The Gate to Nowhere

ACT 3

The convoy is dark, very dark.

Everyone here is afraid of the darkness, having marched non stop for days, monsters of the old world claw out from the shadows, snatching victims of the convoy, dragging them to their pits of bones and sticks

The man has seen dozens try to retrieve the bodies, but they just turn up missing too.

What good can you even do with a retrieved carcass? Especially this far away from civilized creations belonging to man?

Its no better than rotting meat, the stains of saliva and blood, and the flies, the smell that emanates with the body.

Joshua looks up as he guides a lead, the palfrey once gifted to the man by a King had long been adjusted to their bleak surrounding

The countless attacks, the mud, blood and strain the mare had to burden and fight through the past three years

Joshua's heart, for once in many moons, had bled for something.

Well, funny about that idiom, Joshua has bled a lot, god knows if he wants to expierence a bleeding heart, nor actually care for a thing that seemed so little in the grand scheme of things.

With a sigh, he places a hand on the mares neck, patting it, he feels it breathing, every breath it has, its alive, despite how artificial the surrounding world seemed to him.

But he knew this was real, because one look at the person sitting atop the same mare brings him back to the numb, unpleasant reality full of rain and the smell of mud

A woman, same age as Joshua, wearing an elegant black dress, coldly looks down at him, yet comparably as disheveled and exhausted, Joshua can't reciprocate the icy stare, a guilt that tugs deep inside tries to make him cry, but he brushes aside the feeling, knowing it won't do anything useful for him and others.

Still, he knows its his fault she's even here.

Joshua turns to look back to see a carriage, Kalani, another man in this group in part of a larger band of refugees, smugglers and fleeing bastards, holds the reins that controls a carriage

So many months of excruciating work for this gang of lowlifes and scum so that they can be smuggled north, at least they were far away from that shit whole of Haven.

Is the North really that safe? The Old World is hell, past the Seeral mountains contained the New World, the new frontier, the north

The Occident.

Thousands of years of rich history, fighting against tribal dune stalkers, or what most enviously called them, Freemen.

Three toppled empires, the century long civil war between twin brothers, the rise and fall of viking tribes a thousand more years before.

The continent was a big place, big enough to be exhausting. He had heard tales, there was a sea down south, Cassian, a isolated island empire full of warriors, fighting a plague that grows larger in the mainland every year.

Perhaps it was good to think about how good the north was.

Too bad Joshua, Kalani, and Sandra..