It opened its mouth and spoke, produced noise with emotion. Pronounced that it had discovered something aside from their sadness. Said that which had never been said but had murmured in all their minds, had poked and bullied them since forever.
They understood these terms, even if the noise meant nothing, in the way the individual moved and spoke. They saw how it changed and flowed and knew it, knew it all from somewhere deep within their empty bodies. It said that it had found something different and new, a thing to be felt and used and held dear. It told them about beauty, the second thing it had felt aside from sorrow, and gazed over the crowd as it told spoke of the sand and the sky and them, each of them, and spoke of what beauty was and what it meant, and how it changed everything. The crowd was not sceptical, because they never had been, but this concept moved like water in the driest of places, soaking through them as they turned to one another under the individual's words and noticed things they never had before.
Slight imperfections and oddities among them. Two had never truly been before, there was always one, alone and wondering, but this encounter allowed them all to glance this way and that, seeing not just gold and each other. But individuals.
Separate entities, with differing faces and skin, unique stances and voices as they all started to speak, imitating the individual until they all became different, all speaking and walking and looking, noticing the beauty in each other.
While woe could birth only woe, and then woe forevermore, this concept of beauty was so wonderful to them that it became everything, and suddenly the sand wasn't so bad, and the sky wasn't so empty. Hands delved through the grain and let it run loose, and each piece felt different to the next, and each handful dropped in a way which none of the others would. Beauty allowed them all to see the world on which they lived, the endless place over which they had staggered for eternity, and one among the crowd, an individual, saw them all there and laughed, because it was so different from their sorrow, and they all started to see it, the sudden change and the wonder in their eyes, and they all started to laugh, and soon they were all laughing.
All smiling.
They moved from the congregation and started looking for others, seeking out the wandering to tell them of this new aspect of existence, something more than a simple expansion but a whole new aspect or route of life. For once in forever, appearing out of nowhere, the wandering figures had a reason to move, more than ambling through the sands, but to walk with reason. Walk with pace, until they walked no more but ran, sprinting in all directions like the desert had never seen before.
Unnerving at a distant, the solitude of a people subjected to eternally sway over the sands saw one of their own, their dormant kind of pitiless emptiness come running, moving in a way never before realised, pelting towards anyone they could find, saying things and making gestures, laughing and pointing, and then move further into the abyss, flowing through the sands, a wave of realisation and understanding separating what had been one mindset into two, then crushing the previous sorrow under the heavy weight of their wonder.
Those with the new thirst for existence started treating the grain differently too, using their image to form it into new structures, making it larger or much smaller, shaping it into great stones or creating a sea of reduced particles. The disease of what had been the closest thing to life to ever live spread throughout that infinite place, shapes and arcs rising from the mass, structures and formations appearing at the hands of the creatures who pushed all their beauty through their grip and made it solid. Taller than sight and deeper too, a flat plane blown out, destroyed perfectly, the wandering becoming the purposeful as islands and continents of rock rose from within. The search for the depths left their minds as what they wanted although never knew, what they found to be their purpose, to simply find a purpose, and to have meaning, a reason to live, found them.
They found life, and what it meant to live there. To have a purpose, and to have reason. Even if it's aimless to malform the sands it was more than they'd ever had, and the sadness became a mere memory, a thing of the past, something they'd never experienced, as for the first time a new chapter opened, something to move towards and something to leave behind. Memory of the silent lands echoed through the peaks and dips, mountains and caves, an afterthought of sorrow in a time of Beauty.
And it was this way for a while, as infinity became so much smaller and their numbers spread, the second aspect filling the void within their bodies and shattering their cage, letting loose what had been contained forever. The sky became thick with flying desert, launched by wild hands, and then caught as something new, a different shape or construct as sharp and soft, thick and thin, all blooming from the simple smile and laughter of a few.
Things were beautiful. They were great. It was all they had ever wanted, a little bit more, an objective to walk towards. Even if it had been a simple boulder, they'd have been happy. They could feel some achievement. And suddenly they were filled with this feeling of pride, of purpose. Something they could look at aside from a desert and think that this was nice. It was pleasant. They'd made it, and nobody else had. It was their thing.
Their achievement.
Their point of existence.