Ruins in the Desert

I do a lot of thinking when I'm traveling. Then again, I do a lot of traveling, so I guess you could say I just do a lot of thinking.

Thinking is really all I can do. There's nothing out here in the desert; nothing I've seen, at least. Sure, there are probably ruins and ancient strongholds deep in the dunes, maybe even little trinkets half-buried in the sand, but you just don't see all that when you're walking in the desert heat. You just see the dunes, and when the entire world is just one big desert, you start to stop expecting something new over every crested hill.

I've been told the world hasn't always been this way. They say that there was a Fall, eons ago. They say that things actually used to be pretty good, that there were oceans, forests, gleaming cities. I find it hard to believe. When you spend your entire life living in desert, only sand and rock, the only hint of something else existing solely in your imagination, you begin to think that there was always desert. When you can only see the spindle forests, the vapor farms, the fortresses built in empty husks and hollowed-out mountains, it's really hard to imagine that there could have been anything else.

Could we really have screwed up enough to turn our entire world into this? Sometimes I don't think so, that humanity couldn't really be that cold, but then I remember the things people have done to another simply to survive, the things I've done just to see another sunrise.

But I know that there was something that came before. I just came from a village formed in an old fallout shelter, buried deep underground. I stayed in the ruins of some kind of building only a few days ago, ravaged by the sands and the passage of time, still holding some old relics of the past. I walked the halls of the place, its original purpose long-forgotten, and through the sounds of my footsteps and the lonely moan of the desert wind, I could almost hear the murmurs and shuffling of long-forgotten people, back when this place was still alive.

As I strode through the ruins I began to think of what had happened to it. What it had seen, in all the years it stood silently watching over the sands, a lonely reminder of an ancient people. Was it really important enough to have had to endure these countless years? Or was it simply just some twist of fate that allowed it to survive until I came? I wanted to know the story of this place, and yet I knew I never could. All I could add to its history was a night or two of rest, silently moving through its corridors and letting my imagination run wild, like I have done so many times before, as it had seen so many others do before me.

I guess you could say that this is why I keep traveling. I live for places like this; I immerse myself in them, losing my sense of the present as I try to learn whatever I can about the past. By thinking about why these buildings are still here, I wonder why I'm even here to see them in this state. If there had really been an End, why were there still survivors? If everything was always like this, who had come before to build this lonely place in the endless dunes? Smarter people than me have said that we can look to the past to understand ourselves, why we are, who we are. As I wander through these ruins, I know exactly what they mean.

Maybe I'm just looking to define myself here. Maybe that's all anyone ever wants to do: understand and define themselves. They just go about it in different ways. Exploring these places is really all I can do with my life. Nothing else could ever seem to compare.

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Another Rachel Aensland story. I read an article about the appeal of post-apocalyptica, and got inspired to write about why my favorite wasteland-wandering gunslinger is wandering in the first place. I imagine this takes place while she's still traveling to Dahn.