ElectronX
26-08-2007, 22:30
The windswept dunes of the Gerotae desert are depressing caricatures of men. Just like men, they're everywhere, and they're all made of the same worthless sand. Each one thinks it’s above the external forces of nature that grind and torment everyone around him. But that's only a delusion. Age wears down men just like the wind wears down the dunes, till there's nothing left but a gaunt husk. As menacing as nature is in its simplest forms, mocking man’s hubris, Horren Nihlo liked it out here.
Twenty years of service in a dry wasteland thousands of leagues away from any civilization save for his own outpost gave him an eerie sense of tranquility. Everyday the fiery twins would rise from the west, tormenting the land with wave after wave of heat, till the sand was white as acid washed bone. Then the suns would set, and terrible heat would be supplanted with a hellish cold.
Regardless of the time, the landscape was always an unending sea of this bleached sand: pocked with islands of tortured glass born from the gaze of fiery eyes that stayed too long.
Horren slowly traversed this land each day, not moving more than ten miles away from the outpost. It was nothing but a wild conglomeration of tents of animal hide clustering around small a spring in the middle of a sandy nowhere. It was also the last stop for the trade route they called The Lonely Widow that provided the outpost with the required supplies once every month. Though it was some civilization, its inhabitants numbered twenty, with half asleep at night, and the other half during the day. Hell was a quiet and lonely place.
"Anything out there?" The familiar voice of the outpost captain crackled over Horren's shoulder mounted vox.
"Nothing. Nothing but ghosts for leagues and leagues." He responded hoarsely before taking a swig from his water skin: the air made your throat as dry as the sand within minutes.
"As expected. We haven't seen anything for almost a year now. Before that they were in bad enough shape as it is: central would never believe it, but I think maybe they're all dead." The captain said, sounding as sure of his assessment as he was his own name.
"Maybe. Try not convincing them though, I like it out here." Horren said seriously, sitting down on a patch of sand. It was hot enough to cook food without the aid of a fire, but the haggard threads of his tunic and cloak made it tolerable.
"You're crazy, but there's no point in me telling you that. Keep your guard up, make it out to point Delta and report back." The vox cut off. The captain could deal with it but he hated this place, and couldn't understand why anyone else wouldn't either.
The haze clouded his vision beyond a mile. Quarts trees swayed in the distortion like leaves of tortured grass while the sand devils danced around them in menacing fashion. Nihlo looked into it with iron determination and headed towards the next lookout point.
The particle rifle was heavy, and part of his turban was sagging down over his hood, further obscuring his view. His boots were full of hot sand, but so where everyone else's: after a few weeks you were used to it. The walk was misery incarnate, but at least misery is company.
He arrived at the point, another spot on a map that had become outdated decades ago. The coordinates were always the same but the wind always changed the physicality. One day it was a dune, the next it was a depression between dunes. Today, thankfully it was the former.
Walking up mountains of loose sand is always hard no matter how experienced you are at it. Every side looks the same, so you can't tell the stable portions from the unstable. Years of practice only reduced the difficulty a little. Nihlo walked up Delta point with a relaxed swagger, his rifle slung over his shoulder and cigarette burning slowly between his windcracked lips.
"This is Sand Demon, nothing out here." Horren said almost instinctively over the vox.
Horren had been here for twenty years, wearing the same tired assortment of ecru colored clothes that protected him from the hard winds and blistering heat. Walking the same path every day no matter how the wicked desert gales had changed it. Looking out into the same unfriendly world with aged hazel eyes that somehow survived without protection. His hair was always the same mess of short ashen threads that his tired hands ran through every day during weapon maintenance. Repetition wasn’t as bad as they made it out to be.
"Copy that. Report back in ten minutes, then proceed to Beta Point and check in. We'll be done in a few hours, I guess you're sorry to hear that, huh?" Replied the captain. His mocking tone meant Nihlo would be out here for a few more hours, but he didn't mind. The captain had tried things like that before, to no effect, which probably encouraged him to continue trying. Horren chuckled at the thought as he surveyed his surroundings with the same degree of carefulness he always had. Nothing, still nothing.
Horren lit another cigarette, taking in deep breaths of smoke to calm him further as he sifted through the haze with the scope of his aging rifle. A tattered cloth had been wrapped around the barrel and stock to protect against the warping effects of the heat. The magazine was larger than most containing more power for more shots: Horren hated reloading.
Another long walked awaited him as he peered towards Beta point, another spot in the contortion horizon. He walked down the dune in boot with a packed layer of sand between his foot and the insole; it was like a layer of gritty padding that actually made the walks more bearable…
A plume of sand and darkness erupted ten meters away, creating a thunderous shock wave that deafened the continuous howling of the abhorrent wind, knocking him off his feet and sending him crashing into the side of the dune. Instinct took over, and he clutched his weapon tight, ignoring the pain from the four ribs that cracked. The rifle was powered up, connected to his nervous system through the ports in his hand. He was the rifle; the rifle was he.
"What the fuck was that? Sand Demon report in!" The captain screamed frantically.
The blast was powerful, annihilating a ton of sand within an instant, creating a hole at least four meters deep and causing shards of glass to form where the blast had struck, colored purple by the dark energies that created the explosion. Nihlo rolled from his position and dived passed the smoldering crater, crawling around to the crest of the sandy hill.
"They're back. Point Delta. Don't know how many, but they're armed with the typical assortment of powerful shit." Nihlo said, snatching a targeting drone from his belt and tossing it up over the dune.
The mechanical sphere scanned the immediate area, sending the information to implant in Nihlo's right eye. There were hundreds- no, thousands of them. Fuck, he thought to himself, his finger resting nervously on the trigger.
"This is bad, captain. Alert everyone, send a message to central. It's another bloody March." Nihlo shouted running up the side of the dune to get a better firing position.
"Fuck. Do what you can, the other teams are on their way, and the ghosts are waking up too. Out." It was hopeless, and Nihlo knew it, but at least he'd die somewhere he liked to spend time.
Distorted by the haze, the specters of death marched on silently, their eyes aglow in a fire of violet phantasmal energies. Thousands of them trekked through the sand with a casual ease that made Nihlo sick. Hundreds more arose from beneath the dunes every second, the sand flowing around them like water. He watched on in disgust, noting their stoicism and uniform movements, clustering into a tightly packed wave of monster, and as if to scream out in unknowable pain, their maws – writhing with the same energy that transformed their eyes into embers, opened and unleashed a fusillade of the same horrid bolts that nearly killed him only a few moments ago.
His entire world was awash in frigid black, the storm of energy decimating the landscape and silencing the wind in horror. Hell was annihilated; he knew that already, it was just him and an army of walking demons intent on destroying everything in their path. But Horren was a demon too, a demon of the very sand they were violating.
Horren set his weapon at its maximum power setting, boosting it further with the power sink in his arm and chest being fed along the power network intertwined with his veins. It was on maximum spread, encompassing a group of hundreds of skeletal abominations about a hundred meters away.
"This is just a taste of what we're gonna give you undead fuckers." He said, his enemies readying for another attack aimed right at him. You all should have stayed buried in the god damned sand.
His hand squeezed, his eyes blinded, his uniform ablaze. A holy pulse of cobalt vehemence spread over the armies of Hell and obliterated them in a storm of brilliant light, turning sand into a warping, flowing, melting stream of glowing quartz at least twenty meters wide. The last thing Horren Nihlo felt was satisfaction and peace, before being swallowed by the fires of his own indignation.
Twenty years of service in a dry wasteland thousands of leagues away from any civilization save for his own outpost gave him an eerie sense of tranquility. Everyday the fiery twins would rise from the west, tormenting the land with wave after wave of heat, till the sand was white as acid washed bone. Then the suns would set, and terrible heat would be supplanted with a hellish cold.
Regardless of the time, the landscape was always an unending sea of this bleached sand: pocked with islands of tortured glass born from the gaze of fiery eyes that stayed too long.
Horren slowly traversed this land each day, not moving more than ten miles away from the outpost. It was nothing but a wild conglomeration of tents of animal hide clustering around small a spring in the middle of a sandy nowhere. It was also the last stop for the trade route they called The Lonely Widow that provided the outpost with the required supplies once every month. Though it was some civilization, its inhabitants numbered twenty, with half asleep at night, and the other half during the day. Hell was a quiet and lonely place.
"Anything out there?" The familiar voice of the outpost captain crackled over Horren's shoulder mounted vox.
"Nothing. Nothing but ghosts for leagues and leagues." He responded hoarsely before taking a swig from his water skin: the air made your throat as dry as the sand within minutes.
"As expected. We haven't seen anything for almost a year now. Before that they were in bad enough shape as it is: central would never believe it, but I think maybe they're all dead." The captain said, sounding as sure of his assessment as he was his own name.
"Maybe. Try not convincing them though, I like it out here." Horren said seriously, sitting down on a patch of sand. It was hot enough to cook food without the aid of a fire, but the haggard threads of his tunic and cloak made it tolerable.
"You're crazy, but there's no point in me telling you that. Keep your guard up, make it out to point Delta and report back." The vox cut off. The captain could deal with it but he hated this place, and couldn't understand why anyone else wouldn't either.
The haze clouded his vision beyond a mile. Quarts trees swayed in the distortion like leaves of tortured grass while the sand devils danced around them in menacing fashion. Nihlo looked into it with iron determination and headed towards the next lookout point.
The particle rifle was heavy, and part of his turban was sagging down over his hood, further obscuring his view. His boots were full of hot sand, but so where everyone else's: after a few weeks you were used to it. The walk was misery incarnate, but at least misery is company.
He arrived at the point, another spot on a map that had become outdated decades ago. The coordinates were always the same but the wind always changed the physicality. One day it was a dune, the next it was a depression between dunes. Today, thankfully it was the former.
Walking up mountains of loose sand is always hard no matter how experienced you are at it. Every side looks the same, so you can't tell the stable portions from the unstable. Years of practice only reduced the difficulty a little. Nihlo walked up Delta point with a relaxed swagger, his rifle slung over his shoulder and cigarette burning slowly between his windcracked lips.
"This is Sand Demon, nothing out here." Horren said almost instinctively over the vox.
Horren had been here for twenty years, wearing the same tired assortment of ecru colored clothes that protected him from the hard winds and blistering heat. Walking the same path every day no matter how the wicked desert gales had changed it. Looking out into the same unfriendly world with aged hazel eyes that somehow survived without protection. His hair was always the same mess of short ashen threads that his tired hands ran through every day during weapon maintenance. Repetition wasn’t as bad as they made it out to be.
"Copy that. Report back in ten minutes, then proceed to Beta Point and check in. We'll be done in a few hours, I guess you're sorry to hear that, huh?" Replied the captain. His mocking tone meant Nihlo would be out here for a few more hours, but he didn't mind. The captain had tried things like that before, to no effect, which probably encouraged him to continue trying. Horren chuckled at the thought as he surveyed his surroundings with the same degree of carefulness he always had. Nothing, still nothing.
Horren lit another cigarette, taking in deep breaths of smoke to calm him further as he sifted through the haze with the scope of his aging rifle. A tattered cloth had been wrapped around the barrel and stock to protect against the warping effects of the heat. The magazine was larger than most containing more power for more shots: Horren hated reloading.
Another long walked awaited him as he peered towards Beta point, another spot in the contortion horizon. He walked down the dune in boot with a packed layer of sand between his foot and the insole; it was like a layer of gritty padding that actually made the walks more bearable…
A plume of sand and darkness erupted ten meters away, creating a thunderous shock wave that deafened the continuous howling of the abhorrent wind, knocking him off his feet and sending him crashing into the side of the dune. Instinct took over, and he clutched his weapon tight, ignoring the pain from the four ribs that cracked. The rifle was powered up, connected to his nervous system through the ports in his hand. He was the rifle; the rifle was he.
"What the fuck was that? Sand Demon report in!" The captain screamed frantically.
The blast was powerful, annihilating a ton of sand within an instant, creating a hole at least four meters deep and causing shards of glass to form where the blast had struck, colored purple by the dark energies that created the explosion. Nihlo rolled from his position and dived passed the smoldering crater, crawling around to the crest of the sandy hill.
"They're back. Point Delta. Don't know how many, but they're armed with the typical assortment of powerful shit." Nihlo said, snatching a targeting drone from his belt and tossing it up over the dune.
The mechanical sphere scanned the immediate area, sending the information to implant in Nihlo's right eye. There were hundreds- no, thousands of them. Fuck, he thought to himself, his finger resting nervously on the trigger.
"This is bad, captain. Alert everyone, send a message to central. It's another bloody March." Nihlo shouted running up the side of the dune to get a better firing position.
"Fuck. Do what you can, the other teams are on their way, and the ghosts are waking up too. Out." It was hopeless, and Nihlo knew it, but at least he'd die somewhere he liked to spend time.
Distorted by the haze, the specters of death marched on silently, their eyes aglow in a fire of violet phantasmal energies. Thousands of them trekked through the sand with a casual ease that made Nihlo sick. Hundreds more arose from beneath the dunes every second, the sand flowing around them like water. He watched on in disgust, noting their stoicism and uniform movements, clustering into a tightly packed wave of monster, and as if to scream out in unknowable pain, their maws – writhing with the same energy that transformed their eyes into embers, opened and unleashed a fusillade of the same horrid bolts that nearly killed him only a few moments ago.
His entire world was awash in frigid black, the storm of energy decimating the landscape and silencing the wind in horror. Hell was annihilated; he knew that already, it was just him and an army of walking demons intent on destroying everything in their path. But Horren was a demon too, a demon of the very sand they were violating.
Horren set his weapon at its maximum power setting, boosting it further with the power sink in his arm and chest being fed along the power network intertwined with his veins. It was on maximum spread, encompassing a group of hundreds of skeletal abominations about a hundred meters away.
"This is just a taste of what we're gonna give you undead fuckers." He said, his enemies readying for another attack aimed right at him. You all should have stayed buried in the god damned sand.
His hand squeezed, his eyes blinded, his uniform ablaze. A holy pulse of cobalt vehemence spread over the armies of Hell and obliterated them in a storm of brilliant light, turning sand into a warping, flowing, melting stream of glowing quartz at least twenty meters wide. The last thing Horren Nihlo felt was satisfaction and peace, before being swallowed by the fires of his own indignation.