The Alien Rhythm

	What fools we were. Nobody had ever crossed those wastes and survived. Miles of dead sand and deader animals, of things hollowed by the heat and worn by the wind. We saw signs of civilization, somewhere, though. Rudimentary roads, paths for vehicles of unknown origin… coming from within the wastes. Near as we could tell, someone lived in that hellhole. Someone that we had apparently never heard of.

	No one had ever explored this place before, to our knowledge. Why the hell would you? Almost everyone knew it was a death sentence, an interminably hot place that offered absolutely nothing to anyone who dared to tread it. Anything you needed from that place could be gotten just as easily anywhere else, or surely wasn’t worth your life. It was a massive risk to even try and move through it in the way we planned, but we were carrying high value cargo and, we figured, a bit of heat, a dust storm and some wild animals were somewhat easier to account for than bloodthirsty highwaymen.

	As we ventured deeper, though, Garren started to hear something… strange. A ticking in his ears, he said. A steady, low and almost imperceptible rhythm that he heard most when we settled down under the unyielding cold and soulless silence of the desert nights.

	“I just can’t get the damn thing right,” he said. “Every time I try to follow it, it’s like it slips from my grasp. I don’t get it. Where the hell is it coming from?”

	Of course, we all assumed he was going mad. We were in the middle of nowhere, and surely no such sound existed. We heard him muttering to himself at night, and trying and failing ever so often to keep that rhythm in his head just long enough to understand it. We worried the obsession would start to take him, but we kept our eyes on the prize and continued our desert march.

	We delved deeper, ever deeper, into those blasted wastes. It’s hard to explain exactly how they appear, so far in. Like ruins of something that never existed. A place so desolate and blighted that sorrowful visions of what it might have been blossom in your mind, because it’s just so hard to believe that someplace could end up this way without any kind of cataclysm. These vast, seemingly endless plains, mingling with the blinding blue horizon in the form of whipping, stinging dust storms careening past… spires of glass.

	Yes, the further inward we traveled, the deeper into this blasted crater we ventured, we started to see these immense spires of glass, erected by Gods-know-what and carved into gorgeous spirals as they seemed to conduct and whirl the wind and sand about them. Flecked with iridescent glass, perhaps carved away from these spires or perhaps from whence these spires themselves came, the sand started to glimmer in the harsh sunlight in a way that kept us all rapt, almost hypnotically so.

	As I laid down in my bedroll during a particularly calm night, I watched the last light of our campfire glinting off the glass sand, I started to hear it too. But unlike Garren, I found the rhythm clear, crystal and beautiful as the sand around me. Tick, tick, tap tap, click, tap tap, click click, tap tap, click click, tick tick tick… I listened intently, my eyes fixed on the stars as the campfire died out at the edges of my vision. It was long, complex, the sound of delicate clockwork completing what must have been an hours-long cycle.

	As the clockwork rhythm began to repeat, I looked over at Garren a few feet from me, and saw him in that same thousand-yard stare at the waning stars, only to realize that they were slowly being drowned in the warm red haze of the dawn.

	Needless to say, we were both tired as hell when we had to get moving again. But there was something about that rhythm. Now that I could hear it, now that, far as I could tell, we could all hear it, I understood why Garren was so taken with it.

	It started subtly. I could see my comrades tapping to the rhythm along the cart, quietly muttering it to themselves, and in short order I realized I had been doing it too. In the night, it turns out, it had sunk into our skulls and burrowed into our minds, and in the day we marched to that rhythm. Eventually, each footfall joined with each tick, each tap, each click. It drove us forward with renewed resolve, it dredged us out of that sleepy daze and dragged us by our minds across those wastes. We didn’t speak a word to each other, each command spoken only in nods and gestures, each act of cooperation timed to the rhythm.

	Where were we going? Hell if we remembered. The cargo in our stores surely was going to decay under the brutal sunlight, and indeed we’d lost some of it along the way. Wasn’t of any concern to us anymore. There was something deep down there that we so desperately needed, desperately enough that I could swear to you that our hearts started to beat to the rhythm just as well.

	Then we saw something strange.

	Far across from us, just as a massive dust storm crested the hills, we saw a small… machine, of some kind. It was surrounded by these huge forms, must have been seven or eight feet tall each. Their sharp, clear silhouettes defied the dusty blur of that sand tsunami, but more than anything they had these bright, glowing red eyes like floodlights pointed directly at us. Moment they saw us, seems like, they gathered up and took off, right straight into that dust storm. Strangest damned thing I’d seen in my life.

	Days passed in what felt like minutes. Everything passed so quickly while we zoned out, our minds fixed slavishly to the clockwork sound and our bodies carrying us further inward. We intended to simply skirt around the wastes, to avoid a few notorious bandit hot-spots in favor of a less certain, but greater danger. Yet now, we danced to an alien rhythm in an alien landscape possessed of an alien mindset, one with great trust in the clockwork to carry us where the world had decided we needed to be.

	The sand had long since passed from ‘familiar but a little odd’ to ‘entirely unrecognizable’, a sort of volcanic shade with red flecks as we half-realized we had passed into what seemed like a volcanic area. Yet even still, there were roads, and we followed them just as we did the rhythm, and we thought nothing of it. Our food and water was cleverly rationed, our supplies were more than enough for the time being, and so we drifted wherever we were told to, animals evidently taken as well by the rhythm completely ignoring us, interlopers in the cycle they inhabited.

	These small and strange spires had, as well, transitioned into monolithic, jagged and unshaped glass as reflective as any mirror, and we could see ourselves in them. We looked… well, like hell. We were disheveled, caked in layers of sand that illustrated subtly the journey we’d made, our clothes worn ragged by the constant winds that we came to realize had scored strips of our skin away across our forearms and faces. Yet for some reason we couldn’t feel a touch of the pain we should have with raw wounds dusted with sand.

	Joining the rhythm were the sounds of sand sliding off the perfect surfaces of these glass monuments, like rolling, faint and mournful chimes. The sky had begun to grow darker even during the daytime, a welcome and cooling reprieve if not for the choking air quality and constant threat of being swept away by the wind. All the while, we had begun to more frequently see those red-eyed creatures, surveying us from great distances and disappearing promptly after we’d noticed them. How the hell were we still alive?

	As we passed over a hill, standing over the mouth of a fairly deep valley in the sand… we saw it.

	[to be continued]