Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen by James A. West

meant, but Ba’Sel did not say so. There was too much trouble and despair as it was, without mentioning horrors loosed from Geh’shinnom’atar.
    “Why not the king’s city?” Nazeen asked.
    “Kula-Tak isn’t safe,” the trader imparted in a conspiratorial whisper, “no matter how much King Daju and his councilors say otherwise. I’ve kin who lived there, and they barely escaped with their lives. They told of darkness coming out of the ground, out of wells, out of the very walls of the Onyx Palace, rising like oiled smoke and stealing the flesh of the living, and making that flesh into other things ,” he finished with a shiver.
    Neither Ba’Sel nor his men argued the point, for they had seen the same. By the trader’s slow nod, he took their silence as confirmation. “With you buying the last of my stock, I’ll be on my way soon enough. Should have left before now. These lands are no longer safe.”
    “Is anywhere safe?” Nazeen asked quietly, but the horse trader had no answer.
    While Ba’Sel and his company did not see any Mahk’lar on the dusty roads to Eponta, there was enough destruction along the way to worry about their homelands. Evidence of the Tears of Pa’amadin, so named by Sister Ellonlef, had turned huge swaths of the desert into planes of greenish glass, or cratered its surface with unnavigable pits, forcing the warriors far afield.
    A fortnight later than it should have taken, they reached their arid homelands, and discovered that many of the granite mountains of Eponta had been reduced to broken hills. The long-slumbering cinder cones now spewed molten rock. And the once pristine dunes lolled sullenly under thick blankets of choking gray ash.
    Ba’Sel’s unease grew over every bitter mile of every bitter league they spent tromping under a blood-hazed sun, or drinking acrid water from once sweet springs. He kept his worries at bay by imagining taking a wife, and together raising good tall sons who would till soil and reap crops, instead of the blood and souls of men, as he had done most of his life.
    He kept that dream alive until they came to Salgo, the village of his birth, and that of half the men with him. What hopefulness remained in any of them died on that day.
    The village stood unharmed, but the folk who walked its few dusty streets, or sat around the village well, were folk no more. When they saw the newcomers, they attacked.
    The last sight Ba’Sel had of home was his mother, naked and sprinting toward him, eyes glistening black orbs. As she came, the rich sable skin between her pendulous breasts ruptured, and the ribs underneath broke apart to disgorge a howling abomination that should never have been seen by the eyes of living men. She came, shrieking his name in a sacrilegious tongue, gobbets of rancid black meat falling from the tear in her chest to splatter at her clawed feet.
    Ba’Sel and the others survived by running. That same fear kept him and his men running over the face of Geldain for many years, but it never kept them safe for long. His men died, one at a time, some taken by wandering Mahk’lar, others slaughtered by desperate bandits, and later by a new race, the Alon’mahk’lar, those who served an enigmatic being called the Faceless One who had risen up across the Sea of Drakarra. In the end, long years finished off all the rest.
    But not Ba’Sel. He lingered, ageless and afraid of being alone.
    Before Nazeen died in a wind-carved cave in the flank of a sandstone cliff, he suggested, “Perhaps something happened at that temple in the marshes? Perhaps it changed you?”
    “Why me, and not you?” Ba’Sel countered. He held Nazeen’s withered hand in his own, which was still as strong as it had been the day Prince Varis emerged pale and ghastly from that forsaken temple, and began conjuring strange fires to turn Ba’Sel’s friends and kin to ash.
    Nazeen, his last and oldest friend from the days before the Upheaval, shrugged weakly under a