I felt the blinding might of the midday sun overpower me. I had no way to tell the time, other than to rely on my intuition. With every step forward, my feet sank into the sand ever so slightly before I could lift them up again. I was loosing gallons of water by the minute. Dunes of sand stretched as far as the eye could see. And as the sun reached its peak, the air would grow too hot to bear.
I had come to this world because I despised my old one. I was a researcher, a life-long tourist perusing the existence of others. Managing to escape from one nightmare would always lead me to another. I was not from here, and by that I don’t just mean the desert, I mean this reality.
She was waiting for me next to a suspiciously placed pond. An oasis hidden in between the dunes. The water was undrinkable, shapeshifting into sand as soon as my hands came in contact with it. She was unimpressed by my display of exhaustion. And as I looked at her closely, it struck me that something about her was inhuman. She had augmented herself to the point where she lost that elusive quality. That critical something. A MacGuffin that defies description, a sentiment that falls apart as soon as you attempt to capture it. She had transcended her humanity and became something altogether different.
I hesitate to say that she was something greater. Surely, her appearance would have you believe she descended straight from the heavens. And yet, I couldn’t shake the notion that something was missing. Something that needs protection and careful guardianship. She had lost the very essence of what makes us humans interesting. She had failed to protect it, amidst a never ending wave of technological wizardry. The Queen of the Desert was a victim of her own ambition. And as I would come to learn during my travels through this vast world, she was far from the only one.
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You are currently traversing the limitless expanses of Visual Fiction. Each narrative fragment in this collection unravels a memory of a man drawn into an alternate reality. With every piece, he steps deeper into the unknown, attempting to describe the indescribable, to paint the unseen, and to make sense of the senseless. These tales offer glimpses into bizarre worlds that can at times feel both intimately familiar and strangely threatening.
