Read The Defiler for Free Online Page B

arch.
    Sláine pushed through the falling feathers until he stood less than a yard from the keystone. The sheet of blue fire was both mesmeric and fearsome. It shimmered with a life all of its own.
    Denuded, the Morrigan crumbled, her body collapsing in on itself until a pile of feathers was all that remained of her. One by one the falling feathers began to rise again, each growing as it metamorphosed into one of the Crone's damned birds and was gone, away on the wind.
    Sláine stepped into the blue fire.
     
    He walked out into tomorrow.
    The desert heat hit him like an anvil. Shading his eyes, Sláine looked up at the sky. A red heat-haze shimmered across the horizon, rising up towards the cloudless red-tinged alien sky. And he was in no doubt that it was alien. Two suns hung low on either extreme of the horizon, making it impossible to tell if it was dawn or dusk, or if the concept of night even existed here: one sun rising always as the other set. The twin suns were merciless, both in terms of brightness and baking heat.
    Ukko sat cross-legged on a patch of parched bunchgrass, worrying away at a kernel of corn that had lodged in his teeth. He hawked and spat, backhanding his lips dry.
    "You took your sweet old time getting here," the dwarf said without looking up. "I've been sat on this damned hillock for five days. I'd just about given up on you and gone in search of grub."
    "Five days, without food? You expect me to believe that?" Sláine said, staring down the shallow decline of the hill he had stepped out onto at what was undoubtedly a city - but it was a city quite unlike any he had ever seen before.
    "My stomach has stopped grumbling now it's decided my throat has been cut. It isn't funny."
    Minarets and bone-fine towers shimmered mirage-like before him. They appeared to rise in tiers, concentric rings of monstrosity building upon each other one ghastly layer at a time: and at the very heart of Purgadair, one tower dwarfed all the other peaks of the city, climbing miles into the heavens. Sláine could barely see the golden crown at its peak, reflecting the suns so brilliantly it could almost have been a third beacon in the sky. It was a staggering piece of architecture - a white finger accusing the gods. Beneath it, it was easy to imagine the earth challenging the dominion of the lords of the air themselves. Sláine could not begin to comprehend its sheer size or the marvel of construction it was. In the glare of both suns there was not a single shadow that fell upon the elaborate carvings worked into its stone. Sláine could make out none of the details but the overall impression was one of a mind gone mad, so intense were they. Sláine struggled to see more, to make out details over general impressions, but all he saw were huge faces, ten and twenty times his height, demonic and devilish gargoyles and tormented men, reaching out, beseeching.
    Rooftops slanted in a crooked patchwork of clays, some hard-baked red, others whitewashed.
    Compared with the wattle huts of Murias, even the king's roundhouse, the city of Purgadair was a monstrosity of stone that devoured both land and sky. The inhabitants of this mad city must surely live on top of each other, crammed into tiny spaces instead of relishing the freedom of the land.
    What was it the Morrigan had said? There is no earth power here... looking at the sprawl of humanity it was easy to see why. In Tir-Nan-Og the land was weakening as the magic was leeched out of it by the Drunes and their huge Weird Stones spread across the land to act as conduits for the great souring. There were no Weird Stones here, only stone, an overwhelming mass of stone. There was nowhere for the land to breathe. The stone of Purgadair had choked the life out of the land. No wonder it stood on the edge of a great barren desert, how could it not? How could the land hope to stand against the parasites crawling across its skin? And when it succumbed, what then?
    "This is the future," Sláine