D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land

D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land, 4

FOUR

They traveled for a full day without further incident, with only the hissing of winds across the dry plains and the occasional crack of ghostly thunder from the Waste's storm-zones to break the electric buzzing of the silence, where the absence of noise was itself a continuous droning sound.

Night across the Wastes was a strange hybrid of twilight and stormfall.

The setting of the twin suns, sitting opposing one another in the dreary sky, gave way to a rising wall of grayish violet that encircled the horizon, seemingly rising up from the ground towards the top of the heavens into a bowl-shaped shroud speckled with jaundiced, sickly star clusters. A pewter-colored haze suffused the atmosphere. A line of dirty clouds lolled petulantly across the haze.

D'Spayr and Nygeia saw the approaching caravan just as the first flakes of shadowdust listed their way towards the ground. Shadowdust was a form of ashen snowfall that had plagued the night-time spaces in the Withered Land since the first appearance of The Wound. Flakes of black snow, some large as coins, littered the landscape to eventually clump together to form a black frost that smothered plantlife and drew heat from out of the spoil, leaving everything cold and brittle.

D'Spayr vaguely recalled an old nursery song, a dark lullaby sung so many times its true meaning had been lost over the ages as mother's sang it to their children at nights, and he recalled it being cold comfort as he would drift away to sleep as a boy...

"Sleep, dead prince...

The falling Night steals the sky

And with cold lips kisses the ground,

Bringing shadow 'cross small eyes

Winding the ticking clock down,

The finest of last light

Haunting dark hours

Growing long,

Shadowdust

Smothering sleeping baby's dreams.

Sleep, little dead prince, sleep..."

Looking at the black snowfall, D'Spayr suppressed an unbidden shudder.

The Knight was uneasy about the journey and its eventual destination, and about his own ability to protect his traveling companions. Derivan and Tuolenne were not veterans of outlaw life, neither were they possessed of any military training that could help them in a violent confrontation, and D'Spayr knew that, if they became embroiled in a battle situation, he may not be in a position to watch over them. They were Wytchborn and, perhaps, their mutated alien abilities could offer them protection, maybe even a defensive edge, but from what he'd seen and heard from their own lips, he knew that they were essentially no more than talented civilians, normal folk with a few extra abilities. They may not be hardy enough to survive the journey to Katamahr.

On the other hand, while he understood that Nygeia was a powerful and resourceful being, a warrior-princess cunning and fierce, he also harbored doubts about her reliability. There was a hint of amorality about her, a lack of obligation, which made her seem too liberal in the way she encountered risks. She did not think of others. Her motivations were entirely her own. He didn't feel he could trust her entirely.

Worse, he did not feel that Nygeia actually trusted herself.

On the couple of occasions when they had taken a rest during their trek, she had wandered away from the group and sat alone, her back to her three companions, and D'Spayr had overheard her speaking to herself, arguing it seemed, as if she were fighting some part of her own mind for control over her actions. When she'd stopped her furiously whispered discourse, she'd looked around with an anxious and embarrassed expression, as if afraid she'd been overheard ---