Snippet #2808257

"Join our cause?" Otis muttered, scrubbing his face with one hand and looking over at the mismatched group of bloodied and probably insane companions below. "Right..."

Otis turned and looked back over the desert behind him, slowly shuffling his feet around as he looked at the desolate, scorched land that he had lived the last few years in. He suddenly felt very tired, and very alone.

"What the hell am I doing?" Otis whispered, looking up at the weapon he stood next to. Its metal was warm from the sun's blaze as Otis put a hand on it, noting how the dirt and grime had gotten under his cracked fingernails. A humorous thought came to him, that just as the dirt had gotten under his skin, perhaps it had dirtied his soul as well.

He'd long idolized Tera Roth, but it had been many years since Otis had seen the man. Too many long years of hiding from the scars in his mind from the darkness of the Oblivion War, too many years of trying to be half the hero his own had been. Men like Tera Roth, Xane, even Darius at times... They so easily seemed to adjust the world to their will, instead of the other way around.

Otis had thought that perhaps with power, he could gain that ability to force an outcome. At first, he thought that he could affect change as part of the Guardians, as part of a greater power, as one small cog in the machine. But he'd been outcast here, marooned on a desert planet no one cared about. His superiors spent the days studying the land or running small errands for folks who hated themselves as much as they hated the Guardians.

Then the cannon had appeared, and Otis' ambition had risen again - use the cannon to force real change upon the Rock. He didn't need to save the galaxy; he just wanted to save this one small piece of it.

Otis looked down again at the group below. The vision he'd had while unconscious from his wound had been unclear at first; it had taken time for his mind to make sense of what he'd seen. Monsters under the sands, a great flood, his own death... all and more. Was it a prophecy? A fever dream? Perhaps both?

The little sparrow Otis had taken to calling Spirit in his own mind landed on the cannon above his hand, chirping melodically at him. Otis' eyes narrowed as the two locked gazes for a moment, then the sparrow flicked its wings again, launching into the air and across the desert to the east.

Otis watched it carefully for a moment, then followed, leaving the cannon and the Last Rest behind him.