A sinister wall of shadow drifted across the plains beyond the mountain borders of Urenda. Fastening heaven and earth together like a thick black tendon, nothing could be seen beyond its girth, stretching hundreds of miles in any direction. Ploughing winds pulled the soil free from the land about its edges, casting it up to spiral into the heavens like black spectres. Crimson forks split the wall frequently, the deafening cracks of thunder only moments behind. Where the shadow did not reach, the twilight of an amber sunset stained the broken and pitted land, and the visage of a thousand ruinous farms and villages seemed frozen in time.
Taric Vesero knew these phenomena as shadowstorms, unnatural calamities that had carved through the earth endlessly since their birth nearly twenty years before then. He stood atop the face of a broad cliff, hundreds of leagues from the storm, watching it with anxious eyes. Thirty men made camp behind him in an assortment of scavenged equipment, their tents and clothing equally tattered or broken.
Taric did not like storms. They could not be measured, were not predictable. They could not be factored into his plans. He grew increasingly agitated watching it, hoping it would not turn its course toward the cliffside encampment, but knowing that such a feeble thing as hope would not change it. Beads of sweat began to tickle his temples, and he felt too hot in his clothes despite the chill of the coming night.
Soft footfalls brushed the receding grass behind him, and Taric knew it was Mendo Hutrin before he heard his voice. Sneaky, he is. Kill him now. Kill him now. Not to be trusted. Always too quiet. Taric’s right arm trembled as he forced it away from the blade at his hip, forced his body into submission. No. I need him yet.
“M’lord,” Mendo said, stopping a stride away from Taric. Mendo was the leader of the men, now more a crestfallen group of cutthroats than an army, but he answered to Taric after having witnessed his prowess in both battle and strategy. “I been serving you for many years, m’lord.”
Taric’s head snapped around to face him. “Yes,” Taric said, his voice little more than a whisper. “You have served. But what do you serve?”
Mendo’s blunt face screwed up in confusion, but relaxed just as quickly. He was accustomed to Taric’s riddles and had learned to speak around them. “Right, sir. I been thinking, me and the boys, we think it’d be a good idea to…” Fear touched Mendo’s small brown eyes as they flickered between the ground and Taric’s twitching fingers. “We got real messed up the last run. To that Kegi place. We can’t handle these monsters, m’lord. People maybe, but not monsters. Heard Urenda nearby’s got some sort of bastion, like they’s all meeting up and protecting each other…we can’t survive out here alone, m’lord. Maybe we should go-“
The smaller blade on Taric’s right hip flew up in a blur, hilt tucked into his palm in a reverse grip. Its straight edge slipped through Mendo’s throat like water, parting the skin and freeing a scarlet rivulet to pour down his chest. Mendo tried to speak, but only blood gurgled from his lips. He stumbled backwards, clawing at his wound with stubby gloved fingers before falling to the ground in a convulsing, noisy heap. That was how Mendo Hutrin, Taric’s right-hand man, the man who had fought beside him viciously with a blood-stained sword and unwavering devotion, now lay.
“Ruined!” Taric yelled at whatever rapidly-fleeting life was left in the body before him. “It’s all RUINED!” The fire dies the fire dies the fire dies the fire dies. Taric straightened, thrusting his sword into his belt and shaking hysterical whispers from his mind. He scowled at the men rising from their camps and stalked away to a rocky slope. They rose slowly, eyes fixed on him, some moving for their weapons, some breaking into a run for Mendo’s corpse.
Taric ran, as well, dark cloak billowing in the wind as he did. “Urenda. I will find this place. It may be of use to me.” He slowed his pace in the fading daylight when he could no longer hear the sounds of distress in the encampment. Not my men. Not anymore. I will find more. His hands and feet moved with a practiced swiftness as he mounted the rocky landscape that lead to the High Road.
The mountains receded in the path of the High Road, a path aptly named. It travelled risen on slopes high above the outlying land, well away from the dangers of the wild and easy for travellers to defend. Night was coming, then, and the road lay bathed in the dim light of a waning moon as it began its nightly ascent.
Taric beckoned words to his lips, words he could not think, but only speak. It was a rigid incantation of syllables, harsh and foreign on his tongue, whispered in offering to the darkness. The instant the words were said, the glow of the moon seemed to intensify, then blazed like a sun far too bright to look upon. The land was now awash in bright argent, and even the darkest shadows cast by the mountains were penetrated by Taric’s eyes.
Alert and prepared, he advanced toward Urenda, filled with new-found purpose. A tingle in his chest hinted at a sensation not felt in months. He was excited at the events to come, a journey he had not even fathomed, and one to challenge everything that he was as a man.