Dark Shard 9. Rusted Remnants
Varsch had left the Bastion over ten months ago, and since then, he hadn’t spent more than a single night in the same place.
Bleak expanses of scorched fields gave way to desolate, charred hills. Here and there, remnants of villages and towns rotted away, but the overall atmosphere remained unchanged — a pervasive melancholy of lands ravaged by war.
If his wanderings had even the slightest, most contrived, and meaningless purpose, perhaps everything would have felt different. But he simply trudged on, his rusty armor creaking, without seeing an end to his pilgrimage, barely remembering its beginning. After so many miles traveled, lost meanings, and dead goals, each ruined village, covered by dark clouds of corpse-eating faeries, became for the aimless rusty knight not a source of righteous anger or somber sorrow but just another barely noticeable notch on his hardened, dead soul.
He reached the edge of the colossal and once-magnificent Grey Forest closer to nightfall. Behind him lay a village of the forest folk, uprooted and impaled on the electro-pikes of the Legion. Not even the corpse-eaters ventured into these parts, so Varsch could observe in full detail what the electromancers left in their wake when given free rein.
By now, it didn’t really matter to him where to set up camp — amid the ruins of a village where the inhabitants were slowly and savagely tortured and burned with white flames for several days, or by the walls of a castle reeking of corpse rot. Yet he passed the forest folk’s settlement without stopping, maintaining his measured, clanking stride and staring straight ahead through the narrow slit of his visor. Charred figures of treemen, frozen in grotesque poses, young saplings hoisted on the roots of their parents, homes shattered into gigantic shards, all shrouded in a dense pall of pale dead mist. Even for an undead knight, it was too much.
So he decided to spend the night under the forest’s canopy, despite being aware of the dangers it held — though, in truth, even those no longer particularly interested him.
The creatures emerged, as usual, a little past midnight — first timidly, cautiously peeking out their sly faces, then increasingly bold and insistent in their exploration. Varsch lay on his back, hands behind his head, gazing at the silent, solitary stars. The creatures crawled over his breastplate, scratched their claws on his helmet, and peered into the narrow slit of his visor — just as they had done hundreds of nights before.
He simply lay there. He barely thought — thinking was painful and dangerous. He waited for dawn, occasionally slipping into a semi-daze, perhaps a hypnotic trance.
As the sky began to tint with the faint hue of young blood, Varsch stood up, threw back his head, and stood for a moment, admiring the giant semi-living trees. Then he stepped into the dense darkness of the Grey Forest, continuing his indefinite journey through space and time.
The creatures had already left — but, as always, not for long.
