---
author: ollie
dateCreated: 641-01-27 BSE
dateRecovered: 524-01-27
length: 167
---
It becomes your primary subject. Paintings of it, its round body, the spiderweb cracks of its face, the gutted internals that refuse to tick, coat the adobe walls of your cottage. An easel sits just outside, overlooking the oasis. Its siblings sit in every room of the house, bathroom and bedside alike. Their canvases are always kept fresh.
Your mind never came back, not as a whole at least, but you've cobbled together a new one. Occasionally you do get flashes, ethereal scraps of pressed papyrus fluttering through your head before dissolving back to formless thought. Each time you tear off to an easel and take brush to canvas with the intensity of an axe murderer, splattering fragments of your brain across the blank surface. The images always fade as quick as they arrived, but scanning the covered walls some patterns are clear. Utter desolation, alien beauty, an infinite empty expanse of sparkling, frozen waves broken only by the obelisk. And always the watch.