Sands of Fate III: Many Sorrows
The black robes of the Keeper bunched around his skeletal form, sitting down upon the Sands and contemplating endlessly. A mound of sand before him emitted a faint glow and a modicum of heat, a slight reprieve from the gloom and chill that the rising moons brought.
The Keeper gazed at the mound as though it were some divining tool, some window into the unseen. It was not. Yet.
In the Keeper's upturned palm was a single grain. It felt heavy in his hand for something as slight as it was. It felt...grim. It's fate was one of many sorrows; and that had been what had piqued the Keeper's curiosity. He placed that grain on the glowing mound to see those sorrows take shape.
***
The world was over. It had been for decades. The trouble was that none of it's occupents knew it yet. Intelligent, evolved primates, borne of murky evolutionary origins on a greenhouse planet. Some banded together while other resisted such things; those who banded together routed those who did not, until assimilation became the standard. Empires rose and fell, split and fought, and these beings proliferated. With their intelligence had come a thirst for knowledge, with that thirst came a desire for advancement, and with each advancement, more and more resources became necessary. Those who owned the resources were very wealthy; and the very wealthy dictated the course of the planet, and did so towards their own goals: amassing still more wealth.
It did not take long for the wealthy to discover that it was easier to take wealth someone else already had than to find more on your own. For some time, the focus of technological advancement was solely devising increasingly efficient ways for these creatures to kill each other. Arbitrary lines were drawn, pieces of the ground were labeled and claimed; encroachment meant violence, and violence meant profit.
Situated below these very wealthy few were everyone else. The ones who actually produced, refined or gathered the resources that the very wealthy claimed for themselves, and those who kept those beings nourished, comfortable, entertained and content. Those who attempted to eschew this system were treated harshly.
So it came to be that a particularly bullish leader of one of the factions who had staked arbitrary claim to a large swathe of very particular dirt decided that the inhabitants of another such area had something that he needed, Threats were made, more lines were drawn, creatures with no hand in the conflict were sent away from their homes to die over it, until it was determined that even that was not sufficient.
Centuries of technologies of violence turned their wrath on these factions, their leaders, their citizens and their world. What had taken countless generations to attain was gone in mere blinks.
All that was left was ruin, and those few who were hardy enough or clever enough to persevere through it.
One such man lay groaning on a rusted hulk of framing that used to serve as a place to sleep. He had survived the initial devastation, and many years since, long enough to witness and even help give rise to another generation who knew nothing but this manic life of fight and flight. He was the last he knew of who remembered what it was like before. All others were dead or had been to young to really recall the almost inexpressible height from which their species had fallen.
In his time since The Last War, he had fought in wars of his own, to provide for those he cared about and stave off those who, in proof of their species’ unwillingness to learn, acted as did the ones who had got them into this mess in the first place, taking rather than earning.
He had been on both sides of wars, raids, plots, and plundering. He had survived wounds, both mental and physical, both trivial and grave, outmaneuvered enemies both aggressive and passive, and he now lay writhing, alone, hidden away like an animal who had slunk off to die without a fuss.
He was miles away from the settlement he called home, scavenging, as was his preferred duty in his advanced age. All had been well until he felt a tightening in his jaw, but he pushed through it for some time, until he found that he could not open his mouth at all.
Then the spasms had started, his body relentlessly writhing of its own accord, stiffening unbidden and painfully, as though he were already dead. He had struggled to find a place to rest, and when he found one, he discovered the source of his plight; a small, festering puncture on his left bicep. Such a trivial thing, he could not even remember where he had gotten the wound, but he did recall seeing the red streaks that emanated from the barely-bleeding hole before, marking the wounds of others. This affliction had a name in the Old World, long since lost to his recollections, for he had been but an adolescent when the doom had fallen upon his world; now it had but one name, one it shared with a million maladies that were certainly once more trivial:
Death.
It would be and had been slow, agonizing, a point driven home by another involuntary contraction that wracked his body so profoundly that he was fairly certain he had felt a bone in his leg break.
He cried out softly, though the pain was immense, and there was no one near enough to judge him for a more primal sound. The wracking pains did not hurt as bad as the realization that he, a man of renowned fortitude, a man of heroic legend in these endtimes would succumb to something so insignificant. He would never return to his partner or their children, he would never be found.
The next spasm was worse, still; it bent his spine so forcefully that everything below his waist was suddenly full of pins and needles, the sense of touch deadened, even though the pain, somehow, was not. His body screamed in agony and panic; he almost felt it was an approaching mercy that caused the failing twitches within his chest.
His life and his pain persisted a moment longer, and in that moment, every experience he had ever had came flooding into his recollection at once, each memory dancing briefly before his mind’s eye in a crazed glimpse of something greater; he tried to hold on to each as they passed, like trying to snatch smoke from the air.
But then there was nothing. Another dead thing on a dead world.
***
The Keeper still managed to find the grain among the others that formed the glowing mound, and considered long and hard if the grain was truly one he wanted to keep with him. He stared at it in his palm, processing both the problem at hand, and the sudden and mysterious presence of any amount of mortal emotion, such as what led to this contemplation to start with.
He took it with him, when he finally stood.