The empty eye socket casts its gaze across the grey fields. Corpses rot in place of soil, the buzz of flies toiling over their gluttony scatter the sky like ash on the breeze. Here and there the restless dead go about their tasks, moving the heaps this way and that in a constant search for a bare patch of life giving earth.
A place to nurture a sprouting plant. A patch of loam for the sun to kiss, for rain to caress a hope of life bursting forth in orgasmic rupture. The flutter of the wind stirs a group of flies from their slumber and maggots make merry on the mountains of meat.
Arbratztan sighs a hollow rattle. No breath in that sigh, that expression of a time nearly beyond un-living memory. He pulls folds of flapping flesh around him like a cloak to ward away the cold. But there is no cold, no heat, no shiver from winter's wanton ways. Just endless gore and the mountains of the dead.
They were his soldiers once. His path to greatness, each one loved for the role they played. General, grunt, king, pawn, it was all the same since the plague had come.
The trickling stream flows through cracks and crevices like a guilty lover returning home from a tryst. Through muscle crevices and crevasses of hollow bone, marrow long eaten by the myriad of decay. Nonetheless this trickle reaches the ground, the sapient earth and lingers for a moment before sinking, gulped down by the thirsty soil. After a time, a brief season of the passing sun, a flower blooms from reaching stem. The sun blazing in sympathy with its winking eye and the rotting dead feed its roots.
Arbratztan floats over the hills of pestilence, the place where the fighting was once fiercest. He hasn't been here in over a hundred years ever since that time of great change. The memory of her singing flutters through his mind, a sirens call in the echoing halls of his soul. This is his penance, an unending remembrance of her cadence, a chatter of a spring born in the high vales of his long ago home. Asmollin singing, her hair a weave of sunburst in the corpulent green, serenading the honey bees bumbling about their business. The golden leaves of Falanmouth and Garanmouth trees listen to the sacred heart of life. The mother and father of the acorn wave their arms to the rhythm of her song.
She had been the living embodiment of that country, the scion of magic and he had destroyed it all. Nothing left but death and the squall of bitter rain. Nothing but memories and pain. Nothing but eternal rot and decay.
Suddenly a green flash on the horizon catches his attention. A note of hope born on the moist breeze, the start of a sonata long missed. He focuses his attention on that spot and summons all his power to move through the bodies of his dead. Feeling every fly burrowing, every maggot shriving, even the final vestiges of life in the small mammals that feed on the entrails of the newly defunct. He feels the tight pull of slack sinew in the still animated as they labor until spent in the sepulture fields.
He appears among a grove of monsterous plants. Large spade like leaves sway in time to a music he can't hear. Fear grips him for the first time in a millennia but he brushes it aside. Giant blood red stalks erupt in a fountain of pink and green flowers, garish as guts rent by the sword. The leaves are slashed with strange markings like runes dancing in the sickly glow of the flowers.
"Arbratztan you have come. To greet your queen who once you loved."
Slowly he turns. Asmollin gazes from the hollow place among the pulsing petals. Her golden hair disperses in motes of light like pollen's flight in the summer dawn. Eyes like two green wells of deep refrain wet with the mead of poetry. Her lips sting his mind with the fullness of life as she leans forward to whisper.
"Life will out Arbratztan. There can be no life without death, no start without finish."
He starts to cry tears of blood as he melts under the pressure of unattainable life. "Let me live Asmollin, I always loved you. I destroyed everything for you. I made of the world a dead place after you gave yourself to the lands."
"No, my dear Arbratztan. You have spent it all. A million times over you have spent your life in Lichdom, but now I shall set you free."
She kisses him and a breath of hot, sweet life passes into him. Finally he sighs and fades away in the dying night.
The end.
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