The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Five

"Are we almost there yet?"

"Almost. You know you could at least pretend to be patient, even if you are not. Remember what I told you..."

"Yes, yes, I know. Be modest, be nondescript, and do not challenge any assertions they may make..."

"I know it sounds strange, but they are not natives to this territory, coming from the far northeastern coastal territories of the Pang Xa'Omathra region. The people of the harbor city of Peravendath are not so cosmopolitan as these of The City. It is important you do not intimidate them more than you are already likely to."

She stood head and shoulders above most the women on the crowded street and she was a half a head taller than most the men, her hourglass figure showcasing more muscle than the casual observer would expect, but the way her voluminous dark cloak trailed behind her, edges fluttering and whipping independent of the wind, betrayed her arcane, sorcerous origins. In one slim fist, she carried a tall walking stick, its length all of a piece, uneven and rough-hewn, but the surface smooth and lacquered, atop which sat a speckled blue stone cradles in antiqued brass fittings. The banded walking stick had the look of a weapon about it and she carried it with a practiced grace and ease that hinted of extensive martial training.

Her name was Nygeia. She had been, at some time long ago and in a faraway province across the Forever Plain, a princess, heir to an outlaw empire composed of alchemists, potion-makers, witches, were-beasts and demon-callers. Her land had been a haven for the macabre. She, herself, had been the favored child of a strange and horrible creature called The Pahrayah, a tyrannical homicidal mutation that embodied the physical and spiritual duality of the human sexes in the most literal, and most twisted, of ways. Not a hermaphrodite, but instead an anomalous aberration that was a genetic amalgamation of mammalian male traits, female anatomical traits, wyrm-like asexual reproductive traits and the traits of monotrematic prototherians,  those being primitive egg-laying mammals, The Pahrayah and its undead Malakoro army had ruled ruthlessly over the southwestern coastal region of Teshiwahur's massive main continent. Most the Pahrayah's other offspring, crippled and misshapen creatures that drooled and gibbered, had died relatively young, but somehow Nygeia had been born morphologically perfect, highly disease resistant, athletically-gifted and exceptionally intelligent. But something even more incredible than her genetic superiority to other humans born in the Withered Land made her stand out yet more --- she was imbued with a paraphysical psychic connection to an Upworld human many light years and many galaxies away. An Earth-born human female, chronologically much older than her Teshiwahurian self and mobility-impaired, by the name of "Meredith McCrae Chapel", became her alternate identity. She lived in two worlds as a result. On the planet Earth and in the Withered Land. Too, as a royal-born Princess of the Withered Land, she experienced an undeniable empathic link with this Plane of Time-Space Existence, a supercharged extrasensory psychic rapport beyond the standard five senses most humans possessed.

The man with whom Nygeia strolled down through the winding streets of The City, past the edges of its rambling and chaotic Market Bazaar, was named Lumynn and it was with him she bitterly debated her subservient role in the morning's rendezvous with Lumynn's mysterious contacts. Lumynn was a close comrade and friend to the Knight, D'Spayr, and, though the two men had only first met during the dramatic events that had introduced them both to Nygeia, they'd become brothers-at-arms, despite their differing origins. Lumynn had played many roles during his time as a solitary wanderer, some of which he had not willingly chosen but had been forced into by dire circumstance, and principal among those, before immersing himself into an austere spiritual lifestyle, had been thief. Lumynn, the former travel captain for and among the few survivors of a doomed caravan crossing the Forever Plain, was bald, as was the norm for religious ascetics and former clerical academicians, but he had been marked as a political rebel by a tattoo of the sun around one bright, hazel-colored eye. He wore, sheathed in an eye-catching scabbard of blue metal hanging from a well-worn leather and metal belt around his slim waist, a short sword, razor-sharp, and inscribed with odd characters from an ancient alphabet. He had never once spoken about how he'd acquired such a strange and singularly distinct weapon.