Author: N. Friedline, Word Count: 666
Featured in Spooky Archaeological Story Moot: Live Stream – Halloween 2023
A rusted dagger plunges into the flesh of a wild beast spilling viscera onto the sand. Blood pools in the dust, shaped by tiny hands into a torrid red clay. It was the first year the oasis had lasted through the Summer. Rushes growing in the small pool of muddy water attracted creatures from across the endless desert.
Elders spoke of unending dust storms and whirlwinds of fire that consumed all life. The rains returned to quench the desiccated earth, and the village thrived.
Nestled in a depression in the dunes, their dwellings were little more than circular pits dug in the sand, capped with red clay domes to shade from the blistering sun. Most of the tribe used stone tools, but the best hunters wielded sharp metal blades. Their hands bore deep scars from crafting slag to a polished edge. Mountains of sand to the east yielded twisted masses of scorched iron, but they could only travel in the cool of night and there was no shelter along the way.
A group of young hunters set out under starlight to find their own steel. At dawn they burrowed a temporary shelter under a large rock to wait out the day. After another night of traveling through the baren wastes they came upon the mountain of sand. The sunbaked surface of the massive dune scorched their hands, but as they dug deeper it became cool to the touch. It would collapse as fast as they could dig so they gathered fine dust and used urine to line the walls with clay. Eventually the sand became compact enough to excavate a long tunnel into the heart of the mountain.
Their fingers began to bind with sticky white threads that supported a hollow chamber from which a torrent of sand spiders spilled out. Venomous fangs took a life and weakened the rest, but they kept digging deeper. They hit a hard vitrified mass. Pawing its blistered surface, it scraped and scratched their tender skin. A loose piece was pried away and snapped off with an echoing CLANG that rattled through the tunnel when the sunlight behind them disappeared!
Scrambling back through the darkness, the tunnel floor quickly filled with tumbling sand like an hourglass. Crawling through the showering sand and choking back dust, one of them was sealed behind! Attempting to dig a new way in, a torrent of hot sand buried another under the landslide. They searched for their friends, but the sand threatened to swallow them all. Forced to give in, their eyes and lips lined with clay, the survivors returned to the village defeated.
The sands continually shifted and by nightfall the entire mountain was sinking behind them. The tunnel appeared as a gaping mouth that had swallowed their companions alive.
They fled to the shelter under the rock and rested for a day. At dusk, out of the sands walked a shining figure cloaked in shimmering silver. Within stood a tall, pale woman with large eyes. The silver suit reflected the sky like a mirror. The hunters believed she was a fallen star and brought her back to the village that night where she began drawing images in the sand. They told of a world rich in life, water, and people who built structures that stretched to the stars. The structures made smoke that trapped the sun and burned the entire world.
The visitor stayed for a night, gifting strange seeds to plant in the oasis and set out at dawn in her silver suit.The young hunters followed her footprints back to the mountain of sand. It had collapsed to reveal skeletons of twisted metal and a great solid door that split open and cast a beam of white light across the desert. Behind the massive door was an underground city with hundreds of tall, pale people surrounded by living machines. It was in this place they had survived for a thousand years, waiting for the Earth to heal after a disastrous calamity.
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