He was free-falling now, wisps of colorful smoke surrounding him. He tried reaching out to them. They were perfectly ethereal, undisplacable to the touch. Unbudging, yet gaseous? It was like magic had come to life.

He landed. The impact jolted his nerves. The scene changed. Somehow, he had stayed on his feet. There was something covering his face, a soft scarf wrapped his head tightly. It stopped the dust of storm from piercing his eyes. He still took to cover his face with his arms. What the hell is going on? Spread out in front of him was a vast landscape of purely sand. How could such a thing have happened? Where the hell am I? It took him only a moment to notice his thirst. He waded through the viscous sand while a sandstorm swept along him.

In places where living beings were uncommon, there seemed to finally be an order to nature. Deliberation prefaced each ticking of the second, each moving of the grain. Every sound a calculated gesture. It was as if time itself moved with purpose in the desert. To dislodge such an order, it seemed imperative to be aware of it, first.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Mata's decisive steps led him beyond one dune and then another, until a line of palm trees discerned themselves from the storm. His footsteps were being swept away by the climate’s tempest. There would be no trace of him in the desert, he had to make it out. Before he fell, before his body inevitably refused to get up again; he had to jump this final hurdle. His steps became comical leaps, face contorting into something severe, mouth stretching in a show of absolute exertion, arms reaching for the tree line. The vegetation was his savior. He saw himself closing in. The world was gaining color.

But nature had its own will to power, and it would resist him on that day. Mata misplaced his foot and fell, mind too weary to soften the blow of the fall. He stayed as such, limbs spread out, muscles still, mind even more still. There was not even the will to move.

A lower-divnity snickers at your naivety.