The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Thirty-Four

He had been lifted on-high, ennobled beyond anything he had ever imagined he could be, and his senses were reeling from the flood of all he could now perceive.

The noise surrounding him was huge in the darkness, reverberating in a continuous booming roar that assaulted the ears and the mind, a sound that could be felt as well as heard, inspiring within any human spectators an atavistic rush of cold dread, welling up from the sunless depths of the subconscious mind. That feeling of dread was like the most precious of narcotics. It created a hollow spiritual hunger impossible to ignore. The phenomenon from which the noise issued was mesmerizing. It was big, so very, very big and it thundered against the bitter-scented winds sweeping across the gateway to the Pnahrryian Sea heralding its relentless and dangerous presence with a demonic glee that any observer near it could feel. Created by the invisible tentacles of a powerful downstreaming gravity birthed by the micro-moon called The Ke'Tareveel, the stormy whirlpool threw colossal splashes of near-glacial seawater eight to ten stories high above the harbor and spawned mistrals wrapped in salty mist.

Vyngreak Norrin, he who had once proudly been known to his fellow humans as The Tammoom, stood atop the crumbling remains of a collapsed lighthouse, arms outstretched in rapturous euphoria, bathed in the primordial wildness of the churning maelstrom named Guarfaghn, that which people commonly knew as "the roar-devil". He could touch and see the ghostly curtain that separated the wicked from the divine. He could see the hated, reviled umbilical chord chaining Chaos to Order.

He had come there, to that vantage point overlooking the sea, via a strange and dream-like journey through the city's intensely animated landscape of confusion and unrest as even more of an outsider than he already was, moving like he was a ghost, haunting the edges of scenes of rapacious violence. Overturned vehicles, burning buildings, mobs of hysterical people running this way and that across a carpet of broken glass, the voices of terrified folks pleading and screaming as they became victims of predatorial invaders..., he observed a panorama of rampaging urban psychosis mostly created by his own hand, birthed by his power mad schemes and manipulations. He had helped sculpt the bestial face of what could only be called a New World Order and it was a hideous and spine-chilling thing. He had left the disturbing miasma of his meeting with The Woman behind him and he'd strode forth into the night trailing a vaporous reek of slaughter, a stench that tainted the souls of everyone he beheld. He was a harbinger of mass murder.

He could no longer pretend to be an agent of that which was Good and Just. He knew he'd abandoned such benign aspirations.

The Tammoom, that simple, yet charismatic shepherd of human revelatory need, was gone. He had now been remade, his skin afire and his bones aching in mutated agony, as one of The Arbiters. He was now a servant of the Mokaeren Host, touched by the Void-Gods. He'd become a substitute for the vampire mind-priest, Jotelokkur.

The Great Endeavor, the intricate conspiracy to which he'd formerly belonged, no matter meant anything to him. He was above such egocentric ambitions, no longer needing such self-aggrandizement. The war that encompassed the concept called Entropy was everything to him now. He understood. His actions now had cosmic consequence. The conquest of a city, the subjugation of the population of a territorial region, the enslavement of a continent meant nothing.

The true nature of Reality was about the eternal conflict. Order versus Chaos. It was all about slaughter. It was all about holocaust.

He was an Arbiter. Ultimately, his very existence, his reason for being, was centered around the destruction he could create.

He would kill as many as he could. He would kill as many as he could imagine.

For Quhr, all for Quhr.