He was like the desert. Not in the romantic colors of flaming sunsets, but in the bleached skies of high noon. His was not golden-sand skin, but worn leather, smooth and creased. His lips were dry and cracked like the parched earth beneath his feet.

He wore the day like a cloak, his shoulders hunched with the familiar weight of its heat, wrapped in the coarse fibers of windswept sand. At night, he settled, as the silken cool of darkness embraced the landscape.

Yet he was unyielding, firm and steady, unlike the shifting hills he treaded. He was stubborn, and resolute. He was like the mountain.