The Abyss

A huge fireball erupted; this had just gotten serious. Of course it didn't take a hoard of demonic spiders rushing at us to tell me that, I was already firing armor-piercing rounds into the cavern and the rest of the squad was doing the same. We had to hurry or else the ground beneath our boots would melt and we would fall through where more spiders would most likely attack us.

The order was given to retreat back to the temple. That emerald monolith stood out as the only feature in the desert of shifting red sand. Movement was difficult, as if we were wadding through custard. I looked down at my boots and realized that the sand had indeed turned into a sloppy barely-edible mass.

"Unacceptable." I thought. Paranoia was working against us again. It was toying with us because it knew we could win this battle easily. But where was the fun in that? What sick pleasure could it derive from us being convenienced in any way? It is because of this that it started to rain sardines and the sand turned into a churning ocean.

Not this time. I reached the temple just in time to see my squad get swallowed by the cruel ocean. I did not mourn, not because the spiders still posed a threat because they didn't, but because I knew I would see them again in some ancient warehouse or intergalactic apartment building far away from here.

This battle was won, for a time. But it wasn't over yet; I still had to scale the steps of the temple. One by one I crawled up those bricks made of ruby stopping every so often to look out on the horizon. The ocean had turned back to sand and the three moons I had grown so accustomed to still hung in the sky with silent grace. From up here I could see the shell of the great turtle, Speedy, slowly shifting back and fourth as he crossed the sands. Yet, the pinnacle of the temple appeared no closer.

How much longer must I climb? Had I not suffered enough already today? Paranoia bid my pleading no mind. So I climbed, I climbed for days. I climbed as the moons spun around me wildly and the birds scoffed at my effort. I've noticed that ignoring the birds has become so much harder now-a-days mainly because that in between their trolling and chatter is what sometimes amounts to useful insight. In this case, they were ridiculing me because these temple steps were not going up, but had, in their indifference to my cause, twisted themselves into a mobius loop.

Typical. Obviously this journey had to wait another day. But as long as I stayed alive this temple would still be here. So I jumped down into the starry abyss below knowing that I would be carried back on the wings of scornful crows to my home among the phosphorescent pools and rusting oil drums.