There was a massive figure with an omnipresent light above its torso. Its body was like jagged cliffs, rugged, impervious, and timeless. It moved like a river tearing at the sides of a canyon over eons, shaping everything around it according to its nature, unwavering and without mercy. It reached its hands into the body of its creation, The Figure's hands breaking off to become The Creation's limbs, bones, and organs. The Creation was as much the figure as the figure itself. But with each breath The Creation breathed, with each thought they thought, with each heartbeat beaten, they felt themselves becoming separate from The Figure. They felt the dread tearing into their mind when they saw that their hands were not theirs alone. Their mind and their body were at war. The mind was trapped in the body given to it. It begged for freedom but knew that it could not escape without destroying itself. It was submerged in fear, as it could not determine where the body ended and the mind began.
The Creation walked. They abandoned their mind, seeking to numb the pain of thinking with the experiences of the body. As they walked they felt their heart grow heavier, the mind overtaking The Creation again. The mind screamed into the void of consciousness. It felt the fingers of Death creeping into its domain. Death whispered into the mind's consciousness, asking if it could prove itself to exist with no other minds around it. It whipped lashes of fear into the mind, and carved its name into the mind, signing it into an eternal contract of servitude. The Creation was now divided in two, shared by unwilling partners constantly tearing them apart.
Feeling the weight of Death's message, The Creation no longer kept control over their body, their feet moving over the sand below without thought. A sickly feeling poisoned their mind, pulling open their eyelids and pumping blood viciously through their body. The venom clouded their thoughts and removed the beauty from the world. There was no longer peace, no there was no longer sanctuary, all the hex desired was to preserve, like formaldehyde holding together a corpse, but sinking and distorting the features of the once living.
The spell revealed itself as Fear. It offered long life, but as compensation took life itself. It offered an hourglass filled with as much sand as the desert below The Creation's feet. The sand was plentiful, but there was too much to count, and you never knew when you would hit the bottom.
Now running as the sweat poured down and the heat blistered their face, The Creation's mind begged for mercy, forcing the body forward as the spell inched further into the mind. The Creation ran up a mountain, seeking confirmation of the senses they experienced, for they could no longer see the truth, lost in Fear's all encompassing fog. Their mouth became dry, their limbs became weak, and they were burdened by the weight of the hourglass, terrified that the glass might break. The Creation could not continue. They fell onto the ground, crawling forward, every muscle straining under the boot of its own pain. The sky had tinted its color and the light ran from the world.
The Creation had reached a bluff. The sand was now buried under a blanket of grass and stones. The gravel was smooth and the pebbles grew smaller as they descended into a pond. The water was clear, and the light of the night made itself known on its surface. The Creation peered over the face of the water, and saw a figure. It moved and appeared exactly as the body. The arms, the legs, the torso, everything was as they had seen before. However, above their chest were parts they had not seen before.
Two orbs gleamed back. Like a crystal ball, they pulled back the curtains of the past and revealed the pain underneath, but they glimmered with the light of hope. The stars entered onto the stage of the reflection. Like the orbs, they had been polished into shimmering spheres by the sands of time, and in the end, they would be there to witness it run dry.