From the Sacred Texts:
The Great Collapse was not a disaster.
It was a decree.
And that decree... still echoes with torments.
Tears are the testament to this.
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Salvation.
A salvation from the hands of heaven - far from sight, yet close to the sky. Or perhaps the opposite - death delivered by the one closest to us.
It felt as if the earth and sky were screaming. I was sinking.
I was within a curse.
What lingered most in my mind was the cold. The wind rising from the edge of a vast abyss. Cold, petrified bodies covered the ground, and I walked among them. One lay there holding a toy doll, a look of confusion frozen on their face - small enough to be called a child. I was the one who once called out to them, and now I had become their killer.
I felt like I was suffocating, my trembling hands exposing my helplessness. My blood-stained sword lying on the ground revealed something else entirely. My mind could not bear it.
And so I said, with a pride born of denial - "They will all submit to the wrath of this sword." Because this was my duty, and that duty stood far beyond their fragile fate. And I would not look back. The roaring, raging sandstorm would command, and I would move forward with steady steps, sinking and rising within the الرمال. Beneath the golden sands and the deep blue sky, those shivering bodies would be left behind, marked by my blade. In the name of the great unity and existence of the Kingdom of Sands and the City of Memories, the الرمال cutting into my flesh would stand as proof of my power.
I sat within those ruins until my eyes could no longer distinguish anything. Between those cold walls, the only sound I heard was the shrill cry of crickets, as if they were screaming their existence into the void. The silence seeped into my soul, carving my heart out of its place. It was pain. Blood was on the ground - and on my hands.
The sands that swallowed the earth and the suffocating air made me feel something like a mirage. As if I were trapped inside an inverted hourglass. And my cursed grandeur would last only until the final grain of that cursed sand. I was their last hope - the last hope of a great people and a crumbling order.
We would either sink or rise. This was the end. The final ritual.
But the ritual had been completed. I had fulfilled the task given by the Desert Kingdom - this duty of salvation.
Now, there was nothing left but to wait. Only God knew what would come next.