Lord of the Wasteland

The sands blew savage across the desolate ground, streaming across the sky in trails and threads of yellow and black. Lightning flashed crimson in the darkness, and the strange rock formations loomed like carved giants in the heat of the storm. Shath leaned into the wind, cloth drawn across his face to protect him from the blowing dust. He held Ellai close beneath his robe, shielding her as well. They moved east, wading through the shifting sand of this wasteland, seeking the path to the sea.

Legends called this the wastes of Ur, and tales said it was a poisoned land where no men dwelled, only monsters. Shath did not fear monsters, and he sought only to make his way to the Sea of Azar, and there he could find a way to return to the east and the cradle of the empire he sought to destroy. To the north were razor-edged mountains and to the south a steaming, trackless jungle. Shath did not fear legends, and he walked with his sword in his iron hand, squinting through the ravaging stormwinds.

Wind moaned as it cut through the rocky crags that rose on all sides of him. Shath felt as if he were in the remains of some dead city, so worn down by time that it no longer seemed to be a work of the hands of man. The wind sounded like beasts bellowing in the dark, and now and again the stones glowed with incipient fire.

He heard something else above the wind, and he stopped for a moment, straining to hear over the hissing of the sands and the moaning of the storm. He heard what could have been a horn, and then something like thunder. He bent down and pressed his flesh hand against the stone and felt the pounding of hooves, and then he knew they were not alone in the dark.

He slipped quickly back into a crevice in the rock and pressed Ellai deep into the shadows, made certain that she bundled herself up in her cloak to keep out the sands that battered at them. She was not made so strong as he, not with his skin like leather and his endless vitality. He had to make sure she was safe.

Shath gave over his sight to the inner vision that perceived no colors, only shapes and shades of gray. The night leaped into clarity, with the stones above him limned with light, the sky black save when rent by flashes of fire, and then he saw six shadow forms emerge through a pass between great stones and ride down upon him.

He saw they were like men, but more massive, with twisted, bestial faces and eyes that glowed in the night. They wore heavy armor and helms crested with horns, and they carried weapons hewn from rough metal. They brandished axe and sword and spear, weapons as heavy and powerful as the men who bore them. Their steeds were reptilian, with heavy necks and armored skulls. They moved swift and sure across the shifting sand.

Shath had no sword; all he possessed was the strength in his body, the power in his metal arm, and the skill of battle from a lifetime of war. He crouched among the rocks and watched the riders come closer. Perhaps they did not see him, perhaps they did not hunt, but they moved with purpose, and he gathered himself as they drew closer, until he could not risk them discovering Ellai. He gathered strength in his legs and up his back, and then he sprang upon them with all the power at his command.

He fell upon the first rider, and his iron fist rang upon the man’s helm and crushed it like dry leaves. Blood exploded from the destroyed skull and trailed through the air as the rider was pitched back to the sands. His steed reared and screamed, but Shath took the saddle and grasped the reins, mastering the animal as he had a thousand riding beasts in his life. He wrenched around and met the other five with the battle howl of a dead race.

Sword and axe-blows rang on his iron arm, and he rode through them, seized one by the neck and lifted him from the saddle, felt bones snap under his grasp as he clenched his fist. He caught the sword that fell from the dead man’s grasp and turned to face the riders with the heavy battle-blade crawling with green stormlight.

They met him in a clash of steel, hacking and slashing at him. His blows struck with murderous fury, crunching through armor and bone, spilling men to the thirsty sands, gushing blood from the rents he made in them. His hand smoked, painted with blood and alight with the gathered fire of the sandstorm. Sparks jumped when swords clashed blade to blade. There were two remaining, then he sheared the head from one and left the other alone against him.

The rider did not flee; he threw down his axe and hurled himself against Shath, dragging him from the saddle to the blooded earth. He drew a long dagger and fought relentlessly, hissing with feral strength. Shath caught his arm with the iron hand and crushed it, snapping the bones, and then he hurled him aside. The man writhed in the sand, struggling up, reaching for a fallen axe with his one hand. Shath caught up a spear and ran him through, the point punching out the back of his armor, red and gleaming, the tip sparking.

The rider slumped to the sands, clawing with his one good hand, eyes wide. Shath drew off his helmet and looked at the heavy-boned, misshapen face, the pale eyes that caught the light. “Vodra,” the man hissed at him, blood on his teeth. “We die for the Vodra.” A spasm wracked his body and he fell back, eyes turning blank, reflecting only the flickers of the storm.

o0o

By day the landscape was even more accursed. The red sun hung low over the desolation, shining red on the wind-carved rocks and the sand dunes, while a low, yellowish mist hung over the fallow places between them. Shath crouched over the men he had slain and stripped them for their armor and harness. He made himself a patchwork of steel plates and gathered a mantle made of scaled skin, likely taken from the same beasts they rode. He armed himself and belted on a new sword and dagger, and he felt renewed.

He had caught one of the riding beasts, and he mounted it, seating Ellai before him and drawing his new cloak over her to shield her from the harsh sun and the constantly billowing dust. He took a spear in his iron right hand and they rode forth. The storm had erased all marks of passage, and so there was no trail to follow, but he began the way the riders had come and he followed it, wending between the strange-looking stones.

There were bones mixed in among the sands, and he saw some of them were men, while others belonged to the brutish, mutated race that dwelled here in the wastes of Ur. This place was poisoned, and he wondered what manner of beings would choose to dwell in it, to breathe in unclean air and subsist on the bitter waters of this place until their very forms were twisted and misshapen.

He rode until the sun was high, a great red pyre blazing down, and then he heard the chanting. At first he thought it was the wind, but then he realized it was many voices all raised together, calling out words he did not understand. He hesitated for a moment, but then Ellai touched his hand and urged him onward, and so he followed the sound. The path led up along a rocky trail, and then he had to dismount and leave the steed behind, made fast to a stone. He crept up along the path, Ellai crouched on his shoulder, until he could look through a window in the rock and down upon the scene revealed there in the glow of the crimson sun.

There was a valley of stone, the floor of it thick with dark sands. It was thronged with the men of Ur, all gathered in their war-gear, chanting and beating their swords and axes upon their shields. They swayed side to side, chanting and stamping their feet, and now he recognized one word in among the noise. Vodra, they shouted as one. Vodra! Vodra!

At the far end of the hollow was a cave, the entrance yawning like a mouth, and as he looked, a hooded shape came out from the darkness to stand in the entrance. It held up its hands and he saw long, bony limbs with skeletal fingers, and one hand clutched the hilt of a long, curved knife that gleamed in the poisonous light.

The chanting fell silent, and he heard the lone figure call forth in a thin voice that rasped like scales over stone. “You live for the Vodra, and you will die for the Vodra! The Vodra is the last god upon the face of the world! The world is death, the world is decay! Ur is the final place upon the world, and there is nothing beyond it! The Vodra keeps death at bay, and so you must feed the Vodra! Blood for the God of Life!”

“Vodra!” the men of Ur chanted. “Vodra! Vodra!”

Shath watched as the hooded priest pointed into the crowd and victims were dragged forward, males and females both, though all wore armor and went armed. The crowd leaped upon them and stripped their weapons away, dragged them to the cavern mouth, and Shath watched with some disgust. To sacrifice their own kind to song unseen cavern god was unclean to him. Among his people they only sacrificed those taken in battle, and those who had been brave died a brave death, not screaming on a blooded altar.

They forced the first victim to his knees before the hooded priest, and that sickle blade flashed through the red sunlight, drawing a spray of lifeblood. The twitching body was flung over the edge to plummet out of sight in the dark cavern. The crowd roared and chanted the name of their unseen god, hammering their shields together to make an echoing din that reverberated from the stone sides of the valley.

Shath felt a small hand touch his own, looked down and saw Ellai there, looking up at him with wide, desperate eyes. She was a gentle creature, and displays of bloodlust like this were frightening to her. She plucked at his arm and he nodded, started to draw her away, but she stopped him.

“No,” she said. “You must stop it. Stop it.” She pointed across the valley, where another victim’s cry was cut short by the slash of the sacrificial blade. She said something else, but the chanting and stomping drowned her out. Shath looked into her strange, lovely face and then he nodded. He put a hand on her to signal her to stay where she was, and then he took the spear in his iron hand and stepped to the mouth of the opening in the stone.

He drew back his arm and sighted down the spear-haft, watching, and when the robed priest lifted the bloody knife for another killing stroke, he hurled the weapon with all the power in his inhuman arm. No flesh and blood arm could have cast it so far or so powerfully, and it hissed as it parted the air, flew across the hollow, and struck the upraised knife and sent it spinning away even as the spear struck the cave-wall and splintered apart, the head striking bright sparks.

Silence cut across the hollow as every warrior stilled, staring as the priest clutched their hand and screamed in a mix of fury and wrath. Those holding the victims fell back, and those chosen to die took the opportunity to scramble away. Shath felt a tremor beneath his feet, and he wondered just what manner of being he had chosen to do battle against.

He gathered himself and leaped down from the high place where he perched, and he landed easily on his powerful legs. The men of Ur drew away, muttering, grasping their weapons, and he drew forth his stolen sword and held it up, ready to contend with any who would come against him. He felt the murmur of their wrath ripple through the mass of them, and he made ready for the shedding of blood.

A shadow flitted over him, and he looked up, startled, as Ellai opened her wings and circled down toward him. He felt a sudden fear, knowing it would not be easy to protect her from them. The Urugan drew away, staring up at her, their blind-white eyes wide as they watched her drift down on her delicate wings until she lit upon his shoulder, her familiar slight weight settling upon him.

A hush went over the gathered warriors, and Shath saw them look at one another with expressions of wonder bordering on fear. He stepped forward and they drew away like the parting of a sea, and so he passed among them, sword ready but unneeded, as they gave back from him, their eyes always upon the slight, winged form upon his shoulder.

He walked across the vale until he stood before the mouth of the cavern, and the crouched, hooded priest stood there, clutching its wounded hand, and Shath saw the slight cut dripped blood that was a dark green, and that it smoked upon the stone where it fell. “You would dare,” the thing hissed. “You would dare blaspheme against the Vodra.”

“I am Shath the Iron-Handed, Last of the Horned Clans. I dare all, and fear nothing. I do not fear death, nor gods, and not you.” He leveled his sword at the hooded form. Now he was near, he could see it was no human shape. It was too tall, the skin gray and hanging in folds, the fingers twice as long as they should be. He could not see the shrouded face, and was glad of that. “Begone, with your false god. I will unmake you, if you oppose me.”

A sound came from the apparition, and it trembled upward into a high-pitched shriek as the priest shuddered all over, and then it hurled itself at Shath with long fingers outstretched. Shath did not flinch, he only struck a single blow, cleaving the unseen head from the cadaverous body and sending it tumbling back down the cavern into the unseen depths of the pit beyond.

The body heaved up, spilling blood from the severed neck, and he saw the thing possessed no legs, only a long, serpentine trunk that stretched downward into the cave. It shook and pulsed, the skin scaled and glistening with some dripping slime, and then it vanished, pulled downward into the earth, leaving behind only a trail of bilious green ichor. For a moment, all was still, and then the earth began to shake.

The people of Ur cried out and scattered from the mouth of the cavern, and Shath felt Ellai leap from his shoulder and take to the air as a hot wind blasted out of the depths of the cavern. He backed away, sword at the ready in his hand, and he watched that black abyss, awaiting what might show itself to the light of the red sun. He heard something like a great leathery sliding and scraping, and then he darkness of the cave became a more physical darkness, and the Vodra emerged into the light.

At first all he saw was a mouth filled by rows of sawing teeth, all grinding and scraping against each other, and then the head of the immense worm came into sight, ringed by a dozen black eyes and pulsating with tenebrous life. The jaws yawned wide, and it vomited forth a stinking torrent of hissing bile that ate into the rock and fused the sand to glass.

Shath slipped aside from the spreading pool and leaped in to hew at the thing, cutting deeply into the scaled flesh. It writhed and dragged more of its wormlike body from the hole, trying to use its coils to crush him. He hacked at it again and again, the blade driven by the power of his iron arm. He cut at it until the sword dripped with green blood and the metal began to dissolve.

The Urugan had scattered, leaving him alone in the valley, and he had to hope that Ellai had escaped. The thing emerged more and more from the pit, seemingly undeterred by the wounds he gave it. It was immense, a maggot nested deep in the flesh of the earth. It opened its dagger-lined jaws and he saw there the greatest horror – the headless corpse of the priest-thing, revealed to be no more than a lure upon the tongue of the monster.

More tendrils shot out from the yawning maw and tried to seize him and drag him in, but he severed them with sweeps of his corroding blade until the steel snapped apart and left him unarmed. He was at the far end of the hollow, the whole of it filled with the writhing coils of the Vodra. He leaped to the rocks above, digging his iron fingers into the stone, pulling himself up away from the heaving mass of hungry flesh below him.

In his mind, the world spun as if far below, and he saw lines of light cross and recross the unknown face of twisted continents. He felt the power that lived in the sky above, and he called upon it. Linkages closed in his brain, filaments of metal sending signals forth, and then he felt the answer pulse down from the sky above.

There was a flash there, high overhead, and as he hurled himself over the lip of the hollow and slid down the rocky escarpment, he heard thunder. The sky began to glow, and then the light became blinding. He heard the thing called the Vodra howl as a scintillant line of white fire flashed downward, and then the roar of the impact blasted the valley apart, hurling molten rock into the sky and sending a shockwave of billowing dust raging outward. Shath covered his face as the skies roared and the earth shook, and the thing that called itself a god was scattered into ash.

o0o

By the time the sun was setting in a dying blaze, the dust had begun to settle. All that remained of the valley was a hollow of blackened glass, and no sign remained of the great worm, or of the cavern itself. Shath did not know how many victims of the false god might lie interred there deep under the earth, but there was nothing he could do for them save what he had done.

He walked the devastated vale, Ellai perched upon his shoulder, and he turned to look as the mutants of the land of Ur came shuffling forward to gather around him. They were an army of men and women and even the young, all armed and ready for war, but they had dwelled here too long, been told there was no other place in the world. They were a sword grown sickly in a dead sheath.

“I am Shath,” he said. “My people were destroyed, and I have come here to the far ends of the world to take the power that will gain me revenge. I am going east to face a mighty empire, and I will need an army.” He pointed to them all with his metal fingers. “You will be that army. You were told there is no place but this one, but that is a lie. There is a wide world beyond these wastes. Ur has made you strong, and so now you shall burst upon the world like a storm. Ride with me, forget old gods and old curses. Ride with me into glory, for I promise plunder and blood and never-ending war!”

Their answer rose up in a shout that echoes across the devastated waste and rose up to the sky as the stars burned and the shattered moon stretched across the far horizons. Shath heard them and he closed his eyes, glad to be once again among warriors. With an army, and the power in the sky, he would cross the world and grapple with the power of an empire, until all that there was lay broken before him.