Desert finale

Read part 1 - here
Read part 2 - here
Read part 3 - here
Read part 4 - here
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‘This is her temple, or at least was before we tore it down’ Huram proceeded towards the locked somewhat intact door with Keesan in tow and opened the rusted lock after a few tugs and twists.

The so called lobby where all the worshippers once sat and waited for Seti was piled in rubble from the ceiling that had caved in so many years back. Birds had taken to nesting in the desecrated temple turning it into an aviary of sorts and the whole place was littered with feathers and droppings.

Keesan watched his uncle clear the bigger pieces of rubble and stones from the pathway that lead to the inside of the temple and fashioning a broom out of a branch from an overgrown tree that had canopied the inside of the ruins, he began cleaning.

‘Did Seti curse this village because you banished her?’ Keesan asked sadly.

‘No’ Huram spoke after hesitating for a few moments 'She cared naught for the banishment as long as Gullat was at her side.

The devastation that befell our village didn’t happen immediately after she was gone, but a fortnight later.

After the wells and streams had dried up leaving but a few so as to enable a rather cataclysmic way of life we realized our folly, much too late and only out of desperation and decided the only way out of this disastrous string of tragic incidents was to apologize to our once deity and bring her back.

We were quick to forget the insults we jabbed her with only to selectively remember the adulation we once showered her way, and how magnanimous a heart she beheld that she’d never look down upon us in moments of need; thus it was decided that a few villagers would group together and go to to the desert to find her.

For some reason it felt like an incontrovertible idea and for the next few days we let the positivity of this thought reinforce our everyday life with an unshakeable belief of incoming prosperity, so much so that we almost forgot how miserable our lives had suddenly become and it was with this assured reasoning that a few villagers made their way to the desert to find our goddess.

You can imagine how selfish we must have been, that even during those times of duress did we not learn our lesson and imagined Seti obligated to do just as we asked, requested or begged.

Did we stop to ponder that perhaps she wouldn’t want to come back to this wretched village? Did we even know for certain that she was alive?

 But goddesses we reasoned never die and we were right, for a few days after the villagers had left for the desert that our village found itself staring at a sudden visitor we once loved and abruptly hated.

Seti was back. Her features just as noble if only harsher and accented with a weatherworn truth of desert life. 

Her eyes had not lost their beneficence and seemed to twinkle with a knowledge of our grief. 

She was however alone. Gullat wasn’t at her side, but this knowledge was easily ignored by a surge of ingratiating villagers who lost no time burdening her with their miseries, grief and flung their wailing needs and despair towards her just as they always did. 

Beseeching her kindness once again the villagers cried hoarse with aggravated demands and sobbed a thunder much like yesterday after the loss of crops.

Seti paid no mind to the prostrating villagers at her feet and slowly walked towards her burnt temple. 

This simple gesture of complete disregard and stark ignorance was new to the ever expecting villagers who felt themselves entitled to miracles and it was then that we noticed that our once deity no longer had six fingers on each hand as she once did, but five.

There was a mute bolt of shockwave that seemed to pass over everyone who saw that truth.

Anxious and alarmed I had ventured forward that day towards the temple where Seti stood and asked her of Gullat’s whereabouts.

The five minutes she spent talking to us were her last words in the village that haunt us to this moment.

Gullat was gone she had said. Not dead but suddenly gone. 

The desert had been most unkind. 

They had found a small waterbody of mostly brackish water that Seti had somehow made usable by treating with cacti and barks of an almost bare tree by the waterbody but water was a sustenance for only as long and soon the need for food had given rise to a greater truth.

The desert was not thriving with animals or insects but they still found some until it was impossible to sustain on chitinous exoskeletons alone.

That was when’.. Huram had fallen to his knees and begun crying on what Keesan thought had once been the altar. He lay there, his eyes streaming with apology and horror for a long moment.

Wiping his tears he resumed brooming bits of rubble and feathers that lay scattered and keesan thought it impossible to imagine this place ever being clean 

‘That was when’ Huram resumed between sobs ‘That Seti offered Gullat her extra fingers to be eaten. She didn't need them she said, and could be a while before the desert yielded them anything worthwhile to feed, but time will change soon she’d assured him and they'd put these tormenting moments of hardship behind them and begin anew. 

Seeing her short of two fingers we knew Gullat in his starving needs succumbed to his hunger and didn't refuse her offer, and the next day when she woke up she found herself alone.

Gullat was gone.

She knew not whether the desert consumed him or if he somehow made it out alive. 

Her heart had torn itself into excruciating grief and so much did she hurt each day in that desert that it began feeling laborious to ache anymore.

Pain had given way to reasoning and she understood that the reason he left was because they were no longer a mystery waiting to be unravelled.

They were to each other layers waiting to be unwrapped and this sudden intimate knowledge of her being was not something he was ready to live with and exist in her presence and so he vanished from her life, because the verity of her as a five fingered woman instead of the six fingered deity he silently worshipped was overwhelmingly real.. and so he is no longer with me she said and with a bitterness to her voice she added “because of you.”

That was the truth of it. She cursed us not because we banished her from the village but because our actions directly resulted in her abandonment by the one man she believed would never abandon her.’

Keesan noticed the sudden flurry of activity outside of the broken temple and saw a few dozen villagers beginning to slowly wipe away the dirt and scrape off the grimy soot from the walls.

The villagers had come noticing Huram clean the temple and so began restoring it, in hopes to sanctify the once holy abode of the miraculous six fingered deity.

‘They’ll never learn’ Keesan thought as another hailstorm approached the village.