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 had spoken. 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 came.

The dust-borne man meandered about. Lost. Confused. Waking only when Glaive approached. It made to him, then, as a child, took his hand with new life. 

There. It breathed, again —

knew name. 

They walked together. The man-giant holding what was not there in one hand, cradling a root-babe in the other.

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 earth and haze — living in 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; history was dust. And it stuck to him by the wetness of his wounds.

Then, the dust-man was gone.