The Dou-Jin Apprentice of Monsters and Men In the Beginning

Chapter 16 Devastation

Chapter 16

Devastation

A sixth tremendous trumpet blast rocked Theara.

Another eruption of light and sound burned Stephanous eyes and deafened his ears. The purplish and indigo flash that took his sight faded a little faster than the last as well as did the ringing in his ears. Again once his vision had returned he witnessed yet another visage of horror and devastation. The intensity of the searing flash burned the student's eyes and a thunderous blast rocked his ears, mind, body, and soul!

Crops of all various varieties produced little or no fruit and the fruit they did grow was minuscule and withered in appearance from lack of rain and good sources of clean water and fertile land. Wheat, barley, corn, rye and other grains that were once plump and full and grew as tall as a man's thigh in places where now barely mid high to a full grown man's calf. Most of the grains never came to produce their fruit. Apples, oranges, plums, figs, pears, and other fruit bearing tree stood barren, dying, and /or dead. Few leaves adorned the dying undersized dwarfed trees from their original state and any produce that grew upon the almost lifeless forms of dead wood were brimming with worms and beetles, normally found in dead trees, now burrowed into the tree trunks and destroyed the life within wood and life giving foliage.

Trees that did manage to bear minor amounts of produce were usually very tiny twisted remnants of their prior selves as if they too were fighting the effects of the blight and their final product tasted of bitter death own hand themselves. It was all the people had to eat and even though the fruit tasted like vomit, they were too starved to be picky about what they were to eat. It was all the people had to eat, that or maggoty meats and withered moldy vegetables, and when sold on the open market the price of a few shriveled nasty tasting apples could have bought a good horse or even a house when times were better. It was said that a bag of gold pieces of could by a piece of small bread, if there was any bread to buy at all.

Fruit that grew on the vine such as grapes produced dreadfully little. Their leaves were as tiny as minute insects and their fruit was the size and consistency dried out raisins that had been left in the sun for far too long and awful pungent tasting raisins at that. Raisins that tasted like embittered medicine. There would be no more making of fine wines, or any wine for that matter, for the people as well as those procuring of ales and other harder liqueurs. The people were forced to try and find good supplies of water, which were even harder to come by than their tensonite ore.

Major battles and wars broke out when someone happened to find some halfway decent water and halfway decent was a trickle of muddy water that had to be boiled and purified to even be considered to be drank if the person was to live through drinking the liquid.

People were being murdered over the diminutive claims were not uncommon and those with the water were those that had immense power. People warred over undersized streams that were no wider than a man's pinky finger, and the water was like vinegary and sulfur at that.

The people starved and were dehydrated from lack of decent food and palatable water. The lands that were once a paradise of vegetation lay dried and barren like vast desolate deserts of unfertile dusty plains of Kul'Don. The bones and corpses were all that were left behind in dried up ghost towns that had once thrived on their good fortune of where they had once lived and now their legacy was nothing more than dead dried up bodies laying wherever they happened to drop from the starvation and lack of liquid. The stench of death itself had taken over the land and scavenger birds made a black blanket over the land like a vile malevolent comforter draped over a wicked bed.