The wind here did not howl. It groaned, long, low, and ceaseless. As though the mountains themselves resented the gash torn open in their western flank.
The wasteland beyond was a plain of silent ash, littered with slag-bones of creatures long dead, the life of this province had been sucked away, what remained was a husk of its former self. A wasteland of death and horror. It stretched endlessly, a grey wound under a choked grey sky, with no sun to mark time, only a faint orange glow that never shifted, as if cast by a fire too distant to warm.
At the threshold of this gap, where stone gave way to ash, a convoy waited.
A modest assembly by Eshkin standards: a spiked iron carriage, wrapped in rusted chains, its wheels half-buried in the dried-out dirt below. Flanking it, a cluster of Clan Metus infantry faces veiled, armour pitted from past campaigns.
A Warmaster of Clan Metus, hunched over and uneasy beneath a windless sky, stood watch beside a warded carriage. His armour was crude, bone-plated and bo, its joints stitched with chain cords made of scavenged loot of the last raid. A lantern hung from his back, dimly pulsing with the flaming light of a doomstone-powered lantern. He stood like a forgotten soldier left to weather in the elements, watching the horizon where the ash met the sky.
He was waiting for the outsiders.
Around him, a handful of Metus soldiery held their ground, silent, veiled, weapons unsheathed but still. They knew better than to speak too often here. The wastes had ears, and sometimes the things that listened remembered.
The Warmaster’s gaze held to the far edge of the breach, waiting. Two were meant to arrive, outsiders, not Eshkin, not known, not trusted. One of the soldiers shifted. “They should have reached-arrived us by now-now, yes-yes”, he muttered. The Warmaster did not reply. His gaze remained fixed westward.
In these lands, time was a suggestion, and death, a certainty.
@Seraphina Ivory @Naexi
