I know you’ll call me insane, a man who lost his mind somewhere in the dunes of the Red Wastes and came back hollow, and honestly that might be the most accurate version of me left alive. Maybe no one who calmly considers shooting himself can claim to be sane anymore, maybe that line was crossed long before I even realized it. The neighbors will talk, they always do, and they’ll say that after I came back I moved like I was being chased by something they couldn’t see. They’ll remember how I never stopped, how I always seemed late for something, how my hands wouldn’t stay still even when I tried to hide it. They’ll say I avoided eye contact, that I looked through people instead of at them, like I was searching for something behind their faces. They’ll tell the police I was burning from the inside, restless, distant, wrong. And they won’t be lying, not really. The truth is I stepped into my apartment, dropped my bags, and went straight to a doctor like a man already aware something inside him had begun to rot. He checked everything, ran his tests, smiled like nothing mattered, and called me a perfectly healthy specimen. He even joked that I was well preserved, like something that refused to decay, and I remember thinking how wrong he was without understanding why.

I should start from the desert, from that last journey into a place I won’t name, because no one should ever try to find it. It was somewhere deep in the Red Wastes, far beyond mapped routes, where the sand moves like it’s alive and the horizon never stays still for long. I hired two guides in a dying town at the edge of nothing, men who knew the terrain better than any satellite map. I bought supplies, water, a camel, everything needed to cross a place that does not forgive mistakes. We left at night, March 23rd, when the heat loosened just enough to let a man breathe. The first two days were quiet, almost too quiet, and I started believing all the warnings were exaggerated stories meant to scare tourists. No raiders, no shadows, nothing but endless dunes and silence stretching in every direction. I even laughed at myself for being tense, scanning every ridge for movement that never came. The guides joked about it too, saying the desert tricks your mind before anything real ever happens. I believed them, which was my first mistake. Because the desert never announces danger, it just removes things one by one until you notice too late.

On the third night I woke up alone and everything stopped making sense. The camels were still there, kneeling calmly as if nothing had changed, the supplies untouched, perfectly arranged. But the guides were gone without a trace, no footprints, no disturbance, nothing that could explain it. I remember standing there trying to force logic into something that clearly had none. If they left, why take nothing, if something took them, why leave no sign. I checked the sand again and again until my hands were shaking, hoping I missed something obvious. There was nothing, only silence pressing in from every direction. The sky above looked wrong too, like the stars had shifted just enough to break any sense of navigation. I chose a direction anyway, because standing still felt like waiting to disappear next. That was when I started seeing them. Dark figures on distant dunes, motionless at first, then gone the moment I tried to focus.

They kept appearing night after night, always far, always just out of reach, like shadows pretending to be human. I tried using binoculars but every time I raised them the figures dissolved into nothing. I chased them once, then twice, then stopped because it was pointless. Every dune I climbed was empty, untouched, like no one had ever stood there. The horizon always looked clean, too clean, like the desert erased everything that tried to exist on it. I told myself it was exhaustion, dehydration, the mind breaking under pressure. But the feeling that something was watching never left me. It sat just behind my thoughts, waiting. Then the first camel disappeared during the night. No sound, no struggle, just gone along with everything strapped to it. The wind had erased any trace before I even woke up.

After that I stopped trusting sleep, but the body has limits and I was already pushing mine too far. I moved everything onto the last animal and started walking beside it to keep it from vanishing like the others. The weight of the supplies cut into my shoulders, but losing them meant death so I kept going. The figures appeared less often now, but the feeling of being watched grew stronger. Eventually I stopped chasing anything at all and focused only on moving forward. The desert had become something else, something that felt aware. When the last camel disappeared, I didn’t even react the way I should have. I just stood there and accepted it like it was inevitable. Two bags, almost empty water, no direction, and a sky that no longer made sense.

I kept walking anyway, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant realizing how completely lost I was. When the last of my water ran out, something inside me shifted. Fear gave way to something quieter, something colder. That was when I saw the structure. Half buried in sand, illuminated by a pale metallic moon, massive and impossible. Columns carved from red stone, smooth and unnatural, leading down into the earth like an invitation. Two obelisks stood at the entrance, covered in symbols that looked like they were moving if you stared too long. I should have turned back, I know that now, but exhaustion and something else pushed me forward. Curiosity maybe, or something deeper that I still don’t understand. I stepped inside. And the deeper I went, the more certain I became that the desert had not been empty at all.