The air was dry, arid, suffocating, the wind blowing sand and salt all about, small particles dancing on the breeze, trying to act nonthreatening. It was just an act, though, that dance, belying the true nature of this place. This desert is nothing more than a tomb, an open air grave, the quicksand a few yards in front of me bubbling with hunger. It knows that a meal is near, ready to metabolize the protein and calories hiding just under my skin.

With a deep inhale, sand and salt coating my lungs, I closed my eyes, her face smiling at me from her resting place on my eyelids. She only exists in song now, only lives in my memories. It should have been me, not her.

“It’s beautiful, no?” my guide asked, his own smile creeping out from under his hood. He was dressed in the traditional garb of his tribe, flowing robes that would protect his supple, hairless flesh from the harshness of the desert his people call home. “The living desert of the gods. How did you know of this place?”

“My father,” I answered, turning to regard my guide, my eyes staring between the peaks of my sheathed sword and bow. His brown eyes lit up, excitement pouring out of them.

“Was he a believer!?”

“Not in your gods, no. He believed in strong poetry and stronger drink. He used to sing about this place, his gravelly voice trying and failing to do it justice. It is beautiful.”

The desert was gorgeous, a lifeless place somehow emanating power and strength, the heat rising up from the quicksand like wavering glass, a mirage so tempting that over half of the pillars rising to the sky had been unintentional, a mistake that had cost many lives. How many weren’t accidents though? How many others had come here like me, like my father?

“Did your father ever get to see this place?”

The guide knew the rules of his people: outsiders weren’t allowed here. It was sacred, the desert of the gods, a place that only the faithful should see. A thick bag of gold can convince even the most pious of the tribe that an outsider has the requisite belief though. My own tithe had convinced my guide. How much had my father paid those many years ago?

“He did,” I answered, beginning to strip weapons and armor from my body. The guide looked on in astonished horror at my naked form when I had removed all garments, his eyes taking in my scars and tattoos, a story written on my flesh in pain and ink. I nodded my head at one of the pillars, its midsection distended, my father’s gut still so full of song and ale that even in the form of a salt pillar it could be seen. “That’s him. He walked out there some thirty winters ago, became a permanent fixture of the landscape.”

“He fed himself to the sand?” the guide asked, deep reverence weighing his words down.

“He did.”

I stared back at the sand and salt, knowing that it would be painful, knowing that it would hurt like hell to be calcified. I had met suffering before, though, on too many occasions. We had become fast friends, pain and I, so I had no problem meeting it here in the desert of the gods. It would be a fitting end to a life that had ultimately amounted to a fucking pile of nothing.

“That’s why you’re here isn’t it? To feed it?”

“Something like that.”

“I am sorry about your father, but I cannot allow you to walk out there, to feed yourself to the desert. You are not worthy. Please put your clothes back on before the sun makes murder of your skin so that we can leave this place respectfully.”

“Slayed a dragon once,” I responded, turning around again to face my guide, my back to the pillars, my flaccid penis the only thing he seemed interested in looking at. It was nothing impressive, my cock, but it had served its purpose. “The sun has nothing on a dragon’s breath. That fire will take the flesh right off your bones. You ever seen the distant star do that?”

“No, sir,” he answered, clearly in awe, wondering just what kind of man I had been to have gone toe to toe with a dragon and come back to tell the tale. That was a lifetime ago, back when they were all still alive, when she was still alive. I left that man buried in the haunted forest that took her from me, though I had crafted my armor out of the chitinous hide of the beast that had eaten half of her. It was more than just protection, a trophy I could wear, a reminder that I had failed her. “Was the dragon what gave you those scars on your back?”

It was hard not to smile, knowing this guide had become enthralled by my story; he wanted more, tales from a life that no longer existed. The smile was bittersweet, though, becoming more of a smirk as I turned back around, my nimble fingers tracing the deep gouges in my back, gashes that had been opened up by an impossibly sharp sword. Feeling the scars took me back to that prison, the lab she had saved me from somewhere in the middle of our careers. We hadn’t yet faced the dragon when the wizard had captured and tortured me.

“No. A wizard cloned me once. In order to escape, I had to fight and kill my doppelganger. He left me with these as a reminder of just how good a swordsman I truly am.”

It hadn’t been me that had killed me, but her. I was bleeding out on the stone, those slashes tearing into muscles I desperately needed just to hold a sword, let alone swing it with any force. She had arrived before my clone could take my head from my shoulders, her knives digging so deep into the back of his skull their tips ripped through his eyes. She had had to drag me out, carrying me to our party. That had been a good adventure.

“You’re an adventurer aren’t you?” my guide asked, not questioning the veracity of my answer, just wanting to know why I was here in the most holy of places to his people.

“I was, once upon a time. Now I’m just a man tired of this existence.”

He pulled a pipe from his robes, packing the exotic leaves down with fingers used to such motions. The smoke smelled sweet and hot, like sugar had been poured over a fire, as he drug. I missed the pipe, but had refrained for the last few weeks, needing to breathe easy to make this journey.

“Is that why you want to feed yourself to the sand?”

“I have the resurrection sickness,” I said, the confession needing to finally come out, needing to be heard by another human aside from myself and the healer who had told me there was nothing that could be done, outside of divine intervention. So I had traveled to the desert of the gods, not to plead for healing, but to die as my father had.

“Where?” the guide asked, familiar with my plight, likely one that had taken someone from him. The resurrection sickness was a random killer, taking any and all that it wanted, no motivation behind its violence. I had faced orcs and goblins, knights and wizards, whole armies comprised of nightmares that wanted nothing more than to rip me into too many bloody pieces, a godsdamned dragon and had survived. My own body wanted to do me in now. I pointed to my chest, touching where my lungs were hiding behind my rib cage.

“Too much pipeweed?” the guide asked, trying to put his pipe out lest he offend the dying man in front of him.

“Keep smoking, my friend, it doesn’t matter much to me anymore.”

We had been rich, her and I and them, the five of us amassing wealth other adventurers could only dream of. It had never been a glamorous career, the life of an adventurer, when your only income comes from ridding villages of pesky monsters or raiding ancient tombs and graves for whatever might be hiding in the darkness. That dragon’s hoard had been so full of treasure that we had been able to do anything. Much like my guide’s smoking, those untold riches we had accumulated, that only I could do anything with now that everyone else was in the dirt, mattered very little. He who dies with the most toys, after all, still dies.

One tear fell from my felt eye, its salty moisture evaporating almost immediately, never making it to the sand and salt at my feet. This was it, then, the end to my story, an end I had written too many winters ago. Would my pillar last as long my father’s? Or would I crumble to the dust below like countless others? Would I stand, a calcified curse, in direct defiance of time itself for eternity?

I turned back to my guide, grabbing his hooded head in my hands before he could voice protest, his pipe landing near his sandaled feet as he dropped it in his shock. Resting my forehead against his, I imparted the knowledge of the dead dragon’s lair, its location and all that it housed, letting the last of my magic out in that moment. We had opted for keeping our riches in that underground cave, knowing that it would be safer there than under the prying eyes and thieving hands of the city vaults.

“The treasure is yours and your village’s. Make better use of it than we did.”

With that, I walked out into the desert of the gods, the sand and salt digging into my feet until I reached the edge of the quicksand. A final wink is all I gave my guide before plunging into the bubbling goulash, feeding myself to the sand.