There were three things in this desert.

There was sand.

There was wind.

And there were ruins.

We were here for the last, which due to the conspiring of the first and second were being revealed and subsequently buried before anyone could get a good look at them, much to the anger and frustration of archeologists and architects everywhere.

Why we thought we might be luckier than anyone else, I don’t remember. I think one of us might’ve won a free soda from one of those bottle cap contests they hold and were feeling especially lucky.

I say “we,” and most of the time that’s a lie. He was out here looking for the ruins; I just tagged along to make sure he didn’t die without me knowing it. Not knowing stuff is one of my pet peeves. Not that I keep peeves for pets of course; they’re quite noisy and quite stupid and have far too many sharp teeth to reasonably keep one as a pet, but you do get my point. And if you don’t, well, you’re quite likely an orangutan and I don’t care much for what you get and what you do not get and will not waste any more time, ink, or precious vocal cord moisture attempting and likely failing to explain it.

As I was saying, I don’t care much for ruins, or architecture, or sand, or wind, or the indiscriminately hot sun, or olives, or many other currently irrelevant things, but I was not going to let him come out on this little expedition on his own. At the least, I can be someone to talk to, or at, since I might not actually be listening.

“And if worst comes to worst,” he told me once, “I could always eat you.” His face and his laugh told me he was joking, but since then I’ve made him eat first whenever we stop for food.

Speaking of food, we were low on supplies of every variety; our water had lasted a shockingly long time, but the dried fruit and trail mix was pretty much gone. So rather than looking for pieces of old derelict buildings peeking up out of the sand, we search for the even rarer sight of an oasis. I am beginning to suspect that such things do not actually exist, and are a sort of fairy tale from back when people were too stupid to realize that a desert is a very bad place to live. Water is too rare to rely upon, and despite what our lying elementary school teachers claimed there is no wildlife out here, particularly at night. I suspect that aside from the two of us, the only living entities in this desert are the bacteria we brought with us. And maybe ghosts. The ghosts being alive relative to everything that wasn’t him, me, or microscopic.

“So whatever happened to that map?” I called up to him. He was halfway up an excessively large dune that we might’ve been able to see a good distance from, and I was trailing uselessly behind.

“I ate it!” came the reply.

“You what?!”

“Wait, what?”

“The map! What happened to the map!?”

“We never had a map!”

“What about the map you said you had when we first set out?”

“I thought you were joking; no one’s made a map of this region, so how could I possibly have a map?”

A long, long silence. Not counting the wind, but the wind doesn’t count, and it would be hard to count the number of winds in this desert anyway since there is never a pause between one and the next, making one think that there was but one gigantic superwind, mother of all the smaller, less significantly large winds in the world. I politely informed him that I hated him with every fiber of my being, but he had what was left of the food and said food was the only reason I kept following him around. The reason I didn’t simply kill him and take the food was due to my annoyingly loud conscience.

We came to a cliff. Odd, there weren’t supposed to be any cliffs out here. Especially none overlooking a lush tropical forest. He was more interested in what was beyond the forest, however.

“We have to get there,” he said, positively entranced by the futuristic city in the distance. I asked him why, and he asked if I was an idiot and the reason should be completely obvious. He did not, however, ever answer the question. So down the cliff we went, and it was a surprisingly easy climb due to the conveniently placed tree limbs that, for whatever stupid reason, had attempted to grow directly into the stone. They all failed, naturally, but the branches were far stronger than I would’ve thought and supported our weight quite easily. On the way down, we grabbed and packed away the fruit that neither of us could identify but were going to eat anyway. If one turned purple and died, the other would know to force himself to vomit profusely. Or pray. Or pray while vomiting.

Once we had reached the ground and had our deliciously sour lunch, we decided to push onward. It was quite humid here, which was almost a relief from the dry air we had just left behind. Almost.

As it turned out, this small jungle was filled with more ruins, often half-collapsed and covered with vegetation. Reminded me of the Mayan pyramids and such when we went to Mexico when I was a kid. We wandered throughout them for a bit, with him sometimes taking an extra few minutes to stop and admire a building or something and me just grateful to not be in the desert anymore. It wasn't too long before we came to a wall. At first glance, there was nothing special about it; no designs or odd sculptures sticking out of it or anything. Well, aside from one thing. It was big. Very, very big. As far as we could tell, it didn't end, regardless of what direction you chose to look in. So we picked a direction (left, if you care,) and started walking.

The wall ended at a small drop, maybe a few feet, down to a grassy area about the size of a football field. Not thinking much of it, we drop down and continue walking.

We make it maybe two steps into the field before this pounding, almost tribal music comes from nowhere. I wince in slight pain, once again cursing my sound sensitive ears before realizing just how odd it was for music this loud to suddenly erupt for no apparent reason. However, he only paused for a moment in confusion before continuing. Perhaps my imagination? Then came our next surprise.

A pair of twenty foot tall statues of some sort of fat man/parrot imitation minotaur. Normally this wouldn’t be odd; there were such things scattered everywhere about this place and in the desert. No, the odd thing was that they were moving. Stepping to the beatings of the imaginary drums, which meant they were moving quite quickly. So, being the brave adventurers we were, we froze in what was probably a mixture of shock, confusion, horror, and a bit of stupidity. Fortunately for us, the statues paused too, and the music began to become quieter.

“What the expletiving vulgarity!?” I demand, not really expecting an answer to a question that didn’t really make sense. He just shook his head.

“I have no idea,” he replied, taking a cautious, experimental step. The music leapt up what felt like a couple dozen decibels. “Other way!” he unnecessarily commanded, and we both sprinted back to the wall that had led us here.

I’ve always been told I’m a good runner. I always took such praise with a grain of salt, whatever that means, since there was never any real evidence. Well, not counting that time I was the second fastest sprinter in 6th grade P.E., since even then I was a couple of seconds behind the other guy. But after the speed at which I ran away like a little girl, I was almost inclined to believe those compliments. Almost.

“Okay,” I wonder aloud, “Now what?”

“They move when they sense movement,” he replied, and would’ve been too quiet to hear had the music not ended when we got out of the field, “And when they don’t, they return to wherever they came from on the other side of this wall.” He gestured at the wall I was leaning on, the one that had led us here.

“Now what have I told you about reading strategy guides?” He looked at me.

“Waaay too many videogames.” He stood. “We’ll go one at a time. I’ll go first.” I wasn’t about to argue; besides, I was still catching my breath. He dropped down, and ran forward a few steps before stopping and remaining completely still. Odd, I couldn’t hear that damnable music from here. Oh well. He progressed like that, until he was out of sight. I waited another few minutes, then hopped down into the field myself. I dashed out for a bit, then stopped and watched the advancing statues stop and turn around. Once they were out of sight again, vanished into the trees surrounding the field, I moved again. This repeated for a while, until I noticed the remains of what appeared to be a rope bridge dangling down another drop, this one several times the height of the one I had come from. That seemed like something he might decide to explore, so I made my way too it, then struggled up it.

He was up there, as it turned out. So was something else. The end of the forest. In the far distance we could see the tip of one of the towers of the city he had sighted earlier. Between it and us was more desert. But this was like the desert we had left, plus two. We literally could not see more than five feet in front of us due to the thickness of the sand and the ferocity of the winds carrying it. But we pushed on. Actually, we still push on. I think we might be lost.