Man O’ Dust.

Earth-Words to the Named.

The Waste.

Yardangs and zeugens crowded the base of an escarpment. Amidst the rock, a dust-borne man was.

Earth spoke. And to Glaive — with no witness even in the stars. Her words were writ in dust, waking as they were now. She spelt man, and so it was.

The dust-man meandered about. Lost. Confused. And when Glaive approached, it awoke and made to him, then, as a child. Taking his hand with new life. 

It breathed — lived, again. And knew name. 

Together, they walked. Glaive holding what was not there.

They moved ’bout, over and around large, carved rocks, wading where more ghosts of distant past laid heavy. Bones of cities riddled the region. The cut stone stuck like fossils in the stratified rock. Plant and man and sea-things railed from the mounded dust, living a grainy haze — within the shifting curtain that was more dust. Life of a deep-sea, and salt-pools. Peoples of the waste, and of the marine. 

He was burdened with sorrow. Time was dust. And it stuck to him by the wetness of his wounds.

Then, the dust-man was gone.