Waverider Expedition - Badlands
The wind tasted of ash.
For three days and nights, the Waverider’s scout team had followed the Red River through the wastes, its waters thick and slow, staining everything it touched. The air shimmered with heat, and the land stretched out in broken ridges, gray and black and dead.
By the fourth day they saw movement ahead, ox-carts crawling through the haze, banners of bone and cloth snapping in the wind. A Badlander tribe, fifty souls at most, their faces hidden beneath veils and ash.
When the strangers saw the riders, they raised no weapons. They only stopped their carts and waited, patient as stone.
Venera Sorn dismounted first. “We’re not enemies,” she said. “We seek passage, and knowledge of the land.”
The eldest among them, a woman with skin the color of baked clay and eyes like cooled iron, nodded once. “Then walk with us,” she said. “If you can keep walking.”
They learned her name was Maerra of the Ashworn. Her tribe moved at dawn and dusk, never resting longer than a few hours. Every morning they marked their brows with lines of ash and tied red cords around their wrists. When Venera asked the reason, Maerra answered only, “The Rift seeks stillness.”
At first, Selene thought it superstition. By the second night, she began to wonder.
The fires burned low, the air heavy with whispers that came and went like breath. Sometimes a shape flickered at the edge of sight. A pale shimmer, gone when she turned her head.
Arven refused to speak of it. “The air’s wrong here,” he muttered. “Like breathing through a grave.”
The tribe sang as they walked. Long, low songs, little more than hums, but always there. When Selene asked the meaning, Maerra said, “So the Rift knows we are still awake.”
By day, the land shifted between glassy plains and ridges of red stone. The earth was veined with black lines that pulsed faintly in the heat, like veins under skin. They passed a hollow where an entire caravan had burned, charred carts, the skeletons of oxen, the ground pitted, as if from lightning. No one spoke. Maerra only whispered a prayer and ordered the pace doubled.
That night, Venera noticed one of the younger men sitting apart from the others, his eyes vacant, hands twitching.
“He’s been touched,” Maerra said quietly. “By the Rift.”
“What happens to him?”
“We burn his name.”
The tribe gathered bark and ash. They wrote the boy’s name upon it and fed it to the fire while singing low. The boy wept without sound, and when dawn came, he was gone.
Selene wanted to ask what they had done with him. She never did.
On the fifth day they reached the edge of the Rift itself. The ground fell away into a black chasm that breathed heat and whispers. Red lights floated far below, drifting like lanterns. The air hummed, low and steady, almost musical.
Arven spat into the void. “Doesn’t even echo.”
“No,” said Maerra. “The Rift eats sound.”
They camped far from the edge, but none slept. The wind rose and fell like a sigh. In the darkness, shapes moved among the rocks. Wraiths, beasts, or dreams, the tribe did not say. When dawn came, one of the oxen lay dead, its eyes open and black.
“Keep moving,” Maerra ordered. “It has noticed us.”
No one asked what it was.
By the time they reached the Green Verge, the air had cooled and the grass began to show between the stones. The Badlanders halted there, for this was their border, the place where they could breathe again.
Venera looked back once. The horizon behind them shimmered red, the Rift’s breath still rising like smoke.
“Do you ever go back?” she asked.
Maerra smiled faintly. “Always. The Rift is our curse and our home.”
When they parted, Selene pressed a vial of medicine into the woman’s hand. “For the fevers,” she said.
Maerra nodded. “And for you, keep walking. Never sleep too long in one place. The world hunts stillness now.”
That night, as they made camp beside the cleaner waters of the south, Arven watched the horizon darken.
“Feels like we brought something with us,” he muttered.
Venera didn’t answer. She only stared at the faint red glow that still touched the clouds.
Selene whispered a prayer, though she wasn’t sure to whom.
And far to the north, the Rift of Fire kept breathing, as if listening for their footsteps.