The Barren Land

The scum Kings, a Broadsword Studio production created and written by Mike Daltrey. Episode forty eight, The Barren Land. The fire was a three day old memory, but the hunger was a fresh howling wolf. We had been walking for days, pushing west from Graymark into the barren rocky hills that formed the footstools of the Stone Fence Mountains. This was not the Tangle. This was a graveyard of flint and dead scrub. The wind was the only living thing, a cold, constant razor that sliced through our rags and left a shivering There was no game, There was no water, there was no cover. We were just seven ghosts wandering aimlessly through our own purgatory. On the fourth morning, the march stalled. Cobs stumbled and fell, and this time he didn't get up. Stiggin just leaned on his axe, his burned hands wrapped in dirty cloth, his breathing heavy. The rest of the crew just stopped, a silent, shuffling procession of my own failures. Cobb's mutiny from the first night was no longer a threat. It was a shared, unspoken fact. They were done. I had to give them something. A leader, even a failed one has to point the way. Look, I said, my voice, a dry rasp. I pointed to a high rocky pass miles ahead of us, over that ridge. The land will change, it has to. They'll be trees, water. I can smell it. It was a lie. I smelled nothing but dust and our own despair. They looked at me, eyes as dead as the land around us. They didn't believe me, not really. But the lie was better than the truth, which was that we were walking in circles until we died. I turned to our only real hope, Bryn. She met my gaze, her own full of a cold, feral frustration. She hated this land more than any of us. It was a place where her skills were useless. Go I ordered Scout ahead to that ridge, find us something, water, a rabbit. Anything. She did nod. She just turned and vanished into the rocks, a faster, quieter ghost than the rest of us. The rest of the day was the weight. It was not a passive thing. It was a form of torture. I had sold them a scrap of hope, and now we had to sit in our fireless, miserable camp and see if it was as worthless as everything else. We huddled behind it, few boulders out of the worst of the wind. No one spoke. The tension was a living thing. An eighth member of the crew or so, sat apart, sharpening his dagger against a piece of flint, his movement slow and methodical. He was already planning for the inevitable failure, his cold, logical mind accepting a truth the rest of us couldn't. Stigan just sat with his head in his hands, staring at his bandaged, weeping burns. It was a broken giant, haunted by the fire he had lit. Every hour that passed, the hope I had sold them got thinner. Every gust of wind sounded like a hollow laugh. My entire leadership, what little remained of it, was staked on what Brynn found over that ridge. The sun began to dip, painting the gray rocks in shades of blood and purple. The air grew colder, the hope was gone, replaced by the grim, cold certainty of another hungry night. Then a shadow detached itself from the gloom. Briyn. She walked back into our camp, her movements heavy with an exhaustion I had never seen in her before. Her shoulders were slumped, her hands were empty. She stopped in front of me, her green eyes blazing with a cold, desperate fury. She had failed, and she hated it. She hated the land for making her fail, and she hated me for asking her to try. She opened her hand and threw a small, pathetic cluster of gnarled, bitter looking roots at my feet. The land is dead, she snarled, her voice a low, vicious rasp. There is nothing