Eros

Breath in the Smoke - 64

Gurak walked alone, the parched, sallow earth cracking beneath his steps, and the wind a constant flow of dry air and coarse dust against his face. The lands of the Warspawn weren't always the Blighted Lands. Three hundreds years ago, there were rivers coursing with fish, meadows flourishing with berries, green mountains and valleys with beasts that weren't crazed with starvation.

Then there was the War of Aros. When the Warspawn united under the command of Brasgar, god of war, and set to conquer all of Aros.

Half the human and elven civilization had been trampled under their advance into the continent. So mortal was the danger for their existence, that their creators, the gods Velsair and Lyndra, wore their flesh to oppose Brasgar. The human god rained inferno from the skies as the elven goddess rose a tide of water and ice over the earth. The Blight of Fire and Ice, it was called, the doom of the Warspawn armies, and the scorching of their homelands.

The mountain of black rock before Gurak was one of the few that weren't flattened into the barren plain the land became. He pulled the hood of his dark cloak against the dusty wind, looked up the steep, rocky slope, and leapt to the first handhold. Pull after pull, Gurak swung himself against gravity. His legs kicking against the rocks below him and his arms stretching for the ones above.

With a low, guttural groan, he made the final thrust, dragging himself onto the black mountain's leveled top. Clapping the dirt off his large, rough hands, he straightened and stalked towards the lone hut ahead. He pushed the flap aside and lowered his head to enter.

"Enjoyed the climb?" Asked the oracle in a rasping voice. He was leaning for a Warspawn. His white skin clung to gaunt features, furrowed with age and scar. The sides of his skull were shaved bald, and the pale hair across the center was tamed in a thick braid, falling down his timeworn, black robes.

"Depends on the wisdom it earns me." Answered Gurak, and met the oracle's gaze. His eyes were pupiless orbs of white fogged in grey, like the dawn after a storm. The oracle raised his hand in invitation, and Gurak lowered to sit before him.

"Tell me your name, son of War." Said the oracle.

"Gurak of Bloodhowl."

"A worthy name. To be heard plenty." Without shifting his gaze or pausing his speech, the oracle snatched a scorpion from the earth. It writhed in his strong, withered fingers as he raised it to his mouth, and cracked to stillness as he bit. "What wisdom do you seek?"

"The Warbringer of the old prophecies." Gurak said.

"He who will once again band the Warspawn, and throw Aros into the greatest war since the gods have last tread it." The oracle chomped down the rest of the scorpion's body, and tossed away its tail. "Do you believe to be him?"

"The Deathstriders do."

"The Deathstriders remembered our old prophecy." The oracle wet his parched, pallid lips with a dark tongue. "While the rest of you turned it into a nightly tale for your whelps, they have searched the Warbringer, and came to ride for him."

"Do they ride true, oracle?" Gurak stamped his gaze in the oracle's misty white eyes. "Am I him?"

The oracle held Gurak's obsidian eyes. "Will you let the last remainder of an ancient kind tell you what you are or not?"

"No." Gurak stated. "But I will hear your guidance."

The oracle's eyes mouth twisted, baring his sharp, stained teeth in a nasty smile. "You will bring your own demise before you bring war."

Gurak frowned. He lunged onto a knee and threw out his hands, snatching oracle's neck into his grasp. The ancient Warspawn didn't resist, didn't make a sound.