The wind from the west gently caresses your face as you stand on the cliff's edge.
Your bindle is light and not burdensome, the white rose held between your fingertips has freshly bloomed.
Free from all that which shackles you, you take a carefree step forward off of the cliff and your foot finds purchase in shifting sands.
In what must have been a blink, the inspiring cliff-top precipice now became lone and level sands stretching far and wide.
A blackish speck lingers in the horizon as if stuck between sky and sand, a mere pin-prick in the interminable beige and azure.
[[Begin walking towards the speck]]The sun beats down on you unforgivingly.
Your floral tunic clings to your skin and the white rose begins to droop in the heat of the sun.
To pass the time, you retell a story about the world existing in a little play-box and that the sun is just the grand player looking through a hole cut in the top.
That story would mean that looking up at the [[SUN]] would be the equivalent of making contact with something greater and unknowable yet tangible enough to burn your eyes.
You're still on course trudging towards the speck which does happen to be growing every moment though still too far to make out any details.
[[Keep trudging.]]
The journey is hot but as you make more and more progress towards the speck occassional breezes make it more and more bearable.
(if: $sight is 1)[Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert, near them, on the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies.]
(if: $sight is 0)[There is rubble that you pass by without a second thought.]
[[Make your way.]]In that flash, the [[SUN]] appears to have a pitch black spot surrounded by a deepening orange iris.
The sclera appears a gilded yellow. You have arrived at the speck and it's quickly evident that he's a young man weeping into his hands. The man appears to be in rags, but they shift along with his complection. The rags appear to be veils sometimes, tattered sheer blackish-grey cotton, sometimes you see glimpses of gauze . His complection goes from olive to pallid and back again with remarkable speed. He wears a grey hood but it too changes in nature as he shifts.
All that is truly obscured becomes visible as he begins to draw his hands away from his face.
(if: $sight is 1)[Liquified light pours from his mouth, leaks from his nose, and drips from his ears onto his glowing harshly-lined palms.
With closed eyes, his fingertips drip as they fall to his sides. Each drop lights up the sand by his feet. His head still brightly burns as he fixates on you.
[[He opens his eyes.]]]
(if: $sight is 0)[The young man in rags has a reddened and tearstruck face but otherwise he appears completely calm and collected. His eyes appear to have two different colors to them and they never quite fixate on you as much as through you.
[[You catch the smell of storax and antiseptic.]]]
Light bursts from his eyes, burning everything in a resplendent blaze.
All is disintegrated,
the young man,
the desert sand,
the sky, the wind, the sun,
and you.
After the flash all the matter that once was,
now fluttered and swam like glowing cinders floating in the void. He begins to heave a wracking cough the force of which smacks you back into your prone heavy uncomfortable 120-pound body being wheeled through the emergency room doors of the Intensive Care Unit.
The hall keeps cycling over and over again,
the doctors can't hear you,
the nurses don't care.
The smell of saccharine hospital detergent from the linens on the stretcher fills your nose and mixes with the cloying smell of sweat,
your eyes roll around in your head trying to find anything anywhere else and you keep seeing the sign.
Intensive
Care
Unit
Intens
Car
Uni
Int
Ca
Un
In
C
U
I
Z
UYou look up at [[the sun]] and in a flash your eyesockets burn and your head thumps thrice. The sun's rays rays split themselves into three. The first shines down on the top of your head with an mildly unpleasant intensity that can be felt.
The second ray casts down onto the speck and you can, even at this distance, clearly see that it is a man standing with his face buried in his hands, presumably weeping.
As you begin to estimate the time it will take you to get to him the third ray burns a path through the shifting sands that makes the unbearable path at least knowable.
(set: $sight to 1)
[[Keep trudging.]]