Sea of Death

Chapter 8

Long, long ago two great empires fought a war of mutual annihilation. One empire, the Baklunish, was fractured and made backwards, and the land of this race was turned arid and poor. To this day, the Bakluni are not a nation any more, but a collection of tribes that contest with each other for the dubious privilege of controlling the harsh, featureless lands of the western part of the Flanaess.

The people of the second empire, however, suffered even more when the Bakluni retaliatory strike came. Their fair land was scathed by a magically created storm of fire — colorless flames that consumed all life. When all was done, virtually all of the once-mighty second empire, known as the Suloise, was covered in a layer of dust and fine ashes. Gray and lifeless, wind-driven and parched, this covering of ruin blanketed the land for a thousand and more miles in every direction from its center. Indeed, it stretched like water across the landscape, and the area became known around the continent of Oerik as the Ashen Desert. When the Invisible Firestorm finally ended, all who viewed this seemingly endless vista of dust and ash, a gray-black desert born of destruction, assumed that nothing could live in such a place. Of course, they were quite mistaken.

The dweomercraefters of the decimated Suloise empire were so accomplished in the magical arts that they were able to shield their capital city from the fiery storm before it fell. For a time, at least, life continued in this metropolis, buried beneath a hundred and more feet of dust. A few of the other major cities of Suel managed to prevent the ravages of the colorless fire from fully affecting them, and there were isolated strongholds of powerful magi and priests that persevered despite the devastation. The ash and dust covered so much of the landscape, though, that the blanketing might as well have been complete. To make matters worse, volcanoes born out of the upheaval erupted, adding even more flakes and grains to that which was already there, and great storms drove and shaped the whole mass. One after another the Suloise outposts of survival were smothered and buried as years became decades, decades centuries.

But life is persistent, especially on those worlds where the mutable laws of magic take precedence over the immutable laws of science. As humans died, other forms of life discovered the Ashen Desert and found it desirable. At the same time, certain living things that had somehow managed to survive the destruction that had fallen upon their land adapted and mutated to survive in the new environment. Monstrous, single-celled amoeboid creatures flowed under the dust and ashes, feeding on the residue of the fire and leaving traces of matter and moisture for other, tiny organisms to thrive upon. Giant, multicelled clusters, colony animals, fed on silicates and carboniferous materials, returning the favor by depositing as waste other sorts of minerals that smaller life forms found beneficial.

After these lower creatures prepared the way, monstrous things grew up in the domain that the amoeboids and colony growths had dominated. Various types of slugs, all of them small at first, found that they had no enemies beneath the layers and layers of dust and ash, and they thrived on the growth that had sprung up there. These slugs got much larger, but the biggest of them was still no larger than an average man. Then they burrowed even farther down and found the springs and bubbling wells that still flowed deep, deep under the dust. By feeding in such places, engorging themselves with water, the slugs became more and more gigantic, and they made still other life possible.

Because of their size, and as was their nature, the slugs moved with the aid of trails of mucous, which they secreted from all around the exterior of their bodies. This slime, once exuded, hardened quickly. The less massive slugs left small tunnels through the ash and dust, and the big ones left comparably large passages. A network of twisting, turning, pipe-like burrows grew beneath the Ashen Desert. These passages generally led from one water source to another. Eventually, old tunnels collapsed. Some were destroyed by the passage of larger slugs, others by the still-surviving amoeboids and colony monsters — puddings, as their relatives elsewhere were referred to — and many fell due to pressure caused by the growth of vegetation beneath and through the dust. While all this was going on, new passages were being made continually anyway, so the change was hardly noticed — and certainly was not perceived as such by the nonintelligent creatures that spent all their lives in this strange and forbidding domain.

Plants are hardy, and some survived the destruction to grow anew. Seeds sent roots deep beneath the surface, seeking the moisture that still lay there, and thrust stems and tendrils up through ash and dust, seeking sunlight. Where tens or hundreds of feet of the stuff covered it, the vegetation failed. But in a few places, only a relatively thin layer of dust lay between the plants and the light above. Still, most of the growths that made the journey upward successfully didn't survive. The searing heat and the tearing wind that buffeted the plants with fine, abrasive particles saw to that. Many sorts of vegetation that managed to survive the elements fell prey to insects and hardy mammals still dwelling on the surface, who fed on their leaves, seeds, and stems. As all forms of life will do, the plants adapted. In their changing, they grew defenses of many sorts. Eventually, over the centuries, a dozen species with a dozen varieties each managed to survive, if not always flourish, in the sealike desert of ash and powdered dirt.

Insects burrowed beneath the stuff; some few of them lived in a symbiotic relationship with plants, and others survived by eating the vegetation. A few birds, too, dwelled among the plants or adapted to making their homes in burrows below the dusty surface. Some fed on vegetation, others on insects. And not all insects ate vegetation; some sought other insects, avians, or even small mammals to feed upon. A complex ecosystem developed. Cacti of new sorts grew. Wirelike trees stretched up, showing only their branch tips unless a storm shifted the terrain and exposed more. Flat vegetation relied on photosynthesis or else trapped protein-rich creatures to survive, and scores of other sorts of flora awaited the infrequent rain to germinate and then grow in a frenzy while the moisture was available.

Rats, mice, and other rodents moved into the waste. Some took to the mazes underneath, while others found conditions on or near the dusty surface favorable. Shrews and moles burrowed there. Badgers came to dwell in the subterranean portion; foxes and wild dogs roamed the hot, black and gray desert above, and with them were snakes and lizards who likewise hunted their own prey.

A few hundred years after the Invisible Firestorm, the Ashen Desert was known throughout the continent as a place of death and desolation, a location whose deadly nature was sung of in eastern Oerik, related in the Baklunish poems chanted in Jakif, and told in legends elsewhere throughout the Flanaess. If there were men alive to contradict this reputation, none of them stepped forward. The few explorers and travelers who related their own experiences simply said that the Ashen Desert was a void, a place where nothing but the toughest and craggiest of plants could survive. Considering the few areas where animal life could have been seen, and the camouflage and protective coloration that was prevalent among the fauna — green that was either so dark as to appear black or so faint as to be gray to the eye, dun-colored skin and hide, black feathers, sooty fur, dusky hair — no casual observer could in truth state otherwise. But of course life did exist in many forms in this strange desert, and if it did not exactly thrive, it was fierce and tenacious enough to make up for the difficulties it had to overcome daily in order to continue.

Certain tight-lipped or otherwise uncommunicative sources did know of the true nature of the Ashen Desert. Among them were the nomads who roamed the northern boundary of the place; horsemen and camel-borne men of the Barren Plains and the savage folk of the Grandsuel Peaks that walled the steppes from the dust and ash beyond occasionally ventured into the fringes of the place. Explorers from the Seakings' Lands managed to cross the Inferno Peaks to seek wealth in the eastern portions of the Ashen Desert, as did certain expeditions sent by the head of the free state known as the Yeomanry.

Possibly, folk from the other borders of this waste likewise penetrated at least a little way into the Ashen Desert; the legendary peoples of such fabled states as Changol, Jahind, and Mulwar to the south, and the folk of Sa'han, Behow, and Chomur to the west, were the sort who would dare such activity. That the waste was a dead and deadly place, however, most would agree. Even those who had entered the Ashen Desert would not disagree that the expanse of powder and ash was hostile, had no possibility of supporting human life, and could never be explored at length beyond its edges.

Sages and savants of the arcane, if they were asked, would relate that the very place had supported life, at least for a time, when the very worst of conditions prevailed. These same scholars would also inform the interested listener that the centuries had certainly moderated the severity of the initial conditions. These ones knew that some life forms had adapted to survive in the Ashen Desert. But would they themselves venture into the heart of this sooty wasteland? Not likely! Could they suggest ways and means of survival to any — foolish or deranged — who sought to do so? Well, yes, they could suggest, but they offered no guarantees.

As a matter of fact, there were now at least three parties who were intent on venturing into the Ashen Desert — individuals ready and willing to risk its perils, intending to overcome them and seek out the lost metropolis that had been the center of the destroyed empire of the Suel people.

Obmi the dwarf was out to find the City Out of Mind.

Eclavdra, dark elven high priestess of Graz'zt, was bent on doing the same.

Gord, citizen of Greyhawk, once a beggar, thief, and cat burglar, now a free-willed agent of Rexfelis, Lord of All Cats, and the Demiurge Basiliv, likewise was on a mission to somehow trek across the uncharted waste of ash-strewn dust and sand to discover the hiding place of the Final Key, the last portion of the Artifact of Evil — which, if joined with its other two parts, would awaken Tharizdun, the greatest force of malign power ever known. That one would bind all evil to his wicked will, destroy light, and bring a reign of such terrible woe to the very multiverse that all good might be stamped out forever. Somewhere, burled beneath the Ashen Desert, was the object sought by these three — and perhaps others as well. Between all of them and the object lay the vast stretches of this arid waste… and everything that dwelled within it.