The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Thirty-Six

Ghosts, the soul or spirit of a dead person, are theoretical. There is no concrete or uncontestable proof that such beings are possible. And if they were at all possible, what would be their purpose? Nature abhors a vacuum. So disembodied revenents would have to serve some purpose in this universe. Could we ever possibly understand what that purpose could be? They would represent an extreme aberration in humanity's understanding of What Is and What Is Not plausible. But if such things as specters are possible, then it stands to reason even a ghost can have memories. It would be quite possible, even for the questionable conceptualization of a being composed of no more than a still active consciousness living on beyond its flesh and blood container, for it to have recollections..., and goals..., and regrets..., and motivations.

Motivations. Another word for "purpose". And having purpose is having an Ambition. Ambitions born of the events that occurred in its history, born of memory...

*** Though the event had transpired so many, many orbital solar heliars ago, more heliars now in the past than the total of those he had lived when it had happened, he could still smell and feel the memory with an urgency that nearly rendered the recollection horribly real.

He had been traveling alone when it had happened, just before sunset, during the season of Xeshargloom. Xeshargloom was a period of ecological and climatic flux affecting the planetary northern hemisphere and reknowned as the Time of Storms, the shortest of Teshiwhaur's periodic calendar divisions, but it was easily the most precipitatively violent. He had been five heliars out from Peravendath, to the southwest and away from the Pnahrryian Sea, yet still under the shadow of The Ke'Tareveel, the slowly-rotating micro-moon home of the reptile-people. The dry air had been bitter cold and tasted of burnt metal when a heavy blackness had passed between the dying twilight glow from the planet's dual suns and the iron-hued cloudcover.

He had been chased from out the borders of the Elder Township in the crumbling, sprawling refugee encampment that had once been the city of Urab Kulphorem, once a proud and relatively wealthy city of Scrybes, Alkemysts, Algebraists and Wytchken-Hunters. He'd been driven away by the Provincial Marshalled Constabulary, a police force of expatriot former Emperium soldiers, because he'd dared to infiltrate the ranks of the Archivists Guild under a false identity, allowing him illegal access to secret and arcane documents that gave him concrete clues as to the recent whereabouts of the fabled Laukenmass Lazulux, an artificially-created artifact of the System Mages of the Fraternity Machus that was described as a "nondeterministic polyspatial mobile singularity module". The Archivists were an unfriendly and paranoid assemblage of scholars and educators, scientists and tinkerers, magisterial doctrinairians and rebellious heretics, all devoted to sequestering ancient knowledge away from the likes of the common public. It had given Koraevenus much pleasure in pillaging their sacred archives and releasing privately-held transcripts of technological history back into the hands of the public.

Because people had needed to know the Hows and the Whys.

Koraevenus had been many things in his relatively short life: outcast, soldier, deserter, territorial sheriff, thief, nomad, scholar, and eventually an apprentice to sorcerers, and he had traveled much the length and breadth of continental Qundin, roving both latitudinal sides of the expansive Forever Plain. He had been in ancient, majestic Jaggerheim when the people of the Withered Land had first seen the tumultuous approach of a screeching swarm of flaming meteors ripping across a dreary iron-colored sky. That event had been among the first of the dire celestial stigmata heralding the arrival of The Wound and the birth of the Long Death. That day he had found The Calling that had long eluded him, that thing he'd needed to give his scattershot, disorganized life its meaning. And so he had thrown caution and convention to the winds and he had begun his investigative crusade to uncover the secrets of The Wound and why it had chosen to split the skies in the solar system in which mighty Teshiwahur spun about its warring dual suns, gravity-locked in an eternal cannibalistic embrace.