You can sense desire and need. It is the aftertaste of the Screaming Zahir. Something nearby, deep within the alcoves of your mind, has witnessed it. Another threat, another competitor, another enemy who would rend you for a glimpse of the Screaming Zahir.

You descend and find them, not one, but many.

Rows and rows, stretching far and deep into the distance. An infinite crowd of mud-drenched men and women. All stood motionless, weak, barely able to support themselves. All of them turn their eyes to the swampy clay that makes up the ground here. As you watch, one man in the distance collapses without fanfare and sinks into the sticky earth.

“Do not look upon us,” one nearby grunts weakly through gritted teeth. “Your presence only highlights our shame.”

“No! Stay! Let me bask in the hope of you. Whilst I might never see it, you may, and for these moments I am in your presence,” a woman’s voice whimpers from a figure too caked in mud to descern.

“This is our penance,” another woman says, as if to explain. “We are trapped here. Locked within the clay. We cannot progress, we cannot fly on the winds of imagination and conceptualisation as you can. Our minds have been so thoroughly dulled by our need that we cannot think clearly of anything else.”

There is a chorus of pained, but weakened moaning from various figures around. Far off, a dot in the distance stumbles forward and vanishes into the clay.

“We wait out our wretched lives thinking only of the Screaming Zahir, knowing we are trapped. Statues of failure. Testaments to loss.”