"There are worse ways to die. But right now I cannot think of one." The unnamed warrior's words, scribed desperately before the last battle echoed in the young man's head as he saw where he had arrived. Behind him the remains of a great wall stood, carved open from its one hundred foot high ramparts to the river at its base by one great blow. The exposed stones were still clean and grey. The battle had been recent, but the documents had been old. A trick of his new mentors', but he had seen stranger things from those with powers.

There was a subtle wrongness to the ground beneath his feet, movement as if it were breathing. He squatted to get his balance, making himself small against the land and hard to spot. With the robes of his desert childhood he could have vanished, but in the garb of his city home, blue jeans against yellowed grass stood out. Scrubland stretched as far as he could see, scrubland that should have reminded him of his home desert and instead made him sick to his core.

Beneath the bloated dying sun, the sparse trees reached for the reddened sky with branches that spiraled and warped. In his childhood, there had been a penalty for felling a tree, for trees brought life to the desert. These did not. They were twisted things that clawed at the sky, a motion seen only from the corner of his eye but present nonetheless. On the far horizon a darkness arose, like God's Mountain raging when he had seen it with his mother, long before the bad things happened and she was gone.

He wanted to go home, but he had no home anymore, lost in a warlord’s boast that there would be no more fires on the hillsides, that his pyres would end them all. It reminded him of the last day he had seen his family, knives against bullets as their own had run out, bodies strewn across the landscape under the treads of jeeps. There were no guns here, no spent grass casings to mark warfare as he knew it. The tracks in the ground were not tyres, but feet and beast and the utterly unknown. So alien, and yet worse for being so close to the familiar. There were no bodies here, but he had not expected any. They were still in use.

"But right now I cannot think of them." The scrawled words echoed in his head again, still a horror. All the tales of brave princes never said that they'd be dragged from their graves, made to kill their own, kill their family. Any people that still existed here did not live. They suffered, through deeds commited with their own hands as it mastered their bodies and spread to everything as their souls screamed. He would end it. As the sandy dirt breathed underfoot, a dreadful imperceptible river, it felt as though this world itself would fight him. That was good. He would win.

Balance was a struggle, but he stood up, resolute. He had been sent here to avenge the unfallen, and he would do his task. Before he had not known, just walked, and others had died. This would be rightful. Here the Bringer of the End had stolen a boy's body, and that boy hadn't had an angel come with powers to drive the darkness back. For those with powers, the day they got them was the worst day of their lives. For those without them, those days could be worse.

On his worst day his power had woken: Fire, to make them burn, to sear their 'civilisation' from the land, a body remade in flame which could never be quenched, leonine paws to shred what opposed him, and wings. Wings which didn't work, which left him chasing after jeeps and jets on foot for no vehicle could survive his presence. Truly a cursed blessing, for any of his people who were not burned on the warlord's pyres were burned in his awakening. There was nothing here for him to fear. He was fear. He was death.

His index finger rested on the clip of the collar, ready to unclip it, unwilling to in case something had survived; not a person maybe, but perhaps a tale or record he could pass to those who would inherit here when his duty was done. And the translator would be needed, for he was sure he did not speak their language. Longing for the simple embrace of the fire, he delayed it for now. So to walk to the wall or into the scrubland?

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

There was no one living by the wall that he could see, and the river should bring life, but this was as soiled as the land, the water now a choked black sludge that roiled and oozed its way along the base of the channel. Lumps and tar-like outflows caught the shores like something alive before being pulled away and onwards by the inexorable flow of tainted filth. Bile rising in his throat, he turned aside. There was no way across the cursed river that he could see, and he shuffled his feet in the dirt in frustration.

Was this another trick? Were there people here he was being used against? He was no one's weapon. His fingernail tapped against the metal of his collar as he heard the creak of wood loud in the silence.

"Who's there?" he challenged, dropping to a fighter’s crouch, a hand on reflex reaching for a knife he did not carry and did not need. His second was already on the latch, paused and poised.

The creak came again and he moved, stalking it, finding his careful way through broken blades as he awaited the attack. Around the side of a small hillock he saw the source, set back against the rocks that jutted from the scrub. The hut was ancient, worn down, and yet not so ancient as the crone that beckoned from its doorway.

"Welcome, welcome, come in. Quick, before they see you." He frowned. The duty of hospitality was sacred, and yet how could an old woman have survived here where no water flowed to drink and the dead walked free? "Which clan are you?"

He answered truly. It would mean nothing to anyone here, nor to those of his home. Should any have survived the pyres of the warlord, and none had, they could not have survived the atomic fire that followed.

"A foreigner? New people to this place?" Her eyes glittered eagerly. "You must tell me more. Come in!" So eager to welcome a stranger in a dead land of twisted monsters. He sensed the trap, but did not see its nature clear.

"What has happened here?" he asked, staying back. She leaned towards him, lowered her voice confidingly as one sharing a morsel of delicious goissip.

"Disaster, since the Emperor's consort grew so wicked that he must slay her. A faceless demon they said, who dared even poison him. The Shusuro gave another her name before ever the Bayushi leant her his." She stayed in the doorway of her dark hut, gancing anxiously at the twisted plains around them. "Come, child, I have guests so rarely in these dark days. It is scarce safe to have my door open." He chafed at the diminutive. By his people's reckoning he had been a man, if barely, before the change had taken him. Years had passed since. "My daughters have been starved for company," she added encouragingly and the hair on the back of his neck rose as he heard something break nearby as if underfoot.

He took a cautious step, picking his way through the weapons that scarred the land. Among the arrows and blades - the arrows and blades that did not touch the decrepit house though it should have been here long before them - showed shards of bone.

"It is safe here." She beckoned again, urging him forward too eagerly as she saw his hesitation and where his gaze fell on bone of shapes and sizes both human and distinctly not. Here and only here they lay among the weapons and broken armour, picked and polished clean before the bleaching began, fanned forth from the door as if dragged - or spat.

"A liar's tongue burns," he decreed, disgusted. As the hag shrilled a clicking cry and charged, his finger slipped the collar latch.

The crone's form gave way to a gigantic spider made of rocks and uncounted years, and then to explosion and to nothingness, its unholy scream drowned in the thunder. The ground wailed like a thing alive as it seared to untainted bedrock beneath him, as the trees shrivelled and the goblin-things creeping close unseen fell shrieking like burning snowflakes as the explosions claimed them. A new sun burned, and it burned on the land.

His body changed as leonine claws stretched. Wings of flame erupted from his back, beat against the air as they burned it. Comforted, home, he let the sound deafen his ears, the fires occlude his sight, and gratefully gave up thought. He was warm, and home, and safe, and burning.

The Shadowlands screamed its agony as the Ash Beast took its first step towards the dark city of Otosan Uchi. It would take him time to walk there. He had forever.

"All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic heavy elements may be used where there is no life. Unassigned Heavy and Medium atomic weights are available: Caesium, Francium, Lead, Mercury, Polonium, Plutonium, Radon, Sapphire, Silver, and Steel.

Plutonium has been assigned."