>>82245103
a once believer followed the stead of many along the sands of a scorching desert, wilting,
sick and ill from a life and a no life of hardships and non hardships. a frail body wimping along the dunes,
searching for something perhaps to cure them, perhaps to end them, they do not know as no one does.

the sick creature continued and has continued for years, for millennia, or for mere minutes, that does not matter.
the steps, the endless trail of footsteps is only there so long as the prideful winds allow it and the envious rains permit it. there's a cry in the distance.

with every step the sutures on their body burst and burst again. this stitched up puppet, lazily and sloppily put back together by fools
who thought themselves as gods must now walk barefoot, callouses and blisters forming on their soles only for the purpose of somehow living.

but why?

a ripple in the vast ocean of sand perhaps for the first time in the history of forever stranded time like a sailor atop the sea, and suddenly,
the dunes, the mirages, the blisters, the stitches, and the pain all disappeared for a split second, only to come back biting harder than ever.

a creature followed closer and closer to a monolith, carved in a marbled black stone in the middle of an unknown nowhere.
the steps burnt, their skin bled and pulsated, their heart was giving up, their mind had given up.

and so it reached. it's here, the apex, the summit, the crux of one's life and one's death. and so the creature collapsed,
shriveled up into a fetal position and let the blistering sands burn every inch of its body for it didn't matter anymore, as they had made it.

days, weeks, years passed and every day the wounds kept shoddily healing and reappearing at every instance.
stranded now on a pool of dried blood pus urine and feces stood this thing at the steps of a monolith, its joints calcified, its skin now fused to the ground.
and so it finally understood:

god chokes, but never strangles.