What is feeling but a hindrance to the dead? What is the cold but a shadow they live in? The sand glistens with these questions, dipping to accommodate the answer, the grains filling with its blood. Soaked white, dripping and spreading, it gives way to drier land and so fades the Light of the answer.

The drier sands build and they build; they carve out paths underneath his feet as he walks and run the rivers full of his dripping blood but they're not as pristine as usual. The sand is not that like the red deserts of Mars, the world is not his own, and he is an exhausted answer, one very few have found but many have abused. He hopes for nothing but the sand keeps building, the world keeps making itself, and he can do nothing but walk. So it goes.

Nature sprouts. It is not his own but this strange hidden world's. He only thinks of dirt and sand and that is the mold that is filled, glued together by his own blood with each and every passing into the waking realm. The vines grow in competition with the shadows, the blood mixes with crisp water, the grass begins to shape through the grains of pale sands. A star tints the world its sickly teal color. He is exhausted yet he can do nothing but walk. And so he walks, ignoring the trees that begin to sprout, the sap that begins to bleed, the sand that turns to dirt. He walks underneath colourful flowers that sing happy greetings to deaf ears and through the shadow words that they cast, that dare him to look, that fail to make him utter their syllables.

Then the world stops as though it had hit a wall; the blood and water continue, pooling at his feet, slithering into the horizon at an ominous crawl. He doesn't hesitate, simply watches, and then he wades in, arms raised slightly as the liquids flow up to his chest. The Shores of Time are unforgiving in the mind, both a fear and a realization that stains the unprepared; he knows this for he was one of the many that sought its knowledge, had drowned for it, and crawled back up gasping and scarred, a permanent fixture in the back of his mind. The deeper he walks, the more it turns from water and blood and into the feeling of a sucking void, dragging and clawing and clinging. It's tempting to stop, he feels the fatigue of death blooming from within, and if he listens closely, he can hear the whispers of those who failed begging him to join them, begging for one more mind to compliment their loneliness

But he has no time to linger a single thought on all these events, black sand appears before him and he climbs out, the water and blood clinging to him momentarily before reluctantly receding from his body, crawling back to the Shores as he gets to his feet and looks around. The sand climbs, glistening in the teal sun; it falls over ruins of a place previously overgrown and crumbling, some of the stone remains, intertwined with glass and metal plates. Gates stand, rusted over, half-buried, dull and dead. Silence isn't true as he ascends, a dull note ringing through the air, louder with every step the sands offer him.

As he reaches the top, the black sands fall away, burying the ruins that stand below, revealing an entrance made of glass crystal, a plate of similar material nestled in the sand with a single Ghostly flower curled within, lonely but not afraid. What is death to the dead when the gate is open? What is death to the dead when its reapers won't come? What is death to the answer if the answer won't speak?

Death cannot be the answer if you need the answer and it is dead.

A hand gently brushes over the petals of the flower and the black sand begins to shift but it doesn't wither away for the answer hasn't given itself, it hasn't dared yet to leave.

The hand violently crushes the flower, unfazed by the Light that leaks between, grinds it between the palm and fingers, turning it into nothing but a remnant of an escape. A permanent seal as it drops, swallowed by the waiting sand.

And the answer drops to his knees before curling in on himself, resigning himself to his own fate, his own destiny he had created. He knows that he is not meant to go back, that some things cannot be answered and must, instead, be forgotten.

His part is done as reluctant as he may be to end, as devastated as the questioners must be.

At this realization, a helpless sob escapes him, echoing in the emptiness around him as the blood-water of the Shores begins to rise, isolating him and tying him to the black sand that surrounds him. The cries continue unabated, unnoticed; the weakness unseen as the great warrior falls for a final time.

Yet, through the tears, a soft whisper sounds, desperate, resigned, but unafraid. A mouthed prayer, breathless and quick, calling out to a goddess long past deaf, blind, and mute, yet the words still come. A soft plea, half-drowned and echoing, even as the sand begins to dip down to swallow up its new occupant whole, as the blackness of time begins to erase every thought of the answer away, leaving the universe empty and confused and unable to know. A quiet cry, broken and dead, belonging to a defeated god as he succumbs to the forgotten.

"The Traveler, the Savior, the Face Within the Sun, forgive me for the sins that I have done.

Unto the Darkness, I go with the Light; bless me, Traveler, as I descend into the Night.

Sweet Mother, dear Mother, She called the Traveler, hear my plea.

Blessed Traveler, strong Traveler, answer me."

And it is with a brief exhale that the sand swallows the answer.

And the universe forgets and it is with this, it does not forgive.

"Death is my friend, we are well acquainted. I love my friend Death despite all they have done. I would take their job, it is not an easy thing to do; after all, a job cannot be done if you cannot reap what you sow. Sometimes the roots are too deep and it simply grows back. I love my friend Death but they do not love me." - Ecclesiastes-71, Exo Hunter