The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Eight

A dry wind whistled a haunting, unmelodious tune.  She kept her eyes scrunched tightly shut.

The hornet’s buzzing at the back of her mind a few moments ago had long-since evolved into an insistent shrill scream.   Now there was only a ringing silence.  She sucked in a huge draught of air and it hurt.  Her ribcage throbbed with an onset of cold pain.  The air as it flowed into her open mouth tasted of metal and ash.  The skin of her exposed flesh felt as if it was effervescent, fizzing and rippling, and she could feel a psychic wave of dark passions rolling up and down the length of her spine.

Some noxious part of her subconscious had stretched her mouth into a twisted smile.

      The fundamental forces of the universe had turned themselves inside out and the Laws of Attraction had taken over, the Hilbert Lattices framing the corollary of Retracting Co-Linearity were promoted to Ascendency, and temporal cohesion momentarily disintegrated, freeing the irreducible components to stream in particulate fashion and invert.

She’d completed the transit.  Again, despite the fact she’d promised herself she’d only cross the void if the situation were impressively dire enough to warrant her dive into dark corruption.   But here she was.   She was back.

 She slowly opened her eyes.  She was on a beach, the sluggish waves from the gray sea slid off the gathered dunes lining the shore like cold oil.  Light fell upon the land like dead leaves.  She saw, in the distance, a crumbling fortress of aged granite rising from behind the imposing wreckage of a broken statue, a mighty colossus that once had stood taller than the fort's highest parapets, straddling a graveled road that led to the redoubt’s huge twin doors.

 This was once a place of majesty, of legendry, of power.  Once.

 Now it was a hollow ghost of a place, the shell of some great departed beast, the stony carcass of a primordial predator once master of this dry beach head.

 She did not belong here.  She had been summoned here against her will.     Above all else, she had not wanted to come here.

 She was home.  And with that thought, that realization, her memories of her life as Meredith McCrae Chapel began to rapidly fade from her conscious mind…

 Nygeia.  Her name was Nygeia and she was royalty, a princess to this dead world.

 She recalled that not far away there had once been a place of kings, tyrants, knights and rogues, a fortress of aged granite that had dwelled ever in the shadows cast by an imposing metal statue, a mighty colossus that towered taller than the fort's highest parapets, the massive steely figure straddling a wide graveled road leading to huge twin doors set into the fortress' walls.  In time, it had become a hollow place, the cracked and crumbling shell of some great departed beast, a primordial temple to predation, once master of the dry and blank-faced plains beyond the shore, and it resided in the memories of only the very old and those gone mad.

 The Pahrayah had lived within that place. Monstrous and waiting.  An enigmatic and often incomprehensible creature imbued with a duality of mutant morphology and psychology.  It had, in this region of territories on the edge of the Forever Plain, ruled over the lives of tens of thousands of broken, bitter survivors of the Long Death for decades before she had turned against it, rebelling against its tyranny and oppression.  It had lived and ruled from that dark ruin which had once been her home.  And it had died there.  At her hands.

She quickly pushed the memory from the forefront of her mind.

“Been a long time.  Truth to tell, I did not believe I would miss you as much as I did.  And that is a very disturbing thought,” a sonorous male voice said edgily.  It came from atop a sloping sand dune to her left…