Bones and Plan

“I'm sure they are fine”, Wanderer assumed.

Wanderer snapped out of their musing quickly, the excitement of seeing the peculiar creature with a better view causing them to discard their wonderings.

Scooping up a receptive Emio and placing them on their shoulders, a action which elicited a pur from the herbal creature, Wanderer strode the hundred or so steps to the opposite edge of the mesa.

A hot wind swept up as the Golem looked out over the cliff, the faint songs of the small, red birds echoing out from far away.

The sun had risen to its place in the morning sky, having completed its domination of the blue sky as the many moons had fallen well and truly below the horizon.

That same blue sun cast an azure light onto dark sands below, causing it to glint and sparkle under its influence and reveal its glass-like nature.

The great golden cities in the distance were as secretive as ever, their high walls blocking any attempt at prying, yet when Wanderer spied their hardest at the city closest to them, they could make out small, colourful patches of cloth surrounding the walls.

“What are they?”, Wanderer thought.

In answer, their Spirit drew their attention to something which was only barely visible, even to their enhanced vision.

There, along the roads that connected the cities to the rest of the world, tiny black dots slowly moved along them, sometimes going through a great gate that was just out of view of Wanderer, sometimes stopping at the colourful pieces of cloth.

For a moment, the Vessel was perplexed by the scene, until they found their realisation.

“Those are humans” They realised.

it was a shocking thought, before they had thought the cities to be quite small, the lack of perspective in the dark sands deceiving them, yet if the scale of the tiny black dots was anything to go by, there were likely tens of thousands living in each and every one of the walled abodes.

It was now that the whole desert was put into perspective, before the Golem thought that everything would be a short trek from place to place, yet if the cities were of such immense size, that meant that everything else was both much larger and further away than they thought.

“How big must the volcano be, then?”, even the highest towers of the walled citadels were dwarfed by the towering height of the volcano, the angular structure rising high into the sky.

Now that they realised it, other signs of their skewed perspective began arising to their senses, one being the many tents they saw set up along the various roads spread out across the sands, which cut through the rising dunes in uncanny straight lines.

The tent Wanderer had personally inspected, the one from which they had taken the flare-bow, had been quite large, built to comfortably house entire caravans full of people.

Yet those very same tents, of the same make and size dotted alongside the roads of the desert, seeming tiny in comparison to the vastness of the world, fading to miniscule dots on the horizon.

For a long moment, Wanderer was locked in the sudden comprehension how vast the world was.

They never truly knew it in the protected valleys of the forest, the mountains around them blocking far too much of their vision, even from their view in the boughs of the evergreen they did not truly understand it, as skewed as their scale was in their early life.

But now the Golem’s mind had widened, able to understand and comprehend more, now they realised a all important fact, one that filled them with both trepidation and inconceivable joy.

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“I could explore for my entire life and never see it all”, they knew.

It was a daunting feeling, that the world was so vast and full that one could explore forever.

Wanderer did not know how long they could live, let alone how long they would when they took their near constant life-or-death experiences into account, but all of that mattered little in the face of what there was to discover.

It was frightening to the Vessel, that their self given purpose may never be fulfilled, yet their Spirit felt otherwise.

Their Spirit bounded within Wanderer as they watched the Vessel come to the same realisation they had came to a long, long time ago and excitedly offered a different viewpoint so that the Golem may share in their joy.

It is indeed impossible to fulfil their shared purpose, but exploration is not about reaching a goal or place, its about everything in between, its not about getting to the shining cities in the distance, but appreciating every little plant and animal and sight and sound that Wanderer could find on the way there.

The only way for the Vessel to find a true, constant sense of fulfilment, their spirit decreed, was to never fulfil their goal at all, to constantly find joy everywhere they looked

In truth, Wanderer’s trepidation did not instantly evaporate, as perhaps it once would have when they were younger and their mind was more simple, but none the less, their Spirit’s words were sensible and helpful, and they took solace in them.

With their mind eased, the Golem suddenly remembered the very reason they had climbed to the mesa in the first place, to inspect the strange creature they had seen from so far away.

Focusing back onto the world around them, the Vessel stared out to the very edge of the horizon and inspected the anomaly.

They soon found that the creature that caught their interest was not truly a animal, at least, not anymore, what the Golem saw instead was a great pile of bones.

Like spires of great castles, massive, sun-tanned ribs stuck out of the dark sand, contrasting harshly against the black dunes.

Around those great towers, other smaller bones rested in the desert, from skulls to fingers to spines, calcified remains of all kinds stuck up from the sands, each of them at least partially buried.

The owners of those bones were as diverse and unusual as one could imagine, from giant birds to colossal insects, species one would never expect to be in such close proximity to each other shared the graveyard as their eternal resting place.

It shocked the Vessel, what could have possibly happened in this place that all those animals would die in the same place.

Even a query to their Spirit provided little answers, the guide having little more to talk about than abstract guess work in almost any of the phenomena that the strange desert possessed.

Peering just a slight bit harder, Wanderer noticed yet another of the large, quarry-like holes that were beginning to be so ubiquitous with the desert, yet unlike those that could be found deep in the sands, these particular shafts were significantly smaller and more narrow.

Where as the mines that were visibly pock marked at seemingly random across the dunes, which tended to be incredibly wide and shallow, the man made cavities in amongst the ancient graveyard were closer to deep pits in the ground, which had long, winding slopes gradually leading out of them.

Wanderer assumed there were likely people down there, yet it was simply too far for even their vision to reach, which once again brought into question the scale of both the pits and the great skeletons around them.

Excitement grew within the Vessel at the thought of witnessing the great monoliths of bone, but even in their excitement, they knew that rushing to see the graveyard would mean they left behind many other exciting things to explore.

They puzzled the problem for a moment but quickly came up with a simple solution.

“I will slowly make my way to the graveyard, and stop at everything that interests me”, They resolved, “After all, there is no rush”.

Happy with their resolution, and feeling that there was little else to inspect from their viewpoint, they turned their mind to the next issue.

“How am I supposed to get down?”, Wanderer contemplated, while they could certainly attempt to climb down, the path back down was perilous, it being a great deal more difficult to safely downclimb than to climb up something.

They turned the problem over in their young mind before eventually, their vision rested on Emio and they were possessed with a brilliant idea.

The Golem thought back to when they had first entered the canyon that surrounded the mesa, how Emio had so easily picked them up and hoisted them in the air, and although the memory itself was full of fear and anger, from it a plan formed.

There was no need to risk a perilous climb down to the floor if the verdestry could simply lower them down.

And so, with a heart full of excitement, the Golem quickly began signing their plan to their companion.