Restless, Desperate, and Committed

Thoreau has discovered more villagers,
who sadly have been converted to the status of A.C.M.

Boredom gnaws at me. I know, I know, with as much work as I've to do, who could possibly become bored?

Yet so it is. All my work is in accruing resources, and so this I have done for weeks upon weeks, months upon... how much time has elapsed? There are no weekdays, no weekends, no holidays here, and so the days bleed into each other. When I'm mining dozens of meters down, closer and closer to the impenetrable bedrock, several days might slip by without my awareness. I occupy my imagination with the slaying of fell beasties, the relentless defense against Explodicons and A.C.M.s as I plunder the earth for precious resources. "Precious," I say, though I amass scores of gold bars without a single assayer to quote me a price in American dollars. What worth are these to me, then?

The only evidence of the passage of time is when I emerge, at last, to discover every last seedling in my garden has long reached the fullness of adulthood.

Knowledge Increases

A girl's best friend, it's said,
yet there are no women in this world.

Work is going well enough, I should think. This is one of the happiest sights one can see, very far below the earth. Diamonds are a rare commodity indeed, but when you find a small lode of them, it almost makes all the effort worthwhile.

Emeralds are even rarer, with only one or maybe two being embedded in any area, and those nearly as far down as one may mine. They haven't much use except for trading with villagers, and villagers do have many useful items... but one must find a concerned villager in the first place. There are none in the desert.

That is to say, someone surely built the temple in which I now dwell. Surely several someones quarried the sandstone, following the directions of other someones who laid out the plans and assessed the territory, and several more someones financed the entire venture (or at least paid the cruel taskmasters who abused a couple dozen more someones into compliance). And perhaps they all died generations before I sailed up to this section of the continent, leaving only their suspicious temple with the carvings of Explodicons, this epicenter to attract horrific monsters.

The Night-Mare

Around this time I had another bad dream. It is simplistic to say like this, yet that's all there is to it. It was a horrific vision, one which aggregated recent events and introduced a new interpretation or variation to them. I question whether it means anything, of course, except that it did signify my insecurity.

In this dream, I was riding Chestnut much as I'd done in days just before. This dream exulted in the horse-riding experience, engaging all my senses in this activity. I thrilled to feel Chestnut's powerful muscles tensing and shuddering beneath me, to lean forward and feel the wind strike me in a mild barrage, making me feel all the more powerful for it. As we rode over the fields, by crystal ponds in wooded groves, I inhaled the pollen of trees and flowers and the sweet aroma of grasses; when we pounded up the damp beach, I smelled the tang of kelp and fish and salt water (so it seemed to me). None of this was overwhelming or offensive in the least: rather, it underscored the teeming life all about us, various forms of plant and animal life, all thriving and working together for the greater good. It was a magnificent sensation.

To Pass the Endless Days

By the skylight in the temple,
we may safely see that night has fallen.

Now I must endeavor to go back to the days prior, before I got lost in the mountains and the swamp. I've picked up in the middle of my desperate flight... but now I will try to bridge the gap between where my narrative dropped off so long ago and where I find myself.

I have the luxury, for a while, to pause and attempt to recall that passage, now that I've commandeered (for the time being) this little shack in the swamp. Back to the wall, torches blazing, sword at the ready, very cautiously do I now take up quill and review the last entries to resume.

Omnia Mutantur

Armed to the teeth! Alarmed as all hell!

Things are crazy... things are crazy!

I don't know if... I can describe...

It's been so long. I was so good, and then I got caught up in other work... and then I got lost. I've died several times! This doesn't undo my actual progress, but if I have not established a bed in a new realm, I resurrect at my last point of origin, no matter how many miles or islands—or continents!—away. Much more than annoying, this has been a nightmare.

And yet so many things have changed! When did they change? It's impossible to say. Some changes, you may understand, creep up on you, or perhaps there are changes to standards of land and life that you are, of yet, largely ignorant. How can you know what you don't know? All these changes are going on without your wherewithal, so that when you do finally encounter them, you can't know the new conditions from whatever or however they presented in earlier iterations.

I hope this is obvious. It should not bear explaining.

Upon Reflection

When the last of the archer-skeletons crumbled and no more Ebonmen gurgled and flitted about, then I stood alone in the desert for a long while.

My sweat chilled me in the morning air, and then the sun soaked into my clothes and warmed me up again. Reflexively, my mind strained to interpret this and translate it into some kind of analogy for my condition. If this labor produced anything, it has since melted like a thin drift of snow and I mayn't record it here.

Tired in my limbs and tired of myself. I stared off into the featureless blue sky, an unending and consistent hue of robin's egg. No birds, no clouds. No squirrels chittered or sprinted up rough bark; no children laughed and shrieked in the distance. Biter slid from my fingers as I stood there unsteadily, entranced with nothingness, in the broad sea of sand.

The Story in the Stones

The nightmare legion assembles outside the desert temple.

To my dismay, the pyramid temple was surrounded by fell beasties, milling about as though expecting an event to erupt and coalesce them into an organized platoon—or even a company, so numerous were they. I ground my molars as my eyes adjusted to take them all in, to differentiate the Explodicons from the cacti, to pick out the tall and slender humanoids as black as the night itself, for there were a few of these about as well.

All of my senses were on high alert. Agasado, to his extensive credit, held perfectly still while I took the lay of the land. Now, I have very little skill with the base function of chivalry, that is, fighting from horseback (Old French chevaler, "knight"; Latin caballarius, "pack-horse"). I certainly had no desire to abuse Agasado's patience with grazing cuts with a sword or nasty cracks about the skull with my bow, during my preliminary learning phase, so I rode him out a certain distance to a clearing, then crept around the largest group of these predatory nasties.