Their screams cannot be heard and those who stand to pray to their distant and capricious god are cut down by flying craft of their own making. The water melts their wall and homes and the thunder deafens and the lightning kills. The wind throws children and livestock into the swirling vortex of cacophony and unseen force.
#Gladiator begins any reason to wear light armor skin#
Then the rain comes like stones with enough speed to bruise skin and blind eyes. The villagers run from their hovels with praises on their lips to the Lord of the Two Moons, hands twisted into signs of supplication. Dark clouds gather above at first, and then a blessed rain of life-giving wetness pours down. It is the year of Desert's Fury when the storm comes to the village. Already the boy has a penchant for mindless violence. His sunken eyes and strong shoulders tell of crushing labor and constant pain and fear. He is fifteen now and has killed many times.
The village has a simple mud brick wall that must be regularly defended from the intelligent monsters shaped like men that live and die in the waste and filth from which they are born. It is a boy and the mother is dead and her remains fed to livestock.
In a filthy hot adobe hut a child is born amid the howling sand storm. It blows now over a small village in the wastes near the pearly choking dust the living fear and falsely call a sea. The wind blows eternal and eventually returns. The wind carries the burning grains across lands unseen by any, save the Dragon once, over stretches of Athas long dead. The sand blows over dunes, craggy mountains, baked salt flats, fields, desperate cities and the endless sea of silt. The windborne sand is everywhere and experienced by all and screams across the planet like some mad razorwing of immense proportions and destiny. On the dying world it blows ceaselessly and those who struggle for life beneath the dark sun find the world's rhythm in it.