The Weight of a Helm

I.

He walks across the broken earth as the cresting dawn paints the landscape in dead grays around him. His form moves in stark silhouette across the playa, draped in a burlap shawl that flaps on the breeze. Now and then, the wan morning light catches on the immaculate armor hidden beneath his coverings, brief glints flashing like signals from another world.

He is a Glumeknight. The member of an order of mighty warriors, created to serve the greatest empire the world has ever known. Now he marches across the hard-packed and cracked earth, the deep impressions left by his boots mark the only passage through this desolate place.

The only piece of his Glumeplate armor he neglects to wear is his full-face helm, which he carries strapped to his pack. It clinks softly against the canvas with every step.

In his right hand he carries a large, two-handed war axe.

Altogether he appears a fearsome beast, but even a monster is no more than a desperate traveler in these lands. He hunches his shoulders and trudges with heavy footfalls. He uses his weapon as a walking staff, gripping the haft just below the bearded blade and leaning on it to help carry him forward.

Salt crunches beneath his boots.

The sun rises and morning spreads itself like a luminous sheet across the land, turning the earth from silver to a sickening white as the salt crystals catch and reflect the faint morning sun. The horizon disappears into a fathomless white blur so that it appears he travels through some endless limbo, trapped moving in place. The wind whispers in his ear and his bootsteps sound impossibly loud in the emptiness. The stationary illusion becomes so unnerving that the knight begins to pay attention to the small deformities in the ground as a way to confirm his progress.

Here, the cracks in the salt reveal the bleached desiccated remains of a clump of sea grass. There, on a hexagonal crust of salt, the impressions of thin rib bones and fins. There else, a crab shell pokes out of the hard packed earth. Once this place had teemed with life, but the Sundering did more than just destroy the empire, it ravaged the lands beyond as well. And thus, from the remains of the Azure Sea, the Dead Flats was born.

As noon approaches, he begins to look for a place to wait out the heat of the day. Shimmering heat haze distorts the land around him and rays of sunlight lance between the heavy cloud cover and reflect off the salted earth. Salt crystals carried on the fickle winds sting his face and do little to cool the beads of sweat that stream down it.

Slowly, a huge form emerges from the boiling haze, soaring pillars of brilliant white that seem to float several feet off the ground. At first, he thinks them to be a mirage, but as he gets closer these pillars materialize into the bleached rib bones of some dead leviathan, half-sunk into the hard earth.

He moves into the dappled shadows of the ribs and finds the dregs of an old campfire inside the beast's skull. He sits down beside the blackened remains and decides it as good a place to rest as any.

He shelters through the hottest part of the day in the semi-cool shade afforded by the giant skull. He takes off his pack and sits on the warm, faintly glowing earth and pulls out his leather canteen. He drinks shallow sips that do little to quell his raging thirst. He longs to chug down the entire canteen. Instead, he drinks about half of what he gauges to be his remaining water, then he stoppers the canteen and rummages around his pack until he pulls out a half-eaten loaf of hardtack and a meager shred of cheese. He eats a bite of bread then nibbles on the cheese to faintly flavor the stale hardtack which he also eats sparingly.

The day passes slowly in the shade, and, with time, the knight lays back and gazes up at the interior of the domed skull. He imagines what this beast must have looked like in life, sleek and dangerous, prowling the depths, the apex predator of the Azure Sea.