A small carriage creaked across the dark landscape, its wooden wheels crunching softly over the packed earth. Moonlight cast pale silver across the road, while countless stars glittered in the clear night sky. Brindle mares pulled the carriage at a slow, steady trot, their hooves muffled by the soft ground. Inside, a dim light glowed behind a shuttered window, where the lone passenger shifted, preparing for the long ride ahead. The route to the Elven lands was a significant one—long, often quiet, and lined with the weight of history.
Beyond the gently rolling hills, dark silhouettes of distant mountains rose against the night sky, their jagged peaks outlined by the moonlight. They loomed like ancient sentinels, watching over the land in silent vigilance. Wisps of cloud clung to the upper ridges, barely distinguishable from the snow that still dusted the highest points. Even from this distance, the sheer size of the range was humbling—a vast, brooding barrier that marked the edge of the known world for many travelers.
From inside the carriage, the world passed as a blur to Rose. The countryside, still damp from an earlier rain, shimmered with scattered patches of luminescence. Bioluminescent plants dotted the landscape—delicate blooms and creeping vines that pulsed with a faint, otherworldly glow. Moisture clung to every surface, catching the light and refracting it in strange, beautiful ways. Leaves glistened, stones gleamed, and even the bark of certain trees seemed to flicker faintly under the moonlight.
It was an enchanting sight, surreal in its quiet intensity. Had Rose been in need of alchemical ingredients, she could have easily gathered a small fortune from the glowing flora alone. The illusion created by the moisture and moonlight made the fields appear as though scattered with stardust—tiny sparks dancing across the earth in the twilight. She leaned closer to the window, intrigued. How strange this place was, and yet, how beautiful. It was almost as if the world was asking to be gathered.
Rose eased back into her seat, the gentle sway of the carriage a steady rhythm beneath her. With a quiet breath, she raised a hand and summoned a focused orb of light, which hovered just above her head—soft and steady, casting a warm glow across the small cabin. Shadows pulled back as the magic settled, revealing the worn parchment she withdrew from her satchel.
Unfolding the scroll with care, she let her eyes trace the inked lines until they found the place she had last left off. The script was Elvish, and gave Rose pause as she read.
“They spoke of a planet called ‘D’shoth’, but without a shred of longing. Their one deity had a name very similar, ‘D’shath’, which we learned means ‘The Nine God’. Towards it they held something much closer to hate.”
Rose paused, her eyes lingering on the words inked before her, thoughts drifting to the one who had first spoken them. The Elves had liberated the information from Skargol—those bleak, broken lands. From among the chaos, they had pulled a single voice: Baq-Noi, a young Khägan slave.
The Skar were the very antithesis of harmony—an affront to every noble ideal held by the other races. Where others built, the Skar destroyed. Where others sought reason, the Skar embraced frenzy. Suicidally aggressive and dangerously myopic, they feared nothing but their enigmatic “Nine God,” a deity worshipped only through hatred and ruin.
Their bodies were lean and wiry, built for speed and sudden violence, not endurance. They struck with the single-mindedness of starving beasts—fast, brutal, and without pause. Even among their own, conflict brewed without end. In Skargol, war was not a means but a constant state, and it spilled beyond their borders like fire through dry grass. Their place on the wider stage of Terminus remained a question mark—unpredictable, unstable, and always perilous.
“There was something about that name — ‘Skar’. Their hatred of it was unmistakable, yet still they spoke it to each other. It was as if they were forced to use it, as we were forced to use skel. The ‘Nine God’, who they honored with dead hearts… must be the one thing they respect, perhaps even fear.”
The scroll was known as The Khägan Account—the only firsthand account of the Skar ever uncovered. Its pages wove a grim tale, one steeped in betrayal and the crumbling of a revolution that had once threatened to reshape the Skar from within. At its center stood a nameless priestess of the Nine God, her identity lost to time, erased by those who survived her legacy.
She had dared to challenge the order of her kind, igniting a movement that fractured the Skar from within. But the rebellion failed, crushed beneath the weight of its own chaos. Her punishment was as brutal as it was unending—condemned to an eternity of suffering, she was transformed into the sole means by which the Skar could reproduce. Her agony became their cycle of life, and thus, she remained—an eternal fixture in a race defined by pain. The Nine God gave her the name “Averish”, calling out the black hearted lust for consuming that had led to her ruin.
“She is kept in a large chamber, far below the Dead Shear. Some skel — slaves, I mean — said that the Skar kept her body preserved even then, though I never looked upon her, mercifully. But I know one who did. He couldn’t… couldn’t say what he saw, for months. Then only, ‘May she never live.’ That was strange to me, but so much was horrible and strange in Skargol. And while I long to see the last of my people freed, there is much I pray to forget.”
Rose lowered the scroll, the weight of its words settling heavy in her chest. A quiet dread coiled in her stomach. The Skar were not simply a violent people—they were destruction given form, a manifestation of the void itself. They did not belong to Terminus, not truly, yet they had carved a place here in blood and ruin. Few in number, but born of something ancient and ravenous—their origins traced back to Averish, and the shadows of something older still.
A shiver ran through her as she turned to the window. A storm gathered on the horizon, its low growl rolling across the plains. With each burst of thunder, lightning split the sky and revealed a terrible silhouette—towering, jagged, and unnatural. The Dead Shear. A vast, monolithic shard of D’Shoth, half-lost in cloud and mist, reaching upward like a broken tooth toward the heavens. It was through this sundered relic the Skar had come—ripped into the world when their queen fell.
At the base of the Dead Shear, where fog mingled with shadow and the land itself seemed to recoil, the remnants endured. Survivors—castoffs from a dying world, flung into Terminus at the moment of their queen’s death. She was no longer bound in body, no longer the mother to their kind. And yet, something still lingered beneath the surface. Watching. Waiting.
Rose returned the scroll to her satchel. She pulled out her notepad, and started to write. Dobish had gone through great links to obtain this for her. The halfling thief, turned scholar who always found himself right in the middle of adventure. The adventure it seemed had found her. She wasn’t sure what he wanted with the Skar, but answers would be had once they reached the Elves. Dobish would be waiting for her, and clarity would refocus them. For now she would note her opinions, and findings.
How far she had come from the wide-eyed girl with tangled red hair, the one who once clung to the corners of crowded rooms, frightened of her own shadow. That timid child, who had once hidden behind books to avoid the world, was now a memory—faded, but not forgotten. In her place stood a woman shaped by hard-won experience, honed by trial and curiosity.
Rose was no longer the observer. She was the seeker. Brave, sharp-minded, and unshakably driven by the pursuit of knowledge, she had crossed wilds and ruins, deciphered dead languages, and faced things most would never dare name aloud. She smiled softly to herself, the glow from her conjured light flickering across her features.
Outside, the landscape rolled onward beneath the wheels of the carriage. The mountains loomed ever closer, wrapped in stormlight and mist, the path ahead uncertain and full of promise. As the carriage crested a low ridge and dipped toward the horizon, Rose leaned back in her seat, heart steady.
Adventure awaited—and she smiled.
Special thanks to Pantheon for providing inspiration for this work.
Source: The Skar
Writing with Woodson 