There is a desert where the dead go to die. It is a dark place, with sands capturing the light and painting a black landscape for as far as the eye can see. While there is day and there is night, the desert does not change. In eternal twilight, it has been known to the people as a reminder. There was no such thing as the nobility of light, or the pride of an absolute dark. The absolute contrast between the two at their most vulnerable revealed the truth - they only stemmed from the other.

Walking through the sands was the man who did not care for the color of the sand, or the contrast of the light and dark. His mind was elsewhere, and he traveled through the land of the dead in ignorance. Still, regardless of his care, his image made a striking image in the desert. Wearing a cloak of beautiful white fur far too hot and big for the desert.

His cloak, a meager set of clothes and a ring of gold partially around his head was all he wore. His feet bare, he strode through the black sand.

Melancholy was all the young man could feel. He had been wandering for far too long and his heart had nowhere to call home. His memories of kindness from others were dull, and the hatred that used to fuel him felt pointless. All he could do was continue walking.

He hoped that his feet would buckle underneath him. As long as his body gave first, his mind could follow.

It was an escape. As long as the circumstances demanded it, he could give up. He just needed to be able to convince himself that it was beyond his control, all so he could escape the blame of others.

He was far beyond the point of blaming himself. It was out of his control. Although there were people that had believed in him, they were long gone. There was a time he thought he could carry the beliefs that they left with him, but the world was cruel. That meager sense of purpose that he used to keep himself whole had been ripped away.

An individual with no standing and no major backing was simply too insignificant. There was a point where he thought differently. Success was measured solely off the intent to succeed and the willingness to change to reach that goal. As long as he could change and grow, then there was no task too impossible.

But it wasn’t enough just to be willing to change. There were those who held onto their beliefs to the point of death, there were those who threw away parts of themselves that the man could never. There were people willing to take risks that he wouldn’t. He found himself surrounded by those who delved into the extremities of life, and he could never.

If only he had known a bit sooner, maybe he could’ve set the foundations so that he could compare to his peers. But he knew all too well that living under that belief was what differentiated him. Because he believed that the current him wasn’t good enough, he never would be.

And yet, even though it was clear to him why he was wrong, where he was wrong. In the end, he couldn’t change a thing about himself. He’d already accepted who he was, and he’d already accepted that he was inferior.

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No, it wasn’t right to say that he was inferior. The people that had reached the highest heights were no different than himself and that’s what submerged his heart in despair. They had reached a place he never could, and there were people who did it in the same world he had lived in, in the same condition he found himself in.

How? How could you face the worst of humanity and still want to stand at the top of it? How could you see that you were worthless and still want to stand on your own two feet?

He didn’t understand, he couldn’t understand.

There are more stories of failure than there are of success. Those who find themselves swayed by triumph and fortune are ignorant, they’ve chosen to look at the world from a perspective where there’s a reward at the end of suffering.

But then why was it always them? Why was it those who bought into that lie that managed to climb their way up?

Please, the man begged. Stop. Stop accomplishing your dreams. Stop refuting the barbaric and unjust system the world abided by. If they could do it, he feared that one day the pain, the suffering that he went through would slip away. He’d lose the comfort of despair, he’d lose the crushing weight of his loneliness.

“I don’t want to lose who I am.” Had become a mantra of his. He believed that if he were to embrace anything different, then he’d be discarding himself, and the people who believed in that version of himself.

“I’m… not wrong.” Another phrase he would repeat. His belief in himself had inspired others, so how could that be what led him astray? Could it really be that his own beliefs were as fragile as glass? With a single strike he’d shattered into pieces. And slowly, gradually, the fragments of himself were being crushed and scattered.

If he couldn’t fix himself back to the way he was originally, then he felt that he’d lost. Compared to those who steadfastly held onto who they were, he couldn’t compare. Compared to those who’d willingly change and scatter the pieces themselves, he couldn’t compare. All he could do was watch in horror as the pieces that constructed him were broken further down one by one. He’d continue to lose parts of himself, and there was no world where he could reconstruct his entire self. He couldn’t walk away from the scene and start again, he found too much meaning in the individual pieces that formed his mosaic. And because he couldn’t do either, all he could was watch as what was left began to break. First the whole, then the individual parts that made him up.

If he was truly fated to watch himself break piece by piece, then he cursed the world. Why? Why when he was first broken couldn’t he have shattered completely? If it were that way he could have accepted it. But because there were still shards left, and because there was still a frame left, he couldn’t move on.

So the man simply accepted his own inability. There was no future to walk towards, there was no past he could rely on. He was waiting until that last piece of himself finally scattered, and when that was the case he could finally die in peace.

And part after part fell from him. His thoughts that he cherished at one point were gone, his regrets, his temptations. It all began to wash away.

It was an odd feeling, being in a tempest with no resistance. All he could have wished for was his long journey to be given an end through its winds.

But eventually that too, was eaten by the black sand. And he wandered, in that desert where the light dies upon the ground.

Why, he no longer knew. And the answer would never come to him in epiphany, he had simply grown too used to sand that ate the sound of his footsteps.

Carried by his own apathy, the man who never knew arrogance walked through the sands.