The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part One

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

― H.P. Lovecraft

"Now hollow fires burn out to black,

And lights are fluttering low:

Square your shoulders, lift your pack

And leave your friends and go.

O never fear, lads, naught's to dread,

Look not left nor right:

In all the endless road you tread

There's nothing but the night."

― A.E. Housman

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

― Voltaire

"There will be killing 'till the score is paid."

― Homer

He wiped a thickening spatter of blood from off his cheekbone as he looked away from the multiple corpses of the family impaled upon the razor-honed branches of the chrome crucifixion tree. The dreadful and hideous monument to torment was implanted in a thick, knee-high mound of sodden ash.

It wouldn't do for his men to see him enjoying the slaughter too much. They were mostly impassive, self-possessed professionals. For them the slaughter of war was little more than a chaotic means to an end. They wouldn't appreciate seeing the excitable gleam in his eyes as he surveyed the aftermath of the afternoon's ferocious mayhem. They would silently question his sanity and, by implication, his eligibility to lead them.

He quickly wet his lips and looked away, towards the east.

They could see it, an ominously dark, roughly oval shape, hovering high in the sizzling glare from the planet's twin suns at high noon, slowly spinning in an aquamarine sky streaked with wide, irregular stripes of peacock green. It, a massive pitted rock, a micro-moon called "The Ke'Tareveel", sat in stationary orbit eighteen leagues above the turbulent waters of the icy Pnahrryian Sea. A half-farlength long, zigzagging phalanx of aerial predators, quad-winged lizard-eagles called "raegrens", were the only other denizens of the sky above the continent of Qundin's Pang Xa'Omathra region, far beyond the furthest borders of the Forever Plain and southeast of the furthest eastern outposts of the Vorgianis Territories. The hybrid bird-serpents were seasonal creatures, seen usually as they migrated down from the arctic north traveling inland and seaward during Qeringloom, the Silent Season.

It was commonly held by the populace of Pang Xa'Omathra that raegrens were harbingers of tragedy and terror.

They flew effortlessly against a cool, damp wind that wheezed like the shuddering breath of an emphysemic old man, thin and full of pain and despair. As they flew overhead, their shadows crossing over the uneven, alkaline soil, it suddenly came to the minds of the people watching that the flock was not so much migrating to its new seasonal territory so much as it was flying away from the stink of burning flesh and the coppery, metallic smell of spilt blood.