Sadeh staggered in defiance of the wailing gale even as the sand slashed red streaks across her deep brown limbs. Through the billowing orange haze that engulfed the world, she could tease out with shielded eyes the silhouette of a rocky outcrop up ahead. In its side yawned a darker shadow, the mouth of a cave. If there was any place in this forsaken desert she could find shelter from the storm, it would be in there.
She did not know whether to thank the gods for such a small blessing. Had they been looking out for her and her army, they would not have let those goatskin-caped Temehu raiders lure them into an ambush and crush them. As far as Sadeh knew, she was one of only two survivors of the Khumetian force sent to punish those marauders. The other was her dear Eumenes, and she could hear him collapse into the sandy ground behind her, overwhelmed by his exhaustion and the wind.
Sadeh turned to trudge back, still fighting against the storm, and hauled up the man’s bulky body with her arms. Eumenes was not a Khumetian or even a native of the larger continent, but rather a Sherdenu whose light olive complexion and wavy brown hair betrayed his origin from across the northern sea. His armor of thick banded leather and the horned bronze helmet on his head added to the big burly man’s weight. Despite the strength she spent dragging him through the sand-choked wind, Sadeh could never give up on him. Brave and strong Eumenes was all she had left between here and their garrison’s fort to the east.
After what seemed like a lengthy passage of time, they reached the cave at last. Sadeh laid Eumenes on the floor and leaned against the rocky wall with heavy panting, taking a swig from her waterskin to wash her parched throat. She ran her fingers through the braids of her black hair to get the grains of sand out.
The big Sherdenu, upon getting a moment’s rest, rose onto his sandaled feet and brushed dust off himself. “You should’ve just left me out there. I’d rather all that sand bury me than face the overseer’s wrath back at the fort.”
“You know I would never leave you behind, my noble Eumenes,” Sadeh said. “And do not worry about our overseer. I trust he’ll understand and withhold the lashes this time.”
Their garrison’s overseer could be strict and short-tempered like all officers, it was true, but Sadeh was willing to overlook that to reassure her man.
Eumenes snorted with skepticism. “You Khumetians put more trust in your superiors’ mercy than you should. Remember, I’m a northern barbarian, a foreigner. Your people only tolerate me as long as I can serve them with my sword.”
“And you have served my people so admirably. Even back there with the Temehu, you cut them down with more valor than a lion. I’ve never known a finer warrior in my life, Khumetian or foreigner.”
Sadeh walked up to Eumenes and pecked a kiss on his cheek, admiring how it blushed red beside his smile. With a hearty laugh, he wrapped a muscular arm around her waist, pressing her against his chest, and locked his lips with hers. The once cool, shaded cave became hot with their amorous embrace.
Outside, the storm had thinned, permitting enough sunlight to enter the cave to reveal images on its walls which Sadeh had not taken time to notice before. She gasped in awe at them. The paintings covered the cave walls up to the ceiling, depicting the figures of people frolicking across the stony canvas. Some were herding spotted cattle with long lyre-shaped horns, the exact same breed that grazed the riverside pastures back in Khumet. Other people were hunting with spears or bows and arrows assorted animals such as antelope, zebra, giraffe, and elephants. Still others were fending off predators like lions, leopards, or spotting hyenas, and Sadeh even recognized a few hippopotamuses and crocodiles like those back in Khumet.
“For people living out in the middle of the desert, whoever painted these had a lot of wildlife wandering about, not to mention cattle,” Eumenes said. “Half of these animals would die of thirst out here, unless there’s an oasis nearby I don’t know about.”
“That’s because the place wouldn’t have been a desert when the people lived here,” Sadeh said. “Our priests recount that these lands used to be grassy savanna, like the lands to our south, and our people lived on them as nomads herding cattle before settling along the Iteru River. We were not so different from the Temehu back then.”
She laid a hand over one painted figure of a woman who walked while holding her child’s hand, observing how their rich reddish-brown color matched her own skin tone. These people had to have been her own ancestors from millennia ago, painting the walls of this cave much as Khumet’s artisans continued to decorate the walls and columns of their civilization’s monuments with images of their own. This might have been where it all began.
A tear crept from Sadeh’s eye as she knelt on the floor and whispered a prayer to her ancestors, thanking them for their hospitality and for the grand legacy they had left behind.
Eumenes tapped her shoulder. With a face having turned sweaty and a shade paler, he pointed to an image deeper in the cave. “Do you know what that one is?”
What he pointed to was not the image of a person or an animal that Sadeh recognized. Instead, it appeared to be a vast black blob dotted with lots of red eyes that glared right back at her. Tentacular tendrils curling out of its sides gripped flailing people, cattle, and wild animals in their clutches while warriors jabbed at it with flaming spears. The blood drained from Sadeh’s face to look upon this hideous illustration.
“I have no idea what in the underworld’s black depths that could be,” she said. “It’s too horrible to look at!”
The once silent cave echoed with a rough, pulsating grind like something immense was dragging itself over a surface of rock, accompanied by a rumbling gurgle. The strange noise grew louder with every beat of Sadeh’s heart. Further down the cave, multiple red lights flickered like embers within the blackness.
It did not take long to figure out what was coming toward them. Together, Sadeh and Eumenes raced out of the cave into the open daylight. By this time, the storm had passed on, but Sadeh would sooner take her chances with windblown sand than that thing in that cave.
“Let’s hope it abhors sunlight if it’s from deep within the earth,” Eumenes said.
Rock crumbled behind them. Out from the cave’s mouth rose a colossal, amorphous neck of slimy black flesh studded with blinking red eyes and waving limbs. The creature’s skin glistened like pitch beneath the desert sun, but it did not recoil or show any other sign of hurt from this exposure. Like a river of viscous black lava, it oozed out of its subterranean dwelling and launched a pair of its many arms toward the two warriors.
Sadeh whipped out her khopesh and slashed at the tentacle coming toward her. It withdrew with a gash spilling black ichor while two more thrust out. Sadeh was able to cleave through the first, but the second took hold of her shin and plucked her high off the ground. The appendage held her dangling over the mass of the abomination’s blob-like body which formed a gaping pit of a maw beneath her.
A Sherdenu battle cry interrupted the creature’s gurgling and Sadeh’s own screams. From her high hanging vantage, the charging Eumenes looked so small on the ground. He hacked with a lover’s fury through the arms lunging at him and flung his sword at the one which had Sadeh in its wavering grip. It released her on reflex, and she plummeted into his open arms.
The monster snarled, its many eyes blazing brighter, as it swung the tentacle Eumenes had wounded at them both. The Sherdenu ducked, and Sadeh sliced through it with her khopesh. Fierce flourishes of her weapon kept more of the attacking limbs occupied while Eumenes stooped to retrieve his sword from the newly severed one. For every tentacle either of them could cut back, more grew out of the horrific blob’s body.
“There’s no way we can disarm it for good,” Sadeh said. “We must flee!”
And flee they did, sprinting across the desert with desperate speed. The creature surged after them like a wave of floodwater, persistent in throwing its extensions at them. It showed no sign of tiring over its pursuit. If anything, it accelerated even as Sadeh’s calves burned with strain.
“Is there nothing we can do to stop it?” Eumenes shouted as he ran.
A green sliver sprouted from the horizon ahead and grew into a cluster of stunted acacia trees. An idea sparked in Sadeh’s head, and she recalled the warriors fighting the monster with flaming spears in the old paintings. Those trees might have what they needed to slay the terrible entity once and for all!
Sadeh led Eumenes toward the acacias. The creature was still grasping close to their heels until they reached the grove, with the trees just dense enough to slow its progress. This bought Sadeh just enough time to chop off a couple of branches from one tree. “Eumenes, I’ll need you to distract the monster while I make a fire. We’ll see if it burns!”
She fetched a pair of stones from the ground and struck them together over the branches. The stones’ banging and scraping against each other, frantic as it was, was not enough to drown out Eumenes’s warlike screams as he fended off the beast’s arms behind Sadeh. She had precious little time to start her fire before her Sherdenu companion, her lover, would perish in the struggle.
Under her breath, she prayed to all the gods of Khumet. They had to come in and bless her before it was too late. They had to!
Sparks shot from the stones onto the branches, blooming into flames. Sadeh was about to yelp with triumph when she heard Eumenes holler in terror. One of the blob’s tentacles was holding him high over its body, ready to plop him into its mouth. Grabbing one of the branches she had lit, Sadeh hurried to his rescue, maneuvering around the tendrils reaching for her. A tentacle had caught hold of her left wrist when she threw the burning branch into the monster.
The fire swept across the abomination as if it were oil. A deafening screech drowned out all other sound in the world while the flames consumed the thrashing creature, turning the desert even hotter than it already was. In its death throes, it dropped Eumenes into Sadeh’s arms, and the two of them watched its demise as if it were a giant campfire.
As quickly as the fire had spread, it reduced the many-eyed, many-limbed horror of the cave into a mound of gray ash.
Eumenes and Sadeh stood there trying to catch their breaths back, too overcome by awe to speak. They had slain that ancient monster, the monster that must have terrified Sadeh’s prehistoric ancestors, at last. It had to have been the most incredible feat of heroism either of them had done in their lives.
“We ought to ask the priests what on earth that thing was,” Eumenes said. “And how long was it living in that cave? Are there any more like it out there?”
“At least we have a good story to tell the overseer back at the fort,” Sadeh said. “If only we could have vanquished those Temehu so easily.”
“It helped that it was hard to miss, and that there was only one. Nonetheless, I admire your quick thinking, my sweet Sadeh.”
Sadeh nodded with a bright smile. “Of course, I couldn’t have done it had you not saved me earlier, Eumenes.”
Eumenes turned to gaze at her with gleaming eyes. “And then you saved me in turn.”
They gave each other a firm embrace and exchanged another passionate kiss before heading off eastward through the desert, letting the wind sweep away the ashes of the ancient abomination.