Lost to Sand
The spell of Dawn’s enchantment broke around her like a wine glass dropped from a very high place. She lifted her hand from
the page, feeling a strange sense of disconnectedness, like a sleeper who, once wakened, wishes only to return to her
dreams. With a feverish shakiness, she worked her thumb into the palm of her right hand to smooth away the cramp that
pinched there. Only then did she notice her drawing.
Never in her conscious mind had she been able to draw with such detail and precision. She had crafted what appeared to be
a church or a solarium – possibly both – with intricate crenellations that seemed to her to possess the organic geometry and
intricacy of a spider’s web. She thought it unearthly but somehow natural at the same time, the way an old house appears
when it becomes overrun and reclaimed by the vines and trees around it.
Dawn puzzled over the drawing, letting her breathing return to normal, letting her limbs, which tingled with frostbite,
relinquish their stiffness. She had a vague sense that what she had set out to accomplish had been achieved, but she could
no longer be sure what that had been or how she had done it. It seemed to her like she had unfocused her eyes momentarily
and let herself fade into half-consciousness, wherein this detailed schematic appeared.
Dawn drew a breath. The night was clear, pristine, and the air that filled her lungs felt sharp and clean, with a tinge of
oakwood smoke from the chimneys of the surrounding buildings. One of the first things Xander had done when he moved into
their Flat was to install central air and heat, transforming their wood burning stoves and fire places into decorative nooks
and one fanciful cherry bookcase in the dining room. Dawn felt a stab of envy for the neighbors, and a pang of regret, which
she aimed at Xander for having stolen away that deeply nostalgic smoky fragrance from their home.
Which stirred a whole cauldron of emotions… guilt, regret, pain, loss, grief: they all came swirling back up at her, and she
wished again for the solitude she found when she was with Andrew.
A glow of anticipation filled her. She imagined him, tucked snugly in his bed, his arms curled loosely around his pillow, and his
room full of toys and gadgets and comic books. It was clean and warm there, and they got to be children. It was home.
Suddenly, Dawn realized that her feet were bare and her bones felt chilled. She was eager to get back downstairs… and
then, she heard him scream.
Andrew dreamed, and in his dream, he and Dawn were in a boat – a rowboat – and she was wearing one of those stiff, itchy
Victorian costumes with the high lace collars and the starched sleeves, and the dress is this awful striped puce, and all
Andrew could think of was getting her out of it. He thought sex, followed by tea and crumpets.
He was dressed in pantaloons and knee socks, which he liked on her, when she wasn’t wearing anything else, but on him –
come on! – it was like seeing Worf in a sailor’s suit. Totally out of place.
So, in the dream, Andrew was all about the defrocking of the prim and proper Dawn, who seemed blushingly Victorian, as the
dress dictated, but the boat kept rocking, and all of the sudden, and without prelude, they were not on water but sailing
instead on giant quaking hills of sand.
The wind howled with fierce force and with cruel teeth that tore Dawn’s lace parasol to tatters. The tiny boat climbed up
waves of sand and then crashed into the troughs, scouring their skin and eyes and throats, and then, way below them, the
sands pour into a whirlpool like the grains through the neck of an hourglass… And Dawn was shouting at him to hold on as the
boat crested the wave and tipped and teetered for a breathless moment, dangling above the gaping black circle.
In the circle, he saw a fire, and four people around it, shouting as Andrew and Dawn streaked by in their little boat. As they
disappeared beneath the rim of the circle, he heard a voice shouting, “Now! Throw it in! Throw it in the fire…”
Andrew awoke, sweating, panting, in his own bed. It took a moment, but then the pain flared, blinding, searing, formless and
consuming, and Andrew began to scream.
Anjelica had clung to Oz for so long, she no longer knew if she could stand on her own.
But that would not matter for long. She knew that her time was at an end, just as she knew that Hell would soon claim her. It
– they- the damned – they were eating away at her, eroding her. Soon she would be part of them, and them of her. It would
all be lost to sand.
Anjelica dimly recalled a video they showed in her science class. In it, a wasp laid its eggs under a caterpillar’s skin. After a
few days, the larvae hatched and erupted from the caterpillar’s soft, pliable body. She knew now with grisly certainty how
the caterpillar felt in its final hours – its insides liquefied, turned mercilessly into food for the interloping worms, and its
entire existence reduced to pain and powerlessness.
Death came for the caterpillar as sure as night followed day, and with it, release. At least then, she thought, it would no
longer have to struggle.
There was no death nor mercy in Hell. She knew it in the twisted, writhingly souls she saw in the sand. They welled up at her
feet and gnashed at her ankles like a thousand swarming, biting fleas. She knew it in the howling wails of anguish she heard
and could not block out. They assured her that it would not end, not in death, not for her. Not ever.
Oz dragged her to her feet again, and she wondered again why he bothered. He spoke to her, a low sound meant to soothe,
but Hell swallowed it up. They stood now in a Circle, and Helli understood. Anya and Walter were casting the portal. She clung
to Oz’s sleeve, which she noted without mirth was covered with winged alarm clocks. The irony was not lost on her. Her
time was up.
“We’ll be home soon,” he muttered, more words of prayer than reassurance.
“You can’t…” she choked out. “I can’t.”
“Shhhhhh.”
With that sound came another, the harsh hiss of the sky slowly swirling with sand. A thunderous roar pounded down upon Oz
and Anjelica in the center of the Circle as Anya’s and Walter’s chanting spun and weaved in and out of the nightmarish
cacophony.
Oz lifted Helli in his arms. The ground beneath them bubbled and roiled like a vat of pitch coming to a boil.
The walls of the Circle shot up suddenly, spraying like a fountain. Faces and claws and wagging tongues leered out at them,
contorted tortured forms screaming for release. The bubbling sand at their feet lurched, pitching them to their knees.
Instantly, Helli began to sink and she let herself slide from his grasp. He gripped her under her arms and hauled her out. The
walls surged higher, buffeting them on an updraft until they stood high above the desert floor, teetering on a column of
quaking sand.
Oz got one shoulder under Helli’s limp body. He gripped Andrew’s cold, dead hand in his own. Several stories below, Anya
peered up at them, her face underlit by the flames of the fire she’d set to spark the Circle. She cupped her hands around
her mouth and shouted to him, but her words were drowned by the fierce, constant wail of the vortex of sand.
“Helli,” Oz panted. “Helli, it’s time. Be ready…”
Helli dropped to her knees, her head bowed, her palms flat against the moving pillar of sand.
Oz knelt and tried to take her hand.
“Get away from me,” she growled.
Oz swallowed. He blinked sand from his eyes. “No, Helli. It’s me. It’s Oz.”
She rolled her head to fix him with a steady, baleful glare. Her eyes took on the dull red of a dying fire, and the guttural
sound in her chest was anything but human.
“I know who you are,” Helli groaned. She gripped her stomach with one hand as a staggering bolt of pain tore through her.
She heard Anya’s voice threading in and out of the deafening roar, but Oz - poor, sweet, unknowing Oz – he crouched
across from her, too stunned, too concerned about Anjelica Reyes to do anything.
“Get the hell away,” she warned.
“No. No… we’ve come all this way.”
He would never understand, Helli thought. And he would never let go. No matter how far gone she was.
Never.
But she had one last thing she could do, before the desert rose up and engulfed them both. She lunged at him with what
strength she possessed, and, knocking him flat, she pried Andrew’s hand from his and let herself fall.
Oz scrabbled over the pitching sands to catch her, but could do nothing but watch as she tumbled, arms out-stretched,
almost flying directly into Anya’s conjuring fire. As the ground flew up at Helli, the wind died and he heard Anya’s fervent
cries:
“The hand! Helli. Throw it in the fire!”
Oz understood her fall, her final sacrifice. He collapsed as the portal opened above him. He lost consciousness as Helli was
lost to sand.
Dawn flew down the stairs, fearing the worst, which for them… really could be anything. She burst into Andrew’s room,
finding him fetal on the floor, cocooned beneath his duvet and twisted sheets and screaming incessantly.
She crouched beside him. She tried to coax him to sit up, but he recoiled from her, and Dawn could smell an oddly sweet
scent, like roasting flesh.
“Oh God…” Dawn said. She wrenched his shoulders, but still he cringed away, crying out in agony.
Xander appeared at the door, brandishing an umbrella. Maya stood behind him, wielding a spatula in each of her trembling
hands.
“What in the name of the Midas’s Mom?!” Xander shouted.
“I don’t know,” Dawn answered desperately. “Andrew!”
Meanwhile Andrew flopped wildly on the floor, his eyes bulging from their sockets, and Dawn got a glimpse of something…
something impossible.
“Xander, Maya!” she yelled. “Help me hold him.”
They did, though not with much success. Andrew jerked violently, sending Xander and his mighty umbrella crashing into the
bedframe, and Maya collided with him so that both wound up in an ineffectual tangle at Andrew’s feet. At last, they managed
to grapple him at his knees. Dawn twisted his body into her arms, wrenching his arms free from the mass of tangled sheets…
And then they watched in stunned disbelief as Andrew’s once missing left hand turned first from white-hot embers to ash to
flesh and finally to smooth, unmarred skin.
Andrew kicked out of their grasp. He knelt and stared agape at his hand and as they watched, the mark of Kimaris glowed
hotly sulfuric and then disappeared in a puff of acrid orange smoke.
He twisted his hand back and forth, wriggling his fingers, then stretching them and closing them over his palm.
For once in his life, Andrew was speechless.
“Oh my God,” Dawn said.
“Something like that,” he agreed, his tone a reverent whisper.
They marveled in silence while he continued to work his fingers through a series of elaborate calisthenics.
“Holy double heck,” Xander said. “Your hand. It…spontaneously un-combusted.”
Andrew’s mouth twitched wordlessly a few moments before he managed to say, “Yeah, I noticed.”
“Shyeah. Okay. But how?”
Neither Andrew nor Dawn had anything in the way of explanation, and were spared besides, when William wandered in all
sleepy-eyed, leaned against the door frame and asked, in a plaintive voice, “What the bleeding hell is going on in here?”
The spell of Dawn’s enchantment broke around her like a wine glass dropped from a very high place. She lifted her hand from
the page, feeling a strange sense of disconnectedness, like a sleeper who, once wakened, wishes only to return to her
dreams. With a feverish shakiness, she worked her thumb into the palm of her right hand to smooth away the cramp that
pinched there. Only then did she notice her drawing.
Never in her conscious mind had she been able to draw with such detail and precision. She had crafted what appeared to be
a church or a solarium – possibly both – with intricate crenellations that seemed to her to possess the organic geometry and
intricacy of a spider’s web. She thought it unearthly but somehow natural at the same time, the way an old house appears
when it becomes overrun and reclaimed by the vines and trees around it.
Dawn puzzled over the drawing, letting her breathing return to normal, letting her limbs, which tingled with frostbite,
relinquish their stiffness. She had a vague sense that what she had set out to accomplish had been achieved, but she could
no longer be sure what that had been or how she had done it. It seemed to her like she had unfocused her eyes momentarily
and let herself fade into half-consciousness, wherein this detailed schematic appeared.
Dawn drew a breath. The night was clear, pristine, and the air that filled her lungs felt sharp and clean, with a tinge of
oakwood smoke from the chimneys of the surrounding buildings. One of the first things Xander had done when he moved into
their Flat was to install central air and heat, transforming their wood burning stoves and fire places into decorative nooks
and one fanciful cherry bookcase in the dining room. Dawn felt a stab of envy for the neighbors, and a pang of regret, which
she aimed at Xander for having stolen away that deeply nostalgic smoky fragrance from their home.
Which stirred a whole cauldron of emotions… guilt, regret, pain, loss, grief: they all came swirling back up at her, and she
wished again for the solitude she found when she was with Andrew.
A glow of anticipation filled her. She imagined him, tucked snugly in his bed, his arms curled loosely around his pillow, and his
room full of toys and gadgets and comic books. It was clean and warm there, and they got to be children. It was home.
Suddenly, Dawn realized that her feet were bare and her bones felt chilled. She was eager to get back downstairs… and
then, she heard him scream.
Andrew dreamed, and in his dream, he and Dawn were in a boat – a rowboat – and she was wearing one of those stiff, itchy
Victorian costumes with the high lace collars and the starched sleeves, and the dress is this awful striped puce, and all
Andrew could think of was getting her out of it. He thought sex, followed by tea and crumpets.
He was dressed in pantaloons and knee socks, which he liked on her, when she wasn’t wearing anything else, but on him –
come on! – it was like seeing Worf in a sailor’s suit. Totally out of place.
So, in the dream, Andrew was all about the defrocking of the prim and proper Dawn, who seemed blushingly Victorian, as the
dress dictated, but the boat kept rocking, and all of the sudden, and without prelude, they were not on water but sailing
instead on giant quaking hills of sand.
The wind howled with fierce force and with cruel teeth that tore Dawn’s lace parasol to tatters. The tiny boat climbed up
waves of sand and then crashed into the troughs, scouring their skin and eyes and throats, and then, way below them, the
sands pour into a whirlpool like the grains through the neck of an hourglass… And Dawn was shouting at him to hold on as the
boat crested the wave and tipped and teetered for a breathless moment, dangling above the gaping black circle.
In the circle, he saw a fire, and four people around it, shouting as Andrew and Dawn streaked by in their little boat. As they
disappeared beneath the rim of the circle, he heard a voice shouting, “Now! Throw it in! Throw it in the fire…”
Andrew awoke, sweating, panting, in his own bed. It took a moment, but then the pain flared, blinding, searing, formless and
consuming, and Andrew began to scream.
Anjelica had clung to Oz for so long, she no longer knew if she could stand on her own.
But that would not matter for long. She knew that her time was at an end, just as she knew that Hell would soon claim her. It
– they- the damned – they were eating away at her, eroding her. Soon she would be part of them, and them of her. It would
all be lost to sand.
Anjelica dimly recalled a video they showed in her science class. In it, a wasp laid its eggs under a caterpillar’s skin. After a
few days, the larvae hatched and erupted from the caterpillar’s soft, pliable body. She knew now with grisly certainty how
the caterpillar felt in its final hours – its insides liquefied, turned mercilessly into food for the interloping worms, and its
entire existence reduced to pain and powerlessness.
Death came for the caterpillar as sure as night followed day, and with it, release. At least then, she thought, it would no
longer have to struggle.
There was no death nor mercy in Hell. She knew it in the twisted, writhingly souls she saw in the sand. They welled up at her
feet and gnashed at her ankles like a thousand swarming, biting fleas. She knew it in the howling wails of anguish she heard
and could not block out. They assured her that it would not end, not in death, not for her. Not ever.
Oz dragged her to her feet again, and she wondered again why he bothered. He spoke to her, a low sound meant to soothe,
but Hell swallowed it up. They stood now in a Circle, and Helli understood. Anya and Walter were casting the portal. She clung
to Oz’s sleeve, which she noted without mirth was covered with winged alarm clocks. The irony was not lost on her. Her
time was up.
“We’ll be home soon,” he muttered, more words of prayer than reassurance.
“You can’t…” she choked out. “I can’t.”
“Shhhhhh.”
With that sound came another, the harsh hiss of the sky slowly swirling with sand. A thunderous roar pounded down upon Oz
and Anjelica in the center of the Circle as Anya’s and Walter’s chanting spun and weaved in and out of the nightmarish
cacophony.
Oz lifted Helli in his arms. The ground beneath them bubbled and roiled like a vat of pitch coming to a boil.
The walls of the Circle shot up suddenly, spraying like a fountain. Faces and claws and wagging tongues leered out at them,
contorted tortured forms screaming for release. The bubbling sand at their feet lurched, pitching them to their knees.
Instantly, Helli began to sink and she let herself slide from his grasp. He gripped her under her arms and hauled her out. The
walls surged higher, buffeting them on an updraft until they stood high above the desert floor, teetering on a column of
quaking sand.
Oz got one shoulder under Helli’s limp body. He gripped Andrew’s cold, dead hand in his own. Several stories below, Anya
peered up at them, her face underlit by the flames of the fire she’d set to spark the Circle. She cupped her hands around
her mouth and shouted to him, but her words were drowned by the fierce, constant wail of the vortex of sand.
“Helli,” Oz panted. “Helli, it’s time. Be ready…”
Helli dropped to her knees, her head bowed, her palms flat against the moving pillar of sand.
Oz knelt and tried to take her hand.
“Get away from me,” she growled.
Oz swallowed. He blinked sand from his eyes. “No, Helli. It’s me. It’s Oz.”
She rolled her head to fix him with a steady, baleful glare. Her eyes took on the dull red of a dying fire, and the guttural
sound in her chest was anything but human.
“I know who you are,” Helli groaned. She gripped her stomach with one hand as a staggering bolt of pain tore through her.
She heard Anya’s voice threading in and out of the deafening roar, but Oz - poor, sweet, unknowing Oz – he crouched
across from her, too stunned, too concerned about Anjelica Reyes to do anything.
“Get the hell away,” she warned.
“No. No… we’ve come all this way.”
He would never understand, Helli thought. And he would never let go. No matter how far gone she was.
Never.
But she had one last thing she could do, before the desert rose up and engulfed them both. She lunged at him with what
strength she possessed, and, knocking him flat, she pried Andrew’s hand from his and let herself fall.
Oz scrabbled over the pitching sands to catch her, but could do nothing but watch as she tumbled, arms out-stretched,
almost flying directly into Anya’s conjuring fire. As the ground flew up at Helli, the wind died and he heard Anya’s fervent
cries:
“The hand! Helli. Throw it in the fire!”
Oz understood her fall, her final sacrifice. He collapsed as the portal opened above him. He lost consciousness as Helli was
lost to sand.
Dawn flew down the stairs, fearing the worst, which for them… really could be anything. She burst into Andrew’s room,
finding him fetal on the floor, cocooned beneath his duvet and twisted sheets and screaming incessantly.
She crouched beside him. She tried to coax him to sit up, but he recoiled from her, and Dawn could smell an oddly sweet
scent, like roasting flesh.
“Oh God…” Dawn said. She wrenched his shoulders, but still he cringed away, crying out in agony.
Xander appeared at the door, brandishing an umbrella. Maya stood behind him, wielding a spatula in each of her trembling
hands.
“What in the name of the Midas’s Mom?!” Xander shouted.
“I don’t know,” Dawn answered desperately. “Andrew!”
Meanwhile Andrew flopped wildly on the floor, his eyes bulging from their sockets, and Dawn got a glimpse of something…
something impossible.
“Xander, Maya!” she yelled. “Help me hold him.”
They did, though not with much success. Andrew jerked violently, sending Xander and his mighty umbrella crashing into the
bedframe, and Maya collided with him so that both wound up in an ineffectual tangle at Andrew’s feet. At last, they managed
to grapple him at his knees. Dawn twisted his body into her arms, wrenching his arms free from the mass of tangled sheets…
And then they watched in stunned disbelief as Andrew’s once missing left hand turned first from white-hot embers to ash to
flesh and finally to smooth, unmarred skin.
Andrew kicked out of their grasp. He knelt and stared agape at his hand and as they watched, the mark of Kimaris glowed
hotly sulfuric and then disappeared in a puff of acrid orange smoke.
He twisted his hand back and forth, wriggling his fingers, then stretching them and closing them over his palm.
For once in his life, Andrew was speechless.
“Oh my God,” Dawn said.
“Something like that,” he agreed, his tone a reverent whisper.
They marveled in silence while he continued to work his fingers through a series of elaborate calisthenics.
“Holy double heck,” Xander said. “Your hand. It…spontaneously un-combusted.”
Andrew’s mouth twitched wordlessly a few moments before he managed to say, “Yeah, I noticed.”
“Shyeah. Okay. But how?”
Neither Andrew nor Dawn had anything in the way of explanation, and were spared besides, when William wandered in all
sleepy-eyed, leaned against the door frame and asked, in a plaintive voice, “What the bleeding hell is going on in here?”
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
.Chapter Index.
Anywhere Out
of This World
Blood, Pressure
The Drawing Board
All's Well
Anywhere Out of
This World
Mourning Sickness
Welcome to Hell
Relative
Matters of Time
& Fishes
International Calls
Empty as Houses
Lusty Wrong Feelings
Enthralled
Thanksgiving
Seduced
Innocents Lost
Burn
Flashback
Not A Chance In Hell
Empty Rooms
Two Roads Diverged
Starfall
Blindsided
Not Her Own
Outta Here
The Valley of the
Shadow of Death
Comes the Rain
Smoke and Mirrors
Drawn to You
Team Angel
By Fire Reborn
Salvage
Ashes to Ashes
Life Is...
With A Little Help
Appearances Deceiving
Familiarity
Sweetness
Not All Who Wander
That Old Black Magic
For Lorne
Drawn Together
Lost to Sand
Fall of Triumvirate
Parallel Lives
The Lovers
Avenger
Double Cross
Pursuit
Ripper's Girl
Pandemonium
Negative Space
Raveled Threads
Asunder
Human Hands
Singular
Fragmented
Symmetry
Plans
Rogue Squadron
Legends
Mea Culpa
Things Unsaid
Home Sweet Gone
Eleventh Hour
Last Call
Time Is Running Out
Primal
Anywhere Out
of This World
Blood, Pressure
The Drawing Board
All's Well
Anywhere Out of
This World
Mourning Sickness
Welcome to Hell
Relative
Matters of Time
& Fishes
International Calls
Empty as Houses
Lusty Wrong Feelings
Enthralled
Thanksgiving
Seduced
Innocents Lost
Burn
Flashback
Not A Chance In Hell
Empty Rooms
Two Roads Diverged
Starfall
Blindsided
Not Her Own
Outta Here
The Valley of the
Shadow of Death
Comes the Rain
Smoke and Mirrors
Drawn to You
Team Angel
By Fire Reborn
Salvage
Ashes to Ashes
Life Is...
With A Little Help
Appearances Deceiving
Familiarity
Sweetness
Not All Who Wander
That Old Black Magic
For Lorne
Drawn Together
Lost to Sand
Fall of Triumvirate
Parallel Lives
The Lovers
Avenger
Double Cross
Pursuit
Ripper's Girl
Pandemonium
Negative Space
Raveled Threads
Asunder
Human Hands
Singular
Fragmented
Symmetry
Plans
Rogue Squadron
Legends
Mea Culpa
Things Unsaid
Home Sweet Gone
Eleventh Hour
Last Call
Time Is Running Out
Primal