The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Twenty-Four

Light from the planet's dual suns fell in a silent, steady rain of multispectrum radiation down through the layers of the atmosphere, past the Exosphere at the edge of space and the Thermosphere where solar activity strongly influenced atmospheric temperature, into the Mesosphere where weather was birthed to reach the turbulent Stratosphere where the Ozone Layer flourished and where the energy from incoming ultraviolet radiation was absorbed, protecting life on the planet's surface. That sunlight from space, born from the multi-millenia old furnace of a red giant star and the fully-convected, hydrogen exhausted nuclear reactions from a blue dwarf star, showered a never-ending torrent of highly-agitated particles into a vast, self-regulating, geospheric magneto-field, touching everything upon the biorealm's voluminous surface, that "spoke" to the planet Teshiwahur...

The Withered Land was a living interactive network, a synergistic superorganism, a trophic-dynamic place where various elements upon which planetary life depended communicated with one another to keep the planet aware, though "aware" in a non-sentient, non-human sense, of the major events that transpired in and around it. Geobiologically reactive systems of feedback and self-regulation initiated pre-coded responses and counter-actions to and from the planet's ecology.

Evolution never ceased, even though the world was fatally poisoned by the constant, violent galactic ravages created by the effects of The Wound on its solar system, and mutation ran rampant, always in process. Whatever would injure or lacerate or scar the planet was examined, diagnosed and absorbed to create new and stronger defenses against any recurrence of such destructive assault. Teshiwahur was an ailing, bilious beast stubbornly determined to survive its macabre and gruesome ailments. It was graceless and mean, barbarous, brutish and savage and it did not care one whit about the tiny, fragile, scrabbling life that infested its surface like a twisted form of eczema.

The light fell down to the planet's surface and told tales as it fell: there were hurricane-level storms lashing the extreme arctic climes with massive discharges of molecule-shredding black lightning, the detritus of a disintegrating comet that passed into the "goldilocks zone" between the orbits of Pex'Insava and Teshiwahur rained down upon the empty plains of the humid, jungle-covered eastern hemisphere in chunks the size of buildings, a rare and heretofore uncatalogued virus, nested within the dessicated soil of the quicksand-like, rolling metal deserts of the southwestern continent, emerged from an eon's-long slumber after the impact of a meteorite, exposing the microbes to sunlight, and was rapidly infecting all animal life with a rabies-like condition that could only be sated by the consumption of organic flesh...

Anything beautiful born from this planetary biosystem was the result of a perverse accident.

It was not a place that would commonly be described as pretty. The hillside clearing was an elongated, irregular hexagonal shape, a grassy meadow encompassing twenty-seven acres overlooking the eastern side of the cliff's running edge overlooking the harbor. The meadow was an uneven carpet of bluish-green grass, gunmetal gray moss, and knee-high thatches of twisting weeds that skimmed scattered strips of naked rock. It was mostly hidden from view by a trio of mammoth stone projections facing the watery horizon. It was difficult to get to, no wheeled or treaded vehicle could traverse the narrow, uneven path from the metropolis below to climb it and the channel cut into the hillside that paralleled the cliff's face was at such an extreme angle as to require superior-grade mountaineering equipment in order for it to be manually ascended.

In ages past, a fierce battle had been fought there. It had been a harsh and cruel contest between warring seaboard tribes battling for coastal supremacy in the shadow of the spinning micro-moon that dominated the sky over the tempestuous waters of the then-embryonic harbor. But no monument had been erected to commemorate that battle, no plaque had been placed to denote its significance or to list the names of the dead. On that dark day, both tribes had been overpowered, overwhelmed and crushed by the surprise, unanticipated interference of a legion of the Emperium's well-armed shock-troops, dispatched by an angry Regional Governor who had grown weary of and impatient with fractious tribal politics in a territory he had declared as no longer belonging to either group. By his order, both the tribes were mercilessly put down, their rough-hewn, self-made, salvaged weaponry no match for the high-end technological killing power of the armament in the Emperium's massive arsenal.