I thought of the Lord of Endings as I lay there, and of the single word the old man had whispered in my ear. I wondered if, when I slept here in the dream-world, I would awaken in my squalid room and have to start my journey all over again. But the potion I had drank was powerful. I awoke from a dull oblivion to find myself hot and dry on the western shore of the River Skai.
The sun had emerged from roiling clouds of blood and soot. The heat shimmered across the blistered bone-sands. Accustomed as I was to the stifling heat of my homeland, this did not bother me. I drank a bit from my canteen, ate a tidbit from my pouch, and began my walk into the West.
I passed armies of skeletons fallen across the sand, both human and demonic of aspect. Carrion birds the size of men picked at beasts whose blood had dried to crimson powder. I walked among the husks of broken cities, pillars of graven gold smothered in the dust of godly bones. In empty lakebeds I saw the skeletons of fantastic serpents and fish-bodied men. Trees stood here and there, petrified into obelisks of black stone, hanging thick with dried skulls like over-ripened fruit. I wondered who had left such grisly totems, for there was no sign of anything living about me.
Mine was a timeless journey through a land of murdered beauty. Had the old hermit traveled here years ago, when these barren wastes were luxuriant forests and plains of golden wheat? Had he drank the alien wines of these broken cities and frolicked with veiled dancing girls between columns of veined marble? The ghosts of dead dreams flickered in the air, lost and abandoned on the hot winds. Whole families lay fleshless and scattered across the dunes. Bones rattled and tumbled. I wept often during this journey, cursing myself for wasting bodily fluids. How long would this endless day last?
Finally, when my food and water were long gone, the sun completed its trek across the gray sky, and a bloated moon rose to replace it. I stared into the depths of its vast craters, where shadowy beasts moved and flourished among cities of lunar fungi. So far away seemed the golden moon, and beyond it the swimming stars of the dream realm.
The strain of an eerie music roused me from my moon-reverie. I stood, staring across the dunes, and saw a mass of dark shapes moving through the night. Hunched, twisted, and clawed, these marchers plucked bones from the sand like a maiden might pick the brightest flowers from a meadow. The procession sang a mournful song of low pitch and deep timbre, a dirge that chilled me to the bone. It called me toward the grotesque marchers. I walked toward the singers on numb feet as the chill of night sank deep beneath my skin.
Beneath the murky melody of their song I heard again the words of the bearded priest: “Avenge us! Avenge us!” I heard, too, the forbidden word the old hermit had whispered into my ear back in the waking world.
The marchers stared at me with phosphorescent eyes. Many wore tattered robes like shrouds robbed from graves. Their faces were the heads of great worms, eyeless and dominated by mewling, dripping mouths lined with yellow fangs. Others stood taller than a man, yet bent and terribly malformed. Their apish arms and giant hands plucked skulls from the sand and stuffed them into ragged sacks. Still others in the procession were lovely skeletons wearing the crowns of ancient empires. The flames of forgotten sorceries burned in sockets that living eyes had long abandoned.
At their midst, borne on a palanquin of dried skin hoisted by hulking, headless demons, sat a bloated entity wrapped in silvery silks. From the deep shadows of its hood, crimson tendrils snaked and waved like the feelers of an insect. These appendages seemed to conduct the procession in its somber song. When the hooded face, thankfully hidden from my sight, turned toward me, silence replaced the weird melody.
My hand went to the hilt of the scimitar. It seemed the spell of the music was broken. I expected the bone-gatherers to leap upon me, to tear me limb from limb and throw my bloodied pieces into their bulging harvest bags. Yet the thing on the palanquin merely quivered its scarlet tendrils at me in some curious pattern, and the lesser creatures motioned me to follow them across the cold sands. As they picked up their low song again, I found myself trailing behind them. Phantoms swirled about us as we walked, moaning in accompaniment with sad harmonies.
The procession topped a high dune, and the moonlight showed an expanse of dark vegetation. Stooping willows waved in the absence of wind. Enormous blossoms lifted their stamens to the light of the winking stars. Winged clusters of barbed flesh flitted through the air like desert bats. The great oasis did not smell of leaf and petal, but reeked of musty tombs. In the center of the valley stood a fantastic palace carved from massive blocks of ruby, emerald, opal, and beryl. It gleamed like a castle of Heaven, surrounded by the waving stalks of the nightmare gardens, and it sparkled with the refracted light of moon and stars. I followed the singing bone-gatherers toward its gates.
As they walked, the singers fed the hungry, grasping blossoms with treats from their bags of bones. Great petals closed to crunch skulls into powder. Claw-like appendages reached forth from behind black leaves to grasp eagerly at tossed bones. The sweating trees quivered, their trunks gleaming like mottled serpent-skin, branches waving like the tentacles of sea-creatures. The severed and living heads of beautiful women hung by their hair from the branches of twisted willows, gasping like fish to draw air into lungs that no longer existed. Their bulging eyes stared at me as I passed, accusing me of crimes not yet committed. They wept tears of blood which fell to the ground and fed the roots of the sighing trees.
Finally the singing procession led me to the threshold of the jewel-palace, a great portico surrounded by a mass of grinning skulls. The palanquin-borne creature gestured at me, and the singers divided about my person. Each of the fiends motioned me to enter. Could it really be this easy to find and enter the domain of the Lord of Endings? Perhaps the slayer of gods expected me, as the bearded priest had thought. Perhaps he had guided me all this way.
I drew the Sword of Kaman-Thah and walked through the skull gate.
A vast, domed hall opened above me, where the light of stars pierced the diamond-carved roof. Splendid women danced within, their naked skins all the colors of the rainbow, their veils translucent, their bodies virginal and pure despite the lewdness of their dancing. They swirled about a central dais where sat a throne of black metal. Chained to the throne’s base were several dying men, their flesh ripped and flayed, filling the chamber like the stink of rotting flesh and feces. The dancers moved not to the dictates of any ethereal music, but to the invisible melodies of the prisoners’ suffering, which hung thick in the starlit air. A great weariness fell upon me, and I shivered with the scimitar clenched tightly in my fist.
On the throne, draped in robes of spilled blood, sat the Lord of Endings. A giant he was, his skin pale as that of a maggot. He wore a crown of bleached skulls with living eyes that glanced nervously about the hall. The Lord himself had neither eyes, nose, or mouth. His mighty head was faceless, featureless, smooth as a pearl. His great, claw-tipped hands gripped the arms of his throne. The faceless head turned almost imperceptibly toward me. I felt his gaze despite his lack of eyes, for it fell upon me like a great heat or a freezing wind.