The Deadlands - dry, arid, and merciless. A place where only the scent of death hangs loosely on the scorching winds. This is all that remains of a once bright world. This is the only world that Rain-Born has ever known.
As a warrior of the Hanakh t...
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At the end of the Great Canyon, an expanse of viscous green and black swelled as though alive: the Swamp of Many Eyes. Within this mire stood only decaying corpses and dead trees. As one entered, the wind ceased to blow. The world became still, devoid of joy, and the sounds of life that stalked the Great Canyon - for it was said that no living thing may touch the waters of the swamp and emerge without the shadow of the afterlife draped over them.
Its presence in the dry Deadlands was devoid of the logic that once governed the world. And as with all things, the Hanakh tribe had a story of its peculiar origin: once, the great mother from whose womb all the vicious canyon Stalkers were born became infected with a divine disease. This pox was so virulent that she left her home and traveled for days without food, leaving her children behind. Eventually, she lay down to die – her great fall shaking the land and killing many hunters of the tribes. In her death throes, she belched the blackened, viscous bile that clung to her insides for twenty days and nights, in pain and alone. And she finally sank beneath the earth to her watery grave when she had transformed the land beyond recognition to punish the spirits that had maligned her.
At the very end of the swamp lay the tunnel that led the way to the Iron Forest, known to both the Hanakh and Guthra as a place where none may walk, at least not without the protection of a guiding spirit. Unlike the swamp, this place was made by humankind before the Deadlands ever existed. Its dangers were beyond even the imagination of the Hanakh.
Over the murky depths of the swamp, Rain-Born trudged with Jespar, her home now well and truly out of sight. No hunters would venture this far. Not even the Guthra with their fire-makers.
"I'll admit, Chief," Jespar sighed as he stood on the precipice of the corrupted waters. "This isn't the path I'd have picked out for us. What'd you say you called this place again?"
"It is known to the Tribe as the Swamp of Many-Eyes," Rain-Born replied, preparing to intone a prayer to the Great Spirit for swiftness.
"Riiiiight. Gotcha. And why, pray to tell, is it so-called-"
Rain-Born had crouched suddenly behind a dead tree wedged in the marshland, silencing her talkative companion with a hand raised with the sudden swiftness of a snake striking its prey. At Jespar's confused stare, Rain-Born pointed to the horizon before them.
As he looked, he first saw nothing, merely a miasma of decay that rose from the flowing ooze of the marsh like flickering fumes from a burning, dead corpse. Then he noticed the tiny bird perched on a puss-coated rock about a mile from their position. He felt uneasy, for some reason, as he watched it. It sat there perfectly still, occasionally pruning its feathered chest or wings with its beak. And behind it, the putrid clouds of the swamp swirled.
Something stirred within them.
All Jespar saw was the bird turn its head a fraction of an inch. And then, without warning, a thin, sinuous tentacle extended from the air and wrapped itself around the tiny creature's neck, and the bird disappeared in a tiny cloud of red with an audible pop.
