I walked through the remnants of the dead forest, where not a tree remained standing. Shadows swirled from the rotting leaves, watching me with luminescent eyes. Perhaps they were the ghosts of the creatures who once lived among the colossal trees. Eventually I came to a great hill, and I climbed through drifts of gray dust until I stood at its summit. I stared across the vast lands beyond.
What I saw reminded me of my homeland so impossibly far away. A sweeping landscape of dunes. Yet these sands were pale as powdered bone. A black river wound like a snake through the withered field, and I could tell that this land had once been green and fertile, perhaps not so long ago. Like the shattered forest behind me, it had once been a paradise to rival the ancient realm between the Tigris and Euphrates. Now a cold wind filled the air, and the stars quivered as if touched by a nameless fear. I saw a great bat glide across the moon, or something similar to a bat whose body was distorted and swollen beyond all proportion.
I walked into the rolling fields of white sand and saw the skeletons of men and women lying half-buried in the drifts. I headed for the black river and the sand-choked ruins of a small town. Two more sets of ruins sat further along the river’s course, so I made my way toward the nearest.
A thing like a crippled spider rose out of the sand, staring at me with the head of small child, eyes swollen like boiled eggs gone rotten. Mandibles clacked in its distorted mouth, and it drooled a dark fluid. The tips of its eight spindly legs were the hands of infants. I raised the stolen scimitar as it scuttled toward me with a cry of desperate hunger. I slashed it with the weapon, and it fled across the bone-colored waste, a trail of steaming blood in its wake. I was glad it had feared me, for I was not sure I could have killed it. Yet still I heard its horrible, whining cries ringing through the waste as I approached the ruined town.
Cottages and warehouses had crumbled inward or fallen to splinters, and sand filled the basins of dry fountains. Gardens floundered beneath thriving curls of thorn and bristly weeds, and fruit shriveled into black husks along bony vines. Human skulls littered the streets, alongside the smaller bones of delicate four-legged creatures. A black shape leapt from the shadows to perch on a block of crumbled masonry. Immediately, I knew what the smaller skeletons were. A lithe, black cat stared at me with piercing eyes of green. It hissed at me. I could see that it was starved, for its skin stretched tightly across its protruding ribs. I don’t know why I pitied the poor creature, but I did. I discovered that I carried a pouch of dried fruits, so I gave it half a fig and poured a little water from my canteen for it to drink. I noticed the canteen in my hands was the same one that the old hermit had left for me in the desert of the waking world. As I moved through the dead village, the cat followed me like a shadow in the pallid moonlight.
I reached the river, where the sluggish current barely moved. The dock was splintered, and a riverboat lay shattered on the bank. Three emaciated villagers in rags rushed toward me from the shade of the broken vessel. One carried a twisted staff, one was an elderly woman, and one was a boy barely old enough to shave. The stink of death hung about them. I thought of the refugees who fled across the deserts of my homeland to escape the wrath of the pale devils.
“Hail, Man of the Waking World,” said the staff-bearer. By his curious beard I could tell he was a priest. “Long has it been since your kind have walked this way.”
“What happened here?” I asked. I hoped they would not ask me for food or water, for I did not have much to give. The black cat leapt onto my shoulder, as if it had belonged to me for years.
The bearded priest lowered his head as if reluctant to speak. The boy hid behind his mother. I knew then that the youth’s mind was not intact, for his actions were those of a frightened child.
“Once, in a kinder age, this was the sweetest of towns,” said the priest. “Peace, prosperity, and wisdom ruled here until…”
I stepped closer to him. “Tell me,” I asked. My eyes commanded him.
He turned toward the river, which reeked of dead fish. “See now the River Skai, once a font of crystal clear waters. See how it carries the black blood of the Dreamlands along its length. See the distant, frozen slopes of Mount Lerion, from whence the river flows. Once the mountain was green and fertile as were all the lands here: Bold Hatheg and Solemn Nir. Those who survive say even bright Celephais has fallen to ruin. Along the southern river route, the towers of mystic Dylath-Leen have crumbled, and that city’s far-ranging galleons sail no more. Now only the spirits of roaming dead live in these lands. So it has been…since he came.”
“Of whom do you speak?” I asked.
“His names are many,” said the priest. His voice was a rasping whisper. “But should not be uttered. He is the Lord of Endings.”
I remembered the single word the old hermit had whispered in my ear.
The woman and her dim-witted son wept softly now. I took pity on them, and gave them each a fig from my pouch. With such kindness I pried more information from the bearded priest. He told me that the Lord of Endings came bearing the wrath of the Outer Gods, those ultimate beings that dwell beyond space and time.
First, the Lord of Endings came to the monolithic palace in distant Kadath where the Gods of Dream lay in decadent splendor. For their arrogance, or perhaps on a cosmic whim, the Lord shattered the castle of the dream-gods, and strangled each of them. One by one, the Lord broke their bodies against the stones of their fallen palace, and he scattered their bones to the wind: Karakal the Fire-god, Nasht the Wise, Tamash the Trickster, even Zo-Kalar the Master of Life and Death. Lobon, the God of Peace, died on the Lord’s flaming spear. And there were many more whose names I do not remember.
Without the power of the gods to sustain their green and fertile domains, the Dreamlands began to wither and decay. The bones of the slain gods turned to dust and fell from the clouds to bury the land. This was the source of the white sand. The rivers all ran black with the blood of dead gods, deadly poison to drink.
“What of the Lord of Endings?” I asked. “Where did he go when his destruction was complete?”
“Men say he raised a palace for himself in the West, among the Gardens of Nightmare. There a legion of spirits and fiends flocks about his eminence. They say he awaits the coming of something, or someone. Perhaps he waits for this land to be reborn, that he may one day destroy it again.” The priest looked at me with a glimmer of hope in his sad eyes. “But I see a strange fire burning in you, Dreamer. Do you seek the Lord of Endings?”
I nodded, and the bearded priest smiled.
“Cross then the black river,” he said. He grabbed my shoulders, stared deeply into my eyes. Then he saw the scimitar I had stolen from the dead man whose beard was similar to his own. “You bear the power of the Waking World within you,” he said. “Avenge us, Dreamer. Be our champion, Man of the Waking World! It is you the Lord waits for, I know it. He waits for his own ending. Go now, seek the Gardens of Nightmare. There you must slay the Bitter Lord with this holy blade that you bear, the Sword of Kaman-Thah, whose bones now rest in the Cavern of Flame. Go and avenge us!”
The old woman kissed me and the mindless boy hugged at my waist. The three pitiful survivors wept as I walked down to the black water’s edge. The cat screeched and leapt from my shoulder as I waded into the River Skai. I was careful not to drink any of the black water. There was almost no current, and I could see dimly the gray waste of the far shore. The swimming was easy, but I felt massive, slimy forms brushing against me under the waters. Once a tentacle wrapped about my leg and threatened to drag me under, but I pierced its spongy flesh with the scimitar, and it let me go. I reached the western shore exhausted and lay down on the bone-colored sand to sleep.