The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Two

Regret.  He was consumed by a deep and all-abiding regret.  He should have stayed in Oshplaktur.  There, amongst the thieves, whores, witches and power-play intrigues between a trio of battling, exiled kings, he had known where it was he stood.  He had no such sense of certainty in this dire clime.

 Driven by angry gusts of wind, blue-black smoke rolled over the body-littered expanse of the battlefield, catching the edges of the tattered tunic remaining intact over The Knight's heavy armor.

 To his right and just at the edges of his peripheral vision, the ruins of the fortress creaked and groaned as the structure continued its slow collapse following the hours-long assault.  The Knight stood on a weed-covered knoll above a ragged outcropping of rock at the western edge of a thirty acre clearing, larger than twenty football fields.  It was midday, though the casual observer would not have been able to tell from the position of the pallid suns riding the foggy sky.  A flurry of hot cinders near his position was suddenly caught in the wind, the sparks flashing a deep reddish-orange, tumbling in a spiral like a nautilus shell laid on its side.  Rent and battered fragments of body armor from fallen cavalry riders littered the pebble-strewn sand and the blackened, charred remains of their dead or dying steed-animals were lumped in with other debris from the battle.  And there were far too many dead men to count.

 Everything stank of blood.

 The Knight took his gauntleted hand from off the sore shoulder he'd been ineffectually massaging and he slowly began to walk across the killing field, taking care not to trip over the debris or to stress his already exhausted muscles.  He passed the skeletal frame from a shattered breach-machine, the huge stone and metal head of the machine's ramming piston detached from the device and lying in the gritty, dry soil like a severed head from some defeated war-god.  But that was a poet's conceit.  There was no grand metaphor at work in this place, no poetry, no art.  He knew better.  The war-gods were never defeated.   They were not like other gods to which men prayed.  Places like this were their cathedrals, their altars.  They drew strength from carnage such as this.  Prayers meant nothing to them.  Only blood.  Only pain and death.

 The Knight had seen far too much of this kind of madness in his life.

 He cast a sidelong glance through squinted eyes at the crumbling remains of the fortress.  Men fought to take it.  Men fought to keep it.  Did it contain money or treasure?  Perhaps.  Did it hold the prideful heart of a kingdom?   Possibly.  Did it house a royal family or a knavish exile?   Maybe.  But to look at it now... Wreckage.  Ruin.  Humans imbued it with a value it did not truly have.  It was only a construct of stone and wood and steel.  It represented only what they imagined it did.  In the eyes of the Universe, it had no value.

 Two centuries ago, The Long Death had arrived heralded by a massive, flaming meteor swarm that had preceded the uncovering of a colossal rent, a huge tear in the dark ocean of the sky.  A hole had appeared in Space itself.  The populace of The Knight's world had named that slash in the cosmos, “The Wound”.  It had heralded the end of everything he'd once held dear.  Empires fell, technology died, histories were either erased or rewritten.  His entire world suffered beyond common imagining.

 And yet, somehow, for some reason or another, humans still fought over worthless, desiccated, dying pieces of real estate like the field on which he stood.  Men and women stubbornly maintained that the contents of castles, villages and townships still maintained some value in this shattered world, a value worth fighting over.

 It was not worth what had happened here this day.

 The Knight had come to this place seeking to save a single life, looking to find and rescue a lost traveler running from the injustices of poverty and slavery to a greedy and cruel warlord.  He had come too late.  Worse, he had come at the height of the battle and had been forced to defend himself in a conflict in which he had no part.