empty wastes of Hae’Darak, he changed his mind. Suddenly all of the old stories he had dismissed in his youth as fairy tales held a little validity. If a place such as the Hae’Darak could exist, what other horrors and evils could also, banished away into the world beyond his own?
But the emperor, in his divine wisdom, did not heed the old tales. He wanted the Shen-Xin. He wanted to kill for it. His rule was one bathed in blood. In the beginning it was just the blood of his enemies, but soon it became the blood of the people. For once all of the Emperor’s human enemies were dead and mutilated, there was one he could never conquer.
His own death.
And what a travesty that would be. That his divine entity should perish into the dust like a commoner. Like a mere mortal. Gods should live forever, and the emperor thought himself a god. And so, he sought a god’s own heart, and vowed to make it his own. Not for himself, obviously, since such things as vanity were above an Emperor. But for the people. After all, what anarchy would befall the world if their greatest ruler passed away? He wanted his immortality purely for the people’s benefit. And was he not the fairest and kindest man to do so?
He knew stories of the Shen-Xin, a magical object that could grant its owner eternal life. Stories that were long forgotten by the sane. He sought the Shen-Xin with all of his power, his armies scouring the entire world for the mythical object that could lengthen his life. He started wars with neighbouring countries, believing in his madness that his long held allies had the object that he desired most, and truly believed belonged to him alone.
When armies returned empty handed, he delved deep into the forgotten legends. Legends of the world where the Shen-Xin had been banished forever by the magic wielders of the lost ages.
And he found it. The Hae’Darak. The Otherworld. Wherein lay the prison of the Shen-Xin.
And against the beliefs of his peoples’ religions, against the laws of the land, and the laws of physics, he found a way in. He found the way to punch a hole in reality, through which he could send the hand to take up his gift of immortality.
The people called them the Lok’Chang, the Army of the Damned. Their numbers were made up from the most expendable men of the lands, the poor and the convicted. It was an excellent solution to dispose of the two most abundant excesses in the Empire: The poor, hungry, and homeless masses, and the many prisoners working slave labour or rotting in cells.
Altian had been in a prison cell when the Emperor’s guards had come for him. He was serving an unofficial life sentence for a heinous crime he did not commit, spending the long days in his cramped cell thinking about the terrible fate of his lost loved one, when he was unceremoniously dragged away to a secret garrison on the far northern borders of the Empire. There, like all the other poor souls dragged from prisons, street corners or from their homes, he was branded like livestock. The red mark was tattooed on his face to alert all that he was a member of the Lok’Chang.
It was only after the painful procedure involving a red hot needle and an acidic red dye that he and the others had learned just what was expected of them. A steward of the Emperor told the group of the importance of their mission, and dispelled any doubts they had by having them herded one and all through the giant portal that had been made in the old ruins of an ancient city.
Perhaps had they resisted, or at least put up some sort of fight at the time their whole dire situation could have been avoided. They had easily outnumbered the Emperor’s men who had stood about them, armed with bows and spears, ready to pick off any possible dissenters. But then they had been too disorganised, a rabble of the most denounced men of the Empire barely capable of sharing a civil word with one another, let alone uniting against the might of the Emperor.
So, unresisting, they allowed themselves to be herded through the gaping portal into the Hae’Darak. Altian remembered little of the actual trip through time and space. He could recall the throng of men around him, all of them dirty and smelling of filth, and the occasional loud and shocking twang of a bow string as someone attempted escape and was shot down in his tracks. Then the portal loomed before him, a deep empty blackness that cut into the very fabric of reality. He had hesitated, but the men behind had pushed him violently, and he had stumbled into the tear’s gaping maw.
There had been pain inside the portal. A searing pain through his whole body as if he had been dropped in boiling oil. Then may have been others, screaming in the darkness around him, but he could not tell for sure, nor cared, lost as he was in his own agony. He finally passed out, and when he once again awoke he was lying on the cold, ash covered ground of the Hae’Darak. Men were strewn everywhere, gasping, crying. Some had gone mad beyond reason from the journey.
When the last of the men had come through, there followed a long train of wagons pushed across from the other side, containing food, water, weapons, and scrolls containing all known records of the Otherworld and the Shen-Xin. Lastly came a herd of many unlucky horses.
The portal remained opened for a long time. Many of the men, driven to madness by the journey and the bleak landscape around them threw themselves back into the portal, only to be repelled and flung painfully to the ground. There was an unseen force, like an invisible raging current emanating from the portal, and though it was clearly evident that the path between worlds was purely one way, more men than Altian could count hurled themselves at the portal again and again until, as mysteriously as it was created, the portal shrunk and vanished into thin air.
After that, with the portal gone and only the prospect of a slow death left in the minds of the men, anarchy threatened to overrun the army. Angry, ravenous men formed gangs and fought each other over the meagre supplies. The Lok’Chang came within a hair’s breadth of destruction, and would have fallen had it not been for the appearance of the General.
No one had even the faintest idea just who the General was, though Altian had few suspicions. Whatever his past was, however, it was now irrelevant, just like all of their past histories. While the men were fighting over the wagons of food, Altian watched calmly as the General found the weapon stores, took out a bow and arrow, and promptly slew the first gang leader he saw.
He told them all the plain, honest truth as he saw it. They were stuck there, in the Hae’Darak. There was no other way back that any of them knew of. The only food and water they had was the supplies in the wagons, and with such large numbers, even this would only last a short while. But if they turned on each other, their chances of surviving a single day in the Otherworld were more or less non-existent.
But there had to be another portal. How else, he reasoned, would the Emperor, may he reign forever, get his greedy hands on the Shen-Xin? The next portal, the one back to their world would be undoubtedly opened once they had the Shen-Xin in their possession. Now all they had to do was get it. And the only way to do that was to organise themselves into an army, not a rabble.
The vast majority of the Lok’Chang agreed with the General. And the first thing they did was take control of the weapons store and remove any dissenters from their ranks. Even to Altian, who cared so little for his own fate at this point and remained more or less aloof of the resulting turmoil, this course of action made sense. If they were to have any chance of survival, they needed to be united, and they needed insurrectionists like they needed a plague.
So the Lok’Chang began its quest, baptised with the blood of the stubborn, the weak, and the mad who had been driven empty of reason from their unnatural journey. The army set off, in the rough direction that the ancient scrolls supplied to them suggested the Shen-Xin would be found. A few of their number lagged behind, taking the time to cut the flesh from their fallen brethren. It was meat after all, and the General saw the sick logic in their minds and allowed it. No one knew how long they would be in the Otherworld, and they would need all of the sustenance they could get.
Exactly how long they had travelled, Altian could only give a rough guess. The sky never changed, staying the same morbid red for every sec
ond of every moment. As they went, the General set about organising his force with brutal efficiency. He picked out archers, spear men, light infantry, and from the many ranks, recognised those suitable for leadership. None argued his choices. His word became law.
The first officer he selected was Altian. The General told him he knew him well by reputation, though how, Altian could not guess. What battles he had fought, and won seemed to him at the time quite insignificant compared to the travesty that resulted in his incarceration. But the General was insistent, and Altian, too weary to argue, threw himself into his allotted task with single mindedness.
Along the way, the Lok’Chang practised marching in ranks, performing battlefield manoeuvres and trained with weapons. They took to their posts easily, since there was nought else to occupy their attention. And as the non-existent days passed by, it became apparent to all that they were nearing their destination. The Shen-Xin, it was written, was kept guarded in a fortress built far up in the crater of an active volcano. What manner of guardian dwelt in the fortress the scriptures failed to say. But now the volcano loomed over the Lok’Chang like a malicious giant. Their food supplies were running