In the Pursuit of Death| ONC 2024

1| How the Stories Go

The Wanderer comes at dusk. By daybreak, there's one fewer to feed. Perhaps a blessing, perhaps a curse. Most likely, both.

*

WHEN THE WANDERER came to the Deadlands, the people there laid down palm fronds to adorn her path. They always knew which hut she would visit, as the people there were familiar with death.

She came for the witch on a particularly hot day. The sun hung low in the sky like an overblown red eye. The sands were more restless, grains sliding over each other as though eager to glimpse the desert's latest visitor. There were no clouds, leaving the sun to burn, unfiltered. It rained misery upon the people, as flesh blistered, and pools of sweat gathered at feet.

Eris had covered her head in a scarf. She wore a cape, black and tattered, a dusty tunic and trousers, and worn boots. She looked like anyone else trying to survive among the Deadlands. Only she had a horse. Windwalker strode beside her, her reins clamped in Eris's hand. She guided the horse across the shifting sands, despite the horse's trepidation. Windwalker hated when the ground beneath her hooves moved and had Eris not been used to it, she would have hated it too. But the horse trusted its rider, and allowed itself to be guided, down one dune, up another. The pattern repeated until they caught sight of the village.

Huts made of stone and muck stood against the sand like worn gravestones from ages past. Most were beige, with rounded windows, and tattered fabric shielding their entrances, save one. One at the village's edge, was red.

Blood-red in a sea of bone-white.

A witch's hut. Sourness spilled out of the hut's curtained entrance. Eris recognized it immediately.

Death knows death, after all.

She left Windwalker at the edge of the village, the black horse pawing the ground in agitation. Her mane rose on the breeze, a plead in her whinny that matched the look in her dark eyes.

Eris patted the beast. "Wait for me." 

She knew nightfall hit the horse the hardest. The eerie stillness, the lack of moonlight. Carrions came out to scavenge then, the monstrous black birds swooping from the sky to pick apart what the Deadlands hadn't already claimed. But the Ruin had touched all. And most animals had fallen sick. Food was scarce, and the carrions had grown desperate. They no longer feasted on what was already dead, but took their chances with the living. A horse like Windwalker could feed them for days. A week, maybe. To be without hunger for a week, the gods couldn't bestow a greater blessing.

"If you sense anything," Eris continued, gathering her pack off the horse's back. "Head to the stables, there." She pointed at two ancient sand walls, separated by a smaller wall of weathered stone. An awning of rotted wood provided shelter from the sun.

The horse whinnied.

Eris nodded, loaded the pack onto her back, then began her trek, keeping to the path the villagers had laid out. Palm fronds crunched beneath her boots. 

*

Gatta was waiting for her. Gatta had nothing better to do than wait for her. It had been many moons since she could hold her hands steady, stripping Orimsi roots of their flesh and boiling them over the fire to thicken their sap for her potions. Her voice had long since gone hoarse; no longer could she speak with the power of her goddess and command the sky to split open and rain its succor upon the soil. Her flesh had wrinkled, covering up the beauty of her youth. And her eyes had dulled. She could no longer make the trek to the Shallows, or steep her teas or make her fires. There were no songs to keep her company. She had but a small hut, on the edge of the Deadlands, and the loneliness of it all.