The Breath Between Sands

The Breath Between Sands

By Drakovi Bloodrose

The desert folds in on itself—a breath held too long, then forgotten. Colors blur into sounds, sounds dissolve into shapes that twitch in the corners of thought. Here, the sand isn’t sand; it’s the ash of old dreams, a gray dust pulsing with the memory of what never happened. The ground trembles, as if the world itself shivers with fevered secrets, and each grain of sand hums with a silent name that cannot be pronounced.

Heat blurs the horizon into liquid, bending it like glass melting slow and dreadful. The saguaros drift sideways, bent by forces you can’t see, their spines spiraling like the frozen screams of something that lost itself here. Shadows cast no forms, only spirals that coil tighter, tighter, until they vanish into cracks between the seconds, spaces only half-existent.

There’s a pulse underfoot—a heartbeat that doesn’t belong to anything living. It’s tangled in the roots of mesquite and sage, woven into the marrow of stones. And in the sky, strange lights flicker: bruises of violet and burnt amber, shapes drifting like smoke with the memory of eyes. They watch, they drift, they scatter like bones broken into sky-dust.

You listen, but there is no silence here, only the faintest murmur of something trying to remember what it was before it forgot. The sand rises, slow, creeping into your lungs like whispers too fine to hear, too sharp to ignore. Every breath fills you with fragments of something that might be dreams, might be dust—sharp and heavy, like the last thought of an ancient creature that died knowing too much.

Then it happens—a split in the air, thin as breath, thick as stone, and you feel yourself pulled, swallowed by the gaps between moments, sinking into a darkness that isn’t dark. It’s just absence—a hollow so vast it presses close, and as you’re drawn into its depths, you realize it’s been waiting for you.