The desert began to recede, giving way to harder ground. Hot sand transmuted into baked clay, and once again into rocky terrain.
It was nighttime now. The rolling waves of heat seemed to roll back; all the heat seemed to depart back to wherever it came, and it was surprisingly cold.
The boy kept walking, the terrain started to incline — he was going upwards.
Abruptly, he found himself on the edge of a cliff.
It seemed like the edge of the very universe — with no pollution from the lights of the city, no torchlights or electricity or campfires, the stars stretched for miles and miles, perhaps stretching as far as for-ever.
The trudging through the desert had been methodical, sometimes painful, often mindless. But now, emotions blended and rose, rising, rising, rising.
The emotions seemed to originate from his throat. He was thirsty — he felt it viscerally in this throat, parched and full of dust and clay. He felt exhausted, also seemingly to come from deep within his neck. And he felt mystified and confused.
“Where… why… how?”
And he felt the need to fall to his needs, stars spread forwards like brushstrokes of darkness flecked with white paint, stars glowing sometimes strongly and sometimes dimly, a canvas overwhelming in its totality.
Emotions rising, he felt the urge to fall to his knees, half-collapsing, tearing at his clothing, screaming out into the ocean of stars and rock-strewn desert —
“WHY? WHY? WHY?”
Pulling at his own hair, frantic, all the suppressed emotions from the march through the desert coming to,
“WHY? WHY?
“UNIVERSE! OPEN YOUR SECRETS TO ME!”
Nothing so much happened.
Panting, exhausted, the scene transformed gradually from surreal back towards the mundane, and eventually, the young protagonist gathered himself, drank a sip of his low-running water from the canteen, and navigated down the cliffside and onwards.
The next three days were uneventful.
When night fell on the third, suddenly it was as if lightning was coursing through his entire body.
All the patterns fell into placing, the logic of all tragedy and trudging and opportunity and uplifting and love and hate and —
The why was clear; the how was clear; and perhaps even the wherefore.
The weight, the gravity settled. Again he was pulled downwards, his knees falling to the still-warm clay as cool winds caresses his hair.
He was trembling, his palms glistening with sweat.
The universe opened its secrets to him, and they were bright and brilliant and terrible —
— and he understood.