The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Thirteen

Time had passed in sweat and exertion, when they came up over the hill, Veneralli's breath caught in his throat as his already confused and befuddled mind tried to take it what unfolded before his eyes...

 Despite the fact that the rocky, scrubgrass-spotted hill that formed the furthest valley wall was no more than four or five stories tall and leaned away from the windward face of the plain below them at maybe twenty-five or thirty degrees, the top of the hill did little to hide the gloom of the twilight sky.  

 That was why the abrupt appearance of a wide, twelve story tall monolith crowned by a floating pyramid of orange flames was so surprising -- they should have seen the pentagonal-shaped column of cut stone and the flaming pyramid topping it from at least a mile away.

 A rolling wave of bone-colored fog crested the hill away from the monolith and tumbled lazily down a few meters before dissolving.  At the base of the acre-wide monolith was what looked to be a town built from blocks of agglomerated limestone.  There were seven rectangular buildings of varying heights and lengths laid out in a rough crescent around the central monolith and another quartet of buildings, rectilinear and squat, sat outside the crescent at points opposing the corners of the monolith's base.  There were five wide boulevards emanating from the foot of the towering column, each boulevard lit by huge bowl-shaped lamps hanging from the arms of arcing posts and those boulevards each led to a long strip of road that looked like what would have been an airport runway on planet Earth.

 On the hard-packed, unpaved runway, a milling throng of dozens of people swathed in loose-fitting, high-collared robes with voluminous sleeves rhythmically swayed and danced as they watched men on odd hovercraft-like vehicles turn dangerous acrobatic tricks in the air.  Music accompanied the dramatic air show.  A quintet of drummers played a wild polyrhythmic beat while a pair of flutists wove a siren-song melody over the syncopation.  Another pair of musicians with stringed instruments added a grounding layer to the exotic cross-rhythm.  The men on the air-skimming vehicles exhibited a great deal of swagger and bravado while the crowd of partying onlookers cheered the complex aerial antics of their favorites.

 The off-white curtain of fog carpeting the ground spiraled and swirled away from the runway and flowed uphill, contrary to the sporadic night breeze.

 "What are we looking at here?" an out-of-breath Major Holloway demanded of Nygeia and the Knight.

 “Our destination and how we get ahead of the dryfftnaught,” D’Spayr said.

 “Okay, but more to the point: who are those people down there?”

 "They are the Skelm-sin'jala, the Daggers of Heaven," D'Spayr said, patiently explaining despite his natural reluctance to pass along too much of the lost culture of the region to the Offworlders.  "Nomads of Time and clime, they are a loose collective of peoples indigenous to a continental geo-territory that no longer exists, erased from history and from the planet's very surface by The Long Death.  They live on a floating chronal isthmus that pops in and out of existence in synchronization with certain phases of the setting suns."

 "Erased from history?  A 'floating chronal isthmus'?" Doctor Veneralli asked, his tone revealing a strong skepticism about the story he was hearing.

 "A piece of the planet that no longer shares the same Time and Space coordinates of the planet as it currently exists.  A slice of time-space with physical attributes, an island if you will, that materializes for a brief period connecting the quantum spaces of 'What-Once-Was' with 'What-Has-Not-Ever-Happened'," the Knight said, struggling to find the words to define something that was essentially indefinable and, as such, so very normal for the The Withered Land.  "The Skelm-sin'jala are warriors, artists, metal forgers and machine makers famous for their skills.  They are both Real and Mythical.  They have no actual home as defined by the grids of a map, yet their fortress and militia barracks appears and disappears among various locations in the most barren and empty tracks of land at the dying edges of the Wastes.  The Skelm cannot physically leave the confines of their isthmus, they are tied down to the molecular level to their Land of Unreality, but the things they make can and do leave as they trade for supplies with the regular populace of the Withered Land."