This chapter is written for High Fantasy's Fractional Fantasy contest. Word count: 500 words.

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Summer 5, 2014; Vastvoid Desert, Farlook, Linland. Keyword: Hoodoo (a bizarre-shaped column/pillar often found at deserts).

  When President Vertonghen delegated us to the wastelands of Vastvoid, assigning us to 'monitor the extreme silence that recently occurred', skulls and skeletons weren't the first ones consuming my mind.

  Sure, at such a torturous landscape, rarely do souls dodge death. But those skeletons should've belonged to the starving canines or reptiles, not a giant's.

  The giant is at the center, his sides accompanied by spined giant lizards, with bones jabbing the sky and jaws lowered on the ground.

  Endless towering hoodoos. Five vulture-consumed corpses—one of them is a giant adventurer reported missing yesterday. Has this desert revealed all of its surprises?

  I approach the sitting giant with the tip of my cane carving the sand. The wind carries an omen—a stifling one. It's delivering an indecipherable message. "Let's do a quick round. Stay close; I have a bad feeling about this."

  The weapons have left my teammates' sheaths. Their Hunter instincts must've noticed the indistinct words—warnings, perhaps—from Nature. The silence is unnerving. I uncap the tip of my cane, revealing a yellowing shark's tooth and trigger more to jut out from the stalk.

  Dirga's saber-toothed club pokes my stiff back, her impatience at its finest. I've yet to scold her when the ground absorbs her footing, burying her into the sands. Cries are exchanged. Her flailing hands clutch onto mine, spreading hot pain. Assisting hands latch on my waist, pulling me backward.

  "She won't last long that way,” unworldly voices hiss through my ears.

  A brief glance at a hoodoo's back discovers a pair of advancing cobra-headed hybrids with men's legs. The sands don't bear their shadows under the greedy sun.

  My lungs are excruciated, and so are my arms. Rou's meaty palms wrap over mine. Odile and Aborigin leave our chain formation, weapons materializing in their hands. The moonlight howl of a canine and the hisses of those reptiles parry each other's dominance over the land.

  "Don't let go, Dirga!" She mightn't hear it. The sand has reached her nocturnal ears. Sweat separates our skin farther apart.

  "She won't last long that way."

  There aren't any farewells exchanged once the sand gulps her, mocking our vain efforts of keeping her afloat.

  "You shouldn't have gotten too close." A battle between claws and blades ensues behind our backs. "The skeletons have warned; you've seen what they've become."

  With tears swarming in my vision, I heave my cane off the quicksand's edge, slashing one of the cobra-pharaoh's scales. The tip tears the outer, but not enough. His spear dangles between my eyes. He faces Odile and Rou with a self-acting ball of yarn.

  "We're the cobras of the deserts. No one leaves without our gifts." A cracked bone is what he invokes when his fangs penetrate through Rou's shoulder blade.

  My internal screams aren't enough to drown Rou's explicit pleas to die quickly.