CHOSEN, PART TWO

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|  0  |  SIX. SIOL. THE CHOSEN.
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PART TWO
SAMARITAN'S PARABLE

Siol walked across the plains of sand and dust. Shining patterns of stars hung in the sky that seemed to stack themselves into the pictographesque language of Ionian, the official vernacular of the planet. Siol tried to stare at the stars as they danced across the heavens, but whenever he looked upwards, the chilling wind coursing across the desert sands buffeted into his face. He found that keeping his head low prevented backlash. He continued in this manner for what seemed like a day unto itself. The moon trekked to the highest point in the sky by the time Siol had wandered to the far end of the desert, in which a peculiar geographic formation lay.

He had felt its rumbling as he drew closer. It had an almost magnetic effect, really. Bits and pieces of stray sand gradually slid across the horizon, and as you got nearer to the epicenter the effect was magnified until entire shelves of sand were crawling across the desert floor, scrambling over the horizon and into a seemingly bottomless pit. Siol's heavy boots seemed to keep him rooted to the spot - he wasn't pulled forwards, and could see the horror at his leisure. It was a churning whirlpool of sand that let forth a roaring sound. The sparkling pieces of yellow were piled into the thing wholesale, disappearing into murky depths that contained unknown horrors. Though the spiraling sand kicked up dust in Siol's vision, his eyes seemed to pierce through the dark and see something he didn't before. Jutting from the sand was a narrow catwalk with some kind of mechanical instrument attached to it. Though Siol couldn't exactly jump hundreds of feet down to investigate and then have no way of getting back up - his feet, though supposedly propulsion-oriented, weren't exactly operable as far as that went - he did make a note of it.