At last they left the shrieking hills behind. Camp and then on and camp and on, on to the bottom eyelid of the world. Journeying past little white towns that dotted southern Appalia, ghost pueblos lost and fading in the sun and the yellow hills and the desert. And each day the melting of the sun and the strata of the firmament, scars of sky tearing the evening glow to bloody shreds.

Visions of Appalian warriors from millennia gone, helmets and breastplates of gold and silver, shields like little suns dancing on the earth, spears the long poles of the stygian dead. A drink of water, deep, gulping, and sudden gasps of shade, shadows of clouds over the empty land.

The flit of a vulture. Gone the shadows. Gone the game, gone the water. A boiling wet moon, leaking outside of itself.