Wind whipped over the sandy desert under a hazy teal sky riddled with heat waves and low lying clouds. The sand hills seemed to go on forever, interspersed only with the occasional rock formation, or rolling tumbleweed, stretching out until the fog of airborne sand caused them to fade away in the far distance.
At the base of one of these dunes, the sand rustled, shifting slightly. It moved again, and the world around it seemed to still in tension. More sand fell way into a growing pit, and then suddenly a hand burst through the sand. It reached out blindly, clawing for purchase and only finding more loose sand, yet slow but surely, the form of a young girl managed to claw herself out of the sand pit, heaving and choking on the small grains, which cascaded off her with every movement. Sand was crusted along her mouth and pressed painfully into her hands and matted into her messy pale blond hair. Even her clothes were coated in the small particles, the loose navy blue chiffon ripped and worn with sand trapped in every pleat and fold that draped across her small frame. She took a moment to recover her breath, unsure why she had been trapped below the sand. Glancing at her wrist, she paused as silvery threaded chains clinked and then faded away, falling beneath the skin. That was… she wasn’t really sure. She paused, leaning back on her hips, fine golden hair of messy bangs brushing against her nose with the movement.
Raising her gaze to her surroundings, she blanched at the vast desert. The sun glared overhead as her expression darkened. She had no idea where she was either! She scooped up some of the golden sand allowing it to fall through her hands like fine silk or beaded chains. It wasn’t a dream but then-- and if she didn’t know she’d ended up here, did she even know who she was?
She searched inside for a moment, waiting for the fog of her cognition to fade away, if only she could think clearly, still breathing heavily as sand scratched at her throat. She was… she was… Who was she?!
She struggled to her feet on shaky limbs, spinning around to desperately search the surroundings as if they held the key to her identity. She lifted a pale hand to shade her eyes, which flashed a rich blue as the sun hit them. Despite the frantic searching, her gaze caught nothing, and she sighed, defeated.
Running a hand through her hair, the girl mused on the situation. Confused, unsure how she’d gotten in this situation, and not even sure who she was-- it caused a lancing pain just behind her eyes, and she frowned as the frustration and uncertainty bubbled up and ached in her chest. Reaching down to rub at her chest, she paused as she felt the ridges of an old scar just below her collar bone. Craning her chin down, she stared at the mark and trailed her fingers over the harsh edges of the pale, strangely shaped scar: a sharp diamond shape with jagged edges fanning out like a starburst, right over the center of her chest.
A flash of golden thread tightened in her mind, and pain lanced once again through her head, even more sharply this time.
“Ugh!” she yelled, hand leaving her chest to press into her temple as if to rub the pain away.
Vague images flashed through her mind, a tall figure standing in front of her, tan skin and light hair, always in dark clothes but a bright beaming grin on his face. She knew that figure, she knew that man, she knew-- she knew he had betrayed her. She could remember him turning away, silhouetted in the moonlight, the looming figure of a man in golden armor and mask shaped like half of a skull standing with arms spread wide to welcome him. And she could remember the sharp pain of bleeding out, ichor turning into mortal blood as she watched him, hand clenched over the stab wound in her chest as he left. She had trusted him with everything and he had betrayed her, had killed her-- she thought they’d had a bond, that they would fight the world together, and yet--”
“Asteria!” The girl blinked as she finally registered the voice that had been ringing in her head for the past few minutes. It was deep, but feminine. “Asteria, are you listening now?”
“Eh?”
“Asteria, you need to travel north. Come find me. The na--”
“Who are you!” Asteria shouted into the wide planes of the desert as the voice abruptly cut out. Only silence answered and Asteria pushed down her frustration. Despite having most of her memories back, there were still glaring blank spaces in her mind, including how she’d ended up in the desert. Still, there wasn’t much else to do, and eyeing the direction of the setting sun, which had washed the sand in amber light, Asteria turned north, facing endless hills of ever shifting, sparkling sand, and placed her hands on her hips.
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Hiking up the hem of her dress, ragged as it was, Asteria began her march to an unknown location, to meet the owner of that mysterious voice, and to, hopefully, get some answers.
Days later, Asteria thanked the remnants of her divinity for the fact she hadn’t yet died from the lack of water or exhaustion. Even so, as she tread over the land that had flattened out and become an area of cracked earth and strangely skeletal bushes interspersed throughout rock clusters and formations, she was beginning to feel the fatigue wearing her down. She gulped past the scratchy dryness of her throat, and lifted up her long hair, as if that would relieve some of the endless dry heat. Grimacing at the feel of the sand caked to her scalp and tangled into knots, she started running a hand through it to ease some of the discomfort as her trek continued. She could feel the sun flush on her pale cheeks, and was beginning to struggle to keep her eyes open as her throat ached with a thirst that begged for water. She was beginning to doubt the journey, and for a second worried that she might have even imagined the voice.
“Hopefully not,” she muttered out loud, wiping off the sweat that was forming on her forehead. At least, she considered, frowning down at the sandy ground, the sun was setting once again and she always felt revived during the nighttime.
A sudden lump hidden under the sand caused her to trip slightly, and as she rightened herself, her gaze lifted up to the hulking form that suddenly filled the desert in front of her. Jolting backward, she stared at the huge skeleton, weathered bones poking out of the sand met in a colossal rib cage that blocked out the sky. It cast dark mottled shadows onto the ground, an imposing mass that despite its smallness in the vast desert, seemed to blot out sky as it loomed above. Dark crackles wrapped their way across the sand-weathered, yellowed bones, broken off chunks strewn across the landscape, jagged pieces poking up like the giant cragged teeth of gaping jaws opened to swallow the masses of sand.
Asteria gaped in wonder at the giant skeleton for a moment more, before walking forward under the rib cage, observing the dark tan of the aged bone, and the various cracks and missing ribs as the staccato pattern of shadows and sunlight danced across her face.
A sense of great unease filled Asteria’s chest as she stepped further within the skeleton, a tightness laying against her shoulders and an overwhelming sense of wrong and she paused as realization hit her-- this was a displaced soul. It wasn’t something she saw often, since something had to have gone wrong in the Fates’ plans for a soul to die or be born outside of the time it was destined to. Yet that specific brand of wrongness vibrated off the entirety of the enormous creature. She stepped up to its head, having finally traversed the whole creature, and gently laid a hand across its rostrum, feeling the smoothness of the sanded bone under her palm. Such a large animal dying well before its destined time was an unfortunate happenstance.
“How’d you end up here?” She asked the whale, empathetic as she considered how dried up she herself had become. A sea creature ending up in a place that was desert for miles and miles was almost as unusual as it being a displaced soul. Its death couldn’t have been natural, for both those reasons.
“Please allow me to send you to the stars where you belong,” Asteria requested of the whale as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, casting sudden shadows across the flat land. “I hope that you can rest peacefully from now on.” She closed her eyes, reaching inside for her divinity. “May your memory be eternal, αιώνια η μνήμη.”
A navy mist speckled with the glow of thousands of stars and comets fell over her as she murmured the funeral prayers, and in front her glowed a small collection of stars in the shape of a whale. As she opened her eyes they seemed to glow with the same light of those stars for a single moment as she gazed above her at the humongous form of the whale, swimming through the stars like they were deep and cool water. It sang in happiness as the spirit swam past, clicking and sending out pulsing vocalizations as it reveled in freedom from its long decayed corpse. Asteria smiled as the ripples of light through water fell over her, and reached up a hand. The whale trilled as it came over, allowing her to brush her fingers across the same part she had patted on its skeleton earlier.
Flashes of the whale’s memories ran through her mind: swimming the refreshingly cold waters, brushing along the sandy bottom of the ocean until all of a sudden it wasn’t. The water was gone and even as the creature breathed its lungs began to crush under its own weight, painfully heaving as ribs cracked and it slowly slowly heated up as the blubber that kept it warm in water trapped heat in until it built and built and overheated, mind fogging over and dying in agony. She watched its trapped soul sing mournfully from the bones it could not leave as it’s body rotted and filled the air with the scent of rotting flesh, and trapped it remained even as it’s flesh decayed away and its bones became picked clean by scavenging birds and crustaceans, years passing as its bones dried and cracked and fell away and grew yellowed under the beating sun that had killed it years ago. Blinking the visions away, Asteria stared with pity at the whale’s soul, its large gentle eyes staring down at her. It held her gaze for a few seconds, before the whale chirped and began to turn away.
It whistled a farewell as it swam up to the stars, breaching the shimmering surface, and disappearing. The misty illusion of water trickled away, leaving nothing behind but the dry desert and a huge timeworn skeleton. Even as Asteria watched, a few of the skeleton’s ribs cracked and crumbled, falling to the ground and splintering on impact. She smiled at the sight and turned back to the skull.
“Rest well,” she murmured to the empty bone, running one final hand across the smoothed, disintegrating surface as images of its death ran through her mind. The water had simply vanished one day, but how could such a thing happen? She scowled, rubbing at the space between her eyebrows.
Just what had occurred during her sleep?