this long to travel. The calling for sandstorms had the majority of my brothers in arms uneasy to even start.

But we had to go. The higher-ups said it was critical for our home’s victory that we continued this mission, though they weren’t able to go themselves. They said our home was depending on it.

And now most of my brothers are lost.

Not even dead — just… lost. Their bodies swallowed by the sands. I hope at least some of them were lucky enough to get out, but I am hesitant to even wish for that hope for longer than a second.

I don’t have much in the way of supplies. My canteen can’t have more than a half-day’s worth of water in it, and even that tastes gritty from the encroaching sand. A compass is useless if I don’t know where I’m supposed to be heading, especially with its accompanying map long lost to the storm. A torn blanket, a piece of short metal making a sorry knife, and this journal.

A sorry state of supplies. We should have been allowed better preparations if this was as important as the higher ups were making it out to be to us. I wonder if they knew this was a Hail Mary of a mission, since none of them volunteered their own feet to take it.

FIRST VISION: Rolled 3; 3; 1; 2 At the Eternal Twilight, you arrive at an Antelope’s Carcass, a Scorpion, tough but ruthless, watches you.

I’ve run out of water. The canteen got a lot more sand into its seal than I originally thought. I tried to drink from it and got a mouthful of sludgy wet sand. Cruel.

I wonder if this is punishment from the gods for fighting amongst ourselves… if this is some way that they want to force us to behave. A cruelty for a cruelty.

The night is so cold.

Twilight didn’t seem to leave this place. Cold and sparkling — deep aubergine and Prussian blue, sand and stars glinting like well polished silver buttons. I feel tension sitting underneath my skin. A taut feeling, like my emotions are simmering just under the lid of a pot.

My feet continue to walk. The sweat in my once-shined boots squelching against my feet like my nightmares of the trenches when I was a younger man. I didn’t think I would ever have to feel that place again. I can almost hear the slosh of the muck in that filled those hellish lines as my feet continue to move forward.

The smell of rot hit my nose, and it took me a moment to realise it was not a memory.

How could there be a rotting antelope’s carcass this far out in these cursed sands? Was it another poor victim of the sandstorms’ cruel games? My eyes slide over the carcass that looks far too wet to for how dead the animal is. Its wide, dead eyes stared into mine, its face split.

I saw my friend’s face in the trench — hit dead by the cheap materials we had been given to reinforce the trench wall bursting into shrapnel we couldn’t have anticipated from an artillery shell. He’d been laughing and joking only a few minutes earlier, and in an instant those bright brown eyes were dull and bloody and wide from the surprise of death. I was covered in my friend. I couldn’t patch him back together. What use was I? What use was my fucking training if I couldn’t even do that? We weren’t old enough to see death like that, no grown man should see death like that, but certainly no teenager.

A small, jewel-green scorpion crawled out from inside of the carcass. Filaments of gold threading through its carapace, looping in constellations. It shone so bright in contrast to my dead friend — cutting through what I saw to show just the carcass of the antelope.

I didn’t notice I was sobbing until that first heaving of air.

The scorpion stared at me. I felt its eyes watching, and its tail twitching and ready.

There was no care for the lost life it was standing on. Squared up to me in a display of terrible survivalism. It lived and my friends died.

Wars like this weren’t for the the betterment of citizens, they were for those that didn’t know the rot of trenchfoot, of the slick inside your jacket that you can’t tell if it’s rain or blood or a festering wound finally weeping. They only thought of how to move chess pieces, they didn’t care if their machinations caused young men to expel their own lungs. They wanted glory without sacrificing anything of their own.

ROLLED 3; passed the Trial. Found water.

My eyes didn’t leave the scorpion until I was well past being able to actually see it. A soldier’s truce on no man’s land.

I thought it was another cruel trick of my eyes when I saw the spritz of grasses and the water. Gods, I was so thirsty. Carefully, my raw throat managed to whisper out a ‘thank you’ to whoever had allowed me to come across this water. My canteen carefully washed and refilled, water cupped in my cracked hands and held to my lips. I drank and I thanked the gods again.

Though I wished I could stay, I knew I had to keep walking.

SECOND VISION: Rolled 1; 1, 1, 3 In the Cold Night, you find The Jackal, cunning but opportunistic, climbing a Dead Tree

The night changed the oppressive heat of the desert to a bone chilled cold. It scared me. I remember the cold and the wet, I could feel it still sticking to my skin even though it was only a memory now. I wrapped the torn blanket tighter around my shoulders.

The gnarled dead tree stood solitary in the mass of flat sand. Bleached white as washed bones. It didn’t seem a place to rest, at least not to me.

Glinting eyes of a fire orange and coal jackal peering down from one of the natural resting spaces in the juts didn’t startle me as much as I expected. It looked unnatural just like the scorpion. My heart is being weighed in their eyes.

It wasn’t forcing the deadwood into a shape of its fancy, it was taking the situation it was given and making it work for it.

The coal colour of its fur spitting out from where I could see it nestled in the tree forced the memory of the soot and screaming machinery. It turned everything dead and grey in its path. Before this war, when I was just a young boy, I thought metal was always cold. It didn’t make sense that metal could be hot and screaming if it wasn’t the molten glow from the blacksmith.

Men and metal don’t mix.

But, I guess, we can only work with the situation we have. Our brothers can’t be lost for nothing, we can end with fewer limbs lost if we can find the right way to do it.

ROLLED 4; passed the Trial. Stars show the way.

Rhythmic blinking of the constellations above me caught my tired eyes — they were dragging my mind to follow them. This must be the way I need to be going. I must follow them.

THIRD VISION: Rolled 2; 4, 4, 4 At the Bright Sunrise, you see two Gerbils, nimble but weak, fighting amidst the a Dry River.

The light hurt my eyes. It was so unrelentingly bright, my eyes felt scorched inside their sockets. The pain stuttered my focus. I tripped into the desiccated river before I ever saw it.

Two small, enraged rodents were fighting each other. Screaming at one another and trying to rend blood from the other.

I felt white-hot anger — hotter than the baking sun and the piercing spit of the sand. Violence seeped to the marrow of my bones. Don’t they know they’re on the same side? Shouldn’t they want to work together to survive in this forsaken place? Why don’t they understand they’ll both die killing each other and the vulture will eat them both the same?

My hand shot out and grabbed one of the screeching things. Enraged and disgusted, they both were going to be ending their fighting, and I’m making them have the same result.

And for that, I am ashamed.

ROLLED 2; failed the Trial; wounds started to fester.

My steps faltered when I was able to pick myself back up from where I’d collapsed. I felt the tear of my skin inside my boots and I knew without checking that my lower legs were festering. The telltale burn was all I needed as a reminder of the fear I’d felt when the murky water in the trench had managed to seep through cheap cardboard soles and cloth and the mix of death and living mess seeped into the bleeding punctures on my legs. Infection wasn’t a gamble of ‘if’, it was one of ‘when’.

I’m not ashamed to say that I wept.

Wet, keening sobs were forced out of my body when I came upon the Horizon’s Monolith and collapsed in front of the slick obsidian. Figures glinted inside of the monolith, and my bloodshot eyes could not look away from them. I couldn’t even force myself to blink as sand whipped into my pained eyes. I could feel the figures inside the obsidian talking but I couldn’t hear them.

I could feel my heart rend from my chest to be weighed, even though it stayed beating fast and heavy inside my ribs.

Was I enough, in the end?

PASSED 2/3 TRIALS: You wake up in your world, having been rescued with a renewed conviction. Describe what you seek to teach people

I startle awake, a guttural scream ripping out of me. In an instant my thrashing body is held down by my brothers, and their familiar voices help me to calm.

Seeing their mottled faces, young men with the weight of horrors they never should have had to shoulder etched into their skin, I scrambled my hands to touch them. They held my hands, they rested their hands on my body where they could reach, giving that reassuring pressure as I clung to them like they were going to disintegrate if I lessened my grip even an ounce.

The fear that grips my heart from those machines will not leave me. I can’t let more be fed to them. I hope my cowardice manages to stop another from being consumed.