future.
A man she loved.
Only now he bore the marks of having been… there.
His cloak was now frayed along the edges, his clothing worn in places. His musculature had been enhanced. He now possessed the posture of a hardened soldier, not hunched from studying ancient relics well into the night. He seemed ragged yet powerful. Dartun Sur had led them to another world in search of eternal life, and he looked like he had found it.
Images flooded back to Verain — impressions of that other place, beyond the Realm Gates.
Memories slammed into her mind:
A world enveloped by night. Dust-storms and eternal thunder. A landscape littered with the remnants of cultures, of shattered cities and of bonescapes. War raged in pockets of wasteland, creatures she had never imagined, or those that she thought originated from prehistoric cultures, clashed with ferocity.
Verain attempted to piece together what had happened. She realized she had no sense of time — Bohr, her mind was a mess. How long had it been since they’d first entered the gates? How much time had passed exactly? In her mind, it seemed months had gone. It seemed important to make sense of her presence here. The Order of the Equinox had followed Dartun in his quest and they had found that their relics, their pieces of ancient technology, were quite useless against this highly evolved culture. And they had been captured, imprisoned and tortured. Yet why was she here, relatively unscathed from these events?
She shuddered and erased the thoughts from her mind, and hoped the scars would leave her memory. What was important now was that she survived; because she would not have escaped merely to perish so uselessly. I will not let myself die out here.
FIVE
Ulryk’s Journal
I woke with the first rays of our dying red sun, and used its light to guide me to the ancient city, that throng of spires amp; bridges, that place of legend.
Villjamur.
By horse I rode across snow-smothered fields, through villages littered with little broken shacks. Botanic specimens poked up through ridges of snow, dead or naked and no longer able to offer anything to the world, no culinary or medicinal benefit. How my old brethren would have abhorred such a sight. Bones of animals lay strewn about without dignity along dirt tracks, stripped of all the value they had been deemed to possess. Abandoned.
I could not ascertain the age of any buildings out here. They were perhaps hundreds, maybe thousands of years old, or perchance they had crumbled very recently from small-scale conflicts or were disabled by the weather. They were snow-tipped and crippled and devoid of life. This dying earth showed no remorse.
Villages and towns were settlements directly from hell. There existed — though barely — some very desperate people. Forgotten men and women scraped together a way of life from this noble land; and they came to me in groups, hoping I could help. For the most part all I had were guiding words, ones crafted from the very form of Bohr Himself (if I still believed in them), and I prayed that such utterances could offer solace.
In one village I was able, with caution, to utilize the book I carried and disaggregated the ice from a local lake. They intended to fish there, though I was not confident they would find much, but I left them with the hope — because without hope they would most certainly perish quickly.
Many of the people in rural areas seemed vacant inside — I saw it in their eyes, though they were different from the dead who, kept mobile by some fake cultist trickery, drifted between shadows; a presence that tormented the locals.
But some have sunk to terrible depths. On one dark night, through a village I do not wish to name, I witnessed people feasting on the flesh of other humans. I could barely meet the whites of their eyes, focusing instead on the morbid morsels within their fingers and the kin-blood that dripped onto the frozen ground. It did not take second sight to know these moral turpitudes were not few and far between. Skeletons were hanging from trees, bones rattled against bark in the wind — my instincts suggested some kind of local law was in operation out here, away from Imperial soldiers which, I noted, were in short supply, and I knew better than to question the presence of these execrable totems.
Of true humanity, I noted very little present.
*
I progressed further, as the echoes of the past came to my mind yet again.
Nightmares.
I saw the burning buildings and heard the screams, which still ricocheted around my skull. Those things really happened. I saw the hired militias hauling supporters and protectors into the street and their heads being severed before their families. Women being taken to one side as payment, and raped repeatedly. Those things really happened.
And my secret shame was that all I could do was watch; watch as civilization began to crumble on a far-off island. I watched lives disappear or be ruined. And their sins? Simply protecting me, protecting the truth, protecting my path to Villjamur. Because of what I knew, because I was betrayed, because I put my faith in those close to me.
Those things really happened.
In the distance I could see it, finally, the capital of this Empire. The oldest city we had on these islands, though it did not always go by this name. In written history — for what that was worth — Vilhallan was how she was born, eleven thousand years ago, before the so-called Treaty of Science, where the cultists allied themselves with a society crafted by King Hallan Hynur. An ice age destroyed much of that, though I suspect that was a natural phenomenon. Not like this.. How few people knew these facts of the city in which they lived?
I saw the giant walls and the dark mass of people banking up against them, and leading in that direction was the smeared, well-trodden mud-road that pulled the landscape open like a wound. There were plumes of smoke drifting above like devil-wraiths. The city needed spiritual attention. Garudas circled the city, weaving between those bridges which span almost from cloud to cloud — paths one could believe the gods may tread. The spires went ever upwards, beyond comprehension, and from many of those buildings were banners rippling in the onshore breeze.
It was exactly how I remembered, and it had been so for millennia. It was the home of many of our ancestors, of heritage and culture, and being so it was my last hope. Perhaps it was to be the hope of every one of us left alive.
Villjamur.
If only you knew of the magic you were hiding…
SIX
The cut-throat razor lay in the bucket of hot water. He plunged in his hand to retrieve it, and began to shave: gentle scrapes, always two strokes down before moving along, two strokes then move along, carving away thick lines of foam. Rumels’ skin was tough and leatherlike, and he had only to shave once a week because of the slow rate of hair-growth, but his was still a routine of perfection. When he had finished he rinsed the razor before placing it to one side.
Wearing only a pair of breeches, Investigator Fulcrom faced himself in the mirror, his damp brown skin shimmering in the lantern light. He had a slender face and body for a rumel, who were normally broad and relatively squat creatures, and he had wide black eyes that, so the ladies told him, were adorable. Making postures at his reflection, he noted that his intensified workout regime had really worked. All those sit-ups and push-ups each night were clearly taking effect. Absent-mindedly, he brushed a finger down his ribs over an old knife wound.
He investigated his well-defined face for any missed areas and, after dabbing his skin with a towel, he slicked
