Raymond snorted his offense at the dust assailing his lungs and the sound thudded dully in the dead air. Sharp, brittle grasses bristled like a forest of little spears before them, parched and begging for a spark, a perfect complement to the grisly quills lining what parapets remained standing along the ruined walls. Stones as large as horses lay rent asunder in massive piles of rubble that may as well have been their own rocky hillsides, but for the towers jutting defiantly out of the wreckage and what a good squint would tell him were the crumbling bones of this once proud fortress' defenders.
Even the breeze groaned around them like the dying sighs of an ancient, tortured behemoth.
"There's no life here, Florentine."
His voice affected a nearly funereal somberness. Everything about this place was heavy, from the countless souls utterly spent on these crounds centuries hence to the dust of a battle that refused to settle. This was dead land, cursed land. The red stallion stepped gingerly through the spear grass, half expecting some implement of war armed a thousand years hence to trigger and snap at him from the overgrowth.
What he found was far worse than a rusty steel trap.
Not far from where they had landed was a wide, shallow pit in the ground, made nearly invisible by the onset of time as vegetation and erosion crept in from the edges. Raymond's eye might have passed over it completely, were it not for the gentle slope of the field before them, leading the eye inexorably back to the shattered ruin before them. There were other such indentations, shaped with such regularity as to set his teeth on edge, and it was around the third sweeping look that he realized exactly what his eyes were seeing.
Deep claw-like gouges rent what few sections of the walls remained standing, and the destruction of the fortress fell in line with the ancient furrows as though the opposing army simply swept straight through in a wave of wanton destruction, slaughtering everything in their wake. Or...these were tracks.
"Flora," he said out of the side of his mouth, grey eyes transfixed upon the massive animal track, nearly struck dumb by the enormity of what he imagined, "it's not safe here."
Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
@
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
