Cursed be!

The feeling given by the mere presence of such a creature made every pore of the man's body begin to sweat as if death itself had arrived for him, his eyes teared up, blurring his vision. Slowly, he turned his head to see what threatened him, and when he finished the movement, he saw a being emerging from the pyramid, which now had its entrance destroyed by the tremors. It was a creature about three meters tall, with a head feathered with black feathers and strangely calm eyes common to humans. The being also had sharp claws like swords and wore a dusty black cloak of sand.

Despair was the only thing seen on the man's face when looking to the creature.

The creature walked majestically towards the protagonist as if it were a predator looking for prey. The man simply collapsed before this god-like species; his legs wouldn't move, and the closer this apparent raven came, the more the sensation increased.

When the two faced each other, staring fixedly into each other's eyes, the man realized that he was truly nothing compared to the creature. It could be seen in the humanoid crow's eyes - everything and also nothing, the void and the fullness - it was something transcendental in human vision.

*Splash* Without saying a single word, this god put its claws into the young man's chest, piercing him like butter, piercing his bones and flesh as if they were nothing and tearing the man's heart out of his body.

The young man was in such a fascinated and frightened state by the being's presence that he couldn't even react to what had happened. He didn't even scream in pain, afraid of having his existence completely obliterated by the god. So the only thing he could do was to quietly look at his own heart pulsating in the crow's claws.

Amazingly, he was still alive even without his heart, but that didn't even cross his mind in that situation. He just thought about how he was nothing compared to the being in front of him.

This god-like creature turned around as if nothing had just happened and calmly walked back towards its own statue with the bloody boy's heart in hand.

*BLEH* Without those eyes exuding transcendence turned towards the young man, he regained his senses and immediately began vomiting blood and a kind of digestive acid without stopping. He also saw that there was a huge hole in his old chest, piercing his ribs. In normal conditions, such damage would have killed him immediately.

When he finished vomiting everything he had, the man's eyes, now half-lifeless, looked back at the crow, which could be seen standing between the two plates of the giant rusty balance located in its own statue's hands.

Then, without thinking, the crow pulled one of its black feathers from its own head and placed it on one of the scales, which obviously didn't move. Without understanding but fascinated by what was happening in front of him, the man continued to look at the crow, waiting to understand its actions.

Leaving the first plate where it placed its feather, the creature went to the second plate and slowly placed the man's heart on it.

*TONNN!* What could be heard next was a deafening sound caused by the movement of the rusty balance, which now lowered the plate with the man's heart as if the whole world weighed on that plate.

The human soon became increasingly confused, wondering how his heart could weigh so much as to alter the weight on a scale larger than a building, made entirely of what seemed like bronze. But soon, he was interrupted by the most diabolical sight he had ever seen in his whole adventure in that cursed desert.

The raven that had been calm and serene now turned to the man as if it hated him for merely existing. The being smiled in a completely terrifying way, showing sharp, dirty teeth with a kind of blood stuck between them, the god smiled as if he knew that the man whom he had come to hate would suffer the worst of punishments.

Then, in a matter of seconds, from the scorching sand, several tentacles that looked like black as night wrapped brutishly around the man who no longer knew what was real and what was not.

The young man tried to struggle to somehow escape, but without success. The tentacles began to push him down more and more with the intention of burying him in the sand forever.

Before finally completely burying himself, the man's last vision was of him, the being who put him in this situation, the being who now laughed at his suffering, the being who for the man was no longer a kind of god, but rather the greatest of demons.

"Cursed be!" were the man's last thoughts before sinking into the endless sand dunes of that desert.

Chapter end