Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-25038310-20160405011238/@comment-5543592-20160512184134

(I thought since Alador will be gone, I'm just going to introduce my character a bit before he actually gets put into the story-- this doesn't have any baring on the present.  This is more of a flashback or something happening in past time, for my own benefit more than anyone else's.)

The man from the east fled across the desert, and the lancer followed.

The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and horses had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

The lancer had been struck by a momentary dizziness, a kind of yawing sensation that made the entire world seem ephemeral, almost a thing that could be looked through. It passed and, like the world upon whose hide he walked, he moved on. He passed the miles stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing. A hide waterbag was slung around his middle like a bloated sausage. It was almost full. He had survived on less water over the years, much less than a person would typically need to survive. Had he been a Greybearded holy man, he might not have even been thirsty; he could have watched his own body dehydrate with clinical, detached attention, watering its crevices and dark inner hollows only when his logic told him it must be done. He was not a Greybeard, however, nor a follower of the Divine Talos, and considered himself in no way holy. He was just an ordinary pilgrim, in other words, and all he could say with real certainty was that he was thirsty. And even so, he had no particular urge to drink. In a vague way, all this pleased him. It was what the country required, it was a thirsty country, and he had in his long life been nothing if not adaptable.

Below the waterbag was his lance, carefully weighted to his hands; a longer haft had been added when it had come to him from his father, who had been lighter and not so tall. The sheath of it crossed the small of his back. The leather sheath was oiled too deeply for even this Hammerfellian sun to crack. The shaft of the spear, made from Wellspring wood, was a cedar brown and finely grained. Rawhide tiedowns held the sheath loosely to his back, and they swung a bit with his step; they had rubbed away the black of his breechs (and thinned the cloth) in a pair of arcs that looked almost like smiles. The leather made subtle creaking noises as he walked. His shirt, the no-color of rain or dust, was open at the throat, revealing sturdy, steel chest plate with straps crisscrossing it. Those straps connected to long, coiling bands of metal armor that wrapped up and down his arms like great snakes, a duster-cloak pinned to the left shoulder but draped across his back to the right, and all of this was held together by twin red belts at his waist.

He breasted a gently rising dune (although there was no sand here; the desert was hardpan, and even the harsh winds that blew when dark came raised only an aggravating harsh dust like scouring powder) and saw the kicked remains of a tiny campfire on the lee side, the side the sun would quit earliest. Small signs like this, once more affirming the Man from the East’s possible humanity, never failed to please him. His lips stretched in the pitted, flaked remains of his face. The grin was gruesome, painful. He squatted. His quarry had burned the devil-grass, of course. It was the only thing out here that would burn. It burned with a greasy, flat light, and it burned slow. Border dwellers had told him that devils lived even in the flames. They burned it but would not look into the light.

The burned grass was crisscrossed in the now familiar ideographic pattern, and crumbled to gray senselessness before the lancer’s prodding hand. There was nothing in the remains but a charred scrap of bacon, which he ate thoughtfully. It had always been this way. The lancer had followed the man from the east across the desert for two months now, across the endless, screamingly monotonous purgatorial wastes, and had yet to find spoor other than the hygienic sterile ideographs of the man from the east’s campfires. He had not found a can, a bottle, or a waterbag (the lancer had left four of those behind, like dead snakeskins). He hadn’t found any dung. He assumed the man from the east buried it.

Perhaps the campfires were a message, spelled out one Great Letter at a time.

Keep your distance, partner, it might say. Or, The end draweth nigh. Or maybe even, Come and get me. It didn’t matter what they said or didn’t say. He had no interest in messages, if messages they were. What mattered was that these remains were as cold as all the others. Yet he had gained. He knew he was closer, but did not know how he knew. A kind of smell, perhaps. That didn’t matter, either. He would keep going until something changed, and if nothing changed, he would keep going, anyway. There would be water if god willed it, the old-timers said. Water if god willed it, even in the desert. The lancer stood up, brushing his hands.

No other trace; the wind, razor-sharp, had of course filed away even what scant tracks the hardpan might once have held. No man-scat, no cast-off trash, never a sign of where those things might have been buried. Nothing. Only these cold campfires along the ancient highway moving southeast and the relentless range-finder in his own head. Although of course it was more than that; the pull southeast was more than just a sense of direction, was even more than magnetism. He sat down and allowed himself a short pull from the waterbag. He thought of that momentary dizziness earlier in the day, that sense of being almost untethered from the world, and wondered what it might have meant. He scanned the desert and then looked up at the sun, which was now sliding into a far quadrant of the sky that was, disturbingly, not quite true west. He got up, removed his gauntlets from his belt, and began to pull devilgrass for his own fire, which he laid over the ashes the man from the east had left.

He found the irony, like his thirst, bitterly appealing.

He did not take the flint and steel from his purse until the remains of the day were only fugitive heat in the ground beneath him and a sardonic orange line on the monochrome horizon. He sat with his lance across his lap and watched the southeast patiently, looking toward the mountains, not hoping to see the thin straight line of smoke from a new campfire, not expecting to see an orange spark of flame, but watching anyway because watching was a part of it, and had its own bitter satisfaction. You will not see what you do not look for, maggot, Ephram would have said. Open the gobs the gods gave ya, will ya not? But there was nothing. He was close, but only relatively so. Not close enough to see smoke at dusk, or the orange wink of a campfire. He was uncertain what he would do when he found the man. Likely kill him, the lancer imagined. The point of his lance would find his adversary’s heart and in some small way his homeland would be avenged. But the great quest, what lay beyond his adversary, called for the lancer to stay his hand, to be the diplomat before the warrior. The thoughts troubled him, and he set them aside for now.

He laid the flint down the steel rod and struck his spark to the dry, shredded grass, muttering the old and powerful nonsense words as he did: “Song of night-tide canopy, stars woven between your leaves, crow’s watching eye, snake’s empty belly, moving, dancing in every moment, forgetting what comes and what is gone.” His voice was a harsh rasp. It had never been deep, only compelling, a voice of a man who was implicitly dangerous. The rasp had crept in over the years, thanks to hardship and age, but was greatly exagerated now do to his dehyrdated state

It was strange how some of childhood’s words and ways fell at the wayside and were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, growing the heavier to carry as time passed. He lay down upwind of his little blazon, letting the dreamsmoke blow out toward the waste. The wind, except for occasional gyrating dust-devils, was constant. Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc below Magnus and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows as the devil-grass burned its slow way down into new patterns— not ideograms but a straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-nonsense surety. He had laid his fuel in a pattern that was not artful but only workable. It spoke of blacks and whites. It spoke of a man who might straighten bad pictures in strange inn rooms. The fire burned its steady, slow flame, and phantoms danced in its incandescent core. The lancer did not see. The two patterns, art and craft, were welded together as he slept. The wind moaned, a witch with cancer in her belly. Every now and then a perverse downdraft would make the smoke whirl and puff toward him and he breathed some of it in. It built dreams in the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl in an oyster. The lancer occasionally moaned with the wind. The stars were as indifferent to this as they were to wars, crucifixions, resurrections.

This, also, would have pleased him.