The traveller’s feet dragged at a steady pace along the silver sands. Reaching one hand out, they pulled themselves over the rocky shelf that blocked their path and continued onwards; it had been almost 20,000 steps since they emerged from the canyon, which meant that their journey would soon come to an end, as it had so many times before. The landscape trended downwards as they entered the depression, and the desert began to thin alongside the platforms of stone that protruded from the crater’s edge as shifting sands gave way to solid rock. This changing terrain had no effect on the traveller, whose skin had been eroded by aeons of exposure into little more than sandpaper. Feeling nothing as they walked but their own muscles flexing and contracting, they soon began to climb the crater’s rim and emerged onto the surface once more, continuing on. 

Once, in the past, the traveller had gazed upon the surface of this world and marvelled at the beauty of it all, with an atmosphere so thin that they could see each star in perfect detail; now they could make out little more than darkness, their eyes plastered by achromatic dust. Still, they travelled onward. Sticking out among the level sands of the lunar desert were the traveller’s footprints, which lay untouched along their path as the sole proof of any life on the surface, set still until disturbed by the one who made them. Each step they took fit neatly into one of these footprints, as the traveller had fallen into an absolute routine, only straying from this established path when the planet itself demanded it by some geological disruption or another significant event. For now, though, the ground was still. As they made their way across the planet’s surface, the traveller suddenly found themselves submerged in darkness under a blanket of shadow which cast itself over the landscape for miles in each direction. The source of this shroud was a cliff edge, which jutted out of the desert around it and towered over the traveller’s feeble form. Foot by foot they scaled the wall of stone with unfailing precision, reaching for each rocky outcrop in the same place they had gripped during the last cycle. One day they would need to find a new way across, when the stone would erode from use. But not today. Not yet. 

The weary traveller soon reached the cliff’s pinnacle, pulling themselves over the cold stone and onto their feet. They now stood at the peak of this formation and the highest point on the planet’s surface. From here, the vastness of this desolate world could be clearly seen, as the all-consuming stygian sky spread itself across the arching horizon and wrapped around the endless desert in a cold embrace. This sea of perfect pitch-blackness was dotted with islands of colour cutting through the void; red, blue, and yellow stars danced together to the eternal music of the winding cosmic winds, painting the abyss with every tint and tone comprehensible to the human mind in a symphony of beauty and light waiting idly by to inspire any soul that could see it. If only they could see it! But beauty was an idea all too foreign to the traveller. As ages had come and gone, their eyes had been chipped away into crude stone implements by the elements of this unforgiving world, primitive organs that could see only vague blots of grey and black. And so, with no hope of ever again seeing the stars and a path calling for their patronage, they cast their gaze to the ground and began to hike down the widening hill opposite to the cliff’s edge. The formation tapered off slowly from its abrupt beginning into a soft downward slope, not too different from the crater they had previously emerged from, and it was not long before they found themselves back on flat land as if nothing had stood in their way to begin with. 

How long had life been like this? The traveller’s mind betrayed itself; there had once been a meaning to this journey, in a time too long ago to remember, when they had decided to take their first step. This recollection had long since faded into the void. The aeons tend to braid themselves together as a wicker basket, and those memories had fallen between the seams. Yet these sparks of the past, faded and distant beyond recognition, served no purpose to them now. All that mattered was the journey. It was a principle, and the only thought that they could hold on to, for the traveller knew that if they stopped, the ground would open up to swallow them whole. Perhaps there had once been a semblance of hope, a spark in their conscience that they would be rescued, that somebody, anybody would find them.  Perhaps it was an animal instinct, if you could call them an animal, that force that kept them going—not faith, but the faint idea that this world was not immortal. But that no longer mattered. As this wanderer approached the end of their path, they did not stop, even for a moment. Continuing on, they took another step and began the cycle anew. Faced with the same barren world before them, with slow wandering steps, the traveller made their solitary way into the unending expanse.