D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land

D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land, 7

The flittership rode the gunmetal-colored sky against the persistent polar breeze that wafted down in sheets from off the face of the mountain. The ships oval shadow passed over the teeming column of marching soldiers below her, eclipsing the wintry glare from the two suns over The Wastes, and only few of the army of slave-mercenaries cast their eyes upward to behold the hybrid vessel, their senses inured to the constant feeling of weight over their heads as the ship hovered over the marching troop-column.

A sextet of fang-like pinnacles, ragged, ice-laden stony spires jutting up from the mountain slope, marked the entrance to a winding spiral trail, a trail marked by a path littered with crumbling skeletons wrapped in disintegrating rags, that led ever upwards to a flat depression, a plain, set into the naturally-tiered western face of the mountain. The Pandemyon floated over that semi-enclosed depression in the colossus of stone and ice, behind the pinnacle-fangs that cast long sword-blade shadows across the plain's interior. Inside the bowl-depression the remnants of a city sprawled, a vast rambling walled city with stone and glass towers, gleaming bronze domes, a pair of alabaster cathedrals, mighty buttresses cracked and pockmarked by time and weather but still standing, and presided over by the huge rectilinear frame of an outpost battlements hewn from the stone of the mountain itself. At the rear of the ice-draped city, a squat U-shaped building that looked more like a machine that a habitat towered over it all: the ancient hydroelectric plant, the power generator that once ran from off the waterworks from the waterfall off the mountain, a once-mighty waterfall that was now no more that a persistent trickle of oily brackish water, no wider than the Pandemyon itself.

Katamahr.

Bluhd stared past the wide viewport in his bridge onto the vista of the abandoned, empty city and the expression on his face was a mixture of astonishment and bitter anger.

"This? This is all?", he hissed to no one in particular. "No lights, no sound, no people... By the beard of the Devil-Worm, what has happened to this place?"

"The pox?", the Butcher's Ensign-Adjutant ventured timidly in a flat whisper from next to the bridge's pilot-wheel, "Mass starvation?"

Bluhd ignored him, cursing vehemently under his breath. A fool's journey. He had brought his army into the unknown wildness of this barren territory on a fool's errand, wasting precious resources and time. Angrily, he whirled away from the viewport and stalked from off the bridge deeper into the ship's interior, towards the holding chamber where The Pilgrim questioned the Wytchborn.

As he stormed off into the shadows of the skyship, he did not see the lone armored figure astride the back of a dragon-steed sitting next to the desultory, decaying waterfall...

Scores of feet below the Pandemyon, on the path between the stone fangs leading up towards Katamahr, the slave-army continued their brutal march. They squinted against glare from off the ice and the misty air, and they turned their faces away from the occasional icy cold breezes gusting down from the mountain's higher wilder regions, past the cloudline. They were unaware of the dimly glowing serpentine line of light that arced through the mists and cloud cover towards them from the interior of The Wastes.

Lights. Lights in the sky. A muddy rainbow of muted color in the mist. There were so many that no one single color could be discerned from amidst the mob of the rest and they streaked through the air, many hundreds of them, flashing and sparking and pulsating as the traveled in a sinuous swarm through the sky and towards the army. Ghostlights.

Hungry lights...

Lumynn sat wrapped in leather and furs, atop an outcropping of naked rock and peered through a visor at the incoming lights as they began a rapid descent from the overcast heavens and slowly, silently, blanketed the area in the space between the underside of the flittership and the topmost spearheads of the marching army. His stomach fluttered in sick expectation, knowing this ominous pattern from his past experience with the caravan as they eluded and warred with the ghostlights in times past. He grasped his pre-Emperium fire-rifle in one fist and his battle-lance in the other, his tension revealed in his white-knuckled grasp. He felt uneasy about this vile alliance with the unhuman, alien lights, not trusting their predator's rapaciousness, afraid of their unemotional hive intelligence, their relentlessness, expecting them to turn on The Knight and on himself in any passing moment. He did not want to see what would happen next, but he could not look away.