The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-Nine

He rocked gently from one side of the creature's broad muscular back to the other as it momentarily interrupted its sauntering trek to scuff curiously at the braided, tangled root of a leafless bush of thorns. For a brief moment, all felt right with the world.

His world, meaning the sum total to date of his experiences as he traveled the Withered Land, where he encountered assorted peoples and climes via episodic events, had always been haunted by strangeness and dark portents. He often saw and participated in affairs beyond the scope or the understanding of other humans on his world. There were many times when he had mused that he'd been predestined, almost fated, to know and to suffer the consequences of endless violence and warfare. Where his sins before The Faceless Mighty Who Ruled Above All, his world's gods, so great as to demand he forever be cursed to endure a life of constant battle? Was there some distant, as yet unreached ultimate goal or conclusion towards which he was fighting? Many times, alone in the dark during a moment of solitary musing, he wondered whether or not there truly was any point to it all or if he was simply doomed to be a tool of superhuman or divine powers guiding the destiny of Teshiwahur from afar.

And then he realized that he had little time for any such rumination. He would inevitably be roused from his reveries and his introspection by a call to action. It would again be time to fight or die as brutal forces raised their weapons against him or against those he was sworn to protect.

He had to fight. He shouldered that burden when he swore his oath. Besides, given the current tumultuous state of affairs across the Withered Land, who else was there?

D'Spayr sighed and ran a weary hand across his brow, his helmet's face mask retracted and his face exposed to the harsh light of a growing dawn as the long night receded.

At least now, at this moment, he was no longer alone. He'd finally been reunited with his reptilian Veranus Halodean steed, though both he and the massive animal were both somewhat uncomfortable with the emotional realization that the pair of them only felt safe when in one another's company. The company of other people often brought extra and unwelcome motivations and agendas. Ultimately, D'Spayr and his steed knew that, regardless who else they traveled with or were accompanied by, they could only reliably trust and depend on each other.

The sight of the macabre apparition floating eerily ahead of them, drifting against the weak breeze above the sandy plain, only served to drive that conclusion home. That specter was the visual manifestation of the remaining consciousness, the ghost, of the doomed adventurer named Rarbuji'i Koraevenus.

They were at the external perimeter of the southeastern barrier wall of the greater towering cortine encasement surrounding The City. They were outside the fortress of Niyaddour, just beyond the ruins of the camp abandoned by the mutant Xar'gueyeks, those barbarians flesh-eaters known as Blood-Haunters. In the silvery-green glow of the emerging day, the pair had materialized at the bleak edges of the turbulent ion wave zone. D'Spayr could feel the faintly irritating neural effects of the agitated electromagnetic particle field raging silently across the volcanic sand wadis, a system of intersecting tectonic gullies where magma had overflowed onto the planet's surface, known as Jebenna'Seid.

Send. Me. Back. Those were the words with which he'd commanded Ka'esh-Woganhi'e to transport him from out of the mutant monster's bizarre psychic astral plane. Send. Me. Back. D'Spayr had not reckoned with the creature's non-human construal of literalness. For such a cunning and intelligent being, it was nonetheless handicapped in its interactions with common humanity by its inability to correctly process verbal or conversational nuance. Ka'esh-Woganhi'e had known that D'Spayr was, for the present time, working in Kolag Y'phree's employ, inside the districted boundaries of The City. The creature had known little of the details of D'Spayr's experiences in Peravendath. Therefore, when the Knight had demanded to be returned to the Plane of Reality wherein the "real world" was contained, it had transported him to the approximate physical borders of Kolag Y'phree's dominion instead of back to the coastal territories of the Pang Xa'Omathra region.