A Narrative Essay On A Hero's Journey

The sun had already begun its ascent into the sky by the time they found a clear spot to set up camp. Nights in Cal'rota were blessedly low in temperature; none of them were ready to welcome back the daytime and her scalding embrace, but if they stuck around too long they risked discovery by shadowets.

One of them rode a scaly mount of unknown reptilian origin; the others rode standard desert cats, and the young ones clung to their mothers' backs like sap on a tree, eyes wide and liquid. The reptile rider was not a leader, but an outcast. Head bowed, he dismounted his animal and took it by the reins. A shimmery blue eye gazed straight into his own, unblinking and unafraid.

"How is the child?" he asked, throat rough with dust.

The rest had

"Tells the time. Like the sun, but easier to read." The jockey gestured upwards and compared the time on his watch to that of the sun; they were identical but for the sky's lack of numerical sectors. The eyes of the other travellers remained fixed on his face.

"It's tickin'," whispered one woman to another. "Means it's 'lectronic. Dangerous, I bet."

"It's safe, madame," assured the jockey. His palms were sweating.

Suspicious, the women turned away. The dragon jockey made a mental note to disable the watch's hourly chime and turned to his mount, which lay in a restless coil beside the pitch-tent.

It was not a dragon. The beast was a thing of nightmare: a mutation in all the wrong ways, never meant to exist. It was beautiful to look at because its rider was a powerful sorcerer. Beneath the magic shimmering upon its skin it was a horrifying myriad of animals, from a northern bear to a tree doe to a shadowet. Its eyes bulged awkwardly from its misshapen skull, its teeth yellow and hanging from rotted gums.

He called it [i]Fyra'basj[/i], after the goddess of endurance.

As long as its rider remained alive, Fyra'basj would be beautiful and safe. It would shimmer like a fresh pearl in the sunlight, scales gleaming and healthy, eyes sapphiric and sharp as a

But he knew better. Science had created this monster, and science would defend it. Fyra'basj was cloaked in sheaths of photographic reflectors. It would look beautiful. It would remain ugly. This was science, and the rider was grateful.

He had forgotten his name at the top of the hill marking the Western edge of the Cal'rota Sands.

[2]

Green eyes behind rotten brown cloth watched the nomad party disappear into the edge of horizon. The fabric shifted; he yanked it down and pulled a cigarette from his pocket, flicking a match against the sandpaper patch on his belt and lighting it warily. His lips were chapped and his cheeks were hollow.

Java had been here for weeks. Here, wandering this Godforsaken desert, his only commodities the clothes on his back and the pack slung across his raw shoulder. He was exhausted. His envy of the travellers for their companionship had expanded into a writhing parasite, eating away at his persistence, decaying his heart.

He blinked. The sand was still drifting where they had disappeared. With a sigh beyond his twenty-eight years, Java flicked his cigarette and clambered back aboard his desert cat, its fur rough and dry on his flesh. Most of what he wore had worn away; he was left in scraggles of leather trousers and a pair of nasty old boots a size or two too