Engines & Demons - The Undestined

Prologue

I was not truly believing things in their entirety until I saw her standing out in the yard, her dress filthy with cickracol dust.

I asked for her name and she gave it, and the truth of things was no longer deniable.

My decision was made. Your fates were bound.

Except it is only now that I am finally understanding.

There is no such thing as Fate.

Anyadda Padrid

Prologue

The day was ending when a strange silence fell over the plains. The insect drone that permeated their deep grasses faded abruptly, and the herds of horned bipedal creatures that inhabited them stopped their grazing. The beasts raised their heads, their ears and the muscles of their long legs twitching in preparation for flight. The river that ran through the grassland continued to slide between its banks, tumbling loud and white over its rocky falls, but the rest of the land was held in an expectant moment of quiet.

The sun had fallen beyond the horizon, and only the moons were left in the darkening sky, when a burst of brightness washed the band of night from the far skyline. There was something drawing the light, growing as it shrieked towards the earth.

The thing shook as it split the cloudless sky, its smooth sides blazing, trailing red flame and black smoke as it fell closer to the ground. Its noise tore the air and flattened the grass beneath it, and the herds bolted, eyes rolling, fearful calls drowned out. Before the falling object even touched the ground, the flattened grasses beneath it curled and smoked and burst into flame.

It struck the river first. Fast flowing water turned to steam that bellowed and hissed before the noise of collision covered it, and dark soil burst upwards, dirtying the swelling cloud. The thing did not stop. It broke through the river-bank and on through earth and flaming grass, the grating of its passage an undertone to the oscillating whine coming from its insides. Its body was veiled by the expanding cloud of debris it had thrown up, which was lit from within by the red flame that left the earth behind baked black.

          The grinding howl grew harsher as rock intruded through surface soil, and the thing that had fallen from the sky seemed to slow, but then the cloud was shredded by a shriek of light and it was driven forward again, over a shelf of exposed stone. It dropped through the low valley beyond, trailing burning fragments of itself, before it struck the earth with a reverberating groan of torture and ploughed itself to rest. Its red flame had died, but black smoke still curled from the torn ruin of its rearmost section.

The cloud of trailing dirt drifted overhead, swirling in unnatural shapes across the fallen object's domed surface, as static crackled the air. Small fires burned in the valley behind it, adding their own smoke to the newly fouled sky.

Five kilometres to the south of the impact sight, the rolling grassland was dominated by the vast rise of a rocky hill. The place had been silenced by the sound of the burning object's fall, but soon the insect droning resumed. On a ridge of land that bisected the hill's gently rising lower slope, two birds, vivid with red feathers, fell croaking out of the air to return to their feasting on the carcass that had been placed in the centre of a flattened clearing in the grass.

The creature would have been grotesque in life. Spending two days dead on the open plain had not improved it. The birds used their claws to pry apart thick scaly plating and reveal its soft decaying flesh, which they tore at with their serrated beaks, unmindful of the fat yellow flies that crawled everywhere, filling the air above the clearing with the noise of their pulsing wings.

The body lay at the foot of a grassy mound on the ridge's crest, its four thick legs trussed together and its arms splayed to either side, its ugly head close to a round cave of darkness in the mound's steep side.

The birds continued their meal. The flies buzzed and droned. The wind changed direction, bringing with it the smell of acrid burning. More of the red feathered birds flapped down from the sky to argue over the dead creature's flesh, unconscious of anything but the need to feed. Their croaking cries entered the round cavity of the cave mouth to echo down through the blackness of the tunnel beyond where, weakened and mingled, they found the chamber in the mound's centre.

The chamber's black gloom held no other sounds. There were no outward signs of attentiveness. No movement. No inhalation of breath. No life.

But the chamber was not empty.

In the darkness, something began to listen.

But not to the feasting birds.