D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land

D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land, 1

ONE

There were no coincidences in this strange, grim place. Anything in this land was damned, biblically doomed and reviled, and could not escape paying some kind of penance.

That was why he no longer believed in innocence.

**** The Withered Land had once been a place of kings, a galaxy-spanning empire of technology and politics and power, a place of pomp and majesty where familial lineages and tradesman-merchant classes dominated a stratified and orderly society where a confederation of nations and worlds created wonders. No more.

When Time had broken, when Relativity had hemorrhaged, it all came crashing down around their shoulders.

Whole species of plants and animals died within weeks. The polar caps shifted. Weather changed calamitously and regions, in some cases continents, became uninhabitable. The economy of the star-spanning confederation collapsed even as hundreds of millions of its citizens died before the viral and chemo-biological onslaught of new diseases.

The laws of physics changed… Machines that once worked flawlessly, stopped working at all. Gravity suddenly became uncertain, in some places there were anti-gravity vortices where entire cities had unexpectedly spun off from their planetary surfaces into the old depths of space. Earthquakes happened more frequently, were far larger than ever before, and occurred in places unused to quakes to devastating, often fatal, effect.

The light from the twin suns on the horizon permanently dimmed and the atmospheres of several worlds no longer protected their planetary surfaces from an unending rain of deadly radiation.

Then the people began to mutate, some mutating forward, taking great evolutionary leaps, others devolving into predatory beasts, and yet others became deadly alien things never before seen and only vaguely related to humanoid life.

Laws broke down. Society collapsed even as the universe did. Anarchy became the norm. Warlords and tyrants raged forward to step into the gap, imposing their twisted brutal order upon the remaining population that had survived the changes that had overtaken their Reality. The universe changed, morphing into what it was now…

The Withered Land.

They had come to the fallen fortress-city, once the center of the starspanning empire, as a team, six of them, rogues and mercenaries, masterless warriors looking for a cause, looking to make ends meet, looking for a purpose in a world that had irrevocably crumbled into chaos and disorder.

They were there to escort a human package out from the ruined city, a wealthy merchant or a fallen crimelord or masquerading royalty-in-exile, it didn’t matter which, and they expected a large windfall of treasure and supplies, extravagant goods with which they could barter to get their weapons and armor repaired, to keep a few weeks supply of food in their bellies, obtain a few credit to use for getting what little medicine there was left in the civilized places. Survival, it was all about survival now. Where once they would have opposed or even arrested such people, they now counted on getting small jobs from them for their survival.

But when they’d entered the crumbling, towering fortress’ walls, traveling into the depths of the decaying city, they’d encountered the worst of the symptoms of the Withered Land’s downward spin…

Cannibals.

They’d been lured to The City with lies. It was a trap. The cunning, amoral creatures that had spawned in the garbage and waste-littered alleyways and in the ruined, broken buildings were casting a wide net with which to catch all sorts of nomadic travelers ---

--- for food.

The team had fought with the precision and ferocity of trained military warriors, but they had been overwhelmed by the numbers of their foes, stunned and unprepared by their mutant vitality, and disadvantaged by their unfamiliarity with the turf on which they’d fought.