Buffy-fic

[gilascave]

The desert was fucking hot. It wasn't a new thought, it wasn't going to be the last time he thought it. It didn't help, either.

But it was, so he thought it. Walking through the blowing sand, face wrapped behind cotton and eyes hidden from the stinging grains, he wished he could be anywhere. Somewhere, for a day, where there was no sand, was no wind, was no fucking heat.

He wanted to stop and wipe his brow, but there was no moisture in his body to be wasted on sweat. With even that excuse spared him, he only kept walking, one foot before the other through the dunes, cursing the heat and the wind.

There was a place to be. Someplace far, far away in another time, another world. A place where the water still ran upon the surface of the world, and fell from the sky, and people lived like sentient life forms and not scrambling around like insects for what little the world offered its inhabitants.

He knew of this place, had seen it in his mind, had heard its whispers in the very rare stories that remained. Most who still thought, believed them fairy tales. Some believed, and it drew them into madness. He thought he might be mad, as well -- walking relentlessly through the desert, conjuring water from the sky and food from deep within the earth, wasting precious energy and magics on...what. A dream? A chance?

A story about a world that might have existed here, where now a desert covered every inch that was not fused rock and still-boiling lava? Perhaps he was insane. Except he didn't feel insane. He felt calm, rational, and every time he stopped and cast his spell at mealtimes, the spells ran off his tongue like they'd been born inside him.

If he were insane, there was little to fear in it. It did not keep him from his task, and it was not as though he had a better task to perform. Walk through the sands, cursing the heat and wind for lack of anything else to say, and hope.

Hope that one day he would crest the dune and find before him that portal, that dark, swirling vortex that still existed in the stories and legends and minds of men who still held thought. The vortex that had been left behind when hell came and took every monster from the world, and left behind only desolation.

And he would walk through that portal, and he would find himself back at the beginning, and he would kill the man who had done this to his world.