Chapter 4
The False King of Nowhere
This newsletter is a place where I post my works in progress and unpublished manuscripts to see how they land with the world. Thanks for reading! Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
It all happened so fast. One second I was in the dark, dingy hunting lodge, in the frozen mountains in the middle of the night, terrified of a creepy lion’s bust, and the next I was here, aching in my tailbone from having landed very hard on my rear end upon the hard ground, dropped out of the sky from a very great height, into the center of a sweltering, seemingly endless arid desert plain.
I looked around me, trying to understand.
The sunshine was blinding – so hot and white, brighter than any sun I had ever experienced, that for a long minute I couldn’t see anything at all. I shielded my eyes with my hand, and squinted around, trying to make out where I was. This was when I noticed that there were four hot white spots in the bright turquoise sky, rather than the usual one. Four suns. One, it seemed, in each corner of an invisible square in the sky, each blazing like a terrible celestial torch, down upon my head. The air felt heavy and dry, hard to breathe, and it carried a scent I had never experienced before, something similar to the smell you get in the desert after rain, ozone I think they called it. This was the least unpleasant thing about the place, so far.
I heard the distant sound of drums next, an undulating rhythmic pounding, regular and steady. It was coming from somewhere behind me. I turned my head and saw in the far distance what appeared to be a dark flow of water coming slowly down across the desert, towards me. I rose to my own feet and spun around. Squinting, as the flowing darkness grew closer, I could see that this “liquid” was actually a massive group of people, all lined up neatly in rows and columns, marching in formation, in my direction.
As they got closer still, I saw that they were led by a tall, proud-looking man who rode a thing that I at first believed to be a horse but which, as it came even nearer, turned out to be something else altogether. Something I had never seen before.
