Ustalf

A traveler, trudging steadily across the barren and trackless wastes.

"Where are you going?" I asked him. "Surely there is nothing but wilderness for many hundreds of miles in the direction you are headed."

"That suits me just fine," he answered.


We stood for several moments in silence and stared out across the blighted landscape.

"Who would have thought," I murmured, "that the Shade would strike so quickly, and in such force."



He turned up the bone-dry earth with his claws, revealing the darker loam beneath. "Something will grow here one day," he said. "It is the nature of life to persist, in spite of everything."






In plains of dust and rotted bone,
abandoned by the light,
leaves may sprout through shattered stone,
and ragged sparrows take flight.

Seedlings may but slumber
to be awakened by the rain.
Life waits and sleeps and hungers
for Spring to come again.

Though ashes suffocate the sun,
and Shade-cursed tangles spread
the world's day cannot yet be done
before all hope is dead.

Beneath the barren surface
there lies a richer soil.
Thirsty roots in stasis,
and blooms poised to uncoil.

So on and on, his errand
to gently revive the earth,
and one day be the herald
of some new and brighter birth.

by Pigwidgeon