Yung Snout's Ticket to da Cafe

Prologue of book one of my fantasy series.

The sun was a red stain, glaring at the snow-white sand. The stuff knifed beneath his nails and pores, laughing with the mischief of his torment. Laughing like his brothers. Laughing like heresy. You’re delirious. You need water, and to stop with these womanish hysterics. The evening was yellow and spectral, and the dunes bristled with quiet.

Something beckoned his eyes. Risen from the bone-white sand, a cottage. Maroon, like blood had leaked up from the ground and filled it with color. Finally. He quickened.

His boots made no sandy ripples, his stride did not cut the air. He moved like hands through lover’s hair, as the maiden turns her stare - to glinting gleams and stranger dreams, and lost without a care. But the red building rose from sand, and greeted him with a firm hand. Its door was open, shimmering bright, and he would not put forth a fight.

He wiped his shoe and scampered through, fretting carnivorously. Now beneath a roof, he realized how hot he’d been outside. The room was red sand, shaped into chairs, walls, and windows, and the wide mouth of a crookback staircase. The structure seemed alive, beckoning him from the corner of his eye, then being somewhere else when he looked. 

Pale footsteps tickled his ears. From the mouth of the staircase appeared a grey-skinned hunchback, clasping his hands eagerly. His eyes were thorny grey swamps, alive with pestilence. 

“Sir! I am honored you would come such distance.”

“My horse died.” He scowled. “There’s nothing living within twenty miles.”

“There is you, my friend.” An orange twinkle flew through his eye like a falling star. He offered an arm, and led the way up the packed sand stairs. He smelled of old paint left in the sun. The stairs were wide and hard as rock. A perfect square window was cut into thick wall. Through it were visible two horses, whiter than the sand beneath their hooves.

“Fine horseflesh. Where do they graze, in this wasteland?”

“They are fine horses indeed, my friend. So fine that one can scarcely call them horses.” 

The stairs opened into a bare, roofless chamber, all soft, maroon sand, save for a tiny stone disc placed in the center of the floor. The grey-fleshed man did not deign to speak.

“This room has an… elegance, to it.” He swallowed, and glanced at the man, his eyes passing harmlessly over the hunch in his back.

“You are of great interest to my order, Sir Dedric.” He ushered Dedric to a window, gazing out over the desert. “This was fertile land once, my friend. It turns to unyielding sand, as an esteem to my power.” The grey man softly convulsed. “Our power. In which you will share. A wise choice indeed.” The man shut his eyes, and the burgundy teardrops patterning his red robes seemed to rise and shimmer. Then he produced a chipped stone blade from the folds of his finery.

“This isn’t all some trick? You’re not just some trickster?” 

“Ha! A keen eye for character, you are. Taste the air, my friend.”

“It tastes like air,” he said, cautiously.

“Does it? You haven’t asked for water since you arrived. Secrets live beneath these sands.” The man scooped the grey stone tablet from the floor. “In this contract is the power to pay your debt a thousand times and more. Shall we?” He handed his chipped stone blade to Dedric, and held the grey tablet beneath his wrist. 

Dedric’s fingers closed around the blade and sliced into his wrist, and the blood seemed to fall forever. Down and down it fell, and with it his self, his vengeance, and the barrier between memory and dream. It struck the stone with a deafening moan, and the gods arrived from his bones. 

The sun accepted its nightly fate, and fell from its heavenly watchtower.