Argan the Warrior

Story 1- The Emperor of the Dead Awakens

Editor’s note: This tale I have shared with you, unlike the others that I have found in his various stashes of such memoire stored around the world, this one he told me in person. It was the first awakening to the reality of his curse. Argan, once an Emperor, now fully reduced. He did not know yet what he had become. -Kharzai Djinn

The man awoke with a start, cold, dusty air forcing a painful cough to wrack his naked body. Stiff joints, frozen as if in rigor mortis, ached with the need to move from where he lay upon hard bed of stony chill and damp. He cracked open his eyes as he rolled onto his back. The sky was a ceiling of unmoving cloud, rendering the cardinal directions a single unknowable mass of ash grey cloud.

He sat up, sucked in a deep breath at the wave of pain that passed through his body, then gingerly rose to his knees, testing if his stiff joints could take the weight. Naked flesh felt the bite of icy wind that whipped across a wide prairie of scrub and rock. He rose to h…