to my body. I was able to move my arms, and dragging them along the stone-scattered road, I set them in front of me. Eventually, I was able to pull myself into a sitting position. My wrists were bruised, swollen, and infected from the cuts received when they strung me up. My forehead was also cut and swollen. I reached behind me to the water bladder. The warm water stung my wounds, and though I would need the water, it would do me no good if I died of infection. I tore strips off my sleeve, and bandaged my wrists and head.
The pack left by Erik was stuffed with food, most of it traveler's fare; salted fish, hard bread, and dried fruits and vegetables. I took quick stock of my supplies, perhaps a week's worth of food and water in all. My clothing was not more than what I wore the night of Gern's death, but they would be adequate. The mountains were not cold at this time of year, and the desert certainly was not.
A small meal of fish and water helped restore my strength, and by the time the sun began to peak out through the pass, I was ready to rise and walk.
***
The journey through the Winding Pass was quick and without incident. The pass was wide enough to march an army through. The stone and sand strewn road was covered with the wind-worn remnants of abandoned carts, weapons, and everything else dropped by the people of the exodus. I saw royal banners, Esian and Kronan, dropped without care. These were the only markers upon the road, with not a single tree or bush or blade of grass to be found. This barren pass was a warning to the foolish; empty, lonely death awaited me beyond these mountains.
On the second day of walking, I came across a skeleton in the sandy edge of the pass, where the road met the mountain base. An Esian sword was driven through the ribcage and left there. In the sand beneath it, an Esian army badge lay half-buried in sand. This person was an Esian soldier, seemingly killed with the sword of a fellow.
I sighed. Obviously the exodus had started claiming victims, sanity and lives both in equal measure, long before the fleeing, exhausted people of my kingdom even reached the desert. I shook my head and wondered to myself which would find me first, madness or death. Would it matter? The former would likely lead to the later, especially in the harsh desert.
One day later, as the sun set behind me, I came to the eastern edge of the pass. The mountains, which had flanked me on both sides during my journey, now stood silently behind me, as though even they would not look upon me any longer.
The desert before me seemed endless. It was endless, in fact. This was knowledge handed down to us from the beginning. The dunes of gray sand extended outward before me, and to my left and right where they met the foot of the mountains. A warm wind stirred up the grains of sand before my eyes, and I held my arm up to shield my vision. The wind howled at me, beckoned me forward into the embrace of the endless, barren dunes which had swallowed up my people fifteen years ago.
I was at my end. I had nowhere to go. My people would not have me, and by now, word of me would have spread to other villages. Innocent though I knew I was, nobody would offer me shelter. I had been a soldier once, and knew well enough how to survive on my own. I could turn back, and live among the forests. I knew where the plagues did not churn violently. I could hunt, make shelter, stay alive.
I could turn back and live, but I did not want to. No. No longer.
I took the slightest drink of water, and replacing the bladder in my pack, set myself toward my death. I turned toward the desert dunes, toward the endless sands which would claim me as they had my people.
I began to walk.
CHAPTER 4
The sun. I never thought I would view the sun as an enemy. It hung overhead like the great eye of some cyclopean beast, burning with anger at my trespass. The harsh yellow eye gazed down upon me, and I felt its hate. The sand around me, endless and harsh, reflected the heat and warped the air before my eyes. The great, angry eye seemed intent on burning me to the ground. So intent indeed, that it would lure me to my death by making the world about me impossible to navigate.
The sun was not really a beast, of course. Once, before the days when men built great castles and keeps, and raised their standards upon them and declared the world theirs, our ancestors believed that the sun was a god. They prayed to it, offered it wheat from the fields and fruits from the vine, and sang it to its rest every night. In the mornings, they offered it a welcome, crying out upon first seeing it.
"Welcome, father of the stars," our ancestors would call out. "I thank you for your warmth, and pray that you will stay with my family, though yours is far away."
A traditional prayer, offered to a warming God in the Sky. He danced with the Moon goddess in romantic embrace, and their children, the stars, hurried off into the great unknown. Now, they could only be seen in the distance, at night. The Moon, weeping at the flight of her children, refused to speak to her mate, and so fled from him. She appeared only at night, so she could gaze up at her children. Every month she reached out to them, and slowly disappeared from view. Then she grew tired, and returned to us. Our ancestors always thanked her for returning to light our nights.
That was all long ago. Our great mages, wielders of magic, had long since determined that the Sun and the Moon were not gods. They were not alive at all, but merely great bodies in the sky, revolving around our land, Theris, as it rested upon the Fountain of Life. Foolish ancestors. Suns and Moons cared not for our prayers. Even the gods who replaced them in our prayer, the evil gods of the sky and the benevolent gods of the earth, had drifted out of favor among many. Ours was an enlightened age, our knowledge great and far reaching.
Our knowledge had brought us the secrets of construction, metal, medicine, and magic. Our knowledge had also brought us evil, and corruption, and war. A thousand years of all that, and at its end, the end of our world was at hand. Magic plagues, corpses that moved, men who became wolves, and even grass and wind that sought our end; these were the things our knowledge had wrought. The world had turned its back on us, taken from us the magic we used to destroy each other, and used it to wipe us from its surface like the blemish we were. Those of us who had chosen to stay, to ignore the call to exodus, were only delaying that which could not be stopped. We would all die, one by one, until there were no more of us. If there truly were gods watching us, I wondered if they felt disgust or amusement at our extinction.
I was next. I welcomed death. What else was left for me? My refuge, Clearlake, had turned their eyes from me, replaced with the terrible eyes of that horrid statue. Jeannine had turned away, and Erik as well. Only the accusation of a terrible crime remained. And those eyes. Those angry eyes. They stared at me now every time I closed my own eyes. Why suddenly, was this so?
I encountered the courtyard and its statues years ago, on my first visit to Skyreach. I had walked through the ranks of statues many times. I had stopped to read the inscriptions more than once. I had stared upon the nameless, unknown Dark Lord often enough over the years. Why now did it suddenly haunt me? What had changed? Had the keep simply had enough of my constant trespassing? Or was it something else? Had someone or something followed me back from the keep this time? Or was it truly me? Had I become a Kronan monster? Had I killed Gern, and simply hidden the knowledge from myself?
Too many questions. Too many questions needing answers, and I was without a single solution. Death was the only answer I could find, and it seemed to seek me out as quickly as I sought it.
And so I walked.
I walked through the endless desert, watching the sun rise from its rest, burn me, set, and rise again. I did not eat or drink, though
