The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Four

He didn’t like this place.  Not that it mattered, but it was something of which he was always conscious after making the Transition.  He didn’t like it here.

A gust of wind ran across the crackled, bone-white surface of the vast plain, and its path through this lower stratum of the atmosphere was actually visible, appearing as a serpentine river of periwinkle-colored shadow lashing the space between the ground and the horizon.

It, the wind gust, wept piteously as it undulated and lashed at the open spaces above the plain.  It carried with it the smell of wet stone and fleshy corruption, the scent of distant decay.

To the west, under the rolling encroach of deepening shadows, an ugly, black feathered, hyena-like beast called a “phrangbek”, emitted a feral howl as it prepared to stalk its prey.

The Pilgrim's hooded eyes peered out from under the brow of his helmet and he surveyed the farthest reaches of the horizon, past the dying glare from the setting twin suns, one enormous and red while the other was small and an intense shade of blue, over the landscape, as he waited to be met by his fellow conspirators.

The oddness of the thought interrupted his rueful silent reverie.  Perhaps the phrase, "fellow conspirators" was not quite accurate.  It indicated they, these people for whom he waited, were his peers.  They were not, not in any sense.  He had no known peers.  They were frightened, greedy, miserable little creatures of limited imagination and talent.  They were needy and small-minded.  They created nothing.  They did not evolve.  They were not worthy of their aspirations.  They lived only at the kindness and mercy of those who were more powerful and who were greater than themselves.

They deserved nothing more than to live ... and die ... under the growing shadow of The Wound.

Sometimes, when he'd been Upworld for too long, when the sensation of fire ants roaming chaotically under his skin made him want to hurt something even more than he usually did, the Pilgrim forgot how strange and awful this place could be.  The phrangbek’s call brought a thin smile to his cruel lips.

A transmogrified Oliver Titus Wander reveled in his power.

He was The Pilgrim.  No longer a small, physically awkward, emotionally and intellectually precocious little boy, he'd become a dour and grim, wide-shouldered paladin wrapped in a voluminous cloak as iridescent black as a crow’s wing.  The body armor that protected his torso, groin, and thighs was metal of a dark, glistening cinerious color, gray as ash.  Muscled like an Olympic athlete, tall enough to dwarf even the tallest barbarian on this strange world, he fairly vibrated with barely restrained vitality and otherworldly energies.  He was a predator of the Apocalypse.  His motionless figure was embraced by a shadowy gloom that gathered deepest across his face and chest like a hood, as if he were a splinter cut from off the falling night that slowly blanketed the plain.

He didn’t like it here, but, sadly and to his eternal regret, he undeniably belonged here.

He saw the coach approaching, cresting the rocky rise that bisected a rippled, sandy acres-wide concave depression in the plain.

The lumpen, pumpkin-shaped suspended carriage was drawn by a quartet of large and muscular, six-legged canines, their untrimmed matted fur flying in the twilight breezes and their forked blue-black tongues hanging from out their wolfish muzzles, almond-shaped eyes glowing with a sickly jade-hued light.  A pair of small cloth pennants flew from thin, rat-tail poles affixed to the rear of the coach’s round, slightly ribbed frame.  The coach driver, a turbaned bearded man in a silver-studded leather tunic, sat on an ornate gilded bench above a forward-facing window in the carriage’s shell.  The driver’s eye sockets blazed with a thick, aqueous fire that glowed and sizzled like magma.  On his hands, he wore thick, oversized gloves made from cured and tanned reptile hide and the chain-link reins of the coach were permanently fastened to the inside of each fist.  A pair of iron spikes topped with acorn-shaped finials had long ago been driven while white-hot through the thickest muscles of his thighs to forever pin and lock him onto the driver’s seat.  The flesh around the ragged holes in his limbs had healed around the spikes.  He was permanently bolted to his bench atop the coach.