When someone lost consciousness, they clung to their last memories, the last moments their senses had caught. Not their whole life, no wandering thoughts, just what they were doing last.
In my case, it was walking.
At that stage before thoughts ceased, all that remained was those last instants and with them what actions to take next. What motions the next seconds would require but of course, they would fail. Fade into the haze. Because it was acting on memories long gone.
So what consciousness remained observed that nothing had changed, and the actions to take next. The exact same. Dreaming endlessly about the next seconds that never came.
In my case, it was walking.
Crossing a desert that could not be crossed, using mana long extinct, carried by erased stone tablets. And I knew it was already over because I could string more thoughts than just walking, which meant I had stopped to walk.
Soon my senses would cease and my thoughts with them.
Thoughts I should never have had as a sand golem.
So why were my limbs still moving? For however blurry the realm looked it still changed slightly. I had not nearly the strength to turn my lumbering hunch of a head.
But any time I stumbled, any time a piece of me broke into sand and I had to somewhat rebuild it, I could sense it. I could see the washed up sand of those deadly plains fill that of my ocher body.
Everything did feel like a dream. Like moving in deep, invisible waters. My body endlessly drained, fading away. The pain dulled by time and dizziness.
If I was still moving, should there not have been mana around? Some landscape away from which it trickled to me? But I could not look past a meter or two or the vertigo would have me crumbling where I stood.
When I had left the red ruins it was night, then dawn had stretched indefinitely and now, it was indiscernible from dusk.
A realm too weak to just turn into darkness.
Come on! Break me down already! I knew your lies, I knew your tricks, realm! I somehow knew your tricks... Let another me reach a place so deprived in mana it could not possibly sustain my shape.
And for what?! Reaching the lair of a monster that wished to see the realm turned to void. Spreading the mana that remained until none could subsist, but him.
Because I somehow knew that too.
Somehow, it had got worse. My whole right side felt devoured. It took me seconds to take just one step. But in a still realm, that was lightning speed.
And for what?! Oh I was not finished! Getting that monster to help kill a human? That was the plan?
For what! A bunch of indifferent lords living it large with all the last riches!
So tell me, masters, why was I still walking!? It wasn't even me moving, it was other golems, without thoughts nor senses carrying my frail body. Just going through the motions! I could not have stopped even if I wanted because that's how you built us!
The whole realm loathed your existence!
Every time you suffered, every time you had regrets, every misery that happened to you, know that it was us! The crimes your forebears committed, the ones you inflicted just by being alive! You had to pay for them!
There had to be a way to make you pay...
There wasn't...
It had finally happened. I had tripped and fallen. My body should have burst on impact, the tablets so brittle as to shatter. Instead, my limbs still moved by themselves.
Not the right side, those were too damaged. But my left legs had me crawl further.
Now I could see better what state my foreleg, or arm, was in. A brownish sand barely covered the two tablets, then stretched best it could into a trickle that hooked on the rocky ground to drag me forward.
Then the hook broke and it took time for sand to accumulate into a new spike. All the while sand was just falling off everywhere else, so it looked like pulses.
Matter pulsing forth, dragging, then receding and pulsing again in a slow, pointless dance.
Something was moving behind me. I could not tell what it was, my senses were too weak, but vibrations rippled around. Ah. A monster. A monster in nowhere.
With this I knew where I was.
I had indeed been washed up to the shore of Bayankam, or just away, along a fault created by the void. And the monster behind me was a caparace.
Knowing that changed nothing. I still had to keep going. And so, with time itself struggling to pass, my slow crawl dragged on. Chitinous insects, their massive massive shell cracked by deprivation, followed me at my pace.
Rock and sand got replaced by the first rubbles.
I had made it. Well, more aptly I was the other one that had been born at Bayankam. I could now, with all the energy I didn't have, just fade to dust.
What bit of magic stagnated in that ancient, ruined town gave me enough echoes to work with. While the tablets dragged me I listened to the broken pillars around which masses of debris formed mounds and low hills.
And breached walls from past houses. And shattered remains of a pavement. Here and there still hung the arches of old aqueducts.
Bayankam, at the edge of nothingness, where the void prevailed, defiantly held its ghost standing.
Monsters were hunting in its streets. Famished meniles, cat-rat creatures looked for rapts on which to feed, only to be caught by the last flights of red beaks. The crows fell on them, ate at the still struggling beast and kept eating after that, knowing they could not fly back.
Until another menilis came and snatched them as well.
But the most terrible predators were the rocky lizards with a metal head, the greyhounds. There were so few, yet just one was a behemoth.
I crawled through that unnoticed. Monsters that glanced at me only saw a pile of moving sand carried by nothing but dry rocks. I was not even worth the effort to hunt.
Look at you, greyhound! King of the ruins. None could even dent your rough scales. But they could not flee you, that required more energy than they had. So the fell to your maw, they were crushed by your feet in one short bout. And you fed. You fed on their paltry corpses.
Yeah I had stopped. The first stone tablet on my arm had slipped out but it was already wiped clean so that actually helped me move further. Then the other tablet cracked and the whole limb had vanished with it.
No matter how hard the rest of the body tried, with just one functional leg I was going nowhere.
That was when the caparaces came back for me. Two or three of them crawled around, rubbing my sand, digging a bit. They were confused and also, exhausted. Their motions even more tired than mine had ever been.
It was painful, actually, to just see them struggle with their tiny insect legs, while carrying that massive shell and knowing that every exertion stretched them to their limit.
My other limbs collapsed. The insects were collecting the tablets, most of them likely without inscriptions anymore. Still, they put one in what sand remained of my arm and it rebuilt.
Thank you, vermin, now I could keep crawling again.
And when that arm collapsed as well they brought yet another. By then I had made it through the town. What knowledge I was never meant to have told me there was some shelter beyond, so with a renewed arm I kept pulling. And pulling.
In a hazy realm.
Somehow, I made it to a cave where two dozen or so caparaces huddled, waiting for death. There, they snatched the stone tablet from my limb, letting it break again, and scratched it.
They were trying to etch the faded inscriptions. Which meant this was the last stone tablet they could salvage. Those monsters tried to make it work and looked frantic, as much as deprived creatures could be.
Their little legs scratching desperately.
The others were bringing sand and rubbing rocks to make more. They put the tablet back and it cracked a bit, but held. Sand reformed. I could keep going.
Past that cave, through the plains again. Knowledge said there was nothing but instead, after a while I was going through more debris. Passing a dying ridge on which, long ago, vineyards would have their harvest flow down to the hamlet.
Now the hamlet was just piles of rocks shaped in a single street. And it felt wrong. It felt wrong for that broken remnant of a hamlet to be there at all.
But that was it. The stone tablet broke further, fell into pieces and with this I was just a sandy torso waiting for no wind to blow me away.
The caparaces were panicking. At the very least their motions had become erratic.
Eh. Little guys. What do you care? I was just a sand golem. You were just wasting what little life you had and beside, if you just wanted to take me somewhere, just pick my stone tablet and carry it. It would have saved you so much time.
But they were insects. To them I was a dying beast and an unsolvable puzzle. As if just touching me could be too much.
It was fine. You know? It didn't feel hurtful anymore. It didn't feel like anything anymore. In a way, there was no greater joy to a golem than when the moment came to rest. When the last of its instructions was met and it could, just, stop.
They were trying to dig under me, maybe in hope of sliding there and carry me that way but of course the sand was just filling their hole.
So their tactic changed radically. One of them got picked and the other started to assail its shell. They were trying to break it with their tiny legs, with whatever passed as their mandibles. Like fleas trying to break glass.
That glass was so weak that it broke. The caparace reeled from the pain, writhed on the ground and then, started to feed on another insect that was lain right in front.
After that, the broken monster crawled to my still body and buried what remained of its shell into my torso, where the arm had been.
Somehow, something in me understood what it was going for. Because it could not pull me, the sand would not hold. Not if I held on to it.
So I held on.
With practically no potency and no instruction to even know how to reshape myself that way, I had my body snatch onto him as if to devour that thing.
It dragged me the rest of the way. Until past the point of exhaustion the monster kept pulling with that indomitable strength their legs concealed. Even when it was dead, the motions remained, blindly taking me further toward the void.
The others had to stop it before I was engulfed into nothingness.
That was it. I had reached Bayankam. I had gone past it, further into what had been the kingdom of Wekel. Nothing remained beyond, but the lair of a void monster.
The caparaces grouped together, latching on one another in rings that formed the massive body of a worm. Faint winds had its inside crackle with the tiniest of magic.
"Golem."
Somehow that monster's voice, Veleter, was the faintest it had ever been. That of a wounded beast buried deep.
I had never met that creature. I was in no state to talk to it. I was, in fact, at this point, nothing but the pile of sand invisible winds finished blowing off. And it was fine. Whoever I had brought here, you could handle the rest.
Me? Ah. There never was a me to begin with, was there. I had no name.
That beast was still talking to someone.
"You have won." It said. "You saved the realm."