The sky really didn’t change. Callan frowned at it, waiting, searching for even the smallest hint of the lovely blue he remembered. But no, all that ever was over the course of three days was the unmoving silver like a gentle rain cloud that never actually broke.
People walked by him sitting in front of the garage and barely gave him a passing glance, probably attributing what they thought was vacant insanity to his rumored long imprisonment. He’d spoken to a few of them, committing their names to his improving perfect memory and learning about how they contributed to the community.
They asked little of him in return; only a few mentioned his eyes, the rest were unnerved too much to really say anything.
‘You can’t save them either,’ the skull in the dark whispered from the tomb below, ‘they will all die like I did, Callan.’
“Callan!” A hand appeared in his silver-saturated vision and snapped twice. Callan started back into the real world, looking downward to see Halari standing to his side with a concerned face. “I was saying something to you, did you hear me?”
“No, I did not, sorry,” he said, standing. “What were you saying?”
Halari cocked her head to the side, a habit he noticed she did when she had some kind of question or concern. “Where were you, just now?”
“Not here,” Callan said grimly. “Some place a long time ago.”
Halari nodded and frowned softly. She was a bit too early for dinner, which she usually brought along with some decent conversation. Talking grounded him, kept him in the real world, and quieted his deathly companion. Thankfully, Halari had a lot to say.
“Well, I was about to go foraging outside,” Halari said, nodding to the cliff rising above, “and I get the sense you need to get out of here. Move around a bit. Wanna go?”
“Out there?” Callan eyed the landmark glumly. There most likely wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle in those wastes, but he didn’t feel the need to see more ruins of his old home. “Is there anything out there?”
“Not much,” Halari said, “but my mada asked for a certain fruit which I brought home a while back, so I figured it was a good chance to get you more familiar with the territory.”
“How is she taking all of this?” Callan asked. “Your father seemed to take all in stride.”
“Oh she’s cooking more,” Halari said, tapping her chin. “Which means she’s nervous, but she’s keeping it to herself like we asked. Speaking of which…” She pulled a small foil parcel and handed it to him. “Figured you were sick of the ashbud diet.”
“Thank you,” Callan said, taking the parcel. He unwrapped it carefully and found something resembling a flatbread inside. It was filled with… meat? Paste? A combination of both? “It’s… what is it?”
“A protein mix,” Halari explained.
I don’t like that look in her eyes, Callan thought suspiciously. Still, he took a bite and chewed the strange sandwich.
The meat paste was not good.
He swallowed it, but his face must have committed treason, because Halari began to chuckle.
“Halari, I’m beginning to think you find entertainment watching my reactions to your wasteland food,” Callan said, brows raised.
She just smiled and shrugged.
“You ready to go right now?” she asked, evading his accusation. “I wanna be able to get back by nightfall.”
“Lead the way,” he said.
The wastes really were miserable, as he expected. When they drove above the threshold of the cliff’s edge on Halari’s monstrous vehicle, the world revealed itself him in full, onyx despair.
When I named the Obsidian Empire, Callan remembered sadly, I didn’t mean it literally. Oh, Great Melokon, we’ve failed so much. “It looks like Hell,” he whispered, thumbing his ring.
“It can be sometimes,” Halari said. She drove while he faced the rear behind her. “But most of the times it’s just quiet.”
Halari steered them through rising outcrops that were jagged like the horrible maw of some monster, around tall crags standing like stakes in the stone, past ravines that fell deep into the earth.
So dead, so bleak. Callan remembered this area being a dense forest. Where had all those trees gone? Where had all the life gone? He caught sight of some mote-like bug swarms swirling about in the far distance, moving like a tornado over an object he wasn’t able to make out.
“What are those?” he asked, pointing. “Some kind of insect?”
Halari stalled her trawler, a truly beastly vehicle compared to the automobiles that he remembered, and followed his finger towards the horizon.
“I don’t see anything,” she said, squinting.
“Oh, right,” Callan said. Only his eyes could pick something that small out at such a distance. “They’re small bugs, moving in a swirling formation above something.”
“Fleshflies,” Halari said, revving the engine back up. “Harmless if you’re not dead or bleeding. That’s when they’ll strip you for parts. Probably feeding on some poor bistag or something.”
“Wonderful,” Callan groaned.
They moved on past the swarm and drove for another ten minutes or so before Halari parked the trawler in a shallow ditch and hopped off.
Callan followed suit and stretched while looking about the landscape. A grove of bone-thin trees, some with white trunks, others black, stood before them. The ground was different at least, a blend of gravelly not-soil and needle-like blade of grass.
“It would be hopeless to ask if there are any brown trees somewhere, right?” he asked.
Halari scrunched her face, like the very idea of a brown tree was disturbing to her in some tragic way, and Callan’s rock bottom heart fell a little more. “No. Not here at least." They walked into the pale imitation of a forest, ducking the trees’ stubby arms and weaving around thin trunks, all the while looking through the glassy underbrush for the fruit Halari needed. After a few minutes of hiking, they rested near the center of the grove which held a wide puddle of brackish water and a large boulder.
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Callan stared into the pool, reflection faint in the lack of a real sun.
“Halari.” He turned to her, taking the woman’s attention away from a dense bush she was scrounging through. “Is it like this everywhere?”
She grimaced and started sweeping her foot on the ground lightly. “I think the land of the Scrag Fort to the east is different, but…”
“Not that much different,” Callan finished with a sigh. “Is there… anything redeeming about this world? I will help, but I need to know what I’m working with.”
Halari didn’t respond for a moment, and he felt bad for any guilt she felt, but he’d yet to see anything worth organizing outside of the people.
Then, Halari bent down and picked something up off the gravelly surface.
“Here.” She walked over to him, standing close so he saw the object in her open palm.
It was a rock. A pebble, really.
“I might be totally wrong, but did you even have rocks like this in the old world?” she asked, bringing the small stone closer. Callan looked at it harder and was surprised to find that she right. He wasn’t much of rock scholar, but he’d never seen one like it.
The small stone was glossy in sheen and swirled with a miasma of colors inside. He saw a galaxy in its unpolished facets, more distinct than even the most perfect emerald of his old world.
“No, actually, I don’t think so,” Callan said, taking it from her and studying it more.
“It was probably fused together with hundreds of other things when the world ended in fire,” Halari said. “It wouldn’t even exist under better conditions. Callan, I’ll never say this world is better than the old one, but… there is some kind of beauty here. The kind that only it can make.”
He wasn’t full convinced, but it was a start. “I appreciate this, Halari,” Callan murmured, meeting her light, coppery eyes. “Maybe I’ll try to start looking at this world as it is, instead of comparing it to how I remember.”
“Glad I could help.” She grinned softly, then turned back to her work in the bush.
‘She’s a pretty one,’ the skull whispered in the back of his mind. ‘Do you think her hair will burn the same color as mine did?’
“Callan?” Halari said, eying him quizzically. He realized he’d spaced out again and shook himself back into focus. “Could you check around that boulder? I’m getting nothing over here.”
Callan nodded and pocketed the small stone before turning toward the large, silver boulder that rested by the brackish puddle. He crouched down under its faint shade and picked through the low shrubs for the target fruit.
Glossy black, fist sized, he recalled her description. Ribbed arou— That’s odd. He touched an area around the boulder where the foliage was pressed flat, like something had walked on it. And the boulder itself didn’t look right; its surface was made of—
“callan,” Halari whispered. “Callan!”
He spun to see her pale and wide eyed, standing still a few feet away.
“You need to move away from that,” she hissed, waving her fingers frantically.
“It’s just a rock, is it not?” he asked.
As soon as the last word left his mouth, Callan heard the ‘boulder’ shift behind him, crunching the gravel as its bulk moved. He turned, not slowly, but carefully, and saw that the ‘boulder’ now stood on two legs and loomed above him.
It was not a boulder.
Oh Oliver, what were you thinking? Callan thought, staring up at the monster. The mad Flame had always been creative when it came to his bioengineering projects, but he must have been having a truly disturbed week when he dreamed up this fiend.
The creature stood almost a full chest taller than him and twice as wide. It’s face was something akin to a bear, but it had no fur. Instead, its corpse-hued skin was comprised of fine scales, which culminated at the top of its head in the mockery of a stout mohawk.
The beast’s arms were massive, shoulders especially, but with equally dense forearms.
That mad fool actually invented a cave troll, Callan thought, his draconic eyes meeting the monster’s own bloody red ones, which were set into pit-like sockets deep into its face.
“Callan,” Halari whispered, “don’t move. Cragbeasts don’t have good sight.”
The cragbeast growled at him with the sound of an earthquake.
“I think we’re past that,” Callan said.
It swung, striking with one clawed, gnarled hand as if to gut him. Callan took the blow on his forearms, bringing both up in a boxer’s stance to block the impact, which hit with the force a high-speed truck.
Something’s wrong, Callan thought as the strength of the blow slid him a few feet to the side on the gravelly ground. His block should have shattered the beast’s hand.
He ducked the next swing, then threw himself backwards to make distance and reached for the Stormspace, for his weapon within. His fingers pulled at the very world, tried to pierce through to the pocket of dark clouds and energy, but they didn’t break through.
They weren’t strong enough. He wasn’t strong enough.
Callan felt it just out of reach, like static cling on his fingers, but it wasn’t enough. And he had no more time. The cragbeast charged him, so he tried a different tactic and struck with Melokon’s Fire. Its heat started in his heart, focused down into his arm, then built in his fingers.
He unleashed it… in one pathetic bolt of amethyst electricity which cracked through the air and left a faint odor of ozone in its wake.
The arc still held enough power to throw the beat off balance when it tagged its massive shoulder, leaving a dark scorch mark on its scaled flesh and sending its feral advance wildly off course. It crashed into the line of trees, crushing a dozen or so.
“I need a shot at its throat!” Halari yelled, firing a shot with her rifle at the monster. Her bullet sparked off its forehead, the next one off its shoulder.
Callan froze.
I can’t… I don’t… His mind whirled, ripped itself apart. No weapon, no power, what did he have left? Halari fought, uselessly shooting over and over, but Callan stopped in place.
‘It’s gonna crush her,’ the skull whispered. ‘It’s gonna rip her limb from limb.’
In the name of the Dragon, dominate your fears. He rallied himself; his god would never forgive such weakness in this moment. Always fight. Callan leaped forward to the beast and punched its incoming arm. His force was greater, and the monster’s blow was redirected backwards, spinning the beast to the side.
He didn’t have his weapon or the true fury of the Melokon’s Fire, but he still had his raw, physical strength, and that was enough.
Before it recovered, Callan sent a two-hit combo into its gut, doubling the monster over into a perfect position for an uppercut, which caught the beast on its chin and forced it reel back, roaring in pain and rage. He rolled under its legs and jumped, scaling the creature’s back in a single bound. He stood on the monster’s shoulders, then grabbed the top part of its broad maw and pulled. Its fangs dug into his palms but failed to pierce his skin, and he wrenched its head backwards while it flailed in a desperate attempt to pull him off.
A shot rang out, whizzing past his waist, then another grazed his shin and glanced off. A third shot sounded and the beast jerked. Its arms dropped limp to its sides and, like a felled mountain, the cragbeast toppled face first to the ground. Callan stepped off of it just as it made impact and rolled with the momentum before standing to come face-to-face with a very pale, shaken Halari. They both stared at each other for a long moment, then Halari started to laugh, heaving massive gulps of air as she calmed down.
“Good shooting,” Callan said with a heavy sigh of relief, stooping over with his hands on his knees. Halari sat on the gravel, still giggling hysterically, enough to be infectious and get a good chuckle from him. “How did you know where to shoot it?”
“Old… Bear,” Halari said between gasps. “He’s the only… one who’s killed one of… these. But that one was stuck in a pit. ” She breathed deep and composed herself. “He said under the neck was the only soft tissue it had.”
“Now you’ve got a better story,” Callan said, studying the fiend’s carcass. “What do we do this thing?”
Halari stood back up on shaky legs and brushed herself off. “It’s no fruit, but we’ll just chain it to the trawler and go. Bear’s son is a meat carver, he’ll portion it out. Quarry’ll be happy to get some protein portions for a while.”
“You can eat this monster?” Callan asked incredulously. The beast looked far too muscular to make into anything worthwhile. Then again, Halari and her people were used more unsavory foods, so a little extra gristle on their meat was most likely something they didn’t care about.
“Oh yeah, mada’s gonna make a good stew out of this,” Halari said with another giggle. “Now, come on, help me get this thing tied to the trawler. I’m betting you can carry it over after you fist fought it like that.”
“After you,” Callan said, grabbing one of the beast’s massive wrists. He pulled the cragbeast’s dead body through the ring of trees, flattening more than a few with its bulk.
Halari looped a chain around and under its shoulders, then connected it to her vehicle. Slow and steady, they dragged their trophy back to the Quarry and away from the torn-up grove.