D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land

D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land, 3

THREE

The air smelled of ancient memories and tasted of bad dreams.

On the haze-cloaked horizon, the foothills before the mountains to Katamahr looked to be a lifetime away.

The Wastes were a mostly unmapped, uncharted region of the Withered Land. It was a place traveled by only the bravest of explorers. The Wastes had always existed. They were not a product of the slow and torturous devolution of the continental landscape. It was a prehistoric territory where the laws of physics suspended themselves, a place that seemed to reinvent itself from day to day. Once, back in the glory days of the Emperium, the Grand Vizier and the Royal Cartographer had planned an expedition into the territory in the hopes of creating a network of roads into the far mountains, past the Forever Plain. Surveyors and scientists and soldiers entered, passing through the wall of fog and once into the mist, they became embroiled in a fantastic journey beyond time and mind. Three groups of a dozen intrepid experienced explorers went into that place...

None ever returned.

There were no stories or legendry surrounding the Wastes, no mythology to pass down from generation to generation, and no epic poems or sagas of heroes and villains at war within its mysterious interior. This was simply a damp, fog-enshrouded, windswept land of strange beasts and sudden dramatic changes in weather. This was the dead zone before one reached the southern mountains, where volcanoes still rumbled and where small hard-bitten pockets of humanity lived free and fierce beyond the tyrannical reach of the Emperium.

But the Empire had now fallen, dead some seventy-eight years. Entire villages had been abandoned, their economies dying faster than their listless populations, and buildings crumbled, falling into ruin. Time itself started and stopped fitfully, like chronal micro-climates, passing faster in one town than in the next. The twin suns that had once bathed the land in a crimson and gold glow, feeding vast plains of wheat and creating the perfect climate for vast rambling forests, now were dim pale glowballs in the ever-murky skies.

The winds blew in three different directions at once, winds without any discernable source of origin, and dust devils, some as tall as fortress guard towers, roved the landscape. In the distance, to the east, lightning scoured the skies without the accompaniment of thunder. To the west, a rainstorm raged, the sheets of icy cold water falling to earth where they evaporated on contact, leaving no patches of muddy acreage. And somewhere in the center of the strange region, balls of multicolored ball lightning, sizzling free-floating spheres of electricity rose from the porous swampy earth and rode the air currents to every corner of the territory, never straying past the towering wall of rolling mist. Winds blew...

None of those winds seemed to touch the fog. The fog was eternal. The Wastes were unchanging.

Ever solemn, ever haunted, ever hostile.

No one in their right mind ever chose to travel through them.

D'Spayr was on foot, walking beside his dragon-steed, and his eyes traveled the width and breadth of the what little he could see of the far horizon, off towards the foothills that led to the mountains. Nygeia strolled next to him, walking as if she hadn't a care in the world, taking in the bleak and dreary vista with a sardonic eye, while Tuolenne and Derivan brought up the rear of the small procession, each carrying knapsacks across their shoulders, walking with measured pace, with the practiced ease of experienced wanderers. The Knight was surprised at the misted haze that drifted over the area they traveled through and worried about the lack of clear visibility peering into the distances.

Behind them, the wall of fog looked solid as granite-colored stone.

The place was awfully damned quiet. Even the sound of their footfalls and the occasional grunts or huffing exhalations they made were swallowed up by the silence, as if it hungered for the sound of animate life.