The dawn sun crawled across the rocks while Lesh savored her breakfast of kej tea and ripe leno fruit, as had become her habit these two decades past. This victual she had picked up in her cyclings spent from home, among the fisherfolk of Terth. Most of those them were early risers, brewing their tea and as they did peeling the purple lenos to heartily sink teeth into crimson flesh.
The leno, as large as two big fists conjoined, was not a particularly sweet fruit: rather quite bland and at times with a sort of coppery aftertaste, the flesh moldy, yet it was belly-filling and held one to lunch, which was a meal the Terthians(and Lesh, certainly) made sure to never skimp on.
It was, of course, great fortune that a seller of these fruits existed out here in the riplands, in this dustbowl trading town named Derklu, so far from the coastal jungles of Mershaher and even Lesh’s home in the stalkflats. At least she had brought enough kej stems from her small garden to last her some time. She knew well enough that at some point in the future the luxury of maintaining some of her personal habits would be slowly denied to her, but not in a fell manner, no, she would make sure of that!
Lesh always found pleasure in looking at things from a fresh perspective; just as her pilgrimage to northern Terth at fourteen cyclings had introduced her to a new, interesting way of life, to the verdant coastal crags and the people inhabiting them, so too this journey would prove interesting... it certainly had so far.
All the things she’s seen! Half a hundred leagues crossed already, all the way from her humble cottage, weaving over the farmpaths wending through the ever-overgrown stalkflats. That journey had been relatively peaceful, barring a drunken acoster, and finally she sighted Fensere. There she had joined a milling crowd of souls, all looking for passage upon the great fungal barges that berthed near the shores and plied the placid river Tsere.
After brief discussion and the exchange of three ivory discs, Lesh was pointed vaguely in the direction of her cot and subsequently ignored by the bargefolk and her hundreds of fellow passengers alike. Not that she had minded, content with spending her time watching the turgid waters of Tsere lap against the ever-changing landscape as the barge wended its way north, downriver, and relieved by not having to carry her overstuffed pack.
At long last the barge had lazily spilled itself into lake Kaz, and from there Lesh had taken the cobbled Satrap’s road, wide from where it stretched out of the Kaz fens, and narrowing league by league as it ascended into the distorted riplands. And finally, with near on six hundred leagues still remaining between Lesh and Kastrasorp, she found herself here in Derklu, a sprawling settlement with structures built into the jutting rocks of the south as well as onto the northern plains, depending on the inclinations of the denizens.
Slowly gulping down the last of the kej, the cloying fragrance presaging that sweet rush of simultaneous relaxation and enervation, Lesh studied the hustle and bustle from beneath the humble sandstone overhang she had made her home.
They day was hot, an uncomfortably dry morning heat, yet it no way deterred some from going about their business and whether they did this adroitly or lazily seemed more a matter of temperament than acclimation to Lesh. Derklu was the northernmost outpost of the Satrapy, and so was a centre of interest for many—the various stone-wanderer tribes of the riplands, caravans mostly from the south and east; Lesh recognized Kazan fencrawlers come to trade frog hides, merchants, mercers, sellblades and rogues of each and every persuasion.
Most of the folk were human, with skins predominately ranging from light sienna to dark umber and the many shades between, with long pointy ears; small round ones or fat lobed ones, and noses of many varieties. The day before Lesh had even spotted a gaggle of pale-skinned southrons, all of them with night dark hair and bedecked in their tapesterial togas and overly tall hats, all interwoven with the brightest of threads, ancestor bones and tin discs polished to such a gleam as to dance in reflection to the world with every movement. It had been quite the impressive sight in the midday sun.
Some hours after Lesh sighted a second group which had intrigued her even more, in an exciting albeit nauseating manner. It consisted of three kershaks, that strange people who preferred, it was said, to dwell in their subterra fastnesses, and shady forests and craggy swamplands, who scorned the sun and all who moved beneath it.
At least, such were the rumors, or perhaps superstitions, that Lesh had come to know of, among other darker ones besides, whispers of carrion eatery and cannibalism and even more entropic practices. Her father, a humble sage who before his disease had been her guiding light, did not have much to opine on the matter. “Them’s strange folk, true,” was what he used to say whenever Lesh had heard the latest oddity and came bothering him in his work, “but I never seen one, met one, spoke to one. So what can I say?”
He would always go on to repeat one of his rote lessons, insisting that she trust her own senses, and that chances were that whoever it was that said whatever this time around most probably had never encountered a treshak, either.
Well, yesterday she’d gotten her chance to study the strange beings and it had been quite enlightening. The three of them had come jabbering and whistling into one of the larger markets nestled between the stone ridges jutting from the pebbly earth almost twenty feet to more than forty feet at their apexes, enveloping the bazaar about two hundred yards on three sides. Lesh was seated at the time, spooning some steaming brek stew into her mouth when their strange ruckus drew her attention.
The keshaks walked hunched, stoop-shouldered yet with arms inordinately long(at least in human terms), so that they were held to the sides with the elbows bent out. Lesh had marveled at how far those things might grasp, but did not see a keshak enact such a feat. The beings had backward jointed legs, thick yet short thighed with long, bony calves stretching to four clawed toes on each stubby foot: three to the front and one jutting inward to the side.
All of this Lesh had surmised from only one of the specimens: One not clad like its fellows, indeed it was utterly naked with its leathery hide stretched thin, moreso against its many torso bones that seemed to be ribbed vertically, not like humans at all!
She had struggled to identify anything remotely sexual despite the kershak’s stark nudity, and was surprised to note that there didn’t seem any obvious way by which it could perform its other excretions. The many folk gossipings she had lapped up in her youth had never hinted at such absurdity... the only conclusion she could reach was that it had to be done through the skin, or their beaked yet strangely lipped razor-teethed mouths, if they ate at all... which surely was something, at least, that all living things had in common? Lesh wasn’t sure; in fact she knew from all her father’s many tales and the reality of the world around her that, forevermore, nothing was stable and anyone believing so were fools.
During the spiritrend the cosmic creators had been forced to tear themselves apart, to abandon the world to the deluge of their destruction in order to save it from the folly of a single mortal, a mortal who had dared to try and tame the stuff of creation itself. None truly know what happened on that far distant continent of Gekak, how a single man, or so it was said, managed to threaten the spirits enough that they chose their own destruction and the eternal scarring of the only planet among the infinite stars: its waters, its soil and beasts and people and even, some doom sages shrieked, its very core.
All of that had been, as near as all the squabbling scribes and ego-stroking scholars could agree on, a little more than three thousand years ago. The great scarring it was also called, the times of change and carnage and madness. In a reality-wrenching instant priests were severed from their patrons, some so brutally as to have fallen into dust or become withered, pathetic and drooling parodies of their former hale selves.
Only Ak, spirit of death, had remained then. Only one spirit, howling the sorrow of its solitude into the hearts and minds of its priests. Most of them, or all depending on the records, were driven mad beyond recovery, yet were still suffused with Ak’s power, the power of the only spirit. Some merely stepped off cliffs, it is said. Those who did not carved their bloody madness onto the slates of history, like Mellek-Sha Pinha, She Who Reaps, who led legions of starving and shock-mad souls on a rampage that scoured whole continents of life. She was fed for centuries by the energies of Ak while her followers cared naught for sustenance nor survival, for once they were embraced by her chaos they could only end life, of insect and plant and everything else until they sagged into nothingness due to thirst, hunger or damage.
All such tales children of the scarred world knew, for even if the rending was an event of ages past it still dictated the daily wend of the world as it was. Here on Sashen lands shifted, polities sinking beneath the waves and just as new earth speared out of the crust, quite literally in the case of the riplands. Beasts were altered, entire communities changed in the span of the breath it took the spirits to enact their dire purpose.
As the millennia rolled on, southwestern Sashen suffered through ages so dark as to be still etched into manifold cultures as tales and scriptures of terror and dire warning, yet folk adapted.
Certainly they still warred among each other, but they also became acclimated to eldritch floras, shattered landscapes and fearsome beasts. In some places this pandemoniac altering of nature was beaten back, scoured, tamed... other communities adapted around it, and some who were not changed by it readily embraced any such changes. The world had always been a strange place filled with strange peoples, even before catastrophe, and Lesh reflected that it was a wonder that the Satrap had been able to introduce a state which approximated peace some four centuries ago.
It was with such wandering, meandering thoughts that Lesh kept herself busy with while cleaning her kej pot, keeping an eye on the folk moving past her shelter. This was her third day in Derklu. The first Lesh had spent resting her weary body, and yesterday she had set about getting enough supplies for at least six days, also making inquiries both in her native Klekish and in the Satrap’s tounge, Zeran, of which she boasted only half-fluency. It had taken her some time and a lot of expansive hand gestures, but she had finally cornered a rangy looking woman who indeed turned out to be from the plains to the north. While her Zeran had been even more broken then Lesh’s, after a few minutes spent gesticulating and at times articulating like a grunting beast, Lesh finally gleaned a pretty good idea about what type of person she was looking for.
She slipped her pot into its leather pouch, placed it in the top cranny of her pack and tied its hempen ropes taught. Lesh continued sitting against the rockface, her head resting against it and strands of her auburn hair dancing before her eyes in a surprise breeze. It took patience, and the sun did shift some up the rocks, but finally she sighted a very likely candidate: he was rushing through the wide crag, sticking to the edges were it was faster and weaving close past and through others were it was unavoidable. An old fellow, his grey-brown beard bouncing against his navel as he shoved his way past a dung seller.
What had caught Lesh’s eye was the sack of nails as thick as two of her fingers and half the length of her forearm slung across the man’s left shoulder. She slipped her pack onto her back and rushed to catch up with the longbeard, who was heading toward the plains.
Pushing through an arguing Kazan family, Lesh managed to fall in next to her target at nearly a lope.
“You a beetler?” she asked in Zeran, clutching her pack’s strap as they strode. The oldard met her eyes for a solid ten heartbeats, quite a feat considering they were still weaving through the morning traffic.
“Who’s you asking for?” he finally drawled, squinting at Lesh as if she was a possible tree leech ready to drop from a branch and paralyze him for some egg-laying.
“I’m looking to cross the plains,” she easily rejoined, not bothered by his gruffness in the slightest. The man grunted and made a barely perceptible whipping of the head, which Lesh could only assume meant ‘follow me.’ Still, she could swear he lengthened his stride, as if not pleased in the slightest by this new addition to his morning labors.
After some minutes they came to the end of the echoing crag, and for the first time Lesh looked out upon the powdery pink plain that stretched beyond, with the spears of the riplands reaching for the sky to both sides as far as the horizon went. Here Derklu took on another face, the crampness of the crags no longer an isssue as the folk sprawled out in numerous tented camps, wagon laagers and a few caravanseri made from ripland stone or whatever other material had been at hand. In the distance she saw a watchtower stretching forlornly over the expanse.
Lesh had asked the old man his name as they walked, more out of boredom than anything else, but after ignoring her with a glance she decided against any further attempts at conviviality. Instead she studied the peoples of the scattered enclaves, ranging from trader camps that drew in all kind of folk to scattered campfires tended by lone travelers, their possible reasons for embracing solitude a tantalizing mystery that Lesh explored with each figure she so sighted.
At last, after what had felt near on an hour of walking, the old man slowed his pace. While Lesh had been impressed by the many camps, the ones they now neared were by far the strangest of the lot. They seemed to be more widely scattered, and beyond stretched only the pastel plains. Giant insects, twice to thrice the size of her sold cottage, grazed listlessly on the strange grass or were being loaded with cargoes.
It was with another grunt and a small movement of the head that Lesh was pointed to a large, colorful tent consisting of what seemed to be various salvaged and conjoined fabrics. Without a second glance the longbeard strolled off with his bag of nails, and now there was no doubt in Lesh’s mind as to his profession, for he strolled lazily to one of the ebony beetles.
Wasting no time, Lesh marched to the the tent, pushed the flap aside and entered. The woman who turned to face her was taller, broader, wearing a kilt and a loose woolen vest over skin that was a map of scars.
“Can I help?” she asked in a surprisingly gentle voice, her large mouth set in a grin.
“Yes, I hope so. You take people across the plains?”
“For a price,” the woman affirmed.
“And that would be?”
“Twenty discs, you come with us to Jekert, forty we feed you. Seventy we feed your mount as well. Quite simple.” Again a disarming smile.
“But I can’t ride on one of the beetles?”
“Ak no, girl! Them’s for the cargo, and for we who tend and own the beasts. Expediency, tradition, I’m not in the caring for what you want it called but we don’t go about taking passengers, but if you got the pay then you can join us. You’ll be safe, no worry bout that, got near on twenty warriors of my own, and we ain’t setting off alone at the start that’s for sure.”
“I don’t have a mount.”
“You have discs for one?”
A nod, and the woman whistled all of a sudden, much to Lesh’s surprise. Some moments later a scraggly lad appeared in the tent of the scarred woman, who had since introduced herself as captain Kerata.
“Jor, sirrah Lesh here is in need of a beast. Now she went and admitted that she knows next to nothing of husbandry and all that, so you make sure she gets sold one that’s hardy and doesn’t go no way to wasting her discs, she still has to pay us lad!”
Jor set about this task with alacrity, whether out of fear for the boss or general pride Lesh could not determine. The sun had slipped past midday when they returned to the camp, Lesh pulling a rangy poltar on its reigns. Strange amphibian creatures, this one definitely looked tough and she had made sure to load it with some bags of extra feed despite already having decided she would pay Kerata for a share of the caravan’s stocks as well.
Lesh slept well that night, choosing to fall in bed early. Some of the caravaneers did the same, while others decided that they would rather revel away their last night in civilization for quite some time.
The new day dawned and so the journey began. There were three of the great beetles in Kerkat’s group as well as a few other travelers. With a shock Lesh realized that two of the kershak she had sighted before had also joined them, the naked one and one other in its voluminous robe. They both walked, with the nude one pulling a small covered wagon behind it with what seemed to be relative ease.
The going was slow at first and two days passed by in a breeze. The beetles were to be spared for a bit, perhaps not to tire them out too fast or acclimate them to continual movement, and so Lesh led her mount by the reigns. This gave her time to appreciate the monotonous yet beautiful landscape, the ever-rolling pastel pink grass that was so utterly without nutrition that only the beetles really ate it.
On the third and fourth day the pace picked up and Lesh had no choice but to ride, at first wonkily but after a day with enough confidence not to feel permanently unbalanced. On that fourth night it rained heavily, and on the fifth day Lesh’s world changed forever.
It was while ascending a muddy hillock when one beetle slipped in the earth, plowing a ditch as it canted, toppling some of its cargo and those riders who didn’t manage to grab onto the nails driven into its carapace. It was this shifting of the earth which revealed an electrum chest, or perhaps coffin, runed and ancient-looking. Once Kerkat’s beetle had caught up the warriors and beetlers were already prying open what they believed could only be a great treasure.
It was when Kerkat gave a querying shout that the lid was blown clear in an actinic flash of blue light and discharged air, careening into the distance. Before anyone really knew what was happening, a man stepped from the container, standing naked, his fully tattooed skin withered by great age yet his face plastered with a wide, youthful grin.
Shocked silence reigned when suddenly a great screeching came from behind, and as Lesh turned she saw the robed kershak come in at full stride, seemingly shouting in its own tongue as it charged at the man with outstretched claws. Some of those who had pried the lid open, not knowing what else to do, leveled their spears and tools at the charging creature. Now the naked kershak was bounding after its master, first screeching to it and then suddenly, seeming to sense the futility, switching to Zeran as it shouted at the humans.
“No harm! No harm! Please!”
Lesh was shocked to hear such raw emotion in that voice, and for a moment it seemed that it had done the trick. While the humans hadn’t lowered their weapons, they looked less likely to be killing the robed kershak, which for its part had halted its charge just in front of them but was still gibbering loudly away.
“What’s he saying!” Kerkat demanded of the other kershak. The being was just about to answer, seemingly gripped with terror, when everything devolved into chaos. It began with the naked man, still seemingly unperturbed by his recent unburial, laughing... louder and louder, clutching his belly and screwing his eyes close in mirth. Somehow this was the last straw for the robed kershak as it charged heedless forward, ripping through a wall of spears and spades with its long arms and sharp claws and closing in for what what would surely be a killing strike.
Yet the man, now having subsided to a fit of giggles, merely gave a sharp twist of his left hand. The charging kershak instantly exploded into chunks of meat and a blue mist, for such seemed to be the color of its vitae.
Everyone now scattered away from the man, and Lesh had to take the greatest care to prevent her mount from throwing her as it too sensed the unnatural horror of the act. And then she heard, above the new screams of terror and confusion, the living kershak still gibbering away in Zeran, seemingly to itself. Perhaps it was repeating its masters last words, regardless, those are words that Lesh then and there wished she had never come to hear.
“It is is the spirit-render! The bringer of calamity returned! It is Karazal Haled, the mortal fool, the world scarrer! Architect of the end reborn!”