His horse moved languidly along the disfigured coast of the cracked desert that lay drowning in the heat that pounded above him. As though it were some living thing, beating above him, mockingly imbuing itself into him, into the ground, and into the soil. With some supernaturally unletting sense of bearing, his eyes rested wrathfully on the wretched mane of the animal, a silent paladin of no particular destiny in the Sonoran blaze, he continued on his march of death. With each step, he seemed to sink further into the ground, a temporary respite before the mount would jut its head upwards in a desperate effort to move on. Appallingly dehydrated, his steed marched without majesty and without pomp, each step one that seemed to return it to a scorched-over world littered with the remains of an ancestry it had long forgotten. The haze of a violent stench arose amid the flats that it traversed, with each waft its eyes darkening to a redder shade of rage. Each muscle in the neck of the horse was striated as it faltered through the singed, crumbling flats that its hooves mulled upon, held taut as though its life depended on it. From the top of his bicep ran a shivering ache through his nerves, reaching the utter tip of each of his phalanges, like trembling threads of lightning. He looked about at his crew, a brutally relentless way place of smoking rubble and bone that stretched long past his view and long past his comprehension. Finally, from that great hibernation-like meditation that had consumed him, he looked up. His head swiveled roughly, cranking disjointedly upon his burnt, lacerated neck, from side to side, the acrid smoke consuming his presence entirely, masking him, inducting him into that creed of hellish origin that he proceeded in. Turning his head upwards, with little to see but the raucous peaks that lay crooked and mangled as though wrought from the divine rage that permeated this land that ran without regard for lives or deaths or men or animals, he tipped the brim of his hat further down below his eyes and brought his teeth grinding down on the butt of his cigarillo. He smirked.
