Fentiman stops blubbering, and finds himself looking out the sands, and the sands roar like an ocean beneath the wind - and the sand is crisp and clean like ash, and white like the sky. Fentiman closes his wet eyes: certain he can hear a low howling that is not wind. And he feels the phantom of tears that are too thick to be water creeping down his face.

For a moment, Fentiman is sure he sees something shift, in the distance. A coiled movement. A colossal thing unravelling.

“We don’t know a single damned thing,” Aubrey continues, following Fentiman’s sight. “But we’ve survived it all so far.” And Aubrey is right, they have survived. Not like the others. Oh gods, so many dead. He’d not seen too many close up, like that. No, they kept the likes of him away from the worst of it in the Archon.

A passenger ship fully loaded, its rank innards packed in as tightly as possible. The sound of that gigantic tearing, sinking slowly into the black abyss beneath.

Those broken escape pods, scattered out on the white like crisp beetles. And above them still, those pastel moons that wove in and out of the sky as if on bronze spokes, always looming beyond, clattering with the urgency of the visions that haunted his dreams.

And he was so sure he could hear mammoth cogs whirling, a countdown to something he could not fathom.

But there was no use lingering on the horror, Aubrey’s little speech traced out like the one they used to catch deserters in the Archon legion. If he was still on duty, if this was some grand expedition and not a desperate bid for survival with strangers, he would have been shot, no doubt about it.

Fentiman feels shame shifting on his shoulders, disgust that after all those worlds and tours that he was out here, wailing on the sands like a strangled cat. He feels desperate to do something, anything to prove his worth beyond those sordid tears.

Then, Fentiman catches another glimpse, that vast, distant thing, raising its weight, rising up outside the sands. A monolith, emerging from the white. Clearer now.

“There’s something out there,” whispers Fentiman. “Ahead of us.”

Underneath his feet, the ground heaves with lush grass, wet and weaving and white like the sky, pale blooms singing gently at his feet, scraping with small teeth. Love bites. Although he is sure he feels blood pouring down his ankles and although they are wan, the shock of their crimson petals hits his eyes like lightning.

He forces himself, again to look at the palace, and his eyes strain, and it is no longer a palace, but a giant mound of bones, and inside it, there are eyeless serpents burrowing, and he knows that they have always been there, feeding on the peripheral of our reality, slithering on one blurred repeat, seared into his vision. To look at them is to be caught in their motion, moving indeterminately forever.

Above him, the grains of sand are now flecks of blood, landing on him like rose petals. He feels them, wet and cool, on his boiling skin, seeping into a smile that he knows he is not wearing.

Beneath the grass, he feels mighty hands unravelling from deep within the earth. And it is no longer a white sea broiling, but a sea of those hands, swaying like tender anemones, grasping for something distant in that terrible white sky, rising, ever rising, as the snakes tunnel.