Hmmm... I don't think I like this one as much as the first :/ Oh well, here ya are :)
The sands whisper to themselves, in a desert as capricious and fluid as this, and the things they whisper are a farflung assortment for the ears of a listener, from biblical passages to recipies for bread. Many a single soul has lost a mind and a half listening to every word and every single syllable that has echoed from undying and unbirthing dunes there.
Goodbye. (Forgive me, not a statement and end to a story but a man and a beggining.) One Mr. Daniel. Daniel Goodbye.
Goodbye is the last thing one says to another, if one holds to proper sentence structure. (As neither the sands nor our protagonist are wont to do, but I hold a mind as open as a cage with no bars, so maybe you know more) and as such is often the last thing heard. To most this is the natural way, but Daniel Goodbye was a man of skill. And a man of pride.
Despair! A parasite with clicking heels and snapping hints of a spine eight times bisected! For every success, it grows a new leg, for every failure it grows a new fang... Weeping great tears of oil from it's eighty eight eyes, stumbling with rusty joints and lockjawed motives... yet despite this devilish spider-spun contraption of a body, it was more the frame of a centipede than some arachnid nightmare... some venemous bulb-bodied spider-sack frame was too obvious for a beast this subtle... Across the sands it skittered and slid, as if losing purchase whilst walking on water or telling lies. Its onset would be sudden, its rush demanding and deranged... such was the trappings and makings of Despair.
Now, Daniel had walked long in the desert when it began to snow... so long in fact that he had almost forgot the vagaries of the weather and, like so many children on a winters morn, was rather taken aback when the frost and finery draped the land. See, despair was a creature cold and crystalline and a snowstorm in a desert is the first harbinger of such a condition. The poison Apathy which dripped from it's fangs had sizzled and spat on the desert floor and rose up to the heavens and into the clouds. Now, here it all gets rather scientific for a narrative tale so suffice to say that the sky had become thus poisoned with Despair's nectar, and so poisoned did the sighing raindrops that sat unwanted in the clouds did slow their breaths into moans and their forms into snow.
Now when a rain once so talkative becomes something as silent as snow, the human mind has a tendency to, rather amusingly, become unnacountably excited. In heaviest and coldest of whitest of winters do children come shrieking from the warmth and safety of their homes, as if to challenge the serenity of the icescape lounging about their yards. However, this was not snow of the juvenile sort, that writes a white promise of games and childhood across the dozing features of the land, but rather a virulent and murderous snow, heavy with the oils of Apathy and wet with the blood of tomorrow.
Daniel's face was soon coated in the snows of Despair, and as it melted on the warmth on his face, it dissipated into its components, the water sighing freed down his face like tears, the voracious venom of apathy clouding his eyes and eating his will... in sufficient dosage, Apathy eats the muscles and withers the body, but such doses were not present anywhere but fresh from the fangs of Despair itself. Many, and indeed most, never know the venom of apathy for what it is, or from whence it came, for surely as seconds follow each other in their lemming-march into the past, so too does Despair follow in the wake of Apathy with its quivering fangs. Daniel, however, as we have already stated, was a learned man in things others didn't know, and the nature of monsters was one such thing.
Even as his senses and motions, his thoughts and his heart were slowed by the poison did Daniel know surely what it was. Despair had assaulted him many times before, as it has many men, for it is a fearsome and aggressive beast, unparalleled in it's spite. Knowing that he could not outrun the snow anymore than he could outrun his own thoughts, he turned his eyes instead to the snow around him, remembering as he did with his sluggish thoughts the measurements and dimensions of despair.
At roughly equal intervals in the snow did he create small marks by whispering to the lonely snow and giving it a warmer colour than white with his companionship. With a certain degree of skill and a great deal more charm did he talk the snow into his ways, but he needed more than markings to trap the beast despair. He knew his breath alone had become to cold to melt the snow, and that the touch of his hands would only speed its poison. He knew the only way to chase out the apathy in the snow was to give it the ambition to move back to the sky.
Good Mr. Goodbye sat down amongst the snow and spoke of all the things he had seen and several things he had not, but that he regardless claimed to know intimately. The rain already marked by his whispers to the snow listened with growing intensity and felt the stirrings of longing begin in its waters, however the snow not marked was lost in self pity, and could not tell his stories from the sighs of a crying wind. As the ambitious waters whispered to each other of the things they had heard, a thin trickle of steam ascended back to the heavens, slow at first but growing as each drop took confidence from the last.
Apathy had claimed our poor Daniel by the time the last faint drops shook off their torpor and set off on their own adventures, and as such could not see his handiwork behind the thick glaze of daydreams. Roughly interspersed, but roughly equally, were a long line of small holes, each filled with the distilled poison Apathy thrown off by the raindrops. At the tip of this formation was a larger rut still, central and to the forefront of the others but with the least poison. Daniel's gambit was ready, but his hand had been played and now he could but wait, frosted with waking sleep, until Despair arrived.
And arrive it did, with a smug yet sorrowful chatter of it's fangs as it weaved through the snow. Now, loathe though I am to fall back on the time honoured narrative cliché of saving the protagonist at the last minute, the nature of Daniel's trap makes it a certain imperative to tell; that as Despair drew in and clicked and hissed and bared it's many teeth, the first of it's myriad legs sunk into the holes left by Daniel. The poison in the bottom, left alone in it's own device as the rain had fled, turned on its maker, pulling the strength from the limb.
Such a small act, but on a creature as spindly as Despair, it was enough to require an overcompensation as it's weight suddenly shifted. Scrabbling for purchase, its legs each found firmer purchase than the snow only in the pits designed each to this end. And each leg sank into Apathy, and fell into disuse.
Last to fall, when all its many limbs were useless, was the top heavy head of Despair, weighed down by its teeth and it's poison. This fell into the largest of the holes, where the venom still leaking from its fangs filled up the pit, and as eighty eight eyes rolled in eighty eight terrors, the monster drowned in Apathy.
A monstrous end for a monster, and a little graphic I know. Still, Despair is a terrible beast, with no redeeming quality, whilst even Doubt can bring with it Humility and Caution and the horror deserved no better. The snow cleared up a little at a time once word spread of the raindrops that had escaped and the wonders they could see up in the sky, and after a few days of slow recovery Mr. Goodbye set off again, leaving the carcass of Despair where it lay.
Although, of course, Daniel hadn't murdered Despair, only fended off his own, and it didn't end all the sorrows in all the world. But it helped a little. It made the world a slightly happier place. For instance, I expect this line makes you want to smile.
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"Why Eeyore, you look so sad!" exclaimed Winnie the Pooh.
"Sad? Why should I be sad? It's my birthday. The happiest day of the year."
