Seeming full of love and light, the sun - the rotten sun - draws me to my doom. The sullen day is drenched in its love. Embraces belt relentlessly on this land and on me, every cascade of warmth is your hands on my skin. Not only has this land been cracked and split, so too has my body. I am unrecognisable. Have you ever seen a man who has gone without water for months? The body caves in. The eyes shrivel until they are too small for their sockets and fall out of the skull like raisins. I think of food; of sustenance. I forget how it feels to not starve. But still I wander forwards.

I have been here a long time. I haven't given much thought to my destination. The land is a featureless sweep of barren mesas and suppurating dunes, all so alike as to offer me no landmarks or points of reference. I am not even sure if I'm going in any real direction or simply walking in circles.

Despite the layers of thick crust that have grown around the soles of my feet, there is occasionally still a rock sharp enough to pierce through, like the spear of a charging enemy aimed so perfectly at the tiniest most invisible weakness in my armour. As the stone breaks through the shell of my arch and embeds itself into my flesh, the sudden shock of pain a is actually a welcome sensation, breaking me out of the timeless monotony of merely placing one foot in front of the other in the hope of some kind of resolution or even salvation.