Soon I'll march up those steps.
My vision, my fears, my dreams and my ultimate desire.
It stands ahead, mocking me, growing ever farther with each step.
I've felt it, the black pillar that reaches into the sky, maybe above that. It seems unending.
Maybe it is, maybe it never ends and my quest will go on forever.
I can't rest, can't wait, I have to move or I'll lose it.
I'm not the only one questing for it though. There are... others. Friends but not-friends. Fellow travelers who seek what I do, all of them are ghastly figures o'er the black horizon. I can see the whites of their eyes, their palled faces, their tears.
I know I don't look much better, but still can't keep myself from calling them ugly, horrid, ghostly figures. Each of them flickers than falls, reappears, disappears again. I know that we're just walking a circle, that each time we get close, it pushes us away again. I know that I can turn back, can go home.
But I'm not that strong.
I've been walking this circle for years now, almost a thousand, why I'm still alive I don't know. Maybe we're just toys to play with until it gets bored. What it is, that's a question that tumbles around in my aged mind. I've found the skeletons of others who walked my path, their flesh was pink and chewed by some unknown predator. I know that I'll end up like them, grinning and dead. I look ahead of me, this would be my final run before I turn back, I've told myself that since I began. I didn't notice the circle until I was too far gone to go back.
I see them, the ghosts again, flickering away
I notice some of them are gone, and I can see my own skin begin to flake off. Slowly, I reached down to my hip, grabbed my water bag, and poured three small drops onto the cracked and broken skin. The skin seems to drink it all up. I could hear it, an ugly and dull sound against the silence. My shoes weathered and fell off ages ago.
The air, its dirty. Fog rolls in and I know this is when I restart. This is when the cycle begins again and again and again until I die, or until I reach it. But I know, that...
Soon
Soon I'll march up those steps
