Teller of Fate
First Movement: The Birth of a Teller of Fate
Chapter Nine
The first structure became visible in swatches between strips of glowing sand particles as the Dark Man entered the ruins. It was a fragment of a concrete wall. The left half of a gateway into the settlement proper, it looked to be.
It was bare of any mark; the sand having long ago scoured any decoration or words from it. He walked under the remains of the arch.
The severity of the winds rapidly decreased. It seemed like silence after the howling of hours past. There was a lot less sand as well. He adjusted the EM frequency filter, looking for something to explain the relative serenity amid the ruins. There was nothing. He stood puzzling for a moment.
Shaking his head, he chid himself, ‘You have work to do. This is a mystery for another day.’
Movement to his extreme left caused him to turn. It was only a dust devil spinning in a corner where two buildings met. He turned back.
Once the Dark Man had turned away, the whirlwind briefly took on a tall human shape in billowing rags. A clear nodding of the cowl—and it was just wind-twisted sand again.
Taking advantage of the calm and clearer air, the Dark Man moved further into the settlement, trying to get his bearings.
He had a chart of the ruins’ layout as it had been just before it was abandoned. There should be a five-storey structure in the center. If it were still standing and he could find it, the building would make a good reference mark to zero in on the shack that held the cards.
Though clearer, the air still held enough blowing sand to make the search difficult. As he wandered the maze of wind-scoured structures, the howling torrents of air would quiet down then rise to a shriek, but they never stopped. They snaked their way between buildings, sometimes tying themselves in knots in odd corners.
These temporary sand vortices popped up everywhere and lingered longer than they should have.
A paranoid suspicion that they were following him bedeviled the Dark Man’s imagination. Ignoring the idiotic thought, he continued winding back and forth, scanning low or broken structures. He was looking for a view of the tell-tale blankness that would indicate a structure obscuring the glowing sandstorm.
Through wrecked doors and windows, darknesses stared. The permanent night that dwelt within these wind-rotted buildings hated him and resented his trespass. The Dark Man quashed the thought as quickly as it came, though he did quicken his pace.
Exiting an alley, he entered a narrow street. This was the first one he’d seen that was straight for any length. He looked to his right and spotted his goal at the end.
The tower top looked ragged, meaning it was missing a couple of floors. The wind was louder here, though it felt slower.
Clouds of sand outlined yet more little wind funnels, dancing back and forth at both ends of the street. He noticed them coming out of alleyways, blocking his exit.
He waited.
The rational part of his mind insisted that they were just chance artefacts of wind, sand, and worn concrete walls. Yet they stayed where they were.
After a full minute, when they had neither advanced nor dispersed, the Dark Man decided to just walk through them.
Whatever their behavior might suggest, they weren’t substantive. He turned and strode toward the wreck of the tower and the wooden shack that surely lay beyond.
There was no reaction from the sentinels of sand and wind.
Without pausing, the Dark Man walked into a whirlwind that towered twice his height.
The twister shrieked. A burst of static assaulted his ears just as all visual input went dead.
He was falling, a long way falling.
Panic, an emotion alien to him until now, seized him.
His worst nightmare manifested: the presence of another mind in his. Blackness overwhelmed him and he knew no more.
⁂
The Dark Man awoke to silence.
He cracked one eye.
Through the left lens of his helmet was an extremely close view of a tiny mound of sand. It sat on an otherwise clean and pitted cement surface. For a moment after awareness returned, he didn’t move, trying to clear an unfamiliar mental confusion.
His thoughts began to cohere, the last events before his blackout finally coming into focus.
It was anger that gave him strength and purpose back. Those things had assaulted him.
The Dark Man stood, ignoring the stiffness and ache in his legs and lower back.
The storm had ended. Scorn’s dim red sun was not in evidence, yet a bright white light, decidedly un-Scorn like, filled the sky. The buildings were the only familiar things.
While he stood, exasperated by yet another riddle, helmet alarms began going off. His suit’s instruments were telling him that pressure, temperature, and composition of the atmosphere were well outside normal for Scorn.
The air was warm and breathable, which was impossible. Outside the domes of the cities Scorn was uninhabitable. As difficult as it was to believe, he wasn’t on his planet anymore.
The Dark Man unclipped and removed his helmet, trying to conquer a growing disquiet. The air had an elusive flowery scent to it that he found enticing. The silence was less than total. A sound like ethereal music dimly came to him from all directions.
The Dark Man scanned the sky around the ruined tops of the buildings, looking for anything that might give him a clue as to where he was.
The soft light suffused the air, giving no hint of a source.
After staring for a while, the Dark Man fancied he could almost see shapes in the distance. The light’s intensity dimmed in regular patterns, like cylinders or towers rising to infinity. Some of them, anyway.
Others seemed to undulate very slowly, like contrails blown by hurricane winds. Just an effect of the light, he decided.
Determining to get the Syrat first and worry about getting back to his world later, the Dark Man moved toward the ruined tower. If need be, he might use the deck to help him return.
As he walked, the Dark man mentally consulted his chart. He would have to go around this tower and continue forward and slightly to his left.
He reached the foot of the stair leading up to the gaping doorway of the tower’s remains.
Everything was especially clear. There were no shadows except the vaguely edged ones directly under things. The ruins around him, so intimidating when he arrived, seemed well and truly dead now; bleached skeletons with the flesh long since stripped away. He went left around the building.
The Dark Man wondered, given the lack of wind, if he’d see more of the djinn. Not likely, he decided.
It was hard to countenance that any of it had happened. Rather, it would have been if he and the ruined city weren’t manifestly on another world.
The rear of the tower was blank and worn, like everything else he’d seen. Small, ratty structures crowded it, all of them concrete or native stone. Not for the first time did he wonder at a wooden structure amid all this rock surviving the near perpetual sandstorms of Scorn.
It took a frustrating hour to get to the spot where his instruments told him the room had to be.
The buildings on the far side of the tower looked to have been built hastily against each other in stark contrast to what had otherwise been a carefully, even obsessively planned community.
The Dark Man wondered what the last days of this place had been like. Had the wind demons come out of the desert, driving the populace inward? Did the survivors build these shelters hastily around the protection of the tower?
He’d never know.
Being a criminal act, the experiment of this community had been first ignored and then suppressed by the government. No official records were made.
Its existence had only ever been known to the few who traded in the illegal and the secret.
At one point, he found his way blocked by mounds of garbage.
Twenty minutes later the Dark Man had cleared a path through what was mostly desiccated household waste to the end of an alley. The room he sought should be at its far end.
It took only moments to reach it, where a crude fence of wooden slats blocked his way to a square.
It was the first wood the Dark Man had seen since coming here.
Despite a still nagging question as to how wood survived in the middle of an utterly sterile desert, it cheered him.
These timbers looked to be the same variety that had made the little shack.
Rather than spend time removing it, the Dark Man decided to climb over. He grabbed at the uppermost slate and jumped.
As he heaved himself over, his trailing foot caught the top of the fence, and he nearly landed on his face in the dusty square.
Regaining his balance, the Dark Man had his first unobstructed view. The cleared area was roughly square and about twenty yards on a side. Centered in it was a cube of stone.
It looked large enough to house the wooden structure whose inside he had glimpsed so briefly.
The storm had been pummeling that room, though. That concrete box would have protected anything within from even the mildest breeze. Only one thing explained what was happening.
It was a trap.
Someone had anticipated his move and had arranged to maroon him here.
The Dark Man was considering trying to gain entrance to the stone cube anyway when proof of his suspicions manifested across the sky.
The air darkened rapidly as coloured light began streaming down from above. He looked up to see the object of his quest, all one hundred and sixty-nine bits of it, dancing a swirling complex pattern over the town. The cards seemed miles across and glowed as if light were shining through them. Like enormous coloured glass windows, they were.
The Dark Man began running.
His journey back to his point of entry was farther away now than the closest edge of the city. He headed straight on, across the square and into an older part of the town.
He almost made it to the edge of his prison when the sky began to change again.
The cards were fading from the sky one by one, leaving oceans of darkness behind.
The Dark Man could see past the last of the buildings now to what should have been the horizon.
Instead, he saw his doom. The card of the Syrat called, ‘The Sensorium of Aer, the Ruler of Ruin,’ was planted firmly in his path.
It pulsed a deep, deep red. He got to the very edge and met an invisible barrier.
The oracle betokening his end filled all his vision. Close at hand or at the edge of the universe, he could not judge.
That card was the last to fade.
The Dark Man stood in darkness, pressing desperate hands against whatever held him here, when the sound of the storm returned and with it the sand.
The Dark Man reached for the helmet hooked to his belt with hands suddenly numb, choking on grit he could barely see in the familiar dim red light of Scorn.
He never got it on because he suddenly found himself weightless.
His feet slowly left the ground which proceeded to tilt alarmingly.
The Dark Man’s last horrified thought was, ‘It’s falling! The whole damned city is falling!’
— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, July 2026
© Gideon Jagged
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