The Fallen World

The Endless Plains - Part 1

     Malefactos was standing on top of a low hill overlooking a small town deep inside the Shadow. He was so deep inside that any living person would have been driven instantly insane, and yet Malefactos felt only a warm glow all over his body as if he were lying in a pool of warm water.

     The town, once a minor Agglemonian community only a few miles away from the much larger city of Trilos, was now a major staging post for the Shadowarmies as they prepared to send another fifty thousand goblins and shologs against the Fu Nangian province of Heshun, and the immaculately clean streets thronged with the evil humanoids bustling about in their bone armour and skull helmets. The bone effect of the armour, he knew, was created by the soaking, heating and pressing of slennhide in granite molds, after which the raised parts, the ‘bones’, were painted white. It would have gleamed as white as real bone in the normal rays of the yellow sun outside the Shadow, but here, where both suns appeared to shine a sickly dull red, they had a ruddy, crimson sheen as though a layer of living flesh had just been stripped from them, leaving them covered with drying blood.

     The town was surrounded by vast areas of farmland in which sickly, straggly stalks of wheat grew in the dim sunlight that was only just bright enough to allow the lowest level of photosynthesis necessary to sustain plant life. The fields were tended by vast numbers of zombies, most of which had been dead for so long that all the flesh had long since rotted away leaving just the bare skeletons and a few tattered scraps of clothing.

     Several of the farmworkers were alive, though. Slaves taken during the current and previous wars who laboured ceaselessly to grow the food that fed the living components of the Shadowarmies. A few were close enough to be seen clearly, and Malefactos noted the mindless, idiotic expressions on their faces, the total absence of any intelligence in their eyes. Dribbles of spittle ran from their mouths and blood flowed freely from the burst blisters on their horny, calloused hands where they held their old, almost worn out farm tools. They were virtually living zombies, their minds having been destroyed by the mind control spells that allowed them to exist this deep inside the Shadow, and even Malefactos felt disgust, revulsion and even pity at the sight of them. He hadn’t been undead all that long, and some small part of him, deep down inside, was still human enough to react with horror at this worst of all of the Shadowwizards’ crimes. That part of him would fade away in time, he knew, allowing him to look at them with the clinical detachment and impassivity that characterised a truly intelligent being.

     He’d already seen enough to terrify Tragius and send him fleeing to the refuge of a far distant dimension, but that wasn’t enough. The rak wanted to give him news so bad that he’d sink into a pit of despair from which he'd never emerge, that being the method he’d chosen to take revenge on the wizard. He knew that, somewhere in the Shadow, there were over a million additional Shadowsoldiers who hadn’t yet been committed to the war. Humans, trogs, shologs, ogres, goblins, hobgoblins and others of a dozen different humanoid races. If he could find them and describe them in all their mind paralysing horror, the effect that would have on Tragius would do a great deal to repay him for daring to blackmail him.

     He wouldn’t accomplish much by just drifting around at random, though. The Shadow covered a vast area, millions of square miles, most of it empty grassland, and it had only been by the sheerest good fortune that he’d found as much as he had. If he really wanted to see the sights he’d need a guide, and down there, in the town, was the place to find one. Casting a spell to make himself invisible, therefore, he activated his Robes of Flying, rose into the air and swooped down towards the streets and houses.

     In its day, it must have been a pleasant enough place to live, he thought as he hovered above the rooftops. The outlying buildings were little more than skeletons of crumbling brick, still scorched black in places where they’d been burned to destroy all traces of bloodeye fever, the plague that had wiped out the last pitiful remnants of the once mighty Agglemonian Empire three hundred years before. Traces of ornamental architecture still survived here and there, though, such as carved blocks of quarried stone that had graced the homes of even the poorest, such had been the wealth of the old Empire.