The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR -- PART ONE

The name by which he was known among the nomadic tribes of the Withered Lands was "Forynnuhr".

He knew where he was. He waited to rendezvous with the force which had whisked him away from his own world to this place of forgotten kings. A weathered nomad had once told him that the territory he traveled was once a flowering oasis of energy, creativity and life, a haven to the wise and the best. His hawkish profile half-hidden by his winged helmet, the traveler's face was nonetheless twisted into a sneer. Now all that remained was broken stone, seemingly endless acres of arid and brittle soil, and the broken debris from a hundred thousand antediluvian lives passed into ruin...

Something about that memory amused the silent Pilgrim. He took a moment to cease his journey and stare back at the towering statue of the nameless warrior. Perhaps one day some powerful personage would abduct a few hundred impoverished peasant souls and then beat and whip them into bondage to erect a monument to him, Forynnuhr, and his stony likeness would stare coldly down upon the Wasteland.

And it, too, would impassively and patiently wait, lost to Time, Myth and Memory. He did not find anything comforting in that thought.

These were grim and solemn times upon this, the planetary Homeworld of the mighty galactic Emperium. Betrayed by a quantum-nuclear cancer that was corrupting the physical matrices of both Time and Space, the giant planet Teshiwahur, known only through legendry to a few of the denizens of the distant Upworlds as the planet "Brimstone", was engaged in a fifty orbital heliar-long struggle to survive a relentless and implacable, slow-motion cataclysm that had turned the foundations of its proud existence to little more than shifting sand.

Nations went to war over dwindling planetary resources, the economies of nations plummeted into insolvency as currencies became valueless, continental and territorial Kingdoms rose and fell in the throes of seemingly endless wars, formerly miraculous technologies failed, were ingeniously reborn and then later perverted in ways that would have formerly been unimaginable, and then failed again.

And then the planetary ecology began to collapse and mutate as weather systems changed their polarity, reversing centuries of climatological dependability: large bodies of water dried up, rivers disappeared, and the oceans grew more turbulent and more violent, vast forests became infested with mold and alien spores and the trees died or petrified, deserts grew hotter and expanded, widening their arid borders, and at the poles.

The Pilgrim had watched this all from afar, impassive and emotionless, carefully analyzing the flow of events to see how he could best benefit from the chaos.

The sound of a tolling bell abruptly resonated through the air, a metallic, atonal, clamorous peal of unhallowed acoustics. He quickly looked around, surveying the landscape for telltale signs of an approaching enemy. Nothing. And then, to his left some three dozen meters away, a smear of grayish mist materialized above the ground. The image momentarily throbbed and pulsed, as if it were experiencing difficulty achieving and refining optical focus. Next, the mist became opaque and it reformed itself into what could only be described as a crack in the air, much like a fracture line running across a glass surface. Something man-sized and vaguely humanoid in shape abruptly surged forth from the fracture, as if expelled from another distant location to this one. Another traveler, another alien to this world, much like himself. The image refined into that of a Celestial Seraph floating over the dry grit of the plain, a soiled and mucky jewel expelled from out a tumor on the sun. Yet, despite the creature's repellent unwholesomeness, it was beautiful.

Or perhaps it was its beauty that made it repellent, especially here on dying world like Teshiwahur.

He felt his hackles rise. It was one of The Messengers, one of the last of the infamous Empyrean Host, the godlike mutant chimeras that had evolved from the torn Megacosm in the Aftermath of The Wound. The creature was named "Atu'ihma".