/lit/ - Literature

Midway through his ascent he loses will, and lets his heavy head fall into the gravel. He no longer feels the searing heat of the sand. It could be cool soil, or even a grassy hill on a sleepy summer day...

Fear. He can smell it all around him in their nervous sweat. Fear. He can see it in their faces. Fear. He can hear it in their hushed whispers. Dark men, demons with rifles, pushing, prodding, herding them like cattle out of a white building. Distinctly alien; enemies. Now they're walking. He's jabbed in the side by a rifle. Fear, all around him there is only sheer, muted terror. The specters line them up shoulder to shoulder. Now they're forced to kneel, knees knocked in by the butts of the rifles. A shot, a corpse thuds to the ground. Shot. No one is screaming. Shot. Closer now. Shot. He feels the cold steel pressed against the back of his head, and the world goes silent. No more shots. The lifeless body slumps forward, falling on its face in the grass.

Not grass. Sand. Once more in the ocean of fire the exhausted traveller finds it within himself to haul his weary body to the top of the next dune. He reaches the crest of the hill, hoping no longer for the end, expecting only bright fire.

The man stares blankly, his moment of remembrance only a few moments past already faded. In the sandy valley below he sees a huge ruin, half buried. A great dome stands tilted slightly on its side. Both sands, desert and time, have robbed it of its original austere white. One side of the dome is collapsed in, revealing a cavernous room inside once adorned with frescos, now long since scraped blank by time. Atop the great dome still standing tall a bronze woman holds a laurel wreath and shield in one hand, a sheathed sword in the other.

It's just another ruin.