The mountain was unfathomably tall and by the time we made it to the base, I had stopped looking up. The mountain of the Stony Desert was solid as far as I could tell, not like the mountain on the moon where I had encountered the Moon Beasts. That mountain had an entrance to mines carved within and under it.
“Stay here,” Geb said and I watched him approach a flat face of the mountain.
Geb extended one of his considerable hands that were as big as my head toward the mountain and I heard something like rocks scraping against each other.
“What is happening?” I asked, yelling at the top of my lungs over the sound.
The sound of the grinding of large boulders ceased as two females emerged from the rocky surface; one with ebony skin and black hair, and another with alabaster skin and red hair.
“I was hoping he was taller,” the red-haired woman said, scrunching her nose and the freckles there. “He seemed much taller, didn’t he?”
“Humans are always disappointing,” the black-haired woman said.
Geb smiled at me.
“Human, this is Ala and Danu.”
They were both nearly twice my size and they were beautiful. They had the form of women, but there was something otherworldly about the garments that draped them like dresses and silk shawls over their shoulders. Ala had full lips and prominent cheekbones on the ebony smooth color of her face. Her eyes were all black, but expressive and they seemed to be friendly. She knelt before me while Dani stood with her alabaster arms crossed that were also speckled with red freckles like her face around the all whites of her eyes.
“You are a handsome thing, aren’t you?” Ala said in a friendly voice.
I blushed. It did feel good to be complimented by such an impressive woman.
“But petrified and lost,” she laughed and looked back at Danu who joined in her mockery.
I looked down at my feet in shame.
“It’s true,” I said and Ala sat and looked amused by my voice. “I am very lost. These Dreamlands are unlike anything I have ever known and I want to get back to something familiar. You’re all Earth Gods? Well, I am a son of the Earth and I do not belong here. Please, take me with you when you go to Earth.”
“Aww,” Danu groaned, “he’s tugging at the heartstrings.”
“Isn’t he?” Ala said, looking down at me with genuine affection. “I’m sorry, human, Geb shouldn’t have got your hopes up. You can’t travel like us to the Earth. We are Gods after all. This form of yours is flimsy, a shadow of a physical body, like tissue paper. You’d be turned to dust in no time.”
My heart sank. The desert stretched endlessly around me and I feared that I was stuck. Truly stuck and marooned in a strange and hostile land. I wondered if Nyarlathotep was still after me. I almost cried at the realization that he might have forever to catch up to me. I would never leave the Dreamlands.
PRL Serials 