20 - Scouting the Desert

My eyes stung, and I felt a pair of hot tears streak down my face. My emotions were a mess. Trying to fight them back, I growled at her, “I love her. I need to find her. Please, either help or let me be.”

Like a cat suddenly pretending it’s bored, the genie’s face turned blank again. She looked away, dramatically sighed, and rolled her eyes in an inhuman way. “Oh, whatever. Keep the book, dung face. Do whatever you want. After all, what insights could an immortal, ageless genie such as myself possibly have to offer?” Drifting away, she conjured a mirror and made like she was checking her hair, as if she didn’t have complete control over her form at all times.

She might have had a point, but I didn’t trust her. More, I was still freaking out over the fact that Cerise could be alive and that I might find her. I planted the spear in the ground, pulled out the book, and went through the pages with the intensity of a drowning man gasping for air. I flipped through the pages, back and forth, eyes scanning, looking for more messages from her, but there was nothing, only a single smear of blood on one page, nothing with meaning.

I closed the book and stood in silence, eyes closed. Despair coursed through me like a sandstorm, trying to scour me clean of hope. But my hope was strong. I opened my eyes and tried to see the oasis in a new light. Had I missed other signs of her presence here? If she had left, which way could she have gone?

I set out to investigate, knowing it would be difficult to see any signs in the dark of night, but I knew I’d be unable to sleep until daylight. I was too ramped up. I swung by the genie and held the book out for her. “Here.”

She only deigned to twitch a single eye in my direction. I gotta say, she might have been gorgeous in an unreal, goddess-like way, but moving only one eye or spinning her head all the way around, she could be a little creepy. That monster face she’d made earlier felt permanently etched into my soul. She might have a half-human form, but she wasn’t really human, and probably didn’t think or feel the same way a human would. Still, she was a person, and a small part of me still felt bad for her.

I sighed. “Just take it.”

She huffed, but daintily plucked the book from my hands with finger and thumb. Ignoring me, she resumed her own perusal.

Shaking my head, I began carefully going over every inch of the oasis for clues.

Some time later, the genie floated my way. She watched as I peered at the trunk of a palm tree, trying to see if anything had been scratched into it or if there was an arrow of some kind. If Cerise had left the oasis, she might have left a clue as to what direction she’d gone. The genie rolled onto her back and magically twirled the book in the air above her. “Where did you say that spear came from again?”

I answered without pausing my investigation, “A lizard person. Rotting in the water.” I yawned hard and blinked a few times. I was drained from the emotional turmoil and fighting, and fading fast.

“Hmm. Did you know that lizard people don’t have fingerprints like you humans do? Their fingertips are smooth. Kind of like this.” She twitched a finger, and the book in the air opened to the page with a bloody smear on it.

I looked over my shoulder at it. My attention caught, I turned and stepped over, trying to get a closer look. With my scorpion vision, I could see enough. “So a lizard person touched that book. Either getting his own blood on it, or Cerise’s.”

“Perhaps.”

My mind tried to reason it out, and I rambled aloud as I thought, “And there was a dead lizard person in the pool.” I looked down at the clothing I wore. “He was dressed like someone living in the desert. Maybe like the nomads in my world. This is an oasis, which probably means it’s an important spot. The lizard folk probably come through here fairly regularly. Maybe they stopped here, found Cerise, and took her away. Maybe she fought and got hurt.”

“Perhaps.”

“But which way did they go?”

The genie didn’t look at me, continuing to stare at the book as she asked, “Have you searched the area beyond the oasis?”

“…no.”

She gave me a look. “Why not?”

“I…didn’t want to die out in the desert.”

“At your level, you might survive.” She eyed me up and down, then shrugged. “Maybe.”

“You’ve been here for a long time. How big is the desert? What’s around?”

She didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t know. Time doesn’t pass the same for me as for mortals like you. A hundred years on this planet can feel like the blink of an eye. Especially when you’re locked in that blasted lamp.”

“So you haven’t been out here in a hundred years?”

She finally looked away from the book. Her eyes swept over the dark horizon. Did she need light to see the way humans did? She nodded in the direction of the scorpion cave. “Malagar’s stronghold was over there. This oasis was part of the grounds.” She pointed a finger, and an illusion appeared, making it look as if an Arabian castle stood in the distance. It had shiny black walls and crimson minarets, onion-like domes, atop towers and the main keep. Endless gardens spread out around it, black marble paths lined with towering thirty or forty-meter palms lining the main road, while multiple grottos were surrounded with shorter and denser shrubbery.

My brows rose. “That’s both beautiful and evil-looking.”

“Malagar was an even uglier soul than most of you meat sacks. A blood sorcerer. The entire desert was his domain. Yet there isn’t a trace of his palace. It’s been completely razed and buried by the sands of time.”

“He did look like he’d been asleep or whatever for an awfully long time down there. Guess someone wrecking his place wasn’t enough to get him off that throne.” I watched as she allowed the illusion to break up into sparkles and fade. “So you’ve been in the lamp for probably hundreds, maybe thousands of years.”

“I assume so.” Her nostrils flared. But she seemed to be controlling her anger for the moment. She looked out at the desert. “There was a sleepy fishing village over that way called Agarahbad.” She looked in the opposite direction. “And Malagar’s capital was over that way, two days’ travel. He lived there for a few human lifetimes but eventually turned rule of it over to his minions so he could focus on his magical studies.”

“So he could turn into a lich?”

“When he failed to turn himself into a genie, yes.”

I laughed at the absurdity. “He wanted to become a genie? Really?”

“Without — without these cursed chains, even deities are wary of us. And while deities are generally attached to their sphere of influence, often a single planet, genies are free to travel the cosmos.” Her eyes lifted to the stars. Her expression ached with longing. “An endless vastness, a billion worlds. The company of my own people.”

I glanced up at the clear array of diamonds above. I’d been there a while, but the starry sky never ceased to amaze and humble. It really was a tragic shame that we saw it so rarely back on Earth. “I’m sorry. It must be very lonely being trapped here. I guess it’s been a long time since you’ve seen any of your kind, huh?”

Her eyes crinkled in fresh rage. “If only. It wasn’t enough for the first monster to trap one of my people here. Knowledge spread, and others were captured as well. This is a world in love with slavery. It wasn’t enough to do it to each other. Wizards and sorcerers then started summoning demons and creatures from other realms. Enslaving a genie was their crowning achievement, a crime of galactic magnitude that made every owner as close to a god as they could get.”

“Why three wishes though? I mean, why not make genies like other slaves and use their power all the time?”

She gave a dismissive shrug. “Trapping us at all should have been impossible for such weak and primitive creatures. Maybe that was the best they could do. Or maybe one of the local deities intervened for a laugh.” She snorted. “It’s unlikely any pathetic mortal came up with a way to trap genies on their own. It wouldn’t surprise me if a conspiracy of those bloated egos were involved in imprisoning us. Never underestimate the pettiness and jealousy of gods. Like toddlers with unlimited power.” She turned and spat with disgust.

I shook my head. Genies, magic, gods. The universe had things I’d only dreamed of until now. Things on a level that was too big for me to even begin to understand. Especially with my body crashing. I yawned hard again. Very reluctantly, I knew I needed to call off the search for clues and sleep.

I eyed the genie. “If I try to sleep, are you gonna murder me while I’m defenseless?”

She turned to face me, then slowly spread her hands and made an elaborate shrug.

I rolled my eyes. “Great.” I eyed the mimic as well. It hadn’t moved, but there was no trusting that one either. I retrieved my spear, dug a shallow depression in the sand near the water, covered myself with palm leaves, and allowed myself to fall asleep, which happened almost instantly.

If anyone was going to kill me in my sleep, there wasn’t much I was going to be able to do about it. So why worry?

Hot sunlight woke me only a few short hours later. I cracked my eyes open at the glare. There was no sleeping in when you lived in the desert. But hey, I was still breathing. Gotta look on the bright side, right?

I got up, scrounged some food and water, and was soon ready for the day. Mimic had buried itself in the sand and somehow pulled an uprooted palm over itself for shade. Guess it had copied me. Genie… “Holy bikini, Batman.” I held up a hand at the sudden glare.

The genie reclined on a sand-castle-like chair in front of the oasis water, soaking up the morning sun. She was in full human form and wearing a micro bikini made of polished gold. It hid nothing, but the tiny bit of metal was just large enough to blind anyone looking her way. Without looking at me, she called out, “You probably won’t believe me, being a moronic monkey with barely enough brain power to breathe, but there are no other signs of her in the oasis. I checked. Maybe it’s time to expand your search.” She lazily gestured to the desert with fingers ending in long, manicured, gold-painted nails.

I squinted against the glare, taking rather too long to take my eyes off her voluptuous form; I knew she was taunting me, but hey, I’m a human dude, ok? Gazing out at the endless sands, I thought maybe she was right. Fear had kept me close to the oasis for now. It was time to go scouting.

I soaked my robes in water, made a new palm-frond umbrella and crude sandals, and set out. Thanks to my vastly increased abilities, I could move faster and more easily than ever. Even at a fast walk, I could cover so much more ground, and while the heat was brutal, and the sandals fell apart within a hundred meters, I was still able to travel quickly. Applying [Heal] didn’t solve hunger or thirst issues, but it did seem to fight the damage they caused to a degree. More importantly, it healed my bare feet as I went, as the sand was as hot as a stove and bits of rock or bone occasionally cut me.

I walked straight away from the oasis until it was on the edge of the horizon. Then I kept it on my left and walked in a big circle with the oasis in the middle. I was nervous out there. I guess I’d spent so much time at the oasis that it felt safe, like a new home. Even going out this far was both strange and exhilarating.

After the circle was complete, I walked back and rested, drinking semi-filtered water until I had my fill. I napped while buried in the sand, woke, tried to eat some more, then ventured out for another pass. This time, I went so far that I lost sight of the oasis. That was pretty scary. In fact, I was so nervous, that, as I walked the circle, I ended up weaving closer multiple times just to make sure I wasn’t getting myself lost. There was absolutely nothing but sand and sky in every direction, so if I lost the oasis, no amount of levels was going to save my ass.

I returned to the oasis in the late afternoon. I drank again, forced myself to eat some fried scorpion, and rested. The sun was setting, I was exhausted, my feet were blistered and raw from the superheated sand. [Heal] had only done so much. Being so spent, I sat on the sand, head beneath my knees, wanting nothing more than to crawl into a hole in the beach and sleep until the next day. I looked up.

The genie floated on the other side of the oasis. She was in her usual form, wispy from the waist down. She just stared at me in silence, with no expression. I didn’t know if she was judging me (she was probably judging me), but I felt judged.

With a deep groan and aching legs stiff from resting, I got back to my feet. Everything hurt. So be it. I’d rest when I was dead. But the only way to find the one I loved was to get back out there. I needed to push myself. It was a relatively new experience, but if I did it enough, maybe it would become habit.

I ventured out really far. As the sun turned peach and then deep orange before settling below the horizon, my anxiousness rose. If the oasis was hard to find in the daytime, it would be harder now. Or it should have been. As I marched straight away from it, I glanced back at the oasis and saw a faint glow there. It was like someone had left a light on over there. A blue light.

Wait a minute…

Was the genie…helping me? I shook my head. Unlikely. Maybe accidentally? I resumed walking. “Huh. Strange.”

I turned and began making a circle, this time keeping the oasis on my right so that I wasn’t walking the same direction all the time. The desert was quieter. I saw one very large scorpion, car-sized, but I ducked and lay on my belly behind a dune until it skittered away. I was too damned tired to face one of those monsters. Especially out there, in the open. Still, I was glad I’d remembered to bring the spear.

Maybe it was because I was tired. Maybe I was paying less attention because it was night. Either way, I didn’t really clue in when part of a nearby dune softly collapsed. Not even when nearby sand shifted. Of course, I didn’t see the sand behind me rise in a mound because I was looking the other way. But then a spray of sand slapped me in the back. I tripped and fell on my stomach.

Behind me, rising out of the desert, was a sand worm. One of those monstrous things from Tremors or Dune. It had to be as thick as a redwood and as tall as a three-story building. It bent toward me, moving surprisingly fast, and the end opened in a round maw with multiple rings of teeth inside, descending at me, about to swallow me whole and then chew me to paste.

“[Vengeance shall be mine! Lightning Scorpion]!”