Max stood in stunned silence for a moment before the shifting sands knocked him over. Scrambling to his feet, he began looking in every direction, desperate for some kind of direction.
“Wh-ack, what the hell?!” he shouted, hacking up a mouthful of sand. “This never happened before, why can’t I go ba-ack!?” Another sand wave knocked him over.
While this was the first time Max had left the comfort of the oasis with the intention of finding answers, he had partially explored the desert before. He had been able to go up to a few dozen feet away from the tree line without any issue or strange occurrence.
Perhaps the oasis could sense his resolve to go further than before? What if the administrators of this world were finally choosing to make things difficult for him?
Maybe one of these entities were annoyed that it took him this long to leave the oasis and just wanted to be petty.
“Knowing my luck, it's probably the last one,” he sighed and started walking in a random direction. There wasn’t much point in thinking about where he was going anymore, without the oasis there was nothing to orient himself with.
There were no landmarks, even the dunes themselves disappeared in a matter of seconds. In the far distance, there were the barest hints of something that wasn’t sand, but those could easily be a mirage from all the heat. Even the three suns were unhelpful, as they were directly overhead and shifted around each other over the course of the day.
With no other options, Max could only hope that he could keep moving in a straight line and that he found something before his rations ran out.
~~~ One year later ~~~
“I hate sand, I hate sand, I hate sand, I hate sand, I hate sand, I hate sand, I hate sand, I hate sand….” Max muttered to himself as he trudged across the desert. His eyes were unfocused as they stared at the horizon. He took a swig from his bottomless canteen before letting out a frustrated roar to the heavens.
On the plus side, Max discovered that he didn’t actually need food. He felt much anxiety when his rations nearly ran out by the end of his first month out here, but after a day of not eating he realized he didn’t feel any hungrier. By the third day without food, his anxiety turned to relief as his body’s magical properties saved him.
Unfortunately, death was starting to seem like mercy. Even after a year of walking non-stop, there wasn’t a single sign of anything other than sand. No people, no civilization, not even a single blade of grass.
Furthermore, while he knew that walking through the desert would be much worse than staying at the oasis, hadn’t quite realized just how hellish it would be. His feet hurt from walking, the heat was unbearable, and sleeping was impossible thanks to the shifting sands trying to bury him if he stopped moving for more than a few seconds.
Fortunately, he discovered that his body also didn’t need sleep, which was good because even if the desert could stay still for more than a millisecond, the suns never set! The heat of three suns just blasted down ceaselessly cooking everything below them. A ceaseless annoyance that has steadily grown to become the bane of his existence.
“I swear, if this desert wasn’t always shifting the sand would have been cooked into glass by now.”
Max was also fairly certain that he should be suffering from heatstroke considering how the temperature never dipped below 120 degrees Fahrenheit. He wasn’t sure if this was another benefit of his new body or if he was just managing to stave it off with his infinite supply of water, but he wasn’t interested in experimenting with it.
Above all else, what made the desert go from “unbearable” to “absolute hell” was the fact that there was nothing to do.
In the oasis, he had all the entertainment he could ask for, but out here there wasn’t even anything to look at that wasn’t sand, and he got tired of that by the third month. The only thing he had left to break up the monotony was his grape vine, which still demonstrated its magical properties and always had grapes on it whenever he reached for more.
“Is this even getting me anywhere….Maybe I was wrong?”
The thought was upsetting, but every day that passed made Max more and more sure that there truly was nothing out here. No matter how far he walked the landscape never changed. Even if there was something out here it would probably take him thousands- no, tens of thousands of years to find it.
Max stopped walking, sand immediately began to pile around his feet.
“...I give up.”
Max wasn’t the type of person to persevere under impossible odds. Perhaps if there had been some clue, some hint, a single sign of life out here, then maybe he could keep going. But no, there was no life in this desert. Only sand.
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But there was no way back. The oasis disappeared in a sandstorm and he was stranded out here, just because he got too curious about exploring the wasteland.
“I gave up an eternity of paradise,” he screamed, dropping the vine to start pulling at his hair. “I gave up every game in the world!” He dropped to his knees. “Every book penned by human hands!” The sand started to rise around him. “All the food I could eat and a pond of crystal clear spring water for dust and god damned sand!”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“Spring water?”
As soon as the words left his lips, Max felt the stress, fear, and anger vanish from his mind as the metaphorical gears started turning.
For the longest time Max had assumed the spring water was like everything else in the oasis, supplied by magic, but what if it was actually coming from below?
“No, it definitely was magic,” he said as his mind calmed down. “The water always looked like it was gushing from those rocks, way faster than I could drink it. The oasis would have flooded if it wasn’t magic.”
Perhaps it wasn’t a true spring, but his mind was still focused on it. Almost everything else in the oasis just appeared, either from within a magical container or as if it had always been there like the grapes on the vine. The spring water was the only thing that had an even vaguely realistic explanation for its origin.
“...Could it be a hint?”
Water gushing from below, forming an oasis in a desert that rippled like an ocean.
Max had given up on the idea of finding anything out in the desert, but while the surface might be barren, what was there down below?
“Honestly, what else do I have to lose at this point,” he sighed. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when they opened again they were more focused than they had been in months. Grabbing hold of the grape vine before it was completely buried, he lied back and let the sand flow over him. For a moment, if he ignored the rough feeling of the sand, the push and pull of the current made him feel like he really was floating in the ocean.
It took less than a minute for the sand to cover the rest of his body. He took one last breath of air, and one last look at the clear blue sky before closing his eyes. The sand buried him completely, and the flowing desert was pristine and undisturbed yet again.
~~~ An unknown amount of time later ~~~
How long had it been since he let the sand current take him? Max wasn’t sure. He thought it couldn’t have been too long, since he wasn’t feeling any pain from holding his breath, but as the seconds turned to minutes he realized that his magical body just didn’t need air.
And so he waited.
He waited as the weight of the sand above him continued to increase.
He waited as until he was so deep that the sand no longer carried the warmth of the sun, and was ever so slightly moist.
He waited until he utterly lost track of just how long he had been waiting.
Suddenly, dragging his tired body through the desert didn’t seem as boring.
Then, after an indeterminate amount of time, he felt his body slipping away from him. It didn’t feel like losing consciousness. If anything it felt like he was drunk, like his sense of balance had completely abandoned him.
The roughness of the sand was changing as if the grains were becoming finer and smoother, as it began shifting again despite the pressure it and his body were under. The smooth, moist sand had fully convinced Max that he was underwater now.
He tried to move, but whether his limbs were pinned by the weight of the sand or if the strange sensation had rendered him immobile, there was no effect.
Suddenly, the world retched around him. Max felt as if his body was tumbling through the air even though he knew with absolute certainty that his body was still stationary.
After several hours that might have been just a few seconds, the feeling passed and the world had changed.
The sand around him was warm and wet. The immense weight on his body had been lifted, and he now lie face down in the sand. The sound of ocean waves roared in his ears.
Pushing himself off the ground, Max felt several pounds worth of wet sand fall from his back. Opening his eyes, he saw the imprint he left on the ground, creating a shockingly detailed recreation of his face. A few seconds later, the tide rushed in, erasing the imprint.
Raising his head, Max looked around and saw a huge beach stretch out on either side of him. The water still looked like sand or gravel, but it seemed like the particulates were actually floating in liquid instead of simply moving on its own.
A strange sun was rising over the water, dim and large enough for Max to make out the sun spots moving across the surface, but still casting plentiful light on the world around him. The sky above pulsed and shifted with myriad vibrant colors. Reds and blues and greens, mixing and shifting like an aurora borealis, bathing the world in hues both familiar and otherworldly.
Looking ahead, he saw a landscape of trees and grass, but something seemed wrong about them, though he couldn’t say what. Climbing to his feet, he moved closer and noticed two oddities. The first was that everything looked like it was made from metal, stone, and gems. The tree trunks were made from a rough brown stone, while its leaves were a green crystal that shimmered as Max looked up at the sky from below them. The grass was made of metal, cutting him when he walked past too quickly, but felt smooth when he was slower. There was even a flower that seemed to be made completely out of ruby and emerald, but still bent under his touch.
The other strange thing was that everything was massive. For a moment he thought the trees were just fairly large, but even the flowers, which looked like a normal tulip you could find in a garden, was tall enough to reach his hip.
Max made his way through the forest of metal and stone, eventually reaching a road.
An actual road, paved with cobblestones the size of his torso.
A wide grin spread across Max’s face and he started following the path laid out for him. A road meant people.
And people meant answers.