The Diamond Desert

What Zanjan would give never to see diamonds again. They surrounded him in every direction, their glittering and gleaming stones filling him from sandals to collar. Desert winds carried the devilish grains, too, allowing them to grind structures down and self-replicate. In their path was the short diamond cliff he made a home in. When that eventually flattened into dust and joined the infinite glittering dunes around him, Zanjan’s time would be up.

He took a deep breath, enjoying relatively grain-free drafts here in the front ‘yard’, but the glass-thin rear walls of the shelter had acted as windbreakers for several consecutive days. Too many. Like the people back home, the wind always found your greatest weaknesses and struck there. Anytime now, something had to give. But where was there left to take refuge? He had more to think about than just himself, these days.

“Daddy!” Diwal called. She emerged from a cave in the cliff, wearing light-brown clothes that covered her entire body. She ran and hugged Zanjan’s leg. “Daddy, mama’s calling. There’s a big hole in the farm room wall.”

Of course. Of all places, their farming room fell first. It was like something greater wanted him to fail.

Something greater. He’d supposed to have stopped thinking like that. He looked up at the moon—Vaas, the overbearing grey ball in the sky slightly eclipsing the glaring sun—and spat at it before turning and heading for the cave. Diwal spat at the moon too.

“Good girl,” he said, taking her hand. He hunched into the cave, careful not to touch the sharp edges of the diamond mouth. He used to sand them down but, over time, diamond chipped diamond so it was meaningless work. Diwal effortlessly slithered in past it no problem anyway. The perks of growing up here, he supposed.

“Zandi!” Mahi’s voice echoed from within the home. The sound rang with a crisp chime only heard within diamond walls. “Zandi, hurry up!”

“She could just lean back and plug the hole with her you-know-what,” Zanjan whispered.

Diwal took a moment to process, and finally gave him a, “Hehe.”

Zanjan passed the living room, which was furnished with resin-hardened dust. That gave the furniture a white-blue tint compared to the rest of the structure’s semi-transparent diamond. Seats were padded with folded cloth, a little of which he grabbed as he headed down a thin vein to the next cavern.

In his haste, he bumped into a wall, and had to squint so he didn’t get cut. A tarp stuck to the ceiling kept the house from turning into a glittering mirror maze, but it was an imperfect system.

The closer they got, the worse it sounded. Cawing, mooing, bleating—none of which Mahi—echoed down the thin corridor until Zanjan emerged to utter chaos. The animals ran free of their restraining gate, panicking in the diamond storm that had broken into the house. Their shelves of potted vegetable foodstuffs lay in disarray on the ground. The cattle trampled the plants, one unlucky chicken, and most of the flock’s eggs. The rest of the chickens tried to fly up into and peck at the roof, damaging the tarp, likely blinding them and fuelling the panic. It was a wonder he hadn’t heard this din or the shattering while out front.

A woman with the warmest smile—she wasn’t wearing it right now—tried to plug the hole. His wife, Mahi. Unfortunately, said hole was far larger than any one body part could plug. He relieved her of her place in front of the breach and shoved the cloth into cracks in the diamond until he formed a taut, makeshift barrier. Wind and dust beat against it, but this was enough to halt the storm inside. The air came to a relative standstill. Even the animals stopped, silent. It was like the blaring noise of the howling wind was only knowable when it finally shut up.

Absently, the cattle began grazing about on their grass and the ruined veggies, while the chickens pecked at each other as if one of them were supposed to protect the eggs from the larger animals.

Mahi collapsed back onto her seat and dropped her head into her hands. “We have to go back home,” she said.

No. Zanjan would die first.

Diwal crawled up her mother’s leg and sat on her knee. “Back where?”

“Nowhere, honey,” Zanjan said, placing his hands on their heads. “Home is right here—”

Mahi glared at him. “What would you do, slaughter the animals to buy us a few days? This,” she regarded the cave, “this is the last cave out here for who knows how far? It’s falling apart, Zanjan. It’s fallen apart.”

She placed Diwal down and rose, clumps of accumulated diamond dust raining from her thick dress. She placed a hand over Zanjan’s heart and gently leaned her head against it. “I’d have happily died out here with you,” she whispered. “Lord knows we’d be ground to dust faster back home than here. But think about Diwal. Please.”

Zanjan wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulders and peered over to little Diwal, wrapped up in such thick clothing on a hot day like this. He’d never gotten used to this clothing, but it was necessary out here. Which was what worried him. Diwal knew nothing else but this.

“She’d never get used to life in the village,” he said. “And I don’t mean the lighter clothes.”

“Perhaps they’ve changed,” Mahi said. She looked up at Zanjan, her begging eyes a plea for him to believe the impossible. “Maybe they’ve found peace and will accept us back.”

They would take them for demons and fill them with arrows on sight.

“Let’s set off,” he said. “Deeper into the desert.”

The glare he got made him shudder. “And hope we find shelter? There aren’t any cliffs in sight anymore, Zanjan. We have no seeds left. What will we eat once the animals are gone?”

Zanjan dropped his head onto Mahi’s shoulder.

“Don’t gamble with your daughter’s life, Zandi.”

If the villagers didn’t kill them, they’d pull them back into the fighting. Out here, at least Diwal knew peace.

The little girl was breaking up the fights, trying to play with the chickens who not-too-affluently cawed at her to mind her own business. She would certainly get herself killed back home, like everyone else Zanjan and Mahi had loved.

“Okay,” Zanjan said.

“Really?” Mahi’s head cocked back, pushing off the sensitive place above Zanjan’s heart. He ground his teeth and ignored the pain radiating from it.

“Don’t be so surprised,” he said. “Of course I won’t take our daughter to her death. Which means we’re not going home.”

Mahi frowned. “Then where will we go?”

“There’s a place. I don’t know exactly where it is, but—

“You don’t know?”

“Not exactly where. I just know that there must be something roughly in that area—”

A corner of the cloth barrier he’d made swung free, raising the pitch of the howling wind.

Can’t I finish a sentence in this house? The cracks holding other corners of the cloth chipped and chimed like glass as they propagated up to the roof. This place would be coming down soon. I guess not.

There was little time left for words anyway. Zanjan grabbed Diwal and put her into Mahi’s arms. “Get her out. I’ll be there right away.”

Mahi clutched his shirt and looked him in the eye. She was angry, that was plain. But more than anything, he saw trust in her eyes. For that, he loved her more than words could describe. He kissed their foreheads and sent them on their way.

A goat ran after them, and the chickens followed. Only one of which stayed back, protectively standing beside the ruined eggs. The mother hen, fat old Henna. They needed her, so he snatched her up against her flapping will, and yelled at the cattle. The two cows ran first, making for the exit, and the sheep followed behind. On his way out, he bowed his head for a moment to the poor trampled chicken. It was still alive, but its spine was snapped halfway down its back. It would die a slow, horrible death here.

The cloth in the wall burst free of its restraints, splintering the crack it was lodged in. That splinter led to a deafening shock through the entire cave, sending glittering cracks spreading like long evil fingers up the roof, ready to grab him. A death in here would not be fun.

He knelt beside the injured chicken and stroked its head once, twice. Then he snapped its neck. Life drained from its eyes and Henna cawed angrily, but Zanjan held her tight and ran, humming a prayer for the departed. Diamond cracked and shattered behind him, the farm room collapsing just as he jumped out. Henna bounced against the corridor wall and flapped her wings wildly to right herself. Thankfully, she was spooked enough to run herself, and Zanjan followed.

The tarp of cloth covering the roof blew away, letting blinding prismatic light in. The shimmering light filled the walls, turning the transparent structure into a maze of reflections dominated by reds—likely blood of the dead chicken who just got crushed in the farm room. Imperfections in the diamond confused everything more, turning the corridor into a room of mirrors. He could no longer see the exit.

Don’t panic! He told himself. Henna’s got this.

“Pak PAK!” she said as she spread her wings and pivoted as if she was going to turn a corner. For a second it looked like she would run into the glistening wall, but she disappeared.

“That’s my girl!”

He followed, gaining only a single shoulder cut as he slightly misjudged the turn into the living room. Henna was already exiting on the opposite end, where Mahi kept Diwal from trying to run in.

“I’m coming!” he shouted, holding his bleeding shoulder and sprinting. That calmed Diwal down, until her and her mother’s eyes went wide, looking above Zanjan.

Diwal screamed at the top of her lungs, the sound of pure terror, and Mahi covered the girl’s eyes.

Zanjan didn’t look up. No bastard diamond roof was going to fall on his head. He dove early, sliding across the floor. He lost speed quickly, even on the smooth diamond, and had to roll the last arm’s length. That gave him vision for an instant of the mass of glistening devil stone coming down upon him. He wasn’t going to make it.

Tugs on his clothes all around yanked him, and the diamond roof smashed into the floor with the din of a thousand shattering windows just a meter away. Mahi, Diwal, and Henna—with her beak—still held onto his clothes and pulled, but were knocked down by the gust of wind that rushed out from under the fallen structure.

They all lay where they were, unable to move. The only thing that did move was the wind, the ever eternal diamond storm. It buried him up to his ears before his nerves allowed him to stand. It was dark by then, and none of the animals remained save for Henna.

The others stirred now, as if him standing verified that they were in fact, still alive. Henna cawed around, jumping up the fallen structure and calling to her flock. No responses came. But Mahi and Diwal ran to Zanjan, and they held each other for who knew how long.

The temperature dropped eventually, leaving them no choice but to get moving. Zanjan looked up at the moon—it mostly eclipsed the sun—to get his bearing, then glanced deeper into the desert. A part of him wanted to see what lay out there. A young, curious part of him. But that man had come into this desert without knowing his wife was pregnant with a beautiful baby girl.

Zanjan turned his back to the desert and met his wife’s eye.

“Take us to this place you speak of,” she said.

He smiled and nodded. Then lifted Diwal into his arms and set off. “Want to hear all about the mysterious people across the river?” he asked the little girl.

“What’s a river?”

“You’ll see. Its name is Majul.”

Author’s Note

Hey! Thanks for reading, I do hope you enjoyed. This Anthology is made up of short stories based on my 'Final Blink' trilogy (coming soon!)

Check out my Patreon if you'd like to see more stories in this world. I’m thinking of posting the main trilogy there as well!

Cheers!