The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Twenty

Unbidden, a stray quote swiftly flashed through his mind, "One can accurately judge the quality of a kingdom by the ferocity of its enemies..."

Through the massive, salt-streaked windows on his Sanctum Majestorum, he peered out upon gray-green skies atop an undulating, rolling charcoal and aquamarine horizon. The shadow-dappled vista of the constantly morphing, turbulent surface of the harbor's cold waters almost succeeded in stealing his gaze away from focusing upon the dark, irregular egg-shape of The Ke'Tareveel dominating the skies. Here, in this place, moon and sea were inseparable, one not wholly existing without the influence of the other, a primal and logical pairing of natural elemental forces; the emotional draw and power of the fluid, briny expanse juxtaposed against the stark celestial majesty of the imposing micro-moon. Perhaps, once long ago, before the arrival of The Wound, there had even been a type of organic poetry, a romanticized harmoniousness, about the vista. His late wife, his long-dead Queen, had danced in the foreground of that vista, laughed and teased and stared Hope and Optimism at him, bathing him in her Humanity. That had felt like it had been a distant lifetime in the past, a past belonging to a different man, a man incapable of the crimes he had gone on to commit after her demise. But Death changes a man and now, in the times that followed the arrival of the plague years and the slow collapse of the once-mighty Emperium, there was little about the city and its harbor that inspired thoughts of beauty. The scene he observed was far too portentous --- dread had become the prevalent emotion it inspired. Bleakness and dread. The moon above and the sea below... the tableau was that of the Hammer and the Anvil.

That feeling lowered the temperature of the armor surrounding his heart to levels icier even than those to which he was accustomed. That coldness should have hurt. It didn't. It just made him want to hurt someone or something, anyone or anything, badly enough to ignite the fires of his dead passions.

A perverse part of him very much wanted to bathe in the fury of those fires. He craved a certain cruel wildness. But he dreaded it, too.

His thoughts again turned to the memory of his beautiful Queen. Maybe he should not have been so quick to murder her...

He fought back a pained grimace as his mind, nearly overwhelmed by recent events and threatening to spiral out of control, spawned yet another phrase from his haunted subconscious: "... And in the Land of The Dead, it is the Undertaker who is King ..."

That quotation described exactly what he did not want, which was to be the King of Undertakers.

Tomanus Grethvian, the Ymperatur of Peravendath, released a deep sigh from between tightly clenched teeth and turned away from the wide panoramic window to resume speaking to his guests.

Mahrkath Serundi, the Warhound-General of the Ke'Tareveel, sat sprawled across the wide seat of a high-backed, ornately carved medieval style chair, the huge fists at the ends of his powerful, leather-wrapped arms, encased in interlocking metal links of dull gray, clutching the sculpted the heads of a pair of carved gryphons that made up the chair's sides and forelegs. Serundi was an apish man with enormously wide shoulders and a deep, barrel chest topped by a thick, short neck and a large head and wide face adorned with an iron-gray mustache and beard of coarse, untrimmed hair. The Warhound's lower body was something else altogether inasmuch his weak and withered, disease-stricken lower torso and limbs were tucked inside fearsome prosthetic casings that looked to be more designed for a heavy armored, military fighting vehicle than for any kind of humanoid being. He was a severe man, giving the sense that he was always ready to leap to a posture of parade-ground attention, and even when he lounged, as he currently did within the Ymperatur's chambers, there was a tension about him that betrayed an intolerant and ruthless efficiency.