The blood aroma of my enemies is heavy on the evening’s parched air. I drag the crescent blade through the desiccated sand, cleansing the gleaming metal of this battle’s gore. The stacked bodies twitch in the smear of red dusk and I sit heavily on a pale sand dune. I had almost forgotten the cowering family at my back. I pull the obsidian hood from my weary head and turn to face them.

The father is a short, rotund man, quivering in a threadbare robe, even as he bravely shields his two weeping daughters. His hands are soft and weak - the hands of a merchant - unsuited for shedding the blood of those who would take away his life and those of his family. Just as my hands were some years ago.

"Thank you, sir," he stammers, and I recognize the heavy accent belonging to one hailing from the land of C’mehtra, a fortnight’s travel west from my own homeland of Narquelle. "What - what manner of creature are these?" he asks finally, indicating the slashed and torn bodies strewn before us.

"I do not know," I answer simply. "My people call them ‘the Users’." That much was true; some years ago, after the Great Upheavals twisted our world to and fro and the massive peaks thrust from the depths of the oceans, these horrific entities made their first savage appearances in our lands, taking whatever suited their needs, and destroying whatever else remained. At first, we attempted communication with them, but their brutal language was guttural, unintelligible. They seemed uninterested in anything but devastation. Not that they were wasteful - they seemed capable of consuming anything and everything - including the flesh of my people - down to the pallid bone. "And you, sir. What shall I call the man who saved the precious lives of my daughters?" he continues to shield the little ones from the horrors I had visited upon this band of Users.

I consider his question. The man I had been was long dead. I run my battle callused hand along the deadly sharp blade of my weapon. "You may call me Scythe. I am Scythe."

He nods sagely, even though he has no idea why. "I have never seen anyone use an instrument such as that so . . . "

"Yes," I respond curtly. I have already tired of his prattle. Moreover, I have many more miles to go, many more Users to slay. "Heed my words, merchant. Return your way east. Return to your homeland. The road behind me is clear of Users. The road before me shall be, by my word."

The soft, round man looks down, drawing circles in the sand with a large toe that has escaped his worn sandal. "My home was destroyed, my wife - their mother - slain in the night. I was not there to see - I think it was these horrible Users who did the terrible deed." He makes a movement as though he might charge the bodies in rage, but eventually cowers from them instead.

"Merchant," I laugh, "return to your homeland. "You haven’t the stomach for this."

I rise quickly, and smoothly work the wooden stock in my hands, swinging the blade of the scythe toward the nearest pile of bodies. The silver crescent slips beneath the neck of the User on top and his head pops from his neck with a grisly wet sound and rolls across the desert floor toward the merchant. The merchant’s eyes widened with fear and disgust, and without further word ushers his aghast daughters into the gathering night, toward the east and his shattered home.

The User’s head rolls to my feet, the rheumy dead eyes regarding me with what I consider contempt. I raise the lower fringes of my tattered black robe and kick the offending head into the darkening desert, out of sight -- if not out of mind. The desert floor is black with their oily clotting blood. And yet, tomorrow as the winds blow the white sands across the dunes, it will be as if nothing had happened. Even the corpses will be covered, for not even the carrion birds will attempt to eat them, nor will simple maggots nest within their foul bodies.

I travel some distance west to make my camp for the evening. I make sure that I am downwind of the rotting corpses. Arranging myself on a short plateau of rocks, I stare into the expansive star field overhead. A finger of the gods seems to be pointing westward, in my mind, and I touch the comforting farm implement turned battle weapon lying next to me. It and I have slain scores of Users, maiming, mutilating, decapitating them without mercy, and yet, I know within my heart, that it will never be enough. The depths of my vengeance remain uncharted, the blood hunger in my soul unsated.

My people are a simple, nomadic farming people. Not quite trusting, although not ones to turn away a needy stranger. We help those in our community, but never interfere with the lives they chose to lead. That made us easy prey for the Users. By the time we attempted to band together against them, our community was for all intents and purposes, decimated.

We had achieved a comfortable complacency, I suppose. We tilled our fields, tended our crops, took simple pleasure in our own families, without looking outward beyond our own property lines. The legends, whispered myths of days before, had largely gone untold, seldom repeated. The stories of the great Orbs that fell from the sky and rent the world asunder, freezing the tropical, melting the frozen, were mostly told to terrify wayward children. And yet, I had witnessed for myself the ruins of the old places, the strange and terrible machines that rose from the restless sands of the past. Ghosts, arms spread askance, seeking validation. Perhaps they do not exist if no one believes them.

But then, the Users came. Their translucent flesh stretched grotesquely over malformed skeletons, their wild bulging eyes seeking sustenance greedily, their hunched but quick scurry, snarling lips revealing rows of black gummed, pointed teeth. Their clothing was unlike anything we had ever seen, garish colors stretched over their brutish bodies like a second skin, adorned with small metallic devises and brightly colored symbols incomprehensible to us. They carried lightweight metallic clubs with which they mercilessly bludgeoned their victims to death. Their ghoulish appetites seemed bottomless.

They swarmed my farm in the autumn two cycles ago. I was returning sweat drenched and exhausted from mowing the fields with my blade. Something unsettling moved slimily along my spine as I walked along the path to the barn. Everything was too still, quiet. There was no sound of the work animals, the tripeds, coming from the barn. The door to our dwelling was slightly ajar; curtains were rustling uneasily in the windows. In the near dusk, a shadow stealthily crept around the corner of our home. I circled around the opposite way around the barn, then across the triped path to the west side of the house. The universe froze in place when I peered through the window.

The dining area of our home had been turned into a slaughterhouse. Blood was splattered across the walls from floor to ceiling; entrails hung greasily from the rafters. On the dining table - where all our meals had been taken, happily discussing the events of our respective days - the flayed corpse of my beloved wife. She was staring aghast at the ceiling, mouth open in unspeakable horror. Her body had been split from throat to crotch and several of the strange creatures were scooping out her internal organs and flesh with taloned hands, gorging themselves greedily.

Tears sprang to my eyes, and in that instance, I could see my own unrecognizable reflection in the window glass. Then, behind me, the grinning skull face of one of them.

I rolled to the ground just as the window disintegrated from the force of the User’s club smashing into it. Viscous yellow ooze drooled from its grinning lips. Obviously relishing the moment, it raised the club with both hands, preparing to pummel me to death with it. I rolled on my back, then lashed out with both legs into the creature’s chest, sending it flying backwards with a squeal. The scythe was in my hands before I realized what I was doing, and in an economical motion, I had decapitated the creature before it had a chance to recover. The body crawled several feet before it collapsed. The leathery face smiled at me in death.

The others poured out of the dwelling from both the front and back doors; there were easily a dozen of them. They moved somewhat slowly - from being gorged on the flesh of my family as well as that of the farm animals, I would surmise later - and that fact saved my wretched life. I worked the scythe, a man possessed, slashing, disemboweling, decapitating, amputating. The last one I split nearly in half from crotch to neck.

I fell to my knees and vomited bile. Their stench was overwhelming, so I doused them with a liquid accelerant and set them afire. They burned quickly and well.

I scarcely recollect entering our home. The children’s remains were mostly, almost mercifully unrecognizable, but I somehow managed to wrap the remnants of all three of them in cloth and sew the bundles shut. As is our way, I cremated them two days later. I placed their bodies atop the barn and set it and the house afire. I watched the blaze burn long into the night.

The next morning, with the robe on my back, a coated skin for water, a supply of dried meat - and my scythe - I began my bloody journey westward.

I keep them foremost in my thoughts, my family. Except when I am slaying Users, I see their faces, hear their happy, laughing voices, feel the warmth of their love. The death of my family is a festering wound on my soul that will eventually destroy me, I know. But just when it seems there is no use in continuing on, I happen upon a band of Users, and rip them to shreds with neither mercy nor compunction. It is only then that I have found my true purpose.

What began as a vengeful reaction to the horrific slaughter of my family slowly became a crusade: I would journey west to the land where these creatures originated, and kill as many of them as I possibly could. I would bring fear and devastation into the heart of their own land.

My wife and children’s faces are visible in the stars tonight, smiling, calling to me from a lifetime away. Silent tears cascade down my face, into my thick growth of grey beard. The fire burning inside my belly will only be quenched by the blood of my enemies.

The new dawn excises the demons of the night, replacing them with a stark, humorless reality. I have traveled this forsaken spit of land bisecting a dead ocean for nearly a cycle now; I have killed countless Users without serious injury to myself. The wild fury renews itself with vigor each time I encounter them. I have not a clue how far I have wandered, nor how much farther I must go before I find the land of their origin. It matters not -- I have all the time in the world.

I repair my worn sandals again; the sturdy stock of the scythe makes an adequate walking stick with the blade retracted and secured. The flesh of my face is burned and scabbed, my lips parched and cracked. My tattered robe, once light grey to deflect the sun’s merciless rays is now stained black with the oily spilt blood of the Users. I can see in the distance the widening of the land as the isthmus joins what appears to be a continent. I make camp and sleep, dreaming not of my dear family, but of bathing in the blood of the dead.

I shade my eyes against the sun as the black smudge in the distance becomes clearer. A nearly perfectly round hole in a mountainside. Likening the Users to insects, perhaps this was their hive or nest. I nibble on a stringy piece of molded meat, take a drink of tepid, soured water. I can imagine hordes of Users pouring from the vast opening, devouring everything in sight, including me. Users are mostly nocturnal, or they tend to feed at dusk. Their translucent flesh seems particularly sensitive to direct sunlight. Within the folds of blackness inside the tunnel, they would think themselves safe. There, they would be vulnerable.

The rounded walls of the tunnel are smooth, unnaturally so. There are sconces for torches along the walls, but the torches are unlike anything I’ve ever seen - no flame flickers from them, although soft light cascades down the gray smoothness as far as the eye can see. There is a large amount of writing and symbology on the walls, all of it unintelligible to me. This is not a dwelling: no one, no creature has walked these corridors in uncounted time. I flick the stock of the scythe and the blade snaps into place and locks.

There is a continual watermark on the walls of the tunnel as it descends precipitously - this entire structure has been underwater during some long ago age, perhaps drained by the Great Upheavals. Abruptly, the tunnel opens into a vast chamber, the far wall nearly out of discernable sight, the ceiling unseeable.

The symbols are unknowable, and yet seem to impart a palpable feeling of danger. Tens of thousands of transparent tubes line the enormous chamber in perfect symmetry. I cautiously run my hand over one of the smooth surfaces - it seems as glass, and yet, unlike any glass or other material I had ever witnessed. One of the tubes seems damaged - and occupied. One of the Users is inside, or at least the desiccated corpse of one. Although the bizarre particulars were well beyond my understanding, I have found the place from where the Users had originated.

This was some hallowed ground for them, undoubtedly. Or, perhaps they feared this place. In any case, I will attempt to find a way to destroy it. A loose boulder on the rocky precipice above the entrance may well do nicely.

They meet me at the entrance. A dozen or more of them, wielding their clubs, their hunched stances perfect for battle. To their barbarous astonishment, I rush them, approaching the largest first - their leader - and quickly liberating his body of its gruesome head. I slash two or three more of them in turn; one of their clubs finds a fortunate, but impotent strike against my head. They do not retreat, and it is their undoing. Within moments, after a frenzied, though workmanlike slashing of the scythe, they lie squirming on the ground, body parts and heads strewn recklessly, viscera oozing out of ragged wounds.

My face contorted in an evil rictus of rage and bloodlust, I wade through the corpses. A quick climb to the precipice above the opening confirms my earlier suspicions. Using the scythe’s stock as a lever, I rock a key boulder loose and it creates an avalanche that fills the opening to their ghastly shrine - forever.

I walk now along a dead ocean, the stench of ten hundred million fish pervading the hot air. Something rises in the distance, something writhing, seemingly alive. It first appears to be a wind funnel - sand demons, we sometimes call them. But, they are enormous, and there are two of them, spinning side by side, undulating madly from the cracked ruins, disappearing into the expanse of the heavens.

The flat silence is shattered by my own maniacal laughter. In the twin swirling maelstrom there are tens of thousands of the creatures we call Users. Their mouths agape with wondrous terror, they are conveyed into the heavens where they disappear into a wash of sand and sky.

I widen my stance before the insane tableaux. My tattered robe rustles around my tall, starved frame. I snap the stock of the scythe and the deadly crescent blade snickts into place, ready to shed User blood. Once ensconced within the dual spires screaming heavenward, I will slay them every last one of them. I will wash my robes in the blood of my enemies; I will spill their blood over myself and onto their own land. Their translucent flesh will rot on the ground of their ancestors; their bones will grind to dust.