Chapter 1: Plythemus

Roy survives his own execution and evades death, but for how long?

The attempt the denizens of this accursed world made on his life has left Roy with a fleshly opening to his side. If he hadn’t have flinched at the right moment, the execution would have been just as successful with him as it was with Justin. If his shipmate hadn’t have screamed when the spear skewered him, then Roy wouldn’t have flinched and the two seamen would have shared the same fate.

 

However the spear’s thrust into his stomach may not have been instantly fatal to him as it was with Justin, Roy’s late shipmate, the shock, however, left him unconscious long enough to bleed out significantly, but despite the obvious set back of being rendered nearly comatose, his unconscious state fooled the executioners into believing that he was truly dead.

 

Upon awaking, the immediate explosion of agony raging from his wounded side overwhelmed Roy to the point of near immobility, and the sorrow of seeing the carcass of his friend lying next to him brought him to vomit.

 

He was in a ditch, which would have served to become his grave if the execution were to have been a success. Climbing out of it wounded as he was proved to be challenge, and when he was finally above ground, Roy found himself to be in living nightmare of a world; very different from the world he was use to.

 

The first thing to catch his eye was the ominous red sky above him, both cloudless and sunless; it gave off light as if it were its own source of illuminating the world. It was an empty red void, which enticed only madness. The earth was composed of an ashy, cursed soil, which sprouted a cloud of dust for every step he took. The lay of the land was that of a mountainous nature but the execrable earth made the elevations look more like craggy piles of stony dust rather than highlands.

 

This wasteland held no living vegetation as far as Roy could tell, however he found himself surrounded by a forest of tee like protrusions from the ground. Upon closer examination Roy noticed that they may have been trees at one point of time, but now they were petrified like fossils, leafless and dead. The mountainous wastes were congested by these fossilized trees, sticking out of the ground like massive thorns, their existence only served to vex Roy as they greatly obscured his vision of what’s beyond.

 

Reviewing the landscape further, Roy made the error of turning around, and he was faced with a sight, which he will see in his sleep for all eternity. A massive monolith, rose from the ground in the distance behind him, rising above the leafless canopy of this calcified forest and the crescendo of mountain ranges like some kind of overseer.

 

The unnatural rock was contoured like a triangular tower, similar to an Egyptian obelisk with its nature being black as onyx. It was unnatural, as horribly wrong as everything in this world felt, from the red empty sky, and the dead stagnant lifelessness all around him, nothing can measure against the oddness this obelisk implied, it was so much more different, and so much more wicked.

 

Its presence was so horrifyingly wrong, Roy dared not travel towards it as he felt it to be the dwelling place of those shadowy ghouls that made an attempt on their lives.

 

Encountering the creatures of this world was something he did not want to do again. The hellish denizens, Roy gags to think of them again, could barely be described as living beings. His memory of them was vague as he was induced into some kind of drugged lucid state when they first stumbled upon this world. What he remembered of them was vague, but loathsome.

 

Before he was seized and took to be executed, Roy dimly remembered the account of his friends escaping. The demons who held them captive rallied the crewmen on a death march to be executed in the depths of these wastes when three of the crewmembers that were captured fled to this forest after overpowering the creatures and dispersing them with the aid of two pistols they had on their being.

 

If there were anyone alive from his ship, Roy’s best bet at living would be to find them. There was little hope in his mind that they would have assessed the situation any better than he had, surviving his own execution with a near fatal wound, but in this time of desperation the sailor felt that he must try every step conceivably logical.

 

 Reviewing the land again, the sailor noted a column of smoke rising from the near distance, further into wasteland. There was no telling what or who the source could be, but Roy’s options were limited to seeking it out or bleeding to death as he was.

 

With his decision made for him, Roy forged toward the mysterious pillar of smoke under the unforgiving presence of the maddening red sky. Negotiating through the wasteland was harder than he perceived. The slightest bit of movement resulted in an explosion of aches due to his injury, and the tremors filling his body made it clear to him that the initial shock of this world has yet to subside, and judging by the afflictions his wound insinuated he could conclude that he has yet to overcome the zenith of his trauma.

 

As he trekked forward he found that his conditioned worsened the further he went until he lacked the endurance to continue any further. Staying idle only made his fear grow, but his body refused to progress into the woods. Staggering just stand, Roy leaned his back against the trunk a nearest tree to rest, not daring to lie down for the fear of never getting back up again.

 

As the sailor rested he reflected on his situation. His thoughts ran wild with different possibilities and scenarios that may offer some kind of merciful explanation as to what was happening to him. He thought that maybe this was all some kind of drug-induced madness, or just some lucid nightmare, or whether or not his physical life ended and he was in a netherworld as a spirit. The bleeding seemed physical enough to disprove the last possibility. And there was this omnipresent feeling that any other humble Merchant Marine’s officer would have not fared as well as he did if in the same state, this wild speculation may be the result of the trauma’s affect on his mental state but for some reason he was unable to shake the feeling that somehow, some way, this was all designed for him to survive.

 

He dismissed the reflections as something to be engrossed in latter. When he felt that he rested his fill, sailor pushed off from the tree but was encountered with a hopeful sight. A footprint matching the same state of his boot, the standard issue for the Merchant Marines uniform, was embed into the ground before him along with several others.

 

Judging by the broken bows, and the trampled ground, the sailor concluded that a group of people must have rushed through here. Giddy with hope, Roy investigated this section of the forest further. The results left him more distraught than before.

 

Searching the track of footprints, Roy came across the third carcass of one of his shipmates. It was Mark, the masters. The sailor found him with his torso propped up against a tree and a .38 caliber revolver in his hand while smoke billowing from his mouth. Combined with the gory mixture of blood and brains splattered across the trunk of the tree, the sailor could easily conclude what took place here. Mark saw it fit to end this sequence of madness through a method of self-annihilation, suicide.

 

Roy bit down on his lip to break away from the tears. Now two were dead, and only him and two others were left.

 

Trembling to compose himself, he took the revolver from his masters dead fingers and checked it for ammunition revealing to more rounds in the drum. With the weapon in hand Roy forged onwards towards the pillar of smoke as he so previously planed, but only the journey now seemed more laborious than before, at least now he was armed.

 

Above him, the cruel sky sank to an even crueler shade of darker crimson; the sailor could only guess that this was signifying the coming of night in this world. The need to find shelter and medical attention weighed on him more than before. There was little to no possibility that he would enjoy the night any more than he has been enjoying this day.

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

Introducing a universe is always the hardest part, tell me what you guys think. Any form of feedback is acceptable. Better reading as always, check out this chapter on my da

Reviews

[Eiades]

Nice chapter! I really like your vivid story telling. I have nothing to tell besides I like what I read and hope to read more.