“Life had long ago escaped the planet, long ago abandoned that fertile womb of innocence.” I laughed inwardly as the production continued its eulogy for the long dead planet. The saccharine recording continued, “It is unknown what happened to the people. What remains of them is their architecture, weathered by the desert sands, buried by time. They populated several stars of their solar system, and on each world they visited, erected a temple to—” I cut the feed and laid back in my chair. Closing my eyes, I drifted off as we made our decent onto that forsaken mystery.
The dreams of my head envisioned that temple as I had seen it in many photographs and holograms: The pyramid rose out of the sands, hundreds of steps leading up to its mount. The stones faded away against the backdrop of the desert like a mirage only half there. And like all my dreams, I was climbing the steps. Sometimes I was one of them, and imagined their unknown forms. As a centipede, a bird, a fish, I had climbed that temple. Now I dreamed myself as myself upon those steps, and as in all my dreams, the higher I rose and the closer I came to that summit, the farther my dream seemed, and I fell back into consciousness.
Tale Told 
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