On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 160, of 240 so far.

In Endless Abundance

I wandered the desert for years, looking for the place.

The Empty Quarter is vast, and inhospitable, and deadly — no place for a lone traveller — so sometimes I would go with others. The nomadic people of the region had no interest in me, but occasionally I would find company in the form of an explorer, or an archaeological expedition, or treasure hunters, or just lost souls looking to become more so.

I couldn’t travel all the time, of course, because the journeys needed supplies, and camels, and those things required money. So I would work for six months or a year or two years, then embark once more across the sands. There were even times when I chartered a small aircraft and a pilot, in an attempt to speed my search, but the desert speaks lies when you walk upon it, and doubly so when you look down from above.

It was in my forty-seventh year when I set out for what I felt would be my last attempt, because my body had grown unreliable and weary, and my hopes had dulled. It made perfect sense to me that a resource often must be expended in order to gain more of the same, but that practicality became less comforting as I felt the cold more, and felt the heat more, and felt the pains in my limbs that came from a lifetime of mistreatment.

I’d been seeking any change in the dunes and the dust for weeks when I first glimpsed the unusual mound in the distance. Accustomed to tricks of the senses, I felt no particular excitement, but another half hour’s ride only brought the formation closer, and I could tell that it was no natural feature. I allowed myself some interest, if not hope, when I finally drew close enough to discern what seemed like an aeons-eroded pillar, and the crumbled remains of a low wall nearby. A huge amount of sand choked the area below, but it might have been a mine in ages past, and the surrounding region of desert was shaped unusually, falling into a subtle depression that served to hide it from all around.

I proceeded on foot, tying up my beast in anticipation of returning soon for an arduous task, as the place was surely a difficult water which could take days of digging. But that was a problem for later. I went down into the great valley of sand, foolish beyond measure and taking my life in my hands, and I moved even faster when I saw that there was a another structure down there, less damaged by the cruel sun and crueller winds over unknown centuries.

The ruined building below was small, and open to the elements at its front, but within there was still shelter even though sand was heaped upon most of the floor. At the rear, there was a door of iron and wood, neither material having endured especially well, and beyond it there were stairs. I hesitated, but there was nothing to be done. If the place of the pillars was below, then that was where I must go.

I found the mine, and I followed it for a long way, lighting torches as I went, and after a time it became a much older place, weaving to and fro until I discerned that I was no longer in a mine but in the outskirts of a city that had been buried beyond human sight during the times written of in holy books. Now my heart pounded in my chest, as I came to the end of a covered walkway and emerged into the dust-shrouded and oppressive gloom of a great square, which itself gave onto wide and deep steps leading gently upwards to the gateposts of a palace. Its walls were of hundreds of columns, stacked to the limit of sight, and there could be little doubt that my search had finally been a success.

The silence was total, even my own footsteps not carrying far, and I couldn’t see a single snake or a scorpion. The grand hall was a mausoleum, and at its end there were more stairs, made in the ancient style, which ultimately brought me to a throne room. The throne itself was of a black rock the likes of which I’d seen during my travels, lying broken at the centre of impact craters, laced with veins of gold.

And in the throne, there he sat.

As I approached, his eyes opened and looked upon me, still bright after millennia, and unblinded by the darkness I had temporarily banished. I greeted him using the old language, and he nodded.

“Peace is indeed upon me,” he said, “for this place holds nothing else.”

His voice was like the grinding of stones together, and I could see that his feet and legs were indistinct, having partly merged with the stone, keeping him forever sat there. One of his arms had suffered the same fate, but the other was laid upon the black rock as casually as could be.

“Then you are the ancestor of those who once lived here?” I asked, already knowing the answer, and the man using his remaining functional arm to gesture at his own body, as if it were all the evidence needed.

“I am King A’ad,” he replied. “And you are here to ask for a small piece of that which I have in endless abundance.”

I could only nod, because he already knew the truth of me. Having had a horror of death since my childhood, I had spent my adult years seeking a means to procure unnaturally long life. This gift was within the man’s power to grant, having been cursed to do that very thing.

“Know this,” he said, trying to lean forward even though it must have been a thousand years since he was last able to, “you may have no more than ten times that which was afforded to you by god, and the price will come due at its end.”

“The price?” I asked, and the man smiled a wicked smile.

“You will return here to sit in my place, and you will repay your debt a thousandfold.”

It was so long ago, and I was so young. Barely born. I accepted his terms, and when I came back eight centuries later, tired of life and every possible flavour of it, driven by a compulsion which couldn’t be ignored, he crumbled to dust as soon as I walked into his throne room.

Or mine, as it became on that day. I sit here in the dark, my feet already fused to the floor, and I think that perhaps sixty or seventy years have gone by; the merest fraction of my penance.

I am alone with only time, and the barest glimmer of hope I can retain is that someday, another may come here looking to cheat death and god, and I will entrap him here in my place.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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