The Sands of Revelation
A solitary traveler treads the wastes where no winds blow.
His cloak, a tattered banner, flaps in silence, frayed and thin,
And endless dunes, like frozen waves, stretch far where none have been.
“O truth,” he whispers, parched and hoarse, “thy face I yearn to see—
Unveil thy form, though sharp as thorns, and carve thy mark in me.”
The desert, vast and voiceless, breathes a sigh of shifting sand,
A labyrinth of echoes built by some unseen hand.
Three suns have died since first he crossed the threshold of this waste,
His skin now cracked like porcelain, his soul by thirst effaced.
Yet still he staggers onward, lured by phantoms of the mind—
A glint of light, a whispered hymn, the shadows left behind.
At dusk, a specter shimmers there, its visage gaunt and pale,
A mirror of his hollow cheeks, a brother to his tale.
“Turn back,” it mourns, “for truth’s embrace is colder than the grave;
What wisdom blooms in barren soil but sorrow’s thorny stave?”
He grips his staff of blistered wood and cleaves the spectral haze,
While twin obsidian moons ascend to judge his desperate gaze.
The sands, like ancient chronicles, conspire to efface his tread—
Each step, a fleeting testament to paths the lost have led.
At last, a spire claws the night, a jagged, ashen blade,
Its peak ensnared in tempests where the firmament is frayed.
Within its shadowed chambers, whispers coil like serpents’ breath:
“Behold the heart of nothingness, the zenith after death.”
He climbs the fractured altar, where no god has ever knelt,
And carves his final question in the stone with hands that melt.
The tower screams; the sands collapse in cataracts of time,
And truth, at last, unshrouds itself—a maw devoid of rhyme.
His bones, now dust, commingle with the desert’s barren breast,
A requiem of echoes where no soul may pause to rest.
The dunes resume their slumber, and the stars, unmoved, endure—
For truth, that vast and hollow wind, devours what it cures.
