The Journeyor: Chapter 1

Emptiness. A vast wasteland of dry heat and parched rock, interrupted occasionally by dust devils stirred by a scorching wind. Aside from that, nothing moved. It was as if time had stopped, such was the utter stillness in this long forgotten inferno of heat and light. The horizon warped in the distance, as if the intense heat had melted the very air itself.

Suddenly, far off in the distance there appeared a lone figure, a solitary traveler in a burial ground of shattered hopes and long-forgotten dreams. The only life in a landscape that could sustain none. The Journeyor. Alone for eons in a world of infinite but loveless hearts, he walks on. His journey began somewhere in distant memory, billions of heartbeats ago, be he is still incalculably far from his destination.

From where he stopped and stood, like a silent, lonely sentinel, the mountains looked unreachable. And still, after a brief rest that stretched to eternity, he set out again on his endless journey to freedom.

All along his path he met strangers, lovers, friends. Countless times he sought brief respite from the heat and exquisite loneliness in the arms of a shepherds daughter or a sultans mistress. Passion knows no boundaries, and always he would leave before commitments could grow and love could bloom. His journey continued.

In spite of the distances traveled and those yet to be traveled, he was not patient. He wanted only to finish his journey and see an end to the loneliness and pain. For with every step further into the emptiness he lost a little more of his heart and became more a part of the wasteland he was traversing.

He was afflicted with pain beyond mortal comprehension, and still he endured and moved on. He knew that as soon as his journey was finished the healing could begin. The wounds suffered from eons ago to the present could be tended, but for now they would be left to fester. His journey was all-important and all-consuming and for now it was his destiny to struggle across this graveyard of human dreams.

As he traveled he reflected upon the scope of his torment; how it went beyond mere physical pain to excruciating emotional and spiritual apocalypse. The sensation could be compared to skinning someone alive and then bathing them in diesel fuel.

Ravaged by time and crippled by countless spiritual extremes, he walks on. Loneliness has become his faithful friend and companion. As he traverses this wasteland of infernal heat, his mind is set on a group of mountains far ahead in the distance...

It hadn't always been like this. In the distant past, thousands of thousands of years ago he had been a mere mortal, with all the hopes and dreams that such existence entails. He'd had a mother and a father and six brothers and four sisters, all of whom had succumbed to the evil that had stalked the land so many millenia ago. The evil that even now was fleeing his wrath across millions of miles of wasteland, fleeing across the bones of the millions that had perished in this supernatural conflagration.