Steven Montano: Crown of Ash

Sometimes instead of hunting, he is hunted.

Great beasts with canine skulls, pugnacious jaws and moon-slit eyes prowl th e black lands. There are Blood s h adows: avian and tentacled masses with bea ks and teeth and flailing limbs that rip open the landscape in their ravenous hunger. Snakes melt out of trees like burned trails of cinder. Pools of briny water camouflage the open maws of subterranean marauders.

H e i s forced to do battle with bizarre beasts, multi-limbed and black-bodied brutes like monstrous gorillas, lamprey-mouthed foxes, drooling two-dimensional humanoids with prehensile tongues.

H e proves more than capable of defend ing himself. He draws strength from the black-and-white blade in his possession. It make s his body stable and keeps him from being fully assimilated into the landscape.

H e tries to avoid contact with others, but sometimes it’ s inevitable. He stumbles upon people lost in the wastelands, people like himself. They are abandoned and adrift, afraid of the arcane natives, marooned from another time or reality. The se people are almost always mad. One refugee accuse s him of being a frog disguised as a man so he can lull people to their deaths. Another ru n s away from him so fast he kills himself tumbling down a dark gorge.

Once he comes across twins, blonde women not yet fully saturated by the taint of shadows. They take turns drinking from a vial of briny fluid that they found at the base of a dying tree, and they wager on which one of them will be the first to perish from the obviously poison substance. They wail and beg for him to jo in him, and their calls still ring in his ears long after he leaves them to their mad suicide.

The Whisperlands. That is the name of th e ebon- wracked lands, that bleak domain of shadow mud and endless dusk. He isn’t sure how he knows its name, but he does. Someone gave this grim reality that title long ago.

The Whisperlands. He has been there for so very long.

A cadre of warlocks rule s the Whisperlands. They, in turn, owe their allegiance to a powerful witch. They are just like him in that t hey have n’ t been fully corrupted by the soul-saturating substance of the realm, that black ash that drifts like debris from some perpetual explosion.

He ’ s never seen th e mages in person, but he sees evidence of their existence everywhere: t races of hex power left in the air, b lack fields blasted white, a reas of dark rock or red tide chiseled or cut with vorpal proficiency, t ainted soil, s moking ripples in the lands cape, c old iron shards and crystal and other effluvia of the arcane.

But the most telling sign of the mage’s existence are the whispers. He hears th ose voices in the wind, faint echo es like a distant memory. Sometimes they raise the hackles on the back of his soiled neck. I t’s difficult to tell how close they are. T hey scour the earth and poison the atmosphere with the force of their presence. They are legion, a horde of derelict ghosts fused together in a mongrel presence.

The warlocks hold a small army of these spirits at their command, mindless apparitions held captive, forced to shape and bend against their will. They are u nliving slaves tethered by ectoplasmic chains and cold iron bonds. He hears the pain behind their voices. The whispers sound together in an anthem of surrender, a dirge of loss. They sing to warn the black world of their fate.

He comes to understand the Whisperland ’ s geography, and by so doing he learns which areas are controlled by the mage warlords. The shadow world is not as random and as chaotic as he'd originally thought. There are patterns to the rippling dar k landscape. He learns where t he jagged hills melt into dark waters and where they turn back to solid gr ound again. He learns to anticipate the spread pattern of erratic fissures created by sporadic earthquakes.

The s ky is blood slate, petrified cloud and frozen dust. Everything appears burned or bleeding. The Whisperlands are so deeply and utterly black that treading the ground is like walking across a night sky.

He feels, sometimes, like the Whisperlands are sealed in a glass case, and that he is part of the gritty diorama held within.

H e stumbles across a black field littered with pale rocks and comes across something he doesn ’ t exp ect: a child, ungainly and hideous, with an enlarge d h ead and skin that is slowly being eaten away by va ricose veins of shadow. The child points at a distant mountain.

He can't be sure if either the child or the mountain is real.

That mountain, he suspects, belongs to the mages. He has n’t made any physical maps, but he doesn’t need to. He has committed the geography of the black lands to m emory, and he knows there is a region on the other side of the mountain that is empty on his mental diagram of the Whisperlands. That blank spot is a place he has not yet explore d.

That, he deduces, it is the mage’s home.

He’ s tempted to go to it, but he can’ t explain or understand why. They have n’t done any thing to him. He doubts they ’ re in any way responsible for his being trapped there. Likely they are trapped, as well, and th ey have chosen to band together rather than remain isolated.

He avoids the region. The mountain reminds him of something from his old life. Whatever it is, it’s painful, and he’ s glad the memory never really forms.

He walks on.

Time passes. He drifts through the ruins of cities. Some of them contain shadow people, while some are populated only by refuse. T he whispers are always there, a mournful sound like a forlorn wind. His boots crush stones into black dust. He smells burn ing fumes and c old smoke. His body grows weary, but it ’ s only a memory of fatigue.

With every step he becomes more of a shade. His skin has lost much of its natural color. His mind isn’t as focused as it once was: like the landscape, it become s darker and less distinct.

He travels through an ink stain. S ilhouettes follow him, the arcane tribals. Or maybe he follow s them.

The child.

It ’ s there, watching him. This time it isn’ t alone. A second child, a girl, is there with the boy. H er head is just as freakishly large, her eyes are bulging orbs. Filigrees of wet dust fall from their bodies. Their eyes and hands are barely traceable outlines of grey, vague underwater impressions. The bitter wind pulls away bits of t heir flesh and clothes.

Is that what I look like? Am I only a shade now?

He ’ s almost afraid to hold up his hand, but he does. It’ s hard for him to find it, to focus in the dust tempest. He watches bits fall away, pulled like sand into the funnel of sky.

The wind intensifies. His body is discorporating. He feels himself drift apart, but the sensation is surreal. H e feels so very, very old.

The shadow children motion. They want him to follow. H e does.

They walk to the remains of a city. Buildings lean in towards one another as if huddled against the cold. A low black wall surrounds thin black structures that have toppled like fallen matchsticks.

Dust flies across their path, and for a moment he worries the children have come apart and drift ed into the sky, but then he sees them again in the black windstorm. They move deliberately so as to keep him in sight. He follows them at a distance, his fingers near his blade.

He wonders if they ’ re associated with the mages, or if they are the mages.

The mages. I was trying to remember something about the mages.

They lead him through the remains of the crumbling city. Most of the buildings have collapsed. The earth underfoot is old clay. Wreckage lies everywhere, and he sees the lonely skeletons of the city’s long-lost inhabitants.

Up above, the clouds roil like a dark sea.

T he children enter one of the few standing structures. They pass through a crooked archway beneath what might have once been the leering face of a demonic lion, but now the stone is too dark for him to tell.