C11 THE SAND ELEMENTAL

Suddenly a bright circle appeared above me as a tornado rushed out from the circle which swept away the quicksand around me.

As the sand was blown away, I was the only survivor among those trapped in there while the rest were suffocated and killed by the loss of air underground.

My body stores the oxygen I needed in a compressed form inside my lungs so most of the time l didn't need to breathe which was the only reason I lived.

Cartelle’s magic took time to prepare, and he couldn’t muster another tornado spell in a short time, so Kay quickly pulled me out from the ground as we rushed to the pyramid’s entrance before the sand returned.

The quicksand transformed into humanoid again which chased and grabbed onto more of us and buried them under the ground.

When we reached inside the pyramid, the sandman bothered us no more, but only Cartelle, Kay, and I survived the ordeal.

The rest of Cartelle’s escorts were buried in sand and were killed and we didn’t have the opportunity to give them a proper burial because their corpses were gone and none of us dared to recover them while the sandman was guarding outside the pyramid.

“What was that sand thing?” I asked Cartelle.

“It was a Sand Elemental which was created by magic to protect this Pyramid, I should have studied the documents more and brought a counter spell”, Cartelle replied to me as he cried at the death of all his escorts.

Cartelle regretted that he didn’t prepare for the situation and his lack of experience caused the death of so many.

“What’s done is done and there is no point to dwell on it”, I said to Cartelle offering to console him.

The Sand Elemental was a shape-shifting pile of sand that had no physical parts or solid constituents, but there was plenty of radiation around the creature which indicated there was a form of sand-specific magnetism which gathered the sand together which gave it form and abilities.

When the Elemental caught its victims, it wasn't the sand that killed them, but the eventual suffocation from being buried alive did.

We activated the pyramid’s burglar system when we forcefully turned the apex knob and revealed the entrance, so the sand guards were sent for us.

The only way to deal with the sand was to disperse them with a much greater kinetic force than the Elemental's inherent magnetic pull.

When Cartelle gathered himself, we had to continue with the quest because the only way ahead was to go forward.

We couldn’t turn back now with the sandman waiting for us in the desert.

Inside the pyramid there was a long spiral tunnel that went downward, so Cartelle cast a magical torchlight that shone the way for us, as we climbed down the tunnel until we reached an entrance to a very large cavern, filled with a pool of molten lava at its bottom.

It was rather strange that lava would appear in the middle of the desert, so I couldn't understand how the lava ended here.

Over the other side of the cavern, there was an opening and Cartelle guessed that we needed to enter the opening at the other end, so he placed his hands on his amulet and focused, as a boat appeared on the molten lava below us.

Cartelle just teleported an item again and this time he had time to explain to me the magic of his space locker as we rowed across the lava lake.

A space locker was a magical space where the user could teleport items inside for storage and retrieve them when needed, as easy as it was to store data into cloud servers and retrieve them from it, except the stored items weren’t data but physical things.

I guessed it could be explained as teleporting or beaming objects from one location to another, and in this case from the current location to the space storage, and vice versa provided the technology to teleport something was made available.

There were experiments on Earth that deconstructed objects into fine particles and transferred them to a different location to be reconstructed like the original, but such experiments were in the fringe of science and really wasn’t successful, and I would never have imagined a pre-modern society in Ouamua would have achieved what we would consider as the holy grails of science.

But the miraculous teleportation was clearly demonstrated and proven in front of me so I couldn’t deny it.

The magic of this world truly astounded me and questioned the logic and understanding of our science and technology.

If I had the opportunity, I would not miss the chance to study and master this strange technology called magic, and perhaps it might help me advance my scientific knowledge and technology.