He appeared as if deep into some inexplicable sensation. And he were no better thespian to stow the reaction aside.

Andreij kept his gaze geared far-wise to the rolling and greyed out prairies to the north of his being, of which were marred and caked with a coat of dust the same palette of drab as the skies. A fusion of ashen-gray forced on that myriad, swallowing all.

The tips of the dead crops of the surrounded plains in those once golden brown patches flailed wild, barely able in wrestling against the whistling high winds of the encirclement of the rising terrain.

That sudden, profound trouble forayed unto his mind as he rode with the Kapitan on the horse-drawn cart upon that shaping path.

First it was scant, then starvation of it, then towards to some form of withdrawal. And just before came the shivers.

The barrages and the suckered stream of the stimuli of the sounds, sights and sensations contained in that of a usual polis of his time and world had now been stripped from him .

Any other littler happenings did he, in fuller awareness, surmised that they were no longer underfoot.

And so on he kept with that task of leering back and forth from the grayed fields-and of the rotund rolling hillsides of the marred landscape in the far reaches- long past the land and the paths continued therein. The eminence of a heavy fog hovered over kindred to a great entity by the far hills in the countenance of an lethargic animal. And an auburn sheen seemed struggling to perforate through the thick in a cross-shapen stilt out of that barred stratosphere.

A heavy, repetitive crackle of reins from the Kapitan besides him were of the few snippets registered as his low lip hung in a slight gape of dark.

No individual like himself, some meanderer, could be for the turn of a second to be of a sound existence, and of temperate disposition in a barbarous and wild nature of this sort. Even if it were not some primeval realm of invasive under-growths of greens and canopies that chews on fresh matter itself ,

Or for let it be a suppressive scape of where the hand of man who've slogged on his back his faiths had done caressed and commingled in- or been cut off rather- or even where sparse throes of civilization itself are supplanted in terse roots,

The trickle of some invasive sort of dread still marched to that outline of the transmigrated man's thoughts. Because even the quickest peek and the slimmest possibility of unkempt folds of undergrowth, of frightful fogs, of protruding vines and of the exuding thickened air- and of ultimately what is vagueness and mystery-were to him making itself maddening to his long-dulled sensibilities. There it lurched forward to be a familiar exhumation.

And he recognized littler to none that the entirety of his existence, his microcosm, was rendered entirely possible due to his adjacence of institutions, of neighborhoods and of the ushering hand signals of lawmen, of his immense willingness to be supervised wherever, and of vast information squandered a mess.

So he had even found himself almost mute to the notions, his mind forcibly brought to hazard before some frozen court where the jury is in it the world itself and the order of it is not abound and beheld to any sentence. And he turns craven to begin the incubation of something long lost few ever find in his little welling comeuppance.

The cart rocked more jagged than ever, screeching at the touch of those wheels. Andreij sat shaking on his seat, mouth shut and no longer aghast. He glanced to the Kapitan, who held by his waist the long and thin leather reins that he whupped down fervent on those steeds.

The Kapitan in turn too regarded the man as he sensed his look, but returned only a stare back of some distant veneer as both men were no oddity, one or the other of them. And after he brought his focus back to that long road again. The one of its kind there for some uncounted miles, as around lays long dried grass and slags of drained of color.

As the men on the cart passed over a dwarven hill, they had now come upon the stop in their destination.

A strand of pummeled down baggage trains leaking artifacts or the like lay lined blocking the road they traversed. And there the Kapitan reared in the reins and pulled the workhorses to a halt.

Joern on horseback trotted by the Kapitan's seat.

"Start unloading." The Kapitan gave his command, hopping off the cart onto the dirt road.

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"Aye."Joern nodded, bringing his frame down from the saddle to face the man. "The freemen's almost done with em. And you'll find neatness even there I say."

"Oh?"

"Aye, Quite the piece of work. Pretty little rows." His countenance then shifted in a sudden, "Well, most of them."

The two men then got off the cart, boots treading on the dusty ground. Joern stayed behind, loading brown sacks off the back while Andreij was ushered by the Kapitan to walk a direction off the path.

Both of them stepped into the grass sprawled with wildflowers and the like, walking off through the stretch of the small hills littered in large mounds of earth.

Andreij walked carefully in his steps, bringing one foot over if it stumbled upon a protruding stem of a plant or two his way.

And the Kapitan did so too, only that he would stand still at one moment, and give a quick glance at some particular flowers and would grind his greaves down on them twisting a leg on the grass under his stomp, his steel sabatons quaking at the eve of movement. And then he would just move on after.

"Haven't seen them before." He always remarked after the act.

And Andreij followed suit behind still in silence, not a word out as he took in the whole of the hills.

After some few minutes the two men had halted by shriveled oaken trees of lank boughs oozing a musk at the top of some flat hill , and the Kapitan faced westward.

Andreij followed suit in the action, as he had been doing naught but in tail with the armored man in front of him.

Behelding the two men came a plateau of sparse green mingled by a barren plain interlocked by decrepit greens. And Andreij held a glint to his widened eyes, recognition etched.

And he swore to his long-neglected faith that he could still faintly hear those screams of fury, anguish and apathy as it had been just a short while. That battle.

But naught of that aside remained but only traces, and on the foot of where the two men loitered a plateau, and on those flats lay planted like great white blights on that land were bivouacs scattered by smoking fires and a watchtower at one edge firmly stood by the remains of that clash.Moreover Andreij spotted denizens in the fray in measured movement.

The Kapitan gestured to Andreij,pointing him down the bottom of the hill and the transmigrated man giving a tense look back, reared a foot forward and slid rocking down the hill with the Kapitan following behind in a more controlled pace than his other.

A few moments passed and they made it to the gathering, passing by a entrance affixed by palisades and ditches, and closer Andreij began to spot men by the five dozen pace around in step as if in routine, pulling with them mule-carts crammed with bloated blank-eyed cadavers.

The Kapitan had already stopped at a table by a makeshift roofing of thick furs, his subordinate Claudi at his elbow who had a cow-leather ledger tucked in an arm. And they began conversing, leaving Andreij to take ganders.

And in front of them lay vast rows of corpses strewn about in lines stretching a field's worth, carrion either hovering or idling nearby.

There were men clad in either doublets or tunics in their garishly colored breeches picking and filching off the unmoving corpses of trinkets and the like. There it seemed as if some feverish and archaic dreamscape had been poured into the world.

A tangible, seething wind was passing, and the men with their countenances unmoved tending at their pickings seemed fast, appearing as if silhouettes pulling at unresponsive fingers spider-like in stripping rings of every iron forged or vow imprinted, unfastening steel chausses and padded pantaloons, unclamping and detaching muddied breastplates, mail coats, helms and the like off with an accrued swiftness. And by them more souls holding wicker baskets trotted by them making rounds of all that would be accumulated and usurped from the lying inanimate.

And there'd been not a single scavenger swooping in- not even a rock needing to be seized to usher any creature away-as if man and bird had settled on a truce to the task given to filch all that remained of ones who no longer have naught of anything to take away as all had already been taken, and all that they shall ever claim only ever be what caught their eyes. And no other.

"Can you believe this is what we have laid witness to, Argie?" Andreij turned to catch Claudi by him speak out.

"New horizons found, and it's naught but new grounds for scuffles. New Carolea. Should've just be dubbed the Grand playground. Only took but a few decades for the first suzerain to bring em here."

He then let out a barely audible sigh, the many wrinkles on his face defined by a shade.

"But ye bring conflict of a homely kind, I'll give you that." He continued, "And there's no better place like home I tell you. The happenings of these elven and human tribals are gettin stale on these frontiers. Perhaps these damn falling ashes may bring something of them, and when the horses stop grazing, there'd be something to face then."

Andreij looked about the man, raking in the words with raised brows mimicking clarity as best he could, and with dread loosely hanging over him.

Then Claudi stretched out to him the ledger, then spoke with furrowed brows, his padded coif seemingly stretching as he faced Andreij, " Time to earn those meals, Argie. Make a count of the loot."

Andreij meekly seized the ledger, visibly paling at the possibility of not being able to read the language, and being deemed to have outlived his usefulness by his captors, even he did understand what they have been saying so far.

As Claudi walked back to the Kapitan, Andreij slowly opened the leather ledger, and there he saw letters shifting, strange symbols flashing back and forth before finally halting to numbers and alphabets he knew. First he raised a brow to it, before letting out a relieved sigh."Thank Christ…."

But there came swathes of notes and forming on the pages of that leather-bound ledger. Names, some crossed out with lines drawn marked as "relations" crossing to some other monikers written.

Numbers, the adding of items and the like and sections scribbled with categories of what had already been taken, and what had not.

Some things were not so different.