Wesley's Grave
Madagascar, the world without shrimp 2022
Wesley stood at the top of the hill, his elbow firmly creased where he'd rolled his shirt sleeves up high enough to look like an archaeologist from the 1920s. His glasses were planted onto the tip of his nose and he'd applied enough sun cream to fill a small sink. He lifted his hand to his brow to shield the sun and then wondered down the small dune until he got closer and closer to it. What he had discovered - deep in the heart of Madagascar was the site of something mystical.
He'd discovered the grave when researching ancient slayers and their battles. He'd been reading a scroll with markings that matched a map. The place itself couldn't be found on anything modern, but after some magical intervening he found such a place in a vision. It was a grave. A final resting place for a slayer who'd lived a few millennia ago, perhaps just after Sineya - the first. The story goes that she was fighting a large serpent sort of beast, she defeated it, a blow to its head and neck with a large spear, but it managed to bite her. The venom quickly killed her, leaving her to die where she stood next to her enemy. She was buried deep in the heart of the desert, on the outskirts of a tiny little town in region 19.
Wesley knelt down beside the worn stone, there was a blank headstone - all markings had been weathered away by sandstorms over the years. A pile of smaller, blanker stones were layed over the grave. Wesley couldn't quite believe there was once a body here, that now all that remains would be bones in the sand. 4,000 years, that was what it took to be rediscovered. He'd write up this place for his paper, he'd photograph the evidence and take it all home to be studied. He'd write up the story, he'd make people know the legend of the ancient slayer.
His childhood learnings were coming back to him, those thousands of days he spent inside classrooms devouring books. Night after night spent inside libraries swallowing the knowledge of watchers past. He his hand through the grains at his feet. Each piece was once a larger rock, but now chipped away into dust. Wesley believed that one day they would all return to the dust, that his work would live on but his body was pass back to the earth. He liked that idea. He didn't want to be left, wrapped and cold in some old family tomb. The one his father had been buried in some years ago, alongside his grandmother and grandfather before him. He'd like to be dust, free in the wind. He thought Fred would too, she felt almost at one with nature sometimes. A rare fluke of her years spent inside a cave, with only the plants to talk to.