Shredder V
Gerard put his small feet one in front of the other and pushed himself to physical limits, shapeless terrain blurring by him, blotting out the grim images which were trying to scar his psyche. His Ranger training was the only tool which served him now, and it provided enough insight to allow him to survive the next few restless days and nights. His instincts kept him moving in a straight line away from the carnage he had witnessed and toward a safe haven of the Rangers some leagues north of the accursed lands. There he would perhaps be able to rest, to allow his mind and body to ingest some of what had been seen, and to perchance begin the healing process. There had been no indication that the Shredder had been giving pursuit, and he at least took some small degree of solace in the fact that his Halfling companion was able to nearly destroy that which had brought about her demise. Until he was safe though, his faculties were bent only on survival.
The Rangers were created not as a means to deal with the unusual and unexplainable events which surrounded the dead zone, but primarily as an entity to police its borders and to keep those who did not know better from wandering into dangerous areas. For nearly three decades the Rangers had performed this stark duty, often times at great peril to themselves, but it was a calling that had spoken to Gerard from his earliest understanding. His sister had suffered from imagined horrors in her youth, and the family was nearly sundered by the resulting conflicts and emotional taxation. Gerard felt himself compelled to join the Rangers and to continue protecting innocent folks from the dark mysteries of the unknown and what lay beyond.
For the last six seasons Gerard had walked the hallowed and harrowed lands of the foggy wastes, experiencing them through the changing of the seasons nearby although the dark lands themselves never really changed. A great many anomalies had crossed his path during his tour, many unexplained stories and occurrences provided him with a respectful insight into the terrain which he mentally mapped and the work which he had chosen to pursue.
But never before had he come across anything remotely close to what had happened with the Shredder lo those too few hours ago. He had heard stories from other Rangers about wandering too close to the border or fluke occurrences that would set your spine to tingling, but this was unprecedented. He had not taken the small group of travelers along any new or uncharted paths, and they had still been quite a distance from the trickiest zones for them to navigate. The most disturbing information which came to him after he replayed the events over as many times as his mind would allow, was that the thing which had decimated his charges had begun tracking them from the north.
The north. Above them in respect to the wastes. That would seem to indicate that the creature had moved beyond the limits of the blasted landscape and had been hunting new territory. If that was in fact true and he merely hadn’t misremembered or manufactured the memories, then the rules had changed and that was ill news for everyone in the lands.