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a particle of sand tossed about by sullen wind recoiling onward along aimlessly what seemed a great
black serpent of tar and gravel curving into the
oblivion that spanned the breadth of the
sisyphean sentinels tasks made but a few melodic sour drum taps as it skittered along the tattered scales then faded away perpetually
lost in the unyielding and immutable silence of the painted expanses
It was a desert, an arid wasteland. The grain of sand was one of many, part of the furious storm that obliterated even the ancient stones in time. Nothing survived.
The road was just another victim. The road was a vague shade of the young serpent it once was. The road had rarely felt the embrace of heavy sole or tread in its early years. The road would never again know that experience. The road was narrow. The road had no destination. The road had no signs. The road was straight. The road; was the spirit of the desert, an endless stretch of tar and gravel that began beyond one horizon and dropped back into the other. Something that shifted erratically and yet when viewed from a distance seemed uniform.
A figure emerged from the sandstorm; a lone figure emerged from the sandstorm. A first it was a little more than distortion in the sand, something that could easily be dismissed as an illusion or mirage. But slowly, the distortion became a shadow. A shadow, a shade, a Stygian void; a silhouette cast playfully by a clever architect or puppet master on that advancing wall for an audience of none. As this construction or show ended, the figure took form from out the sand.
The figure was aesthetically unpleasant. It was a jilted cubist painting rendered to life and dimension by a listless artist who had long given up on their canvas, five segments bridged together and identifiable by design only. Each segment was a crystalline shape in symmetry: two limbs, a body, a tail and a head. The limbs and tail were blue, the kind of light blue that made one feel a torturous peace borrowing into the soul. This blue slipped its way up the "underbelly" and to the tip of the figure's "nose", countered only by a red that was unremarkable in its jubilant gayity.
In short, PITH was a standard porygon.
PITH scanned the ground nearest to it, searching for threats that had eluded its detection devices as well as other anomalies or oddities. This was what PITH always did first. PITH scanned the horizon, searching for something, maybe a clue or standard. This was what PITH always did second… most of the time. Occasionally PITH would do something different. For instance, today PITH stopped scanning for a moment to admire the beauty of the desert under clear skies before returning to that loop of gazing at the near and far.
This was PITH's sole occupation. It is what compelled. It is what bound. It is what drove PITH to action as the sentinels pursued each other through the heavens. To strive, to seek, to yield and not to find: the master. The one to whom PITH was bound. PITH sought after its master with all the diligence of a mathematician or surgeon endeavoring to square the circle or repair the delicate sinew of a weary body.
It was in the second chapter of that gazing loop, that PITH spotted it; the wicked glint of a metal fixture atop a tiny spire on the horizon. The eye of the sentinel flowering stinging melodies in that twitching bauble. For reasons known or unknown to PITH, the wicked glint held a strange fixation and power in its core; the power that only stemmed from the memory of something once forgotten. PITH deemed it worthy of further investigation. It sought a match for this bewitching will-o-wisp or ray in its vast ocean of computational memory, but the search was proven to be, in vain.
There was one part apart from all others in the memory. A part obscured by encryption to the point of utter inanity wherein a few sacred memories adorned the essence. But those were not to be defiled idly, for how does one know the burn of frost ... but by the cool embrace of whirling flame? PITH stared at the wicked glint for what seemed an instant or an endless age, a starving man between two shanks of meat equally unappealing.
Ultimately, the spark of fate leapt to the holy ground as a great echoing void of memories engulfed PITH in a maw of light and it met that Door...