Free Dawn of War by Tim Marquitz

forward. “We must go on.” The words were certain, but his voice wavered.
    Without hesitation, Jerul leaned once more into the oars, driving the raft onward. Domor watched as the shadows of the Dead Lands swept toward them, then overtop as though it were a storm cloud readying to unleash its burden.
    The temperature dropped and Domor felt his skin prickle at the sudden change. The trees that had stood so straight and tall just twenty yards back now drooped and bowed as though they shouldered a great burden. Their branches were twisted and deformed, bringing to mind the elderly of his race, their fingers gnarled and useless on the trunks of their hands.
    Where there had been clear sky and sun above them just a moment before, there was now a knotted canopy that seemed to reject the light, letting little more than random pinpricks of daylight through. A palpable hush settled over them as they sailed into the shade. It was as if the trees had swallowed all the ambient sounds, leaving only the splashes of the oars and Jerul’s grunts of exertion.
    Domor clutched to his pack and eased it open as he glanced back at Jerul. The warrior shifted to sit at the edge of the bench and leveraged the oars against his ribs. He loosed his swords from the cradle at his back and set them side by side at his feet. With a smile that failed to brighten his eyes, Jerul sat back and took up his oars again. He bore down and Domor could see the strain at his chest as his blood-companion endeavored to speed their journey as best he could. The purple veins at his neck pulsed in time with his effort.
    Domor looked once more to the way ahead before scanning the canopy as they sailed beneath it. The eerie silence and monstrous trees seemed to close in on him, a garrote around the neck of his spirit. Though he knew it was Ree’s blood that corrupted the land so deeply as to make it untenable, he felt nothing of the great goddess’ presence. It was as though she had turned her back upon the Dead Lands, letting its malignance fester and grow unchecked, virulent in its gangrenous deformation.
    He saw none of her beauty in the shadows that clung like a thick mist to the shore, its darkness bleeding into the water to taint it black. Domor leaned over the side to examine the water closer. The glassy surface of the river no longer reflected his wavering face, but seemed to swallow the image, drowning it in an obsidian shimmer. He moved away from the side, a nervous sickness growing in his stomach.
    Domor had no fear of the river itself, for his only certainty in the ruin of the Dead Lands was that nothing living dwelled in the water’s depths. In her wisdom, Ree had damned the water of Ahreele to never carry natural life within its current. The heavy water that sat so still was like a sack of stones in one’s lungs. While it could be ingested in small quantities, as was necessary for continued life, its unnatural denseness was an anchor that would pull one down into the depths should a body ingest too much.
    It was the same for any living creature.
    As a child, Domor watched a horse stumble into the river. Its thrashing attempts at swimming filled its mouth with water, its panic driving it to swallow. As its stomach filled, the horse sank lower and lower, drowning with its head still above the surface. Its frantic motions caused only more water to be ingested until the horse ceased its thrashing and sunk silent to the bottom of the river. The mirrored surface, no longer broken by the horse’s motions, settled to a fine sheen. Just a moment later, it was as though the horse had never been.
    Domor purged the image from his memory and focused his attention on the way forward. The forest felt as though it were closing in on him, the silence deafening in its somber strangeness. Domor hunkered down inside the raft, his eyes just high enough to peer past the retaining wall. He slid his hand inside his pack and clasped the hilt of his dagger.
    It would be a long