The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Four

Adam Wilder's muscular seven foot tall frame squatted atop a tortoise-shell shaped rock formation in an underground quarry several dozens of chancks, a unit of measure in the Withered Land equivalent to two feet on planet Earth, below street-level on the outskirts of The City. Though clearly illuminated by a generous scattering of electric torches, the cavernous quarry was enveloped in dim shadow and Wilder's crimson and vermilion-hued armor and hooded cloak nearly rendered him invisible in the somber and dusty darkness.

He watched the scene below his perch with a skeptical and discerning eye.

The form-fitting, pewter-gray, segmented armor of overlapping metal bands encasing Kolag Y'phree's muscular, V-shaped torso glittered with the sparkle from a thousand droplets. The turbulent cascade of icy cold mist from the wide pool at the base of the nearby waterfall speckled the metal shell protecting his thick body as he moved among the towering metal pylons on the underside of the transmatter excavator.

He was intently focused on what was playing out across a series of man-high display screens. He was looking for a very specific something, concentrating on something that could very well determine the future of his domain. Nearby on a downward sloping trail, constantly scanning for any evidence of threat, whether man-made or mechanical, were a special detachment of nine scarlet armored and helmeted sentries attending Y'phree. They were his personal guard on those occasions he entered the mammoth sunken, hypogenous chamber.

The transmatter excavator discharged a series of fluted tones as its external-scanning neural net projected visual representations of integrated algorithms on each of its four giant rectilinear monitor screens. Isothetic visual imagery assembled into coherancy and took recognizable shape on the screens as the excavator's emitters scanned through the solid rock walls lining this chamber within the subterranean mine in which Kolag Y'phree and his entourage stood watching. A group of mining engineers in flexible metallic-mesh bib overalls attended to the pipe organ-like control console and the hydra-like mech-extensions that fanned out from the console area.

"There, see? Right there, pulsing like a heart...," a reedy male voice said. That voice belonged to Czarik Drameklion, the Quarry-master, who managed the secret underground mine beneath The City, the aged metropolis of which Y'phree was military commander and ruler.

The Warlord tilted his face up and squinted as he peered even more intently on the images on the digital screens.

"Yes," he said slowly, "I can see it." Though the image they viewed was of something encased within solid rock, it was like a thing alive: moving, twitching, periodically quaking as the seconds passed.

They were looking at the unveiling of a dark, preternatural miracle. It was a vein of stone within the rock wall. It was a haunted and foreboding treasure. They called it Ikarenium and it was renowned as the Gateway Stone, matter that opened dimensional portals, the doorways to different universes.

Under his cloak's hood, Adam Wilder's dark face twisted into a scowl of disapproval. Ikarenium. It was very recently the object of a deadly and violent experience he and his companion, Ryelle, had experienced in the company of a determined team of Upworld military Special Forces soldiers who had traveled across the interspatial dimensional bridge from the planet Earth. A madly ambitious and unscrupulous metallurgist named Lord Cr'Aughtin, from the far away Duchy of Wyst Terringer, had crossed the Withered Land's Forever Plain in the hopes of securing this forbidden, and mostly forgotten, renegade Tekk substance. Cr'Aughtin had brought a small army with him to join with a warlord named Arvenall Dampiko in a plot to use the strange, energy-imbued metal to cross Time-Space to the Upworlds and begin a reign of terror against the alien populations there --- populations that included that of the planet Earth. The soldiers of the U.S. Army's Broken Mirror unit had, in exploring the Withered Land, stumbled across Cr'Aughtin and Dampiko's plan and fought to end it before it reached the critical mass of deadly fruition. Wilder, the red-eyed, albino warrior-woman Ryelle, the men of Broken Mirror and an enigmatic, dragon-riding Knight named D'Spayr and his companion, a mystical sorcerer-princess named Nygeia, had valiantly opposed the evil conspiracy. In the end, they were only partially successful. Neither the seditious terrorist organization housed within the renegade Duchy of Wyst Terringer nor the conquest-hungry Warlord Dampiko had obtained the metal, but their defeat had come at great and tragic cost to the Traveler in Red and his companions.