Bonepicker

VI

Heat's dropping. Can feel it on my face. 

I seem to do it all by feel now. Dirt under my feet, the burning on my skin.

And what's not digging into my ankle is digging into my feet. Or it's that sidearm gnawing at my hip. 

And of course I'm saying not to even acknowledge that weighted pack of inventory damn bearing on down like I have the whole world in there. And the whole world is all stones and junk.

He'd found a decent haul of stones over the past few days. They were useful tools to cut or shape or trade. Some shiners in a heavy sack with a rudimentary drawstring stuffed in deep next to a boulder. The sand storms had exposed the string. 

Whoever had sought to hide their haul must have done so in a hurry. He might have thought they had some greater significance, but it wasn't unusual to find buried spoils on his travels. If the storms were kicking up you had to lighten your load, and polished stones were dead weight when measured against the force of the assaulting sands.

Might have been a raid, too, and there was no use killing a picker with nothing to take. He'd dumped a lot of spoils himself in his time, whatever that would prove to be. Raiders were wise to empty picks, and the hell sands were not the place to waste time or effort. Take it if it's there. If it's not, get on. It was pure opportunity.

As he trudged, his thoughts moved from the stones in his pack to his trinity of secrets. The little sidearm for emergencies, the great boot-packed vellum, and the last. The one that no-one could know or take from him. His entire world of thought and dream and creation captured in his papers. 

He'd never dared to share the strangeness of the structures he'd conceived and concocted. The worlds he had wrought and honed and commanded from the great pool of words he had collected were almost a source of shame. 

He felt a strange dishonesty as he picked and trekked, traded and talked, exchanged and survived. All the while he felt his true self was elsewhere. As if he was merely the false avatar of a truthfully hidden personified will. A mindful husk just living in the desert with a distant but flourishing heart, never to be known to the outside.

It made sense to occupy himself during those long and arduous treks. However, he really believed in the significance of the papers. Or certainly, the text they held, the words they signed, and the meanings they signified. As much as he saw to his physical survival, as much as all that mattered was food and shelter, it was the promise of the word that was driving him.