When he’d awakened an hour after the intrusion of the first streams of pale, stale light had heralded daybreak, the usual ritual of sudden piercing headaches and nausea to assault his mind and body quickly faded.  Too quickly.   That meant he was adapting, getting used to being a part of the broken cosmos into which he’d been marooned.

That was not a good thing.  As long as regaining waking consciousness in this dire place meant pain and discomfort, it meant he didn’t yet belong here.  The discomfort marked him as an alien to this universe and it was his “humanness” which marked him as alien.  He didn’t want to lose that.  To lose that meant to become part of The Withered Land…

And this was definitely not a place to which he wanted to belong.

Staring out past the pewter-gray gloom, he squinted against the wild winds that lashed the upper atmosphere into which the nineteen story minaret towered and he swore bitterly.  They were here, down on the beach.  They'd actually come back, following the trail left in the ruined mind of the lone survivor of that last tragic, charnel event that had stirred up the dwindling populace of the Withered Land.  There had been so much death..., so many innocents had died and perished violently, not knowing why.  And it had only served to reawaken the most vile, most bloodthirsty devils from within the depths of the Withered Land, beings of ambition and power who had slept in endless torpor, content to leave the unraveling of the foul history they'd created alone, now aroused into murderous action once more.   From his perch atop one of the least-ruined minarets in The City, the Traveler in Red had, courtesy of his inhumanly enhanced vision, seen Morpheus Team wink into existence out on the seaside edges of the Forever Plain.

Fools.  Idiots.  

Damn.

Didn't they know enough to stay away?   Didn't they know that just being here would be cause enough to start the killing all over again?

Or did they even care?

The Traveler in Red shook his hooded head, the tousled head of braided auburn hair underneath the coarse-woven cloth was long and shaggy, and he lowered his red visor down across his bleak purple-irised eyes.  He reached down to the stony floor of the balcony on the minaret’s peak and hefted his backpack, slipping his arms, long and whip-like with lean ropey muscle and banded in segmented, deep ruby-colored armor, through the chain-reinforced carrying loops.  He adjusted the bandolier of razor-sharp metal throwing stars across his chest so that the backpack's straps weren't caught on the stars, flipped the edges of his knee-length serape down across his chest where it hung to cover the dual-holstered gun belt he wore around his waist, and then he slowly rose to his full height of two and a third meters.

They were going to need his help.   Again.   And, dammit all, he really did not want to have to help them.  They were stupid and they were greedy and self-centered and they didn't belong in this damned place, in his universe.  Once, he, too, did not belong here, in this place, but circumstance changed his Fate and changed him, as well.  He was no longer who he was.  He was both Less and More.  He no longer felt any real connection with them, with these arrogant Upworlders.  He shouldn't have to risk his life for them.  He'd warned them the last time they'd come here, warned them as they, his former brethren, left, taking their one chance at freedom.  He alone had stayed behind, a lone guardian who protected the doorway out from the Withered Land.  He held the Line, keeping them safe as they had escaped.  He had stayed, dooming himself for an eternity.  How much more could be expected from him?

It had been like that all his life… even back when he, himself, had lived among the Upworlds.  Always the responsible one, always the “Go-To” guy, always the protector and the rescuer, he had grown increasingly soul-weary of that role over the years.  It wasn’t him.  It wasn’t who he was.  He was a thinker, a scientist.  All he’d ever wanted to do was to investigate the cosmos in which he lived, look into the many mysteries of Creation that had tantalized his intellect, but instead, more often than not, he’d had to play the role of warrior.

There was always a war to fight somewhere…

The animated corpse of Adam Wilder ran down the spiral staircase inside the shadowy, crumbling minaret to the arch that opened out into the streets of the sprawling city-fortress that once housed the Royal Family, Court, and Army of the cruel and mighty Emperium.

As he descended the immensely wide stone stairwell, he caught quick views of the different groups of peoples living on the acre-wide cobbled landings in makeshift encampments: a quintet of ragtag families with their skinny, mischievous children gathered in front of canvas tents and metalwork lean-tos, merchants arguing around a wooden table crowded with scavenged machine parts for sale, carpenters and stone workers at opposite ends of their particular landing down the stairwell working on commissions for wealthy landowners, a solemn parade of cloaked mourners following a priest in armored vestments as he led a family’s funeral procession… Each level of the massive stairwell down the northern wall of the sprawling fortress was its own sub-society.  The population of The City had collapsed inward as economic depression and the slow devolution of internal support services in The City had made the areas beyond the government center and business district square incapable of sustaining urban life.  Disease, starvation and violent banditry had taken over most of The City’s neighborhoods and the people, deathly afraid of the roving bands of mutants, cannibals and changelings beyond the city’s fortress walls, drew closer to the security of the local warlord’s armed militia.  By their reasoning, the only safe place to be was inside the boundaries of the fortress’ inner perimeter.

Adam Wilder didn’t have the heart to tell any of them that the warlord, a paranoid, reformed drunken bully of an ex-police officer named Kolag Y’phree, feared the treachery of his own militia as much as the urbanites feared the monsters living on the Forever Plain outside the towering, age and warfare-pitted walls.   

“Traveler!” some of them greeted him, as he passed, with a respectful cordialness or a waved salute, “Red Wanderer!  Hail to you, Dark Nomad!”

When he emerged from under a grand arch decorated with the bas-relief carving of a serpentine dragon, he saw Ryonne, sitting as primly and daintily as ever she did, an albino woman with waist-length white hair and red-eyes hidden under a thick-lensed black visor.  She was his companion and his comrade-at-arms.  Though an albino, here in the Withered Land the rules form albinism did not fully apply.  She retained a dire and irritating hyper-sensitivity to sunlight, but she was neither sickly nor weak of body.  Her energy and stamina often rivaled his own.  She carried a gilt-etched crossbow, a holster of bolts on her hip, and, on a sheath on her back, a long broadsword with a bone hilt.  Paradoxically she was, by most definitions, blind.

She was beautiful in an alien unearthly way, but cold and slightly repellent, as if something reptilian lived within her, something angry and sinister living just under her carefully controlled calm demeanor.  Often, Wilder had discovered, her calmness was a contrivance, a way to ward off fear, a way to control dangerous situations, a way to fool her enemies.  Like most things in the Withered Land, she was not what she appeared.

 She “saw” through the radiations and disturbances of shadow cast by or around anything her eyes locked onto.  As things moved through shade, twilight or gloom, she saw how they created waves in the darkness.  She saw very accurately silhouettes, contours, shapes and could discern depth and distance.  She could not see color.  She could not see fine line features, like those of a human face, the granular details of a painting nor individual strands of hair blowing in the wind.

 And she shared an intimate telepathic rapport with Wilder.

 More, she had a psychic affinity for simple machines: she could feel their molecular structure and actually link with the metal, allowing her to manipulate minor mechanical constructs with a limited form of telekinesis.

 Wilder, known amongst the Caravanserai Leaders, free-trade merchants, and outlaws in the Withered Land as “The Traveler in Red”, presumed that she wasn’t missing all that much.  He knew she would differ bitterly with him.

 For her part, Ryonne assumed that he was better off not returning to the chaos and contentiousness of the busy, bustling Upworlds, better off freed from the shackles of Life, made stronger, larger, swifter, and more durable by the sorcerous science that mutated him in death.  But she knew the tragedies he’d experienced had severely embittered him.

 She had been a slave when he’d found her, chained, starved and used as a passion-thrall in the back of a ramshackle gambling parlour.  Her sex had been used to settle debts.  At the time, he had only been an animated dead man, a slain escaped prisoner from the power-draining Doom Engines of the Emperium’s Life-Harvesters, free for only a few months.  Wilder hadn’t yet grown into his abilities.  He hadn’t yet been immersed in the strange polycultural madness that was what remained of the Withered Land’s society in the wake of the fall of the megalopolis city-fortress called “Phansygree”, once the heart of the mighty Emperium at its conquest-hungry height, once the teeming home to nineteen million people.

 Now the entirety of the Withered Land was barely a third of that population.

 The War had resulted in the destruction of the Doom Engines and the freeing of the power-slaves from the Life-Harvesters.  Phansygree had fallen.  Yet the Emperium had won the War.  How typical of the fortunes of the Withered Land that their victory should be so hollow, to rule over a dead continent in a Reality where everything was spinning down into Entropy.

 “They’ve returned, haven’t they?” Ryonne asked.

 “Yes”, the Traveler in Red replied.  “Yes, they have.”

 “Are they looking for you, Whyelle-dur?”

 He shook his head, suppressing the smile he usually had when he heard her mispronounce his last name.  Like most residents of the Withered Land, she did not understand the normal Western European Earth-human linguistic custom of first-name and then familial last-name.  To her, the last name was the first name and the first name was a designation of merit, or guild association, or a notation of geographic ancestry.  He was not “Adam Wilder” to her.  He was “Whyelle-dur’.

 But he put his musing behind him and aloud he said,  “No.  I’m lost to them.  They don’t know to look for me any longer.  Besides, too much time has passed.”

 “You are sure of that?  I would imagine the knowledge you possess would be valuable to them…”

 “I’m sure.  To them, dead is dead.  It is a finality.  Things Upworld are not as they are here.”

 “Then why do they come?”

 “I don’t know,” he admitted, sighing.

 “Who do they serve?” she asked cautiously.

 Wilder sighed.  It was an inevitable question amongst the surviving wanderers in the Withered Land.  Politics and feudal intrigues ruled the fortunes of the surviving ragtag nations populating the continent, with the existences of entire tribes at the brutal, not-so-tender mercies of the rabid power-mongers who ruled the devastated wastes.

 He and Ryonne had only recently been soldiers inducted into the service of the Barony of Osthursdale, nestled within the Forever Plains’ Western Hills where roving packs of cannibal ruin-dwellers held sway over what remained of the once-privileged population of academicians and artisans.  Only the mighty Temple of Syrkoness'A, the last remaining great church of the Emperium, remained free of pestilence and physical devastation, but it had long since been abandoned by its grand Holy Order.  The Temple had become the castle to the despotic warlord Arvenall Dampiko, called "The Crucifixer".  Dampiko battled the Brotherhood of the Barony, sworn enemies of Lord Lazachus the Infernal, for control over that slaughterhouse of a city.  Wilder and Ryonne had battled the cannibal horde for almost five months time before voluntarily canceling their commissions to the Barons and heading out from doomed Osthursdale. 

 Their travels since then had taken them to the crumbling remains of the monolithic, dead metropolis only known as ‘The City’ at the edge of the Plains.  Not much of an improvement, but it had at least given them temporary respite from the non-stop bloodshed of Osthursdale.

 “I don’t know.  I don’t really know that it matters.  They’re Upworlders.  Their motivations aren’t that much tied in to duty in service to a master or to royalty.   They’re mostly driven by ego and by personal greed”, he explained, frustrated again, as he’d been in the past when talking with her, at his inability to translate the alien concepts of Earth-human interactions into a framework understandable in the Withered Land.  “All I can guarantee you is that it doesn’t directly have anything to do with me.” 

 His last statement referred to the fact that time in the Withered Land was a mutant of Relativity Gone Awry: time did not move in linear form within this plane of Reality and it was a fact that every nine earth days was equal to just one solar day on the Forever Plains.  Time inside the ruins of the fortress-city passed even more oddly, it depended on how close you were to the heart of the dying carcass of the vast, ugly abandoned metropolis.  Usually, it seemed that Time ran in spurts, one seven day Earth week passing in a single Withered Land day, followed by three Earth Weeks compressed into nineteen hours, then a slowdown where chronal energy seemed to reset itself and reassert some form of balance where Time again moved in a 9:1 ratio.  Since the Traveler in Red had been left abandoned, a lone outlaw in a land full of enemies in a chaotic cosmos, nearly twenty-three months of Earth-time had passed.  

 That was a long time to be a stranger in Hell.

 “Then why do we care?” she asked.

 “Because we’re not yet savages,” he answered.  “There’s no honor in abandoning the ignorant to certain death.”

 “Not yet savages, are we then?  Good to know.”

 He ignored her sarcasm.

 “And Kolag Y’phree?” she asked.  “How does the warlord feel about his favorite alien sell-sword soldier running off in defense of strangers?”

 “Didn’t ask,” Wilder admitted with a sneer.

 “I thought not.  Do we really need to get involved?” Ryonne asked.

 “We have to.  If I could sense them so easily then the hunters will sense them, as well.  The last of the Night Marshals would know that they’re here and they won’t tolerate their presence.  I can’t bear to think about what will happen if those Undead Hyenas descend on them…”

 “Are they worth saving?  Do you even know?” she chided softly.

 Wilder looked into her face, seeing his own reflected in the dim light on the black visor covering her scarlet eyes.  “If you were not from this place, and you saw others who were strangers here, others like yourself even though you did not know them, would you leave them to the tender mercies of the Forever Plain and the Wastes beyond?  Would you abandon them to their ignorance?”

 She smiled sadly.  “Perhaps not.  Then again, I might. It would depend on how many enemies they’ve made and if their enemies were my enemies.”

 “Ryonne…”

 “I know, I know”, she sighed. “Let’s go save them.”

                               *     *     *    

 He didn’t like being called a “Warlord”.  The word implied that the chaos and violence of armed conflict was central to his power over his people and his lands.  There was no implication in the term of knowledge, political acumen or subtlety and the word was rife with negative implications.  Warlords ruled with iron fists, ruled by fire and axe and sword, ruled with their furious passions instead of with their intellects, dispensed Justice and Judgment according to their emotional whims.  They were often ambitious and driven peasants and soldiers, lacking delicacy in their personal interactions.  They were blunt weapons of fury as opposed to being razor-honed instruments of elegance.

 Frankly, he existed in a much more complex and fragile world than that.

 Kolag Y’phree was a muscular man of advanced years.  His long, saturnine face adorned by an iron-gray beard and mustache, he was a product of both a military upbringing and long service in the armies of the fallen Emperium, as well as a life as an historian, chronicling the rise and fall of leaders within the crumbling Emperium.  He looked slightly rough, as if he were accustomed to being outdoors more so than within the protective walls of a fortress or castle.  He was moderately tall, but not so tall as many other men in his employ, but his powerful frame, a V-shaped torso with small waist and thick, powerful legs, and his parade ground-erect carriage, made him stand-out as a leader amongst the motley assortment of outlaws and mercenaries from various points of the compass who followed him.  He wore a form-fitting, pewter-gray, segmented armor of overlapping metal bands under a billowing, ankle-length robe made from a quilted collection of tanned animal skins, predominantly reptile.  A metallic necklace, consisting of various empty or spent ballistic artillery shells intermixed with the bleached bones from small predatory animals, hung from his neck ending in a coppery-bronze metal pendant of a howling human skull.  Hanging low on his waist was a braided leather belt on which he wore, on his left side, a serrated edged sword sheathed in a silvery scabbard.  The insignia of a fierce bird-of-prey spreading its wings and talons was inscribed on the sword's pommel.  On the right side of the leather belt was a scuffed leather holster holding a long-barreled pistol with intricate interlocking mechanical parts in its design.  It looked like an evil, deadly weapon.

 But, mainly, it was ornamental, an unofficial badge of office, and sometimes, a tool.

 Kolag Y’phree was of the opinion that if he encountered a situation wherein he needed to actually draw and use the pistol, then whatever result or advantage he had expected to gain from the situation was already lost.

 Violence was a messy means to an end, and it was never to be considered a solution in and of itself.  Most times it caused more problems than it solved.

 “Warlord”.  What a stupid word.

 Y’phree was standing under a circular stained glass skylight in a centrally-located rotunda-chamber at the top of one of The City’s eleven towering minarets.  The minaret in which he stood was the base of operations for The Grand Vizier, an official who often acted as Prime Minister in situations where the authority of the Warlord was needed, but where the actual participation of the Warlord in those proceedings was unnecessary.  The Grand Vizier, who headed the governing committee, was answerable only to the Warlord.

 Kolag Y’phree’s Grand Vizier was that rarity among rarities, even in a post-Wound Era, sophisticated metropolis like The City, a woman.  Her name was Karliandras Dru’ell.

 Though she was taller than the average woman in the City, she was a head shorter than Y’phree, but, though she was a middle-aged, pear-shaped fat woman, she was only half as broad.  She had raven’s wing-dark, luminescent hair that she wore in a severe short cut.  Her wide feet were wrapped in jeweled sandals with high-heels.  She wore very little in the way of clothing, which seemed, at first observation, to be a bizarre and somewhat startling affectation.  The truth of it was that she was afflicted with a rare sensory disorder, a hyper-sensitivity to touch, that interrupted and distracted her thoughts, making her seem a bit unfocused.  Her round shoulders were bare and a polished, wide brass collar encircled her short, thick neck.  Her lush, preposterously-large bosom was suspended by a brassiere of uncomfortable-looking, wound metal coils.  Nothing else encased her torso.  She wore a sea foam-green, floor-length diaphanous skirt over her expansive buttocks and thick, dimple-kneed legs.  Gray bands of metallic armor encircled her thick arms from just above her bicep down to her wrists.  She carried her pale-fleshed bulk with remarkable grace, vitality and agility.

 He’d known her for almost seventeen sun-cycles, back when he was merely a Shieldsman for the Territorial Mobile Militia, little more than a policeman with a military rank, and she had been a novice Witch, an Enchanter, who served as Lead Archivist for the 3rd Continental University.  Back then she was essentially a librarian to assorted Warlocks and Sorcerers approved by the local government.  What those Warlocks and sorcerers had not known was that she was also the government’s spy: keeping tabs on their comings and goings, feeding the politicians and bureaucrats the latest on the projects and discoveries occupying the attentions of these odd, frequently sinister men and women.  People who spent their every waking moment pursuing secrets and the trappings of superhuman power needed to be watched … and watched closely.

 Her observations eventually made her one of the most dangerous people Kolag Y’phree had ever met, bar none.

 “They’re here,” she said in a surprising musical voice.

 “It is certain they are from Upworld?”

 “Definitely.  And they have brought back to us a leading member of the lost Fraternity Machus, a criminal who had gone into hiding in the Upworlds under the name of ‘James Anthony Pearson-Saint Cloud’…”

 Y’phree’s face wrinkled with distaste.  “Mystikyll.”

 Karliandras Dru’ell nodded.

 “He’s going to attempt to rendezvous with Arvenall Dampiko, isn’t he?”

 “Of course.”

 “And do you still predict that she will make her presence known?”

 “The Princess has been summoned by the Land itself.  She is bound to it.  She can neither resist nor decline the Summoning.”

 “I can’t say I look forward to that,” Y’phree said.  “Her power is formidable.”

 “Were I you, m’lord, I would worry more about the Traveler in Red.”

 “Adam Wilder is a good man.  He can be trusted to do what is right.  I have explicit faith in his abilities and his judgment.  He is The City’s guardian, its protector.  Arvenall Dampiko will be hard-pressed to contain the Traveler’s wrath should he incur it.”

 Karliandras smiled.  It was an expression devoid of warmth or humor.  “You place much faith in the Offworlder.  I recall we battled rather bitterly over accepting him amongst us.  You did not approve of my championing his cause.  If memory serves, you took my support for his sponsorship into the Governing Court and his eventual citizenship as a personal affront.”

“He was, and is, an alien from a distant world.  My exposure to such beings was, at the time, limited at best.”

 “He was lost and abandoned in a world he did not then comprehend, a victim of extreme violence, and forgotten by his own kind,” Karliandras said pointedly.  “I would think a former Shieldsman for a fallen empire would have at least a passing understanding of how that could shape his behavior…”

 “Old news, old woman,” Y’phree remarked out the side of his mouth.

 “All news is ‘old’ news,” she said.  “History is created anew with every passing heartbeat.”

 “Spare me the philosophy.  I admit I was reluctant to trust in him at first, but he has since earned that trust.”

 “I agree.  But the rumors persist that The Pilgrim will return to walk the Land if The Princess returns.  The actions and destinies of the two of them are inextricably linked, even in the Upworlds.  And The Pilgrim is more than a match for three Travelers, were there such a thing…”

 Kolag Y’phree suppressed a shudder.  “Hopefully, none of us will have to confront The Pilgrim.”

 “Ah yes, ‘hope’.  Hope is a good thing, m’lord, a rare thing.  And what is it you think Arvenall Dampiko hopes for?”

 Y’phree hesitated a moment and, when he answered, his face had taken on a bleak, unpleasant expression.

 “War,” he said.  “Endless war stretching across the cosmos.”

                                                             *          *          *