| Nobody Knows
And so it went. The four arrows.... pointing. Pointing straight, unlike the curves of the orb they rested upon.
And so he went. Somehow, the Journeyman, to a distant place.
The sun was small.... quiet..... dying.
The planet where he found himself was cold- too cold, truly. Nothing lived here. Breathed here. Rubble, ruins, and dead rock cast unmovng silhouettes on dusty dry ground. Not the slightest breeze stirred the area, an eerie total silence hanging about. And the sky was a dull gray-red.
Chance, it was, that he found the place, chance or timing or perhaps that vague cosmic coincidence.
A vast dry lakebed sat near one of the poles of the planet, which had long since lost most of its spin. The spread was littered in chunks of metal... metal shaped by men. Used by men. Discarded by men. Tons upon tons of it, scattered so thinly that nary a piece was in arm's reach to another. Their own small shades littered the scape about them and made of the place a mess, shadows strewn about carelessly.
Near this, a crater, a gigantic, petrified cup-shape of what may once have been leather or paper, and, of all things, a modern American telephone pole. At one point, he would have sworn that a rock twitched at him.
But here it was. A ruined tower, in a shape like a gigantic six-story beehive with a seventh story making a near chimney shape. Or at least, so it would were not one side stove in. It mattered not.
The place was ransacked. Or what it held had rotted away long since. Except for this..... Except for this.
The skull was bleached to the sheerest white, its continued presence a mystery. Not so what had slain the owner, handle of a pistol still lodged into the braincase. From the barrel, however, protruded the end of a broad-tipped arrow.
The angle left it to point..... there. A further planet. A star in the sky from this point, twinkling a dulled blue tone.
But.... pointing at what? |