Dumuduru: Fabletwine

THE OASIS OF THE DAMNED

Entry: Day One Thousand and One; The Oasis of the Damned

Soh Dumuduru

"I had walked for a thousand lights and a thousand nights, until, at last, I came upon the edge of the Sand Sea of Alzrala'aldin."

Soh stepped carefully around the few remaining muddy puddles that dotted the quickly drying trail. Calling them puddles was being generous, he decided. They were exceedingly shallow when they were filled at all, but in every case the sludge that remained would be annoying if he stepped in it.

The mountains loomed in the distance, stark against the sky. As the sun crested behind their forested peaks, they cast a long shadow before him. It had rained the night before; not for long, but still it had rained. Soh's clothes remained damp. He'd slept not far off the road, with no real coverage to guard him from the short downpour. In damp clothes, then, he trudged onward. Uncomfortable, but generally unconcerned.

There was no particular endpoint which Soh had in mind for his journey. He merely walked. Walked, and wrote. That was all there was to his life now. He'd never be able to return home.

'Not now. Not anymore,' Soh thought.

Nonetheless, he knew the rough geography of these far lands, and there was no doubt that what he could see just a few spans ahead of him, sprawling, with nearly invisible tendrils of heat rising from it, was the Sand Sea of Alzrala'aldin.

There wasn't anyone traveling the road as he was either. 'Who'd want to?' No one crossed the Sand Sea. He was alone. Only the sounds of the last vestiges of animal life, clinging to the meadows that were rapidly giving way to the oncoming desert, and the gentle rustling of the sparse copses of trees around him kept him company on the lonely road. The grasses were drying up now. It was a gradual shifting from the expansive fields that had covered the area between the forested mountain roots behind him to sparse coverage. Eventually, the grass would all but cease, and the ground would turn to dust, then silt. Until, at last, sand would consume all.

'At least,' Soh thought, 'the travel isn't so burdensome.'

After all, he barely owned anything. He tightened his grip on the cross-chest strap of his one bag. In it he kept only three things. A charcoal pen with which to write. A cloth-bound parchment book in which to write. And, as the chief reminder of why he could never return...

Soh ripped his mind away from that line of thought.

'Best not to think on that, Soh, you damn fool.'

Dangling from his buckle-belt, nearly full, was a water-gourd. The brief rain had been enough to top it off. 'Thankfully, or I'd have been in real trouble heading into the desert.' Only one stream had wound its way down from the mountain, but it'd veered off in a completely different direction about a day ago. That had caused some concern for him, but fortunately the rain had come. The price had been the damp tunic and usually baggy trousers now annoyingly clinging to him. Overall, it was a small price to pay.

He cleared the distance with his usual nonchalance despite the grumbling in his stomach. He hadn't eaten for two days. The fact casually crossed his mind in a detached sort of way just as his bare feet sunk into the first bits of the sand sea. Soh reached up and pulled his tattered indigo scarf over his mouth and nose. The tails of the scarf billowed behind in the soft wind. 'Don't want to be breathing in the dust.' Such was known to cause dry lung, and dry lung was known to cause death. Though generally having no purpose in life other than to wander, Soh didn't desire to die. 'Certainly not in that horrible way.' Still, he wasn't decidedly committed to living either. He just was, and he didn't cherish the notion of going by way of dry lung.