Steven Montano - Crown of Ash

“I was just scouting the area, but I…I triggered something…I accidentally found the way to open some p ortal…”

“Ok…it’s okay,” Kane said. F or a moment he forgot the fact that she techn ically wasn’t on his side. “I t’s okay. We know it’s bad, and that’s enough to get us started.” He looked at the rest of them. “Maybe we should…”

A deafening explosion rang through out the cabin. Flam es blasted across the window. T he ship nearly flipped over in mid-air. Maur cursed, and Kane wasn’t able to grab hold before the ship violently lurched sideways and threw him against the wall.

Alarms blared through the airship. Freezing wind blasted through a rent in the hull. Noise and violent motion eclipsed Kane’s senses.

He managed a glance at the nautoscope, and he saw war machines approach across the sand. He wasn’t sure how they ’d managed to get so close without being noticed.

Jade went to the torn hull, and her spirit tried to weave it back together. S team erupted from the ship ’ s pipe-work as the auto-flush system purge d the flames from the aircraft’s interior. Sol grabbed his weapons and Ronan climbed into the gunner’s seat, a swivel-mounted chair near the aft end that controlled the top-mounted 20mm cannons.

Bladed missiles raced by them outside. Kane readied his M 14A, moved behind Maur, and looked through the viewport. A pair of vampire tanks with oversized stone wheels and steel-plated hulls raced towards them, bladed sharks that dragged chains across the ground. The vehicles bore rotating iron guns and bone harpoons. Dark sails atop the sleek vessels propelled them along using the desert wind, and churning pillars of smoke billowed from their exhaust ports.

More missiles launched, screaming black shards of serrated cold metal that left trails of spectral steam in their wake. Kane saw ghastly faces race ahead of the weapons as they drew close.

“Maur, I hope you know what the hell you’re doing!”

Wicked ’s cannons roared. Kane covered his ears — the grind of the motorguns was deafening. The ship rocked with explosive blasts. Shells tore one tank apart as Maur twisted Wicked and dodged the first missile.

But the second missile struck home. The blast tore open the starboard hull and threw the ship sideways. The roar of exploding steel enveloped them. A wave of h o t wind threw Kane hard against the port wall. Glass shattered and flew through the cockpit like rain.

Kane felt nothingness below and around him as Wicked careened out of control. The cannons kept roaring.

Jade fell against the shattered starboard hull and nearly slid out of the ship and into open air. Kane threw himself forward and slid across broken glass, grimacing as he reached out and snagged her hand. Sol grabbed his legs and kept them both from falling out. They all three held on to the floor plating as Maur did his best to wrestle the ship back under control.

“Hang on!” Kane shouted. H e held tight onto Jade’s arms for those final few seconds before the airship crashed to the ground in a blaze of metal and fire.

He is fugitive to a shadow world.

Nothing is constant. The sky bleeds red to dark to pale and back again. Clo uds like teeth grin down at him.

Day and night are indistinguishable. The sky is the same stain, the land the same matte darkness. Jagged hills and half-ruined structures protrude from the ground like scabs. T he world looks dipped in tar.

He roams like a carrion bird, p icking up discarded items, but little of what he finds is useful. He has n o need for food or water in that place. He is a living ghost.

The dank red sun is the only constant. The air reeks of caustic gases and decay. Iron clouds scar the sky. The dull light has pained his eyes for years.

Trees bend and twist into one another like drunken serpents. Great valleys rest in the middle of dry riverbeds. Dark water flows uphill, turgid and thick, like muddy oil. Massive skeletons litter the land, great tusked horns and shattered simian skulls, the remains of beasts from some lost age.

He’ s covered in black and red dust, a thin layer of soot that won’t come off his skin no matter how hard he tries. Every puddle and flow of water is tainted, filled with iron sediment and crumbling stone.

The world is covered in a film of grease and soot. Shadows cling to his flesh and the trees and the air he breathes. Flakes of it clog in his throat and nostrils.

He walks. Sometimes his curiosity is piqued by the landscape or its inhabitants, but he rarely stays in one place for very long.

He avoids contact with others. The creatures of the shadow world are dangerous.

He has covered hundreds of miles in his exile, and yet he has gotten nowhere. If there are boundaries to that dank reality he has yet to find them. Black deserts crumble into dead forests that give way to dry lakes. He hears the roar of a distant ocean, but he can never find it.

Every now and again he comes back to the crater, and to Shadowmere K eep. He always finds them in different areas than the last time.

He no longer knows his name. He forgot it long ago.

F or a time he thought the wastelands were just a prison of his mind. He feared he was still trapped with the woman from the keep (he can’t remember who she was, only that she’d betrayed him, and that she’d caused him pain). But the longer he roams the melting fields of rot and trudges his way across the broken earth the more he realizes he isn’ t the only prisoner t here.

Most of the other creatures are just mockeries of natural life. He sees bulls made of iron and birds that bleed acid, g iant reptiles wreathed in shadow vapor and lumbering hulks with oversized arms that drag their knuckles across the onyx soil. None of these creatures have discernible features: they are carved from shadow, ebon-skinned and pale- eyed form s that bleed off in to the darkness.

T here are humans, or at least things that are similar to humans. They travel in groups. They acknowledge each other, he and these natives, by keeping their distance. He has not deigned to approach them, and for their part they have left him alone. They seem to survive by staying together and keeping on the move. They hunt, out of some memory or instinct rather than a n actual need for sustenance.

Or maybe they do it out of cruelty, he thinks. This is a cruel land.

Sometimes he follows the natives from afar. Their groups vary from a few dozen to a thousand, mass migrations that ride shadow horses towards the blood horizon. He isn’t sure why he follows them — there is no esc ape from that place. If there was, those people wouldn’t be there. H e realizes this and breaks away, sets off in a different direction, or so he thinks. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell.

He moves a cross plains of dusk, t hrough petrified black forests and up shattered hills. The taste of metal sticks to the inside of his mouth. He breathes air that smells of coal and brimstone. He is so covered in dirt he can no longer recall the feel of his own skin.

He crosses bone bridges and walks through hollow and abandoned cities. He sees the skeletons of sailing ships. T oppled statue s of strange human-reptile hybrids litter the landscape.

Black clouds converge like stains. Trees, bone thin and sharp, prod the sky like knives.

He walks through fields of blood and oil. Dark nectar drips from skeletal branches. The spines of heavy brambles twist like daggers from the ground.

He walks until his legs are numb and his throat is raw. Shadows seep down to his pores. He drifts like a lost leaf, carried by a wind that smells of age and death.

S ometimes he feels the need to hunt.

He hides in deep forests filled with soot-drenched leaves, where black ash falls like charcoal rain. He skewers mangy shadow hounds and forest cats, skins them and cooks them, but he rarely eats their soiled flesh.