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

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART THREE

2. HAR'QWENNE

He wanted very much to be gone from this place before the storm arrived. It was the start of the season of Xeshargloom, the Time of Storms, the shortest, but most climactically violent of Teshiwahur's five meteorological atmospheric seasons. Though it would only last a trio of fortnights, Xeshargloom often left its mark on the planet's inhabitants in nightmares and blood.

After that would be the dread arrival of Sehrenglum, the Time of Whispers, the second longest of the quintet of meteorological seasons, also known as the Darkest Season. Sehrenglum was a period in which the planet was held in an iron grip of despair, unease and chill, when the light from the dual suns above the world's surface was filtered through a vast moving cloud of airborne liquid ash.

His mouth was dry and his face hurt from squinting against the glare from the unclean light that fell in sheets from the iron-colored sky.

He didn't want to be here, in this place. Wars had been fought here. It was haunted by the ghosts of the dead, by the shades of the many soldiers and mercenaries who had died upon this coarse soil. Their blood still boiled, carrying the energies of their endless rage, through the ground beneath his booted feet.

There was a name for this barren, debris-littered stone expanse... what was it? After a moment, he recalled. Shi'draih-Hakaba. It had once, over a decade gone, housed a mighty fortress belonging to a mad outcast, a militaristic despot and scientific renegade, a Tekk-master, from the Royal Family of the Tunq'nyb Primocracy. Six thousand warriors had been housed within the fortress' nine barracks. The Princeling-at Arms, named Kretchnammen, had gone rogue, rejecting the directives of the Emperium regarding limits on the size of personal guards, territorial sentries and weapons armory allowed to lesser royalty in the Outer Exclaves. Kretchnammen, far too proud, ambitious and arrogant for someone of his status, despite his lineage, had been declared a criminal and a traitor to the Emperium. His right to Royal patronage and rights to his lands, his very baronetcy, had been revoked and the armies of the empire had marched against him.

He'd been tortured, whipped and then beheaded and the people who'd lived under his protection had been scattered to the Wastes, exiled and labelled as "Harityun", or Untouchable, to any other royal House of Ascension. The Princeling-at-Arms' personal coffers had been seized, his fortune absorbed by the Emperium, and his personal belongings distributed amongst the Generals and Captains of the Siege-army. The Royal Family of the Tunq'nyb Primocracy had disavowed any allegiance to Kretchnammen, striking his name from the records of their aristocratic bloodline.

Shi'draih-Hakaba had then summarily been bombarded with disruptor-cannon fire and its tallest towers torn to the ground as an object lesson to anyone else who dared dispute the authority of the Emperium.

Now, so far as he knew, only The Scribe dared wander amongst the fortress' crumbling ruins.

Waiting for evening's shadows to enfold and to conceal, lost to the broken internal melody of a madman's dreams, the Scribe emerged from the cool gloom of timeworn crumbling ruins and saw the dark silhouette of the approaching Pilgrim. The Scribe eyed the stranger with suspicion and disbelief.

He knew the Pilgrim was an alien, known among the peoples of the Forever Plain and the Wastes as Forynnuhr, a being from a distant world far beyond Teshiwahur, and the Scribe knew that his own employers, bitter, hateful men who lurked in the corridors of power in the walled metropolis some distance beyond the Wasteland, were afraid of the man, if a mere mortal man he was.

Many had whispered that Forynnuhr was a devil. The Scribe decided not to allow that line of thinking to dominate his thoughts.

He couldn't afford to believe in devils. There were no such beings. And if they did exist, someplace, somewhere, he reasoned the very last thing beings like devils would concern themselves with would be the schemes and ambitions of humans. Why would they care? Humans were so limited in their spheres of influence . They, humans, were beings of the physical world, not the Metaphysical. Demons, should they exist, were beings who moved among all the possible Planes of Existence. Their spheres of influence would be infinitely larger and more complex than anything any single human, or empire of humans, could hope to impact. After all, if he were to allow himself the luxury of indulging an emotional urge to place himself and others like him on the hierarchal Ladder of Dominion, they would not yet have reached even so high as the bottom rung. Devils, indeed.

The Scribe noticed not for the first time that he was subconsciously gnashing his teeth. He tried to relax.

The Scribe hated the Wastes, though admittedly, he knew within himself that he was not much of one for travel. The physical challenges and geographic uncertainties sorely tried his scholarly temperament. The impermanence and disorganization of travel kept him from concentrating. He hated the way the light from Teshiwahur's two suns, one a red giant and the other a blue dwarf, seared the ocean of sky above the almost featureless horizon and he hated the hollow whooshing susurration of the sluggish air that rolled across the vast plain's baked soil. He hated the emptiness and the solitude.

No one came here. No one was comfortable here. It was a place between destinations. Only the forgotten, the desperate and the criminal would even dare try crossing its expanse. Its history was one of terror, conflict and bloodshed. It was once a place where proud and cruel kings showed off their armies, and where statesmen touted the grand destinies of their empires, where caravans traveled with courtesans and soldiers and merchants and jesters. All gone, all gone, now only the Scribe remained, writing a daily testimony to the fickleness of Teshiwahur's broken, downward-spiraling cycle of Time.

It was a diary, a history, he realized that no one would read, yet he felt compelled to write it.

A sudden flash of memory interrupted his thoughts as Denetta's face appeared before his mind's eye and his heart involuntarily skipped a beat. Her eyes, her lips, the earnestness of her gaze... No, he could not afford to think of her now. He did not deserve the treasure of memories thoughts of her incited. That life was lost to him. The Countessa Denetta Thu' M'Rae belonged to another man's life, belonged to a different man. That man had once been a Lieutenant Commander in the Star Legion's Remembrance Corp, an official chronicler of the exploits of the Emperium's Extraplanetary Expansionist Forces. That man had possessed purpose and resolve in his life. Not so the new man he had become. His new life, his new identity and new Reality, could no longer include any reference to the man he had once been, back when he had been a respected scholar and teacher, a guardian of the knowledge to which the children of Royalty were privy. He had, in his new life, lost any right to preserve memories of his own personal history harkening back to that hallowed time and place.

He had lied. He had become a criminal. He had cheated and betrayed those who had placed their trust in him. And he had taken a life, killed a man simply because the act had been deemed a necessity by the sinister, faithless group of Others to whom he'd foolishly owed a debt.

He was nothing now, a no one, a person fallen from Grace. To the inhabitants of the Withered Land, such a person was known by the label of "Har'Qwenne", meaning both "faceless" and "faithless". To those for whom he worked, he was simply called The Scribe. His true identity mattered very little anymore. And, considering his crimes, that was a proper and just punishment.

He saw Forynnuhr approaching and remembered the leather-bound packet he had been entrusted to carry to the rendezvous by his latest employers, the enigmatic Guild of Black Gauntlets. A mission for the Pilgrim. More likely, though, given the alien's reputation as the last resort for the ruthless who wished to eliminate obstacles from their scheming paths, it was the profile of a target. The Scribe waved... The tall and solemn silhouette ever so slightly tilted its helmeted head. The Scribe had been seen in return.

Forynnuhr gradually drew nearer and all the while, in the bosom of the deepest shadows, unbeknownst to the Scribe, something fierce and unhuman waited.

Watching them.