Desert Venom (SHORT STORY)

Luke Newcomb

The sand Shifts underneath Saif’s shoes as he trudges atop the peak of the large dune, sand spraying up like mist off of the ocean. His long, white shemagh covers the majority of his face, protecting him from the harsh sand, which could slash through skin like a million tiny knives if given enough force.

The man is leading a camel along behind him, its back occupied with large bags, a folded tent, and bags of water.

On the man’s back is strapped a long rifle, Winchester Model 1200. Its wooden butt sticking out behind his head.

Oh his belt, Saif carries a sword.

His body is covered in a single layer of thick clothes that both protect him from the harsh sun and the elements but also serve to keep his body stuffy, sweaty and insulated. But smotheringly hot is a better alternative than sun blistered and cut up by sand.

The pants rub at his inner legs, chafing from the amount of walking he has done for the past two days. But his real discomfort is from his back, as the cloth rubs and irritates the four, circular, oddly-placed blisters on his back. A perpetual reminder to what the man is hunting, and why. He looks to the sky as the giant sun passes down below the horizon, her last rays of light saying farewell. The sun is almost completely down, and the desert is rapidly cooling.

Six Days Ago.

The sun was almost completely down, and the desert was rapidly cooling. The small city of Tenduk, far removed from the larger, more populated regions of Mongolia, sat upon a stone hill on the outskirts of the gigantic, endless sea of sand. A small, glowing amalgamation of houses barely worth noticing to any travelers who might spot it.

Saif preferred to work on the house at night, after the sun had gone down, her glaring heat no longer affecting the humans and animals who could finally come out from their abodes. A hostile environment becoming more bearable. And, as the small town’s leader, Saif was constantly doing his outdoors work during these cooler hours.

Saif stood atop the ladder, sweating despite the cool weather, as he drove the large nail into the side of the old, dilapidated building.

He felt a tugging on his baggy pants leg and peered down to see a small, black goat chewing on it.

“Zail!” He said, kicking at the animal, “Zail!” It finally let go and ran off, allowing Saif to go back to his business.

After many more minutes of working, the man rubbed his sweat off onto his sleeve, his forehead sticky and muddy from the mix of dust and sweat. He began to descend down the ladder, when he heard someone calling for him:

“Darga!” Called the woman, who he recognized. Her name was Adila. “Darga! Saif!” She was waving her hands, and as she got closer, he could see the tears in her eyes. He leaped the rest of the way down the ladder and ran to meet her.

Adila tried to explain the situation, but could barely get words through her sobs. So she grabbed Saif’s arm and led him away, running, Saif confusedly following.

As the two approached the spot, Saif saw that a crowd had formed, obscuring whatever it was he was supposed to be seeing.

Adila stopped and gestured to the spot, he hand covering her mouth as she allowed the man to step forward.

He shoved through the crowd, their terrified mutterings running through his head before he even saw what the commotion was about.

As Saif pushed a man aside, he stopped in his tracks. On the ground before him was an older woman, crying almost noiselessly, her mouth agape, holding in her arms a young child.

Well, half of a young child.

“Minii khüü!” She screamed, deafeningly, “Minii khüü!”

Her boy was dead.

Only his top half remained. The ground around the woman was stained red, a gigantic puddle of blood, the child’s insides hanging limply from his body. Nobody approached the woman as she grieved, her skin and clothes drenched all the way through with his scarlet blood.

Saif knew this woman, too. Her name was Durriyah. Her husband had only recently died of an illness.

Saif gently approached and reached for the body, uttering calming phrases trying to get the woman to calm down. It was in vain.

At his request for the body, she only grabbed onto it tighter, screaming in protest. Saif complied, backing away. He turned to the growing crowd.

“bidniig orkhi!” He yelled, shooing them away, “tüünd zai ögökh!”

The crowd dispersed, somewhat guiltily, leaving the two people alone. This time, Saif did not reach for the boy. He simply sat silently next to the woman in the warm, wet sand, and stared at the ground. He stayed there with her until the morning.

Now.

The sunlight has left the landscape completely, and Saif decides to stop for the night. He removes the tent from the camel’s back and attempts to set it up, despite the shifting sand. He makes due, and crawls inside without tying the camel up (He had made that mistake two nights ago when he had tied the animal to one of the poles holding the tent up. In the middle of the night, the camel had attempted to wander away, dragging the tent with it!). He can only hope that it would have enough sense to stay near its primary source of food. Out here, deep in the Gobi desert, the plant life has stopped growing like it did in the village. There’s nothing but sand for miles around, nothing but the sun to guide Saif to his destination.

He has no pillow or bed, only a thin blanket to separate his body from the millions of dust particles. Still, an obscene amount of them manages to get through his blanket and rubs irritatingly at his skin. He tosses, turns, positions himself, re-positions himself, and then re-re-positions himself, but rest does not come. Something is about to happen. Try as he might, Saif can not sleep.

Five Days Ago.

Try as he might, Saif could not sleep. Although he had spent the previous night in the sand with Durriyah and her deceased son, and had spent the following day conducting the funeral and burial of the boy, as soon as he lay down next to Jaliah in his own bed, his mind was wide awake, racing with thoughts, fears, and theories. And one phrase that kept circulating throughout his head. No, not a phrase. A name: Olghoi-Khorkoi.

This name was the basis of the majority of fears and theories being thrown around that day amongst the grieving. The name was on the lips of those who did not consider themselves rational, and the minds of those who did.

Olghoi-Khorkoi. The beast of the desert. The boogie man for Mongolian children. A spooky story. A campfire tall tale, a legend. And yet, it was a legend that they all feared. A legend they could feel resonating inside their bones as not only a legend, but something more.

Of course, Saif, like the rest of those who considered themselves rational, cast such thoughts aside. There was no evidence of such a monster. It was altogether unscientific to go and blame a supernatural figure for something that could be so easily explained as anything else. A pack of wild dogs. A band of raiders.

Bringing about the name Olghoi-Khorkoi only served to agitate the townsfolk, to make them fearful of nothing. The rational, scientifically-minded, like Saif, had no reason to fear such outlandish tales.

So why did he?

Yes, these were the thoughts racing through his head. Memories of a half of a corpse. Of a widow mourning her dead son as he was lowered into a makeshift hole in the sand, the desert swallowing up the body like a gigantic mouth, never to open up again.

Memories of the elders warning him that a terrible tragedy awaited the town. He would respond that, had they not had tragedy enough? They would tell him, this is only the beginning. We have seen this before, they would tell him. We know what’s coming. And this time we may not be so lucky as to remember this one.

Superstitious absurdity. Nothing but stuff and nonsense.

So said his thoughts. So said his words. But his mind itself was stubborn, and held onto the idea like a child grasping a toy he had been told to share.

As Saif finally began to find rest, these thoughts raced faster and faster, becoming more and more warped and disfigured, and his eyes finally began to slowly close.

Now.

Saif still can’t sleep. The man had slept in the desert before, numerous times. He is well used to the discomfort. No, it isn’t that. It’s the prospect of what he’s going to do. And for that he needs rest. Saif squeezes his eyes shut, trying to sleep. That is, until he hears, no, rather feels a low rumbling under his head. His reaction time is without compare, as he leaps to his feet and exits the flimsy tent, almost knocking it over as he goes. Nothing. No disturbance. No camel.

Except, there is something. Where the camel was supposed to be was just a puddle. A puddle of blood. And next to the puddle, words, barely legible, written in the same scarlet substance:

Nearly there 🙂

Five Days Ago.

Nearly there…Ah. Sleep at last. Rest. A break from the horrors of the previous day.

Except it wasn’t.

Saif wasn’t asleep. Not really. He wasn’t awake, to be certain, but he didn’t feel asleep, either. He was dreaming, but he didn’t feel the restfulness that usually came when he began to dream, his brain sorting through his thoughts and memories, clearing space for the following day.

He was standing in a desert. But not his desert. This was someone else’s desert. This desert was perfect. Perfectly flat, with not a dune in sight. Perfectly white, and, if he would have stooped down, he would have observed that each and every grain of sand was perfectly diamond-shaped, each the same size and texture as the rest.

He stood there, looking around, completely aware that he was dreaming, but also aware that this was not his dream.

Suddenly, from the walls of his dream so expertly crafted to appear as endless perfect blue sky, there came a rumbling. The ground began to shake, nay, the entire world began to shake, and Saif could not keep his balance, and he fell over on the ground, the perfectly shaped sand slicing his skin, his deep, red blood falling in tiny droplets and staining the sand.

Over twenty feet away from the man, the sand began to boil. It rose and fell, twisted and caved, roiled, as if something was swimming just underneath. And, indeed, something was, as the sand opened revealing a gigantic, grotesque form rising out of the ground. It looked like…A worm, an animal. No, scratch that, this was no animal, at least not one any god would have put on this earth. It was a monster, in the rawest and most visceral sense of the word, its red skin appearing eternally blistered and dripping with fluids from swimming through the glass-like shards, its legless, snake-like body rising thirty feet above Saif. Its head was eyeless, noseless, featureless all except for its mouth, a gigantic, gaping maw decorated with four fang-like teeth, one on each “side” of the mouth, and inside the mouth Saif could just make out thousands of tiny, razor teeth.

The teeth were dripping with blood. It was the blood of the boy.

It smelled like the boy’s corpse, a smell that had been burned into Saif’s brain after sitting with it all of the previous night.

The man’s own blood boiled with rage at the dream creature, which towered over him, not attacking, not lunging. Just towering.

‘Why did you kill him?’ Saif asked the beast.

‘Because I was hungry’, the beast replied. It wasn’t speaking, of course. It was replying.

‘Why didn’t you eat him, then? Why did you leave his body?’

‘I disliked the taste. Children disagree with my stomach.’

The human balled his fists. ‘Why did you attack him in the first place, then?’

‘You humans really are difficult to tell apart.’

Saif had had enough. ’You aren’t real. You’re a figment of my stressed imagination.

The worm replied; Do you really believe that?’

‘No…’

‘Then let’s skip the part where I have to convince you that I’m real, and let’s get right down to it. I’m still hungry. You will come and feed me.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because you will believe that you can kill me.’

‘And if I decide not to try to kill you?’

The worm thought for a second. ‘Then, I guess, I will be relegated to eating the distasteful children of your village.’

Saif got the point. ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘where can I find you?’

‘The desert.’

‘That’s not very helpful.’

‘Oh, you’ll find me. Don’t worry. I won’t make it hard.’

Now.

Small spirals of dust spin through the dark, cold air, dissipating after several seconds, as Saif trudges through the desert sand.

He is bundled in his desert gear, but still feels chilled. It’s close. He fingers the cold, metal handle of the long shamshir sword hanging from his belt. The rifle feels heavy on his back. Just ahead of him, about a hundred yards, the sand begins to move.

He doesn’t notice.

Four Days Ago.

He didn’t notice. Not until his wife had shown him. Saif had so much on his mind, that he had failed to notice the large, round blisters on his back until Jaliah had pointed them out to him.

She asked him what they were.

“Yuu ch bish,” he said, dismissing the concerns. It was probably sand chafing. Of course, they both knew that wasn’t true. There were four blisters, all of the exact same side, one near his neck, one on the lower half of his back, and two on either side directly underneath his armpits. They were yellow, and one was leaking puss. Jaliah cleaned her husband’s wounds as he related to her his dream. He had so adamantly been against the prospect of some sort of supernatural being, she remembered, it was disturbing to hear him talk about his dream with such fear in his voice.

There had been no thought in Saif’s mind that the dream had been anything but real, but these blisters almost confirmed it. There had been stories about this sort of thing. The bite of the Sandworm.

And nobody in Tenduk knew more about the Sandworm than Azhar.

Wise man or madman? That question has been asked about countless men over countless years, and it is no less applicable here and now. Curator of the small, one room Tenduk library, Azhar is one of the oldest members of the village. He’s seen many born and many die, and Saif is only the next in a long line of leaders the old man has witnessed take the town’s reigns. However, he is the only leader to come to Azhar for advice.

“Oruulna,” the man said as he heard a knock on the library door. The visitor obeyed, opening the door and stepping inside, Azhar surprised to see the town leader.

Azhar beamed at the younger man, extending his arms. “Sain baina uu Saif!” He greeted the man. They embraced for half a second, Saif smiling at the elder.

Azhar asked him why he was visiting. Surely, with the week’s tragedy, the leader of the town had more important things to do than visit an old man?

Saif explained his dream, and the words that he heard, the images he saw. In an instant, any semblance of levity left the elder’s face, and he seemed to age twenty years in two seconds.

“Ergej ergüül,” he ordered Saif. Saif complied wordlessly, turning around and lifting his shirt for the man to see. Azhar almost choked. There it was. The bite of the Olghoi-Khorkoi. Saif was telling the truth.

The library was only a single, midsize room. Up near the front, the sparse shelves contained books such as “The Geography of History”, “Moby Dick,” “Andromeda Strain” and even a copy of “Animorphs: Megamorphs #2: In The Time Of The Dinosaurs.”

But near the back, the books got older, browner, and dustier. There was a shelf in the back filled with scrolls and thick, leather books, the shelf where Azhar was leading Saif.

He rustled around them, not seeming to care that the scraps of paper looked so old that one wrong movement would turn them to dust. He pulled out a rather large, thick book with a hard cover, and a title etched onto it:

“Domog Olghoi-Khorkoi.”

Azhar opened the book with a creak, flipping through the pages of words and engravings until he found one large spread illustration. He pointed it out to Saif, who recognized the image instantly.

That was his nightmare companion. The Sandworm. The Olghoi-Khorkoi itself.

Saif confirmed that this was, indeed, his monster. Azhar nodded solemnly. There was no doubt in the older man’s mind now. The Demon of the Gobi Desert was upon them. God help them.

Domog Olghoi-Khorkoi. The oldest book, by far, in the village, older than most of the buildings, and second only to a few of the scrolls housed on its shelf. The book was the full account of the monster that lurked just outside the village, just out of eyesight, the monster that lived in the sand. The story of the worm had gone back for an untold amount of time, perhaps thousands of years, kept alive by word of mouth, campfire stories, and sightings. Victims spoke of its terrible breath, its venom, and its acidic saliva.

It went by many names. Sandworm. Demon of the Desert. The Sun God. Mongolian Death Worm. Olghoi-Khorkoi.

But Saif decided to call it simply worm. As the elder Azhar guided him through the old book, he mentioned multiple times that, with something so widespread as this, it’s often difficult to discern fact from fiction. There were many claims about the creature’s physiology, its teeth the size of mountains, its eggs which it laid inside living camels (Despite almost all legends agreeing that the animal was a single being), or the acid it would spray from its mouth.

There were just as many, if not more, origin stories for it. It was the daughter of Satan. It rose from the ground when the blood from Abel, the first murdered man, mixed with the desert sand. It came from the stars, or the center of the earth. Nobody seemed to agree on where it came from, or even exactly what it looked like. But there were two through-lines through the entire book.

The first was this: Olghoi-Khorkoi was invincible.

It’s been shot at, sliced, burnt, there are even rumors that the Mongolian military has taken lengths to destroy it (Although these claims are flimsy at best). Nothing can hurt it. No weapon of man could harm it.

The second through line: No man could protect himself when the Olghoi-Khorkoi was after him. It would dig through the sand at high speeds, and its acidic venom, even a drop, could kill an army. It could melt a tank, and turn bones to sludge.

Saif thanked Azhar for his help and left the library. It was time to pack.

Now.

The back of Saif’s neck tingles. The skin feels clammy, the hairs stand up. He spins around, his eyes darting across the featureless desert, as he begins to hear a low rumbling, and the sand beneath his feet starts to quiver. The moon is but a sliver in the sky, and dark clouds slowly coalesce to cover it, darkening the surrounding desert and rendering the man nearly blind. But he can feel something. Kneeling down slowly, Saif lowers his hands to the ground, his fingers digging into the sand, feeling. It’s coming from his right. The man peers into the darkness, his eyes beginning to adjust, if only slightly, as he just barely makes out a shape. It’s large, and growing, taller and taller, rising out of the ground like an impossibly thick tree. It is here.

‘Hello, human,’ Says Olghoi-Khorkoi.

‘Hello, worm.’ Says Saif.

‘You’ve read about me. You know my name.’

Saif can feel the indignity radiating off the creature. ‘Yes, I do, worm.’

He stands upright, his quivering, right hand removing the sword from his belt, his left reaching to pull the rifle off of his back. The worm hisses, a shrill, ugly sound, but a sound that holds the unmistakable essence of laughter. This is paired with the hurricane wind of breath coming from the monster’s gaping mouth, a stench so rotten it threatens to make the man puke. Saif tries to ignore it, but the mixture of hissing and stench resonates in his skull, a fog that obscures his thoughts.

He lifts the gun to his eye, aiming for the mountainous figure that still isn’t moving. His hand is wavering.

Chka! Chcka! Chcka Chcka! Chcka! Chcka! Chcka! Chcka!

The flashes of light from the gun’s barrel slightly light up the desert, and Saif sees the red, raw skin of the worm begin to bleed with the bullet holes. Saif smirks with satisfaction. Perhaps the worm isn’t quite as invincible as the legends make it out to be.

It doesn’t move. It stands in the sky, waving back and forth slightly, like a pole in the wind.

‘Is that it?’

The clouds in the sky let up for half a second, letting some of the silvery moonlight through. Saif feels his throat tighten as he scans the flesh with his eyes, looking for the bullet holes that should be squirting blood onto the sand. Nothing. There had been many of them only a few seconds before, and they had either healed or perhaps they were a trick of his eyes the whole time.

The worm bends down, it’s white teeth almost the size of Saif glistening in the exposed moonlight, globs of saliva hissing and smoking as they dropped from its mouth to the ground below.

‘My turn.’

The creature attacks, without moving a muscle. In an instant, Saif feels the four marks on his back flare up with pain the likes of which he had never felt before. He instantly falls to the ground, screaming, as his back erupts with the feeling that every nerve of his is on fire. He is curled in the sand, his eyes seeing the pain in front of him as if it is a million solid objects invading his body.

It stops.

The pain leaves his body as if it had never been there, and he is left weak, on the ground in a fetal position, a wet substance leaking from the wounds on his back.

He tries to stand, but falls to his hands and knees, vomiting for real this time, all over his hands and the sandy ground.

Saif lifts his head up weakly towards the worm, who hovers above him still. Silently gloating.

You’ll come because you think you can kill me.

And Saif realizes this is the way of things. Every couple of years, a hero ventures out to slay the monster that terrorizes their town. The dead child wasn’t because the worm was hungry. It was bait for a hero. A delicious, juicy hero.

Saif blinks the tears from his eyes and clears them enough to see the hulking figure speeding towards him, its giant maw and million tiny teeth glistening in the moonlight, before engulfing the man entirely. The moonlight shines down indifferently.

Two Days Ago.

The moonlight shone down indifferently, as Saif left the library for the third time, confident now that he had absorbed as much as the Domog Olghoi-Khorkoi as he would be able to. The town had begun to feel tremors, most physical, in the sand. Some deeper than that. Tremors inside the souls and minds of the inhabitants. The knowledge that something was going to happen, even though they knew not what it was. The feeling one has when being watched.

Said hadn’t announced his intention of leaving, but word got around. He was hunting a Sandworm, some said. He’s fleeing this cursed town, claimed others. And a few insisted that he had lost his mind, and was treading into the desert to die. Saif didn’t care to address these rumors. He was worried about other things.

Abbas, the local priest, had visited the man’s home to give him blessings, and a great many others had visited, too, although he started to send them away after the first ten nosy neighbors. He wanted his time with Jaliah, time to sort things out. To say their possible goodbyes. Of course, she had tried to stop him, but she also recognized her husband’s duty, as the leader of the town. The duty he took on years ago, to do all in his power to protect the citizens from threats, both internal and external.

A quest to kill an invincible god-monster definitely fit within those parameters.

Jaliah wrapped her tender arms around her husband. Her skin was the softest thing in the hard, rough Gobi life. Her lips, the most pleasant desert fruit.

The two embraced. They both knew it may be their one of their last. Saif had packed the minimal amount of supplies to survive the journey, and their camel (their most expensive possession) was sleeping in the hay outside, oblivious to the problems of its human masters.

This night was long. Sleep didn’t come for Saif, and he spent the night trying not to move too much as to wake Jaliah. She was doing the same thing, unbeknownst to him.

The sun’s body peeked up above the windowsill, disturbing Saif from the small amounts of restless sleep and nightmares he had been experiencing. The man prepared breakfast slowly and deliberately, as if each second he spent preparing his food was a second he didn’t have to spend away from home. Jaliah implored him yet again to stay, although she already knew what the answer would be.

As he prepared to leave, the couple said goodbye. Their words were small and simple, yet more powerful than any gigantic demon worm the desert could throw at them. And in that moment, Saif knew he would be alright.

Now.

Warm. Wet. Pain. Dark. Camel fur?

Saif’s eyes are sealed shut, for fear of the acid saliva, but he is alive. As the monster had come bearing down on him, Saif, sword in hand, had made the insane decision to run towards its gaping maw. This way, at least, he could control the angle at which he entered the mouth, and had been able to dodge the four venomous arm-length fangs at the front of the mouth.

Now, hanging onto one of those teeth for fear of sliding into the creature’s gullet, Saif only has the million tiny razor blade teeth to watch out for. It’s technically an improvement.

He can feel the teeth on his clothes, quickly tearing them to rags, he can feel the acidic saliva on his face, a slight stinging at first, which grows slowly, as his skin begins to peel.

Saif has to act fast, holding tight onto the large white tooth with both arms, his right hand still grasping the sword. Eyes still shut, Saif climbs his way up the tooth shaft, his feet firmly planted in the worm’s slimy mouth, trying not to slip, as he feels his way upward.

His arms make contact with the ceiling, the root of the tooth embedded in the top of the monster’s mouth. He grimaces, using his entire upper body strength to shove the sword deep into the worm’s flesh.

It doesn’t like this.

Saif feels a lurch, as a flood of fluids fills the cavity, the stinging now eating away at his clothes and flesh, though not fast enough to kill him instantly. But that isn’t its plan.

The slimy fluid rips the man’s hands from both the sword hilt and the tooth, and a strong current is pulling Saif downwards, deeper into its throat, the razor teeth slicing at the man’s shoes as he attempts to stand on them. As the saliva drains downward into the esophagus of the worm, Saif makes one last lurch, jumping upward and grabbing onto the tooth, almost falling again due to the lack of traction on the object, but finding footholds yet again on the slimy surface. He finds the hilt of the sword, still embedded deep in flesh, and begins to pull it. Back and forth, forth and back, like a saw around the root of the tooth. The worm really doesn’t like that, and opens its mouth. It’s evidently underground, as giant mouthfuls of sand fly into the mouth threatening to knock Saif from his position. But amazingly, the man holds his ground against the walls of sand, and, weakened by the acidic saliva, they flow around him.

Saif is almost done with his circle around the root of the tooth, as the creature tries opening and closing its mouth, but, having no actual jaw, this doesn’t affect Saif all that much. It tries again to flood its mouth with saliva, but Saif is too close. Not all the chariots of Heaven and Hell could keep the man from his goal now.

He grasps the tooth with both hands now, the fleshy circle around it spurting foul-tasting blood into the man’s face, his nose clogging with it, every breath smelling and tasting of vomit, blood and puss. He can’t tell if it was his or the worm’s.

With one last, final wrench, the man succeeds in ripping the tooth from its station, which incites a deafening, screeching hissing noise from deep within the lightless, bodily cavern.

He feels its body writhing and squirming. They both know what he is about to do. Its fear gives him confidence that it will work.

Gripping onto the fang tight, losing his hold on the sword, Saif plunges downward, all of his body strength shoving the tooth into the side of the worm’s mouth. Another wave of warm blood hits his body, and his entire world begins to shake, as the Worm rumbles and hisses in pain, the calls earsplitting, as its own venom spreads throughout its body.

Saif holds onto the embedded tooth for dear life, all while being careful not to pull it from its new home in the monster’s gigantic mouth. The corroding venom begins to course through its own host’s veins, the venom that can kill anything versus the indestructible monster.

The venom wins out, ultimately.

With one last screech of resistance, one deafening roar at the indignity of this death, the Olghoi-Khorkoi stops shuddering. The acidic saliva, mixed with blood and puss, starts to drain down the corpse’s throat, and it gives one last shudder.

And there is quiet.

Blind in the dark and half deaf, his skin on fire, Saif feels his way towards the opening of the mouth, diligent to avoid the three remaining venomous stalactites.

Using all of his remaining energy, Saif lifts open the monster’s mouth and finds that whatever god exists in the universe has had enough decency to allow the Olghoi-Khorkoi to die above ground.

Saif collapses on the cool sand, his skin relieved to be in the dry, night air.

He may not make it home. His skin is peeling, his eyes are stinging and one of them is blind, maybe temporarily, perhaps permanently. His body is in pain, but his spirit is at peace. The most peace he’s ever had in his life.

As Saif lay on the rough, sandy ground, eyes closed, he feels something – A drop of moisture on his splayed arm. Then another. And another.

He lifts his head and opens his functional eye to see the sand before him splashing up in tiny mud puddles, as water begins to fall from the sky. A phenomenon Saif has not seen in a long, long time.

Rain.

He stands up and makes his way back towards the body’s gaping mouth. It is no longer a god, nor a demon, nor a mythical monster that lives in nightmares. Now it is just a dead worm.

Saif removes the giant fang from the mouth and turns back around, a thin line in the sand from the tooth forms as he drags it home, the rain getting harder now.

Behind him a vulture lands atop the titanic corpse and rips a chunk of meat off, swallowing it whole.