A Lovecraft-inspired Story

I'm trying to keep up with writing more stories so I have another one here to share. Recently, I was given a small pad of paper and a pen taken from a hotel. I *love* nabbing pens. If I see one undefended, it's mine. And I also like collecting unique things to write on or in, even if most of the time I never end up using them. I sat down one night a few weeks ago and wrote out a quick story by hand and then typed it up, so here it is. It has an H. P. Lovecraft feel to it, I think. I enjoy his stories so much, but that's a post for another day.
I'll go ahead and get out of your way so you can get to reading. Please remember to check out my author page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/authoremilyblue/ Or, I'm also on Twitter @Miss_Emily_Blue.
Now, here's "A Journey Completed." Enjoy!

I have left the ruins far behind, but I cannot stop. I trudge on through the desert, the sun an oppressive force in the pallid sky, the weight of my backpack digging into the welts on my shoulders. Blood and pus have long since plastered my shirt to my skin. The stinking emissions of my own body sear my parched, blistered skin.

I know what is happening to me. I have no water left and there is no moisture anywhere to be found in this hellscape aside from mocking shimmers in the shallow, shaded slopes of the ceaseless dunes, which evaporate when I come near.  Dry skin sloughing from my cracked lips is all I have to eat. My brain is shrinking in my skull, starved of essentials. I am going to die.

And yet my legs move, carving furrows in the scintillating amber-and-white sands. Only the exact shape of the dunes ever changes, which curl in serpentine patterns around me like suffocating python coils. Each step sends dull throbs racing through my muscles, trailing up from my bloodied soles to right behind my shriveled eyes. I have a purpose to serve. 

I stumble, my feet tangling together. Throwing my hands out, I try to catch myself. My arms crumple in on themselves and my face bounces off the sand. I lay there, groaning, throbs of color flashing behind my eyelids. In those flashes of light, like suns dying and being born, I see again the strange temple ruins which reminded me so much of a ziggurat. I could find no entrances made by human hands, only cracks in the weathered surface which led nowhere. The ziggurat lacked any features or visible function, including stairs, forcing me to climb the pocked formation using only my bare hands and my will. 

Why I did not return with a team and proper equipment, I have had much time to consider. I once thought my stupidity to be pride. Now I know otherwise. I was summoned by an ancient call which must have been sounding for millennia, awaiting a creature with a weak enough mind to entrance. 

The artifact.

No, the egg.

My mortal burden shifts and undulates inside the pack as I lay on the sand, stirring me from the haze of memories. My charge makes its terrible sound, one which has increased in volume and intensity even since this last dawn: soft crackling, almost musical, like breaking glass. I feel, deeply, rather than hear, the new accompaniment to the cracking of the shell. It is effortful grunting, forced from the throat of a creature as far from being human as is possible in this world -or any other. The shaking grows more terrible and phrenetic, the grunts turning into muffled bleats which make my soul quiver in my chest. 

The time is now. I know it. 

Grunting myself, I push against the sand and roll to the side, and slide free of the imprisoning backpack straps. I undo the zipper with shaking fingers, covered in cuts from my climb up the temple, which have not healed. 

The pack convulses, flashes of abominable green-swirled eggshell glimpsed through the gap. A sharp crack pierces the desert silence. Moisture pools through the bottom of the bag, darkening the sand. The pungent aroma, reminding me of many breakfast preparations, sends my empty stomach into spasms of its own.

Yolk pours from the opening of the backpack, streaked with white strands and ribbons of blood. Movement from within, more purposeful now. A slick, slimed nightmare emerges, eyes slitted and scaled nostrils flaring. It slithers, tail lashing, sprays of grit flying to either side.

This terrible child waited, slumbered, at the top of the temple which was not, a temple, no. The staggered steplike sides were just that. Steps. Steps built for vast and unknowable legs to climb to the top of the pedestal, where this egg was laid so eternally long ago. 

I close my eyes.

I don’t want to see.

I have outlived my usefulness, ferried my charge as far as I could. And now I will serve another purpose, to give this loathsome infant my remaining strength so it may go the rest of the way to wherever it wishes to be.

I am too tired to weep.

I hear sand cascade, wind sliding over the armor of the horror’s body. A heavy weight slams into my shoulders. My eyes spring open as I fall, staring directly into the dripping maw of the child I stirred into life. The fangs curve inward, as white as icicles, and cold pain slashes through me. The cold is worse than anything I have ever felt, but somehow the flood of heat after is worse, however short-lived. My breath ceases. I am severed.

I drown.

©2018 Emily Blue