Tales From a Thousand Worlds

The coming night cast its darkening shadows across the land, the once blazing brilliance of the day giving way to the dappled deep purples that shrouded the hills. A small camp fire snapped and sparked away in a sheltered bowl in the hills. Over it a scrawny rabbit cooked, one that Lakach had brought down. After a day spent hunting, it had been the only game he had seen.

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Zethar walked down from the dry, rolling hills towards the valley that cut through them. Fields spread out through the valley, just as brown as the hills. The leaves of the trees that grew through the lower parts of the hills were withered as well, curled up and grey.

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Abasan stood silent as he watched the band head off towards the west, a long train of men and women climbing into the hills. Only Niati and Lakach remained behind with him and Nhaqosa, the rest leaving with Zethar. It did not take very long for them to disappear from sight, crossing the crest of a hill and dropping down behind it.

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Abasan sat alongside Nhaqosa, watching as he slept. The giant minoatur’s body shook fitfully. At times he would toss and turn and looked as if he might cry out though no sounds escaped lips that curled back in a silent snarl.

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There were dreams. There were always dreams, and none of them were pleasant. The line between the waking and sleeping hours seemed almost to no longer exist, all of it much like a hazy memory that ran one into the other and back again. Everything seemed to blur together, dreams of pain and fire that clawed at him and sought to drag him under. Occasionally voices came to him, sounding much like flies buzzing off in the distance. The word they spoke made no sense.

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A faint breeze stirred at the red dust of the arid lands. Withered and parched trees and shrubs clung to a precarious life amidst the hills that rolled down into the lowlands to the east, where drifting deserts spread, fingers of windswept sand snaking their way up into valleys and washes, drowning all that they came across. Long abandoned farmsteads lay scattered across the lower slopes of the hills, their fields now buried beneath the encroaching sands and the buildings half submerged as the deserts continued their remorseless drive towards the west. Soon they would crest the hills like a wave and spill down into the lands beyond, sweeping aside the last vestiges of humanity.

Follow this link for Part One of Wisdom From The Ashes