Legends of Amacia Srandi: Last Bastion of the Caverias

Meanwhile on the surface, Clarence had been driving all night through the trackless wastes of the Empty Quarter of the southern Arabian Desert with Surtur riding shotgun in their armored Land Rover. They had the windows down to let in the frosty night air of the desert. The radio played softly in the background as they traversed the sands. Both of them wore loose-fitting desert camouflage fatigues and boots. Unlike Clarence, who wore a military desert camouflage cap, Surtur donned a traditional Arab headdress with facemask...the mask pulled down around his throat under his chin. Clarence fought to stay awake with the first hints of dawn glinted on the eastern horizon as their armored Land Rover traversed the trackless wastes two hundred miles southwest of the Al Hadidah meteor craters. In all directions lay the featureless undulating dunes bathed in the leprous glow of a waning gibbous moon. Clarence blinked and groaned as he kept falling asleep at the wheel. However as he drifted off, he’d inexplicably snap back awake within seconds as he maneuvered the Land Rover carefully through the dune fields.

For most of the night, everything had been calm and tranquil without a breath of air moving in the frosty coolness of the early morning. However, as the hinting of dawn started to creep across the desolation from the east, the wind began picking up, blowing from the southeast to the point the dunes started shifting slightly with wisps of sand clouds blowing across the path of the Land Rover. Then the radio suddenly cut out as if they’d entered a dead zone of radio propagation, leaving nothing but sizzling static. A faint whispering howl floated on the wind like the wail of evil wraiths reached Clarence’s ears over the roar of the vehicle’s engine, filling him with an inexplicable dark dread. At the same time, haunting unintelligible whispers and murmuring of uncountable alien voices started echoing behind the static of the dead radio barely perceptible to the ear. Both the whispering howl on the wind and the haunting whispering through the radio send icy chills racing down his spine as he scanned the path through the dunes ahead of him looking for the source of the ghostly wail in the wind after abruptly turning off the radio to hear the wail better. A few moments later, the radio snapped back on by itself, again filling the vehicle with the soft legion of whispering babbling alien voices mixed deep in the radio static. Clarence turned off the radio again, only to have it snap back on a few seconds later, which further unnerved him. After the fourth time of turning it off only to have it turn back on, he realized the radio was not under his control and left it alone, very concerned with what was happening around him. Only when Surtur reached out and turned off the radio did it stay off. This baffled and concerned him...why Surtur could turn off the radio and he couldn’t. The feeling of driving to his doom oozed menacingly into his consciousness.

Then without warning, a strange malignant odor of ancient moldering death filled his nostrils coming from inside the vehicle in spite of the windows being down. At the same time, a deep raspy rumbling emanated from Surtur sitting beside him that shook Clarence to his core. It completely unnerved him and for a moment, he debated whether to look over at his companion. The rasping of Surtur’s breath that smelled of dried, decaying death reminded him of one of the greatest sci-fi villains of all time...Darth Vader of Star Wars fame. Finally, his morbid curiosity about what he heard and smelled beside him got the better of him.

Glancing at Surtur to see if he was awake and understood the source of the smells and sounds, Clarence’s eyes grew wide and he barely stifled a gasp of horror. In the brief glance which Surtur immediately noticed, Clarence saw that Surtur looked obscenely ancient in the dash lights and the growing twilight of dawn, a gaunt fanged alien mummy with shriveled blackened skin that seemed almost charred that still walked the earth as an unearthly flaming reddish gleam lit his deep sunken black eye sockets. The withered blackened parchment of his lips seemed to have receded from his mouth, showing Surtur had a mouthful of long pointed fangs and serrated, needlelike teeth, giving him a sinister ghoulish demoniac cast...a sinister alien vampiric demon of hideous antiquity. The view unsettled Clarence to the point of total revulsion, turning his blood to ice. He’d never seen Surtur like that. In fact, he’d never seen anyone look so hideously ancient, alien, and so utterly evil. Even at his most evil, Hades had never exuded such a malevolent alien countenance and aura that spoke of uncounted ages of impossible dim diabolical alien antiquity. Clarence shuddered at the view and his drowsiness instantly fled at the shock of the sight.

Surtur noted the reaction and glared at Clarence for a moment, letting him see the ghostly hellfire flame burning in his dark eyes without saying a word for several moments. Surtur could clearly sense Clarence’s fear and revulsion at his alien nature. When Clarence turned his eyes back to the trackless wastes before him, Surtur hissed menacingly, “Be very careful what you see, my foolish apprentice. You cannot possibly comprehend who or what I am. It would blast your minuscule flea mind to bits were you to see me as I truly am, so do not look upon me in the twilight of dawn again if you value your life, soul, and sanity. I cannot counter the light of the rising sun of this world to mask my true nature. It’s the one thing I can’t do on this miserable mud ball of a planet. Do it again and you’ll not see another sunrise; that I can promise.” He raised the mask, bringing it up over his hideous shriveled nose so only his sunken glowing eyes remained visible.

“Sorry boss,” Clarence replied instantly in a tone that betrayed his utter horror, purposely not looking at Surtur and having regretted in having given in to his morbid curiosity. “I didn’t mean to look. I was so tired I couldn’t help it. After all, I am just a man. The only reason I glanced at you is to see if you were awake and to ask how much farther it is to this Nameless City. I’ve been driving all night and need a break. I’m falling asleep at the wheel. The last thing I want is wreck us in this waste by falling asleep, especially now that the wind is picking up.”

“That will not happen for we are very close. At the end of this dune, turn left and you will see a low rocky ridge drowned in the sand,” Surtur stated icily, “Drive to it. We must be on top of it before the sun rises. The cursed rising sun will show us the way to the Nameless City. Hurry now. Dawn rapidly approaches and the sandstorm gathers. We must be atop the ridge before the sun comes up.”

Clarence heard the icy alien intonations of Surtur’s imperious command. Icy chills again raced down his spine, driving away any drowsiness that remained. “Okay boss,” he answered evenly, knowing not to defy his master in this desolation after what he’d just seen. “How far is it?”

“About a mile and a half,” Surtur stated, his demoniac eyes flashing as they rounded the end of the dune and saw the low hummock of rock seventy feet tall rising above the other dunes directly ahead of them just as Surtur had said. “Step on it,” he barked viciously. “If we’re not on the summit as the solar orb breeches the horizon, we will miss the window. We cannot miss that window, not now when we’re so close. If we miss it, I will roast you alive personally. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

“Transparently, boss,” Clarence answered now truly fearing for his life for Surtur had never been so incredibly hostile to him before. He gunned the engine and sent the Land Rover screaming over sands between the fifty-foot dunes that loomed either side of them. In less than two minutes they were racing up the side of what Clarence suddenly realized was a rocky outcropping four miles long and seventy feet in height. The desert sands had piled up against it, leaving a thirty-foot tall spine of strange-looking black stone peeking out of the sands. The wind grew slowly in strength, blowing and shifting the sands around the promontory. As Clarence stopped the Land Rover at the base of this spine of rock, he noticed the rock didn’t seem to be a natural outcropping, but the toppled and eroded ruins of a gigantic cyclopean wall of deep black andesitic stone he’d never seen before. The rock didn’t seem indigenous to the area. The eroded stones were house-sized, broken and pitted from some unknown cataclysm deep in the forgotten eons of antiquity. “By all the gods,” Clarence breathed in stunned awe as he stopped the vehicle, turning off its engine and setting the brake.

Surtur had already jumped out of the Land Rover, looking like a gaunt shambling mummy in the twilight of the imminent dawn. Yet he moved like a big cat with great animation, speed, and purpose. Waving to Clarence, he hissed urgently, “Quickly; we must be atop this pile as the sun rises.” He took off with supernatural agility, bounding up the giant blocks with spider-like quickness and sureness that astounded Clarence.

Clarence immediately followed, picking his way carefully up the rubble to the peak where Surtur waited in the strengthening light. Surtur saw Clarence struggling up the last block and reached down, grabbed him by the wrist with his shriveled clawed hand, and pulled him up as if he was a child, setting him on his feet.

“Thanks boss,” Clarence replied, panting heavily from the run and climb. “Are we in position now?” A shiver of revulsion filled him as he briefly recalled the icy draining feel of Surtur’s hideous hand as it pulled him atop the block.

“Yes,” Surtur replied exultantly. “We are in position now. What do you see, my apprentice?”

Clarence looked from horizon to horizon, seeing nothing but a large valley of endless dunes with a few rocky outcroppings stretching off into the distance surrounded by a faint ridge of rock similar to the one they stood on. The stiff wind seemed to blow from the valley before him with a small low cloud of sand shimmering in the distance like a mirage. “I see nothing but more desert with the cloud of a small low sandstorm off in the distance, boss,” he reported with great puzzlement. “Where’s the city?”

“Wait,” Surtur gloated fiendishly, “Watch. Look for the green flash as the sun rises and we will see the way into the city.”

Clarence turned his gaze to the east, instinctively knowing where the sun was coming up. Surtur began cackling maniacally as the reddish light of dawn grew stronger. It sent fearful icy chills down Clarence’s spine as Surtur laid a gaunt clawed hand on his shoulder and pointed to the solar orb as it broke the horizon, saying, “Look...the green flash comes!”

Clarence stared unblinking as he did indeed see the elusive green flash...a brief narrow pillar of green light shooting skyward lasting for just over one second. Had he blinked, he would have missed it, but he purposely kept from blinking to witness this incredibly rare phenomenon that very few people have the good fortune to witness. Unfortunately, he also saw Surtur’s outstretched hand at the same time, seeing a fiendishly reptilian hand pointing a long clawed finger to the sun as it broke the horizon. As he was about to break and flee from the abominable thing touching his shoulder, something captured his full attention, causing him to completely forget about the vile unholy abomination beside him. The entire valley began to shimmer violently as if a mirage were starting to dissipate, including the low sandstorm he saw. In moments as the sun rose inexorably up, he first saw the immensely rare green flash strobe like a mighty lighthouse, and then the immense colossal ruins of cyclopean stone similar to the rampart they stood on emerged from the shimmer, appearing like a phantom out of the mists in the light of dawn. As the sun broke free of the horizon, Clarence could not believe his eyes. All fear and loathing of Surtur vanished in an instant when the legendary cursed city materialized before his very eyes.