#the timey-wimey-ness of this hurts my brain but basically empires and 3rd life happen in the same world

[redwinterroses]

Ok, so I just saw your post about the Desert Duo inadvertently setting up in Pixandria and then my brain decided to make it sad with the fact that means Jimmy dies in a land that was friendly to him in another life.

Jimmy always feels... strange in Pixandria. There's something about the horizon line that always feels so weirdly familiar, but just off... Like seeing someone in a crowd that you think you recognize, but then getting a better look and realizing they look nothing like the person you thought they were, and you're not really sure why you thought that in the first place.

He's safe here, he knows. Pixlriffs is a fierce and loyal ally, and the sands of Pixandria welcome him always. And yet... and yet there's a feeling of dread in spite of the friendliness. Something he can't quite place.

He asks Pix about it once. Well, not really asks.

"This desert is weird," he says, as they lean on a low sandstone wall and sip honey-sweetened water from leather flasks. The slime delivery has been fully unloaded, and they stand in the setting sun, letting the warm desert breeze dry the sweat from their cheeks.

"How so?" Pix asks, curious.

"I'm... I dunno, really." Jimmy tilts his head and squints at the horizon. "I just feel like I'm forgetting something every time I'm here. You know that nagging feeling that you left the smelter running or something? It's like that. But the whole place."

Pix squints at him, then his eyes go unfocussed and he does that spooky, far-away thing he does sometimes. Jimmy looks to the side, uncomfortable, but it doesn't last long—Pix can be "away" (what they collectively termed it, without really discussing) for hours some days, leaving whoever he's with to gently lead him into some mob-proof shelter. But this was only a few seconds before the haze faded and Pix took a deep breath.

"Ah," he said. "Yeah, I know the feeling you mean."

And that was that. Jimmy had a nagging suspicion that Pix knew exactly why the desert set his hindbrain to itching, but the copper king didn't offer and Jimmy found he couldn't ask. He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know.

Maybe it was just that every time his feet sank into the sand, he thought of red eyes and dynamite hiding in the dunes and a bunker waiting to doom those it meant to protect.

Maybe it was just that the heat radiating off the sand felt more suffocating than warming. That he could remember what it felt like for those hot grains to grind into his knees as he knelt, peering through a narrow gap toward an oncoming army.

Maybe it was only that the heat that made his throat ache with phantom pains every time he landed on the sandstone roof of Pix's manor, causing him to rub at his neck and the small, star-shaped scar that sat in the hollow of his throat.

Or maybe, he thinks, as he trudges up the final dunes of a ruined and abandoned Pixandria, the desolate Codlands dead at his back, it's something even worse than that.

To the south, a flower forest beckons—familiar in the worst way. He sets his steps toward it, with the vague notion of "home" niggling at his mind. Sand was already drifting up the unfinished walls of Pix's great Anthill, filling its hollow center and slowly being buried—a strange and unnatural mountain in the middle of a dead desert.

A shiver runs down his spine, and he wonders if it's possible that the old superstition about chills from someone walking over your grave were true.

And he wonders if it's possible to walk over your own grave, a thousand years before it was dug.