When the Sky is Black,
When the Seas are Red,
When the Earth is Scarred,
The Calamity is Returned.
At the End of Eternity,
Annihilation Awaits
Luin remembered childhood days of hide and seek with her brother.
What fun they'd have; darting through the village, leaping over carts and through crowds to find the perfect hiding spot before the other had finished counting down. She fondly recalled how he'd hide just behind her sometimes, or somehow blend seamlessly into the surrounding area as he seemed to do so well, and fall so silent, so still, it was as though he'd disappeared without leaving behind a trace.
On occasion he'd reveal himself just to admonish her for counting too fast, or for trying to peek through her fingers, or even for giggling as she whispered out each number, knowing full well she'd soon reach the count of ten but her target hadn't yet gone anywhere. Luin could never blend in the way he could, so when it was her turn to hide she'd always end up at that same spot, by the bushes just outside the village bar. There she'd spend an hour away each time, watching and trying to stifle her laughs as he pretended not to know where she was, and pretended to be scared when she inevitably ruined her cover to jump out and roar at him.
How she missed that bush.
Her breath was slow, terrified as it drew from between her lips and into the silence of the night. Her fingers wrapped tight around the dull, gray grass on which she lay, peering warily over the ridge's edge. She blinked. Nothing stood there, there on the rocky earth some thirty or so feet away where she had last spotted the mighty thing before ducking into cover after a brief chase. There was no sand upon which its footprints may have imprinted upon so that she could track its movements, those sparse few amounts were far from a great enough quantity to.
Was it...gone..?
No, it couldn't be. Luin hadn't a clue what had aggravated the Anjanath so deeply, but she knew that even an average one wouldn't simply give up as easily as it had. She also knew that Anjanath, the towering black and pink brutes, had an unnatural capacity for stealth. She had never been convinced by those stories of how trained and well-experienced Rangers could simply lose track of a Brute Wyvern of its size, only for it to ambush them however long later with no warning, but now she fully believed each and every one of them and regretted not doing so sooner. If she had, would she still be in this situation?
It was only meant to be a quick trip down to the lake. How it all went so wrong, Luin didn't faintly know. The night had been a quiet one, the sort where the crickets and frogs join into a melody. There was none of that when she came down to the water, no sound from another creature for miles around. That should've been her first warning.
Luin was raised, as was every other child in the village, to pay dire attention to nature. "The machinations of the wild," The once-ranger who taught them would always say, "Are the machinations of life itself." A snapped stick meant you weren't alone.
Silence meant you were alone with something else. That "something" revealed itself only after the girl had closed her book, deciding her midnight reading had come to an end when the foreboding feeling that something awful was about to happen had overwhelmed her senses until it had rooted itself firmly in her mind. She'd turned and stood when, beyond the nearest wave of hills, a black-furred tail whipped before falling back out of sight. By the time she had already began to attempt a hasty but quiet exit, the pink maw of the monster appeared to her left. Luin considered herself supremely lucky that she had already been close enough to the hills that the sprint into them seemed sufficient to remove herself from the gaze of the Anjanath, though it had still attempted to give chase.
That was three minutes ago.
The past one-hundred and eighty or so seconds had been spent with fear's song singing in her heart and across her body. Her finger twitched rapidly against the ground, upsetting the dry soil from which sprouted the monotone grass within which she hid. Emerald eyes peered wide from amidst her dark skin, each breath drawn long and shaky. She dared not think of what might occur should she reveal herself too soon, should she even attempt to return to her village before she was certain that the beast was well and truly gone.
Though, if it had come this near to the watering hole, it was sure to happen across the village at some point. And what may happen then, should the people be caught unaware, Luin didn't want to know. Which is why, she thought to herself, which is why I need to get back. Trembling, she lifted her head from the dirt and craned it back, to the very faint and distant lights on the dark horizon. She hadn't left Baron too far away—it wouldn't be a long ride back. But whether or not he could outrun an Anjanath if it gave chase remained to be seen, though frankly Luin didn't like her odds in the event it came to that.
She then looked from her far away home to the rolling dunes all around her, spying out not a single sign, track, or print of the Brute Wyvern. Everything she saw seemed to tell her that it was gone, that the threat was passed, and yet there was this nagging presence at the back of her head that whispered softly into her ear, whispered words louder than any shout: "It's waiting."
If she stayed here any longer, she'd die. If she got up and tried to flee, she'd die. The girl realized she'd rather go on her feet than on her stomach. She forced her eyes shut and clenched her fist. She spit out a brief prayer to the Gilded One and steeled her nerves, before exploding onto her legs and from the mound. She slid down the dirt pile and broke out into a wild dash, a flash of pink scales rising from behind a hill on her right. The Anjanath's ensuing roar was ear-shattering, threatening to either force her to a tumbling stop or to the ground as a result of the pain rocketing through the sides of her head. Still, Luin gritted her teeth and forced herself ever-forwards, just as her brother had always told her to do.
Her footfalls on the moonlit soil were meager in comparison to the mighty stomps behind her. They grew closer and closer with each second that passed by, the thumping in Luin's chest louder and louder. She felt the Anjanath's hot breath on the small of her neck, the huffs and grunts of the gargantuan dinosaur in her ears. Adrenaline surged through her bloodstream, bubbling and brewing in her veins. She forced herself far beyond what she had ever achieved in training or friendly races, legs smashing against the barren soil like a whirling storm of wind. She placed a minor amount of distance between her and the chasing Brute Wyvern but the reprieve was temporary at best, for in spite of her best efforts the encroaching Anjanath had caught up in what was only a matter of moments. Now her ears were filled only with her own panting and the rush of blood.
She missed her turn.
Luin's eyes shot wide as she realized she'd missed the turn into the dry dell where she'd left Baron. How far back was it? She had no clue how long past the spot of her salvation she had gone, only that it was behind her now rather than ahead. Behind her...with the Anjanath in between.
Her thoughts wandered. Her focus fell and she stumbled, the adrenaline vanishing like a ghost in the wind as hopelessness swelled larger than it ever had. She fell to her hands, what remained of her momentum carrying her legs forwards and whipping her body around in the opposite direction before it fizzled out. She glanced up to come face to face with a set of mighty jaws spread wide on either side of her, met with a view deep into the monster's throat. In her head, in these last moments, she accepted death. The bite to follow would undoubtedly end her life. But her body, her reflexes deep beneath her conscious thoughts weren't quite ready to give up just yet. Her legs kicked out and she barreled forwards, coming between the Anjanath's legs as its ferocious maw snapped shut behind her.
As much as she wanted to dwell on the fact that she had just dodged what absolutely should've killed her, the girl knew she had zero time to. Luin rose from he knees and transitioned into a straightforwards dash as the monster seemed to stumble over its own feet, tripped up by the sudden change in her direction. This maneuver had just given her a chance, a real chance, and suddenly the hopelessness had been vanquished. She had a shot.
This time she paid the utmost attention to her surroundings, spying out the turn she had missed the first time around in a mere few seconds. Another chance had been granted to her and she didn't waste it, cutting across the hills into the hollow as behind her the Anjanath had finally banked and begun working to shed the distance freshly placed between predator and prey. Luin navigated the darkened dell, whistling out a brief two-note tune for Baron but finding that he did not come.
The girl stood now before a dead end. The dunes of dirt rose up on three sides all around her, too steep to climb. Under her feet were more patches of the grayed grass, and behind her, as the woman turned, the Anjanath stalked down the passageway. The beast's hurried pace had gone for it now understood that she was trapped in here, her only potential way out being blocked by the brute. Luin was sure it bore no intention of allowing her past it again. The monster's legs were bent as it approached on its haunches, black-furred tail swishing back and forth as a low growl emitted from between its snarled lips. The moon reflecting in its eyes gave it an almost unreal appearance, like the thing creeping towards her was a vision from a feverous dream rather than a towering theropod soon to tear her asunder. Luin hunkered down and prepared to dodge any incoming attack, as if she could possibly manage to pull off the same thing twice in a row. The Anjanath had finally come within only twenty or so feet of her when it lifted its head and—
A dark silhouette appeared amidst the stars atop the rest of a hill. Just as the Anjanath began to swoop its jaws towards her the shadow leapt forth, coming into the light as it fell and smashed a boulder against the monster's head. Here now stood Baron, a Kulu-Ya-Ku mightier in size than any other. He was an old monster, his feathery plume less vibrant than the youths of his species and his skin grown into a duller shade than average, but with that age came experience: experience that provided it with the knowledge and skills needed to break a rock against an Anjanath's skull.
The Brute Wyvern roared in pain as it jerked away, falling off balance and toppling over. While it violently thrashed about on the ground, Luin howled out an illegible but joyful cheer, wasting absolutely no time in clambering onto her tame's leather saddle. He leapt over the downed Anjanath and bounded off towards the exit to the dell, running over hills and dunes as the sounds and shouts of the dazed Anjanath grew further and further into the distance. The wind whipped against Luin's face and the greatest relief at last set upon her, as did the soreness that came with it. Her legs on either side of the Bird Wyvern fell numb but a weight rose from her shoulders, and she dared not look back at where they had fled from the ferocious wyvern, only ahead to home.
The mounds soon were tamed into mere bumps, and not too long after even those fell into smooth earth. Nothing but empty desert stretched on for miles around Luin and Baron, save the village before them and a rising trail of dust behind them. It was in spite of this that the Kulu-Ya-Ku still ran like the Anjanath remained hot on their tail, though the beast had long since been left behind by now. Tiredness swept over the girl on the Ya-Ku's back, but she refused to allow her eyes shut save those necessary blinks that ended up stretching themselves far longer than Luin'd wish. She was out of danger but her body remained on edge, prepared to fend off anything new or strange.
By the time Luin returned to the village, though, this wariness had eroded and been fully replaced with just weariness. The Kulu-Ya-Ku had at least slowed to a sight trot through the silent village, the occasional light glowing from within a house but dark and empty for the most part. At least they reached her family home, a two-floor adobe building that seemed not to different from the others around it. The windows were dark. Luin quietly thanked Baron as she dismounted and faltered as she led him to a hitching post just outside the house, before stumbling through the door and blindly making her way across the dark room onto a soft couch upon which she collapsed and did not get up from. Tomorrow, she'd need to pay a visit to the head of the Town Guard and inform her of the monster she'd encountered tonight, but for right now...
Right now, Luin needed sleep.
Her dreams amidst a shallow rest were sparse and unremembered in the morning. By the time she had awoke she was still tired, the events of the previous night weighing heavily on her eyelids. She'd found a discrepancy between her body and her mind once more, for while the former beckoned for her return to the soft and warm cloth cushions of the couch, the latter was racing far too fast to even consider rest. There remained something that direly needed to be done, and Luin couldn't allow herself even a moment of reprieve before doing it: already she regretted sleeping. How much closer had the Anjanath gotten in the time that she had foolishly let herself waste the morning in an only half-asleep state? The woman allowed nothing to stand between between the moment she rose from the furniture and through the door, exiting out into the gold-painted world of mid-morning. Baron was still hitched outside, already awake and alert—or perhaps still awake and alert—and Luin scaled his saddle and led him away from the home and to the east, her destination and the path to it already well-known to her.
At this somewhat early hour, she was unsurprisingly not the only person on the streets. Villagers littered the sandy paths, most on foot but others on monster-back. It was, for the most part, Apceros and Gendromes that they rode. Monsters larger than such were an uncommon sight, though that wasn't to say they didn't exist: Tigris was the famed Tigrex of the chieftain, an old and grizzled creature that sat guard outside the Temple of Wills. Then was Aruplex, the Sandstone Tetsucabra that the in-town construction crew used for heavy lifting and easy demolishing. Last but certainly not least were Unis, a Monoblos tamed by the Captain of the Town Guard, and Gold Regent, the Seregios that had battled alongside Luin's brother.
Baron carried her through the residential area of adobe and sandstone homes, then just past the market where the sounds of haggling and sales lifted over the faint wind before subsiding as she traveled past the vendors and stalls coated in multicolored cloth and fabric, and at last the homes and buildings fell away as she reached the more sparsely populated eastern edge of town. Here, the streets were far less busy though weren't exactly empty, as men and women of the Town Guard began their patrols, coating in thick leather and steel as they carried metal-spears that pointed to the heavens. From each of their belts hung three blades: on one side were their carving knives and a single Kadakar, or "guard talons", hooked daggers that, rather than held by any sort of grip, were slipped on over the knuckles and used as an extension of their own hands; a second of these Kadakars rested on their opposite hip. They greeted Luin by name as she passed and in spite of the worries plaguing her mind, she returned each formality with a smile.
At her command, Baron came to a stop. Luin's eyes scanned the edifice towering before her, the sun's glow only barely visible behind it and reducing the building to a mere silhouette, yet that hardly took away from its intensity.
It was a building that went by two names: the Dhaemadur, "Temple that touches the sky" in the old days, and Mosghula as it was named when it was renovated after every other remnant of the Old City had been excavated and broken apart to form a surplus of building materials that their people could never want for anything in the generations to come. It was with such reverence that this great undertaking was whispered, that for years of Luin's childhood she believed the Restoration was but a piece of ancient history, long since fallen out of relevance to people in the modern era. It was her brother, she recalled, who had finally corrected her with a laugh.
Looking over the Mosghula now, the girl could very clearly tell which parts had belonged to the ancient Dhaemadur before its desolation, and which parts had been added on during the Restoration when it was transformed from a temple to what it was now: the home of the Town Guard. The stone was almost patchwork; Blackstone, charred and crisped in appearance but unbelievably sturdy in structure, made up the foundations and the primary outline of the Mosghula, while the finer details and added-on structures (like the balconies and the L-shaped wing that sprouted out from the left side of the building, within which the armories were stored) were a lighter shade of grayed cobblestone.
Luin swallowed her nerves and guided Baron to a fence just outside of the building. She dropped from the Kulu-Ya-Ku's back and passed through the gate without objection from the duo guarding it. She opened the grand wooden doors, the flowing designs carved into them dancing as they moved across her peripheral. Where her vision truly lay was on the menacing interior. The dark halls were akin to the foreboding storm clouds that hung over the village for weeks on end during the Wet Season. The red torchlight flickering against the almost bluish stones only barely illuminated the structure's insides enough that it couldn't be considered a dungeon, and down the black and brown rugs marched guards on their way either out into town or to some other location within the Mosghula. Luin passed these guards as she navigated down the main hall, glancing up at the monstrous, white skulls of previous threats to the town that hung upon the black walls as either trophies or reminders. They ranged in size, the smallest of which having come from a Great Jaggi that had eaten livestock belonging to a farmer in the Broken Plateau some miles south of the village (Luin had learned this from her friend). The largest of which (and also the only one that wasn't a stark ivory in color), hanging above the black door at the very end of the main hall, had once belonged to a mighty Black Gravios who threatened to trample the village underfoot as it passed through the Endless Sands during the event known as the "Sari-Calamity", when the threat looming on the horizon of a new Calamity was greater than it had been in centuries but still was averted. The Black Gravios, a tremendous mountain of a monster dubbed the "Earthshaker", had navigated its way through the Asha Canyon to the east and set itself on a path that led straight through the village. Luin knew the story of its defeat well, she knew of the man who had taken up arms and led the operation to direct the Earthbreaker instead towards the Skarr-Khaj, a salt pan that lay to their northeast. Of course she knew the story; it was her own great-grandfather who finally vanquished the beast.
Luin moved under it and through the door, a shudder shooting up her spine as she did. How a creature could even grow to such a tremendous size was a question that baffled her--she had seen mighty creatures in her own lifetime, but the Earthshaker dwarfed all of them in comparison. If just its skull managed to instill such fear into her, Luin couldn't help but wonder what she would've done had she seen it when it was still alive, blackening the heavens with the thick, evil smoke that billowed from its obsidian carapace while melting the rock beneath it with the impossibly hot flames that poured from its ember-effusing maw.
Probably run, The girl admitted to herself, and never look back.
Beyond the door, in a surprisingly well-lit room, was her father. It felt an awful thing to do, but Luin couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief that it was him rather than her mother; he'd be far more lenient in his scolding of her mistakes. The stout and swarthy man sat in a Blackstone seat, scribbling with an ink-tipped feather onto a scroll of paper set upon the rectangular table before him. He lifted the utensil and dipped it into a pitch-colored glass, only noticing Luin as he was about to draw the feather from the ink once more. The man beamed, leaving the quill in the cup and rising from his chair to greet Luin with an embrace from across the table as the latter approached. Once the hug had ended father and daughter both lowered to their seats, Luin opting to take the middlemost of the three chairs on the opposite side of the wide desk.
"So," Her father grunted as he leaned back in the seat, looking warmly at Luin through his glasses. The fear in the girl's mind seemed to manipulate her sight--for years she had seen her father as the man he was in his youth, the man she had heard glorious stories of: a brutal yet admirable axe-swinging warrior, but in the context of the Anjanath he looked old and weak. His portliness now seemed less like the proof of a powerful man, and more like fat accrued from several long years of inaction. No longer to her did he seem a mighty champion, but a mere man of flesh and blood, feeble in the face of this superior threat. "What brings you here?" He at last asked, drawing Luin from her thoughts. He looked across the table expectantly, brown eyes cutting above the rims of his lowered glasses.
"I went out last night," Luin paused, as though waiting for a reaction from her father—an angry huff, or a judgmental stare, perhaps—for nobody was to travel outside the town at night without company. Just as soon as she stopped, she decided to speak again before he could even get a chance to react. "Down to the watering hole. As I was about to leave, I saw an Anjanath. It was closer than any I'd ever seen. Too close to the village." The girl made sure to be quick and to the point (intentionally leaving out that she had just narrowly survived was a result of her directness; her parents didn't need to know anyways). Though her father was typically a outgoing and jubilant man, often taking his subordinates in the Guard out for drinks after a particularly successful day, she knew that when it came to important affairs he preferred to get down to brass tacks as soon as was possible. Now she stopped for good, waiting for his response.
It took a few moments longer for it to finally come than Luin expected. Her father's attention shifted to the surface of the desk and he pushed the current correspondence aside towards the edge. He ascended from his seat and wordlessly made for one of the many bookcases lining the room, multicolored spines painting the walls like a rainbow. He lifted his hand to the top of one, lifting his heels into the air and standing on the tips of his toes to reach; it was a sight that might've been comical had the situation not been so dire. When he turned back to her it was with a scroll in hand, sealed by a golden thread and a torn rubber stamp of red. He twirled the aureate string so that the letter was unbound, and set it before him on the table before sitting once more.
At length, he spoke: "A week and three days ago I received word from our Rangers in the West that they'd found Brute Wyvern prints facing the direction of Jahdar. Too big to be a Barroth, they said, and that they suspected it was either an Anjanath or a wandering Banbaro. One of those possibilities was far more pressing than the other, but if I were to dispatch a team to investigate every potential threat that came as near to our town as those prints did..." Her father sighed. "I should've dealt with it when I had the chance. Luin...it's a good thing you've brought this to my attention. It means that the situation at hand is worse than I thought."
Luin nodded, but still, there was some nagging feeling in the back of her mind, like something unsaid still hovered in the air between them.
"Are you...mad at me..?" Luin was nervous as she asked, fingers folding together in her lap as she forced her eyes to remain on her father.
"No. Right now," He sucked in air and leaned back, his eyes never once leaving the newly re-opened letter's contents. "Right now, I'm just glad you brought this to my attention. You know the rules though, Luin. We'll talk about it later. For now, go ahead and head back home. I need time to think."