‘Aye,’ Drem grunted, pulling his deer-skin tighter. ‘Strange that this land is called the Desolation,’ he murmured, struggling with imagining the landscape before him as an uninhabited wasteland of rock and ash.

His da grunted, licking fat from his fingers.

‘And that lake was once a crater?’

‘Aye, it was,’ Olin said. ‘The Starstone Crater, where a rock fell from the sky. Started a lot of trouble, did that rock.’

Drem knew all about that, had listened to the tale-tellers speak of how the Starstone had crashed to earth, though he struggled to imagine such a thing happening. The tales told of Seven Treasures that had been forged from the Starstone, and that the first war had been fought over those Treasures, men and giants shedding a river of blood. It had taken a god to stop it; Elyon the Maker had unleashed his legions of Ben-Elim, raining a judgement of death and destruction upon the world and its inhabitants. Elyon had only stopped when he realized that he had been tricked, lured into the plan of his great enemy, Asroth, Demon-Lord of the Fallen. Elyon had walked away then, abandoning the world of flesh and banishing both his own Ben-Elim as well as Asroth and his Kadoshim hordes to the world of spirit, the Otherworld, where they remained trapped for two thousand years as men and giants slowly rebuilt their shattered world.

Until just over a hundred years ago, when the Kadoshim found a sorcerous way to break their bonds in the Otherworld. They returned to the Banished Lands in an explosion of hatred and slaughter, but the Ben-Elim followed them, their eternal war spilling into the world of flesh.

‘Much has changed since the coming of the Ben-Elim,’ Drem said.

‘Aye,’ Olin grunted. ‘And not much of it good.’

Drem’s da was not a supporter of the Ben-Elim. It was rare that he would even mention them, despite Drem’s attempts to lure him into that conversation.

‘Turning the Desolation into this is good, though,’ Drem said, waving a hand at the vista before them.

‘This is good,’ his da agreed, ‘but the Ben-Elim didn’t do this. They’ve done it,’ he said, pointing to the settlement beside the lake, ‘and others like them. People like us.’

‘We’re trappers, hunters.’

‘Aye, well, I mean people that have travelled north and settled here, irrigating, farming, planting, growing. The Desolation has become this because generations of people like us made it a better place. Though I suppose the Ben-Elim are the reason behind that as well, their protection in the south was what drove many here.’

Drem thought about that a while. Stars prickled into life in the crow-black of night as darkness seeped into the world around them.

‘They’ll come here, too, though, won’t they?’ Drem said into the night. ‘The Ben-Elim. Sooner or later, as they have elsewhere, to hunt the Kadoshim.’