CHIMNEY AND FIREPLACE CLEANING

The Western Owl.

The sky was grey and dim yet in the distance Shalon could make out plumes of smoke rising over the distant plains and could hear the thunder clap of explosions echoing through out the entirety of the region. It would be only a matter of weeks before the fight, a fight that was neither hers, nor her friends concern, was upon them. Rain lightly misted on her hairless head and sighing forlornly she looked around at her people and their encampment. Or rather was left of them. Shalon was a Psi-Stalker of a small tribe called the Pale Skulls. The Pale Skulls had lived nomadically for many generations in relative isolation in the open plains, their only significant contact being with their some times friends and sometimes rivals, the Gursallu, a tribe of Simvan.

Two years prior a strange sickly man came from the east sowing disease and ruin. He passed through heading north by north west leaving a trail of sadness and wasting death. Before any Psi-Stalker or Simvan could retaliate he was gone as were the majority of both their numbers. Psi-Stalkers and Simvan are both very proud and tough people, but their toughness is forged directly from the ugly brutalities of survival which call above all for pragmatism. With both camps equaling less then fifty adults both together they did what had to be done and joined forces.

Yet more trouble came from the east. A war between Wizards and Men in high tech armor was raging. Strangers passed through their lands causing trouble and frequently black vehicles screamed across the sky. A few men left to the east to hire their services as scouts or warriors and never returned. Including a man named Skylo, whom Shalon was to marry. Skylo was the only man her age that was not a direct blood relative. Her customs forbid her to marry or bare a child with her father, an uncle, a brother or a half brother. To her now the east was death and the east was getting closer. The east had taken her tribe, had taken her man and taken away the chance at having a child and rebuilding her tribe.

Nursing a bottle of moonshine a few feet away was her Simvan friend Derok. Derok was a bit small by the standards of his people and his peers bullied him for it. Sensing that the Psi-Stalker men often treated him poorly as well. Not that he wasn't as tough as of them, he was just the runt and had to deal with twice the grief. Derok, like Shalon, knew that their time was short and was repairing to leave. They knew that too many people lay to the south, that the north, while an option, was already territory claimed by other Simvan and Psi-Stalkers, and yes that the east was death. While Derok knew it wasn't quite like that. Unlike Shalon he had more contact with outsiders. Being the runt he was forced to handle all the trading and negotiating with outsiders. From that he knew there was even more wilderness beyond the ugly cities of Wizards and Men in black armor and that beyond their pathetic war was another cradle of land they could live a good life in. But who wanted to wade through a war? Very little was known of the west, but no war was west and if only be default the west was not death.

Shalon walked over and took Derok's bottle from him. "How many days before were equipped enough to leave?", she asked. He was about to reply when the sky exploded above them.
Huge plumes of fire shot forth from the mouth of a vast red-scaled flying reptilian creature that was being chased and shot at by men in flying black armor. Missiles rained downed on their encampment, leaving many of the few Simvan and Psi-Stakers who were remaining a steaming vapor of red mist and charred debris. The journey west began quicker then they thought.

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Whatever name it once knew itself by was a long forgotten memory. It didn't need to call itself anything. It had very little sense of self or identity, it merely was and it merely DID. What it did was hunt and kill. But others had millions of names for It, some names that were screamed in terror and other names spoken in awe struck whispered tones. It was a dreaded presence periodically emerging through out the deep south and magic zone like a earth quake or flash flood that wipes out whole communities.

It was one of the Corrupt, an unholy barely structured cult of killers in the willing service of a demonic god the called the Liberator who in turn transformed each of them into beastie killing machines. Yet even among the Corrupt it was singular. Amongst the corrupt it was a creature of fear and envy because it was the most brutal of them all. Some of the Corrupt envied it, seeing it as the epitome of the liberation offered by their hidden master, but all of them certainly feared it. To the Corrupt it was called Hyrzaku, a word in the language of demons meaning freedom, and to the Corrupt It was seen as a demi-god or avatar with-in their grim numbers.

Yet this was not true. It was merely one of

I got rid of a lot of junk when we painted. Now my working place is a
little more tidy (er... emphasis on "little"). So this is an actual
everyday, neither staged nor cleaned-for-the-ocassion scene!