Barbarian

The Barbarian “There are walls everywhere. Walls within walls within walls, like the cells of a hive.”
From the waste-washed margins of the world you came, where lightning crackles on the salt-pan and the hoary pillars of the air uphold a storm-black sky unseen by civilized eyes, where a shaman’s whispered words once told you of bright stars wheeling. Your first memory is bringing your mother stones to sling as she whirled and hurled from a crag-top that briefly clasped the tribe, spitting curses at some foe far enough away your child-eye could not make them out. Fighting was a way of life since the moment you could walk. For as long as you could hold a knife your hand has never been more than two feet from the handle of a blade. Learning how to find clean water, to understand sign and track, to expect traps and trap them in turn. Always with one eye on the horizon, on the weather, on the wind. Listening. Learning. And never sleeping too deeply. When you were young your world was thirty people, the horizon, and death. The greatest hierarch you ever knew was the old path-finder, storm-seeker, horizon watcher - and they were only listened to two times in three. As for the rest, fight with your kin, or choose to stand alone, as you will. Few who stand alone survive. And always hunted. By the creatures of Yggsrathaal. By the varied un-things that come endlessly from the deeps of the waste, stripped of memory by the fog and the rains or whispering the name and bearing the signs of Demon-Emperors, or Priests of Destruction from living dreams or invisible nations out beyond the shifting line of no-return. You had no idea what freedom was until you came here. . . the great sea-of-people.
Such infinite varieties. Shapes, colors, and sounds, more kinds than there are salt-grains in a hailing storm. Barely a day can go by without you seeing a face you have not seen before. And with people come the rules. So many invisible and pointless rules, like being under a spell or in a maze of glass walls. This world drowns in speech and its own waste. They swim in words. Words of what should be done, what they will do, what others should. Few act much of what they speak, except these few, your comrades. A world of busy flesh ruled by paper and by the frozen faces of dead kings and hidden emperors bound within the circles of coins. The cursed paper-priests with their lists and records of dead words. How could you have known that these leaves of dead knowledge, like words from dry tongues, could hold such power? A power that pursues further than any voice can carry, leaping from mind to mind.
But some things here can be useful. Armour, a better weapon.
Whenever anything is needed, a strange dance of exchange begins. Never in your life have you owned more than you could carry on your back or in your hands. Only a fool would. Wealth then was another day breathing, another chance to move, to survive, to keep fighting. Or clean water, untainted by the memory-stealing rain, or fresh meat, or an unmarred and unwatched path. Only out in the darker lands, beyond the city walls, where no lights can be seen at night, can anything be done in the usual way. Everything else needs coin. And coin cannot be taken - at least not from most. Things must be done to receive it. Any manner of incredible things. You have 'skills' now. Strange to you, you know everyone could do these things if they truly wished to. Where you are from, everyone can do them, or they die. They are the things that living people do. But now they are a thing to be exchanged, for coins with the faces of men. With coin, any manner of things may be bought. And so, the sea of souls is like a great torrent, changing any action into anything, endlessly. Like a strange afterlife, with the punishment being the labyrinth of rules and the flaccid shameful pomp of the Hierarchs, and the simple shame of the poor. You had never known the poor till you came here, and found you were amongst them.
Few here understand you, and there are few you understand. 'Barbarian' some call you, while mocking your speech, or your silence. You realize quickly, this means 'other', 'outsider', ‘thing from the wild’. You smile. To them, you would seem so. But, you have seen the true things from the margins of the world. The true Other. Mile-long corpses of Yggsrathaals greatest children fed on by the iridescent swarms of some Outer-Emperor’s pets. The dreamless wars. Stampedes of invisible Titans of Fog. The Fire-Bright storms of Demonic ice beckoning the unwary and the lost.
'Barbarous' indeed.
You now know that those who walk with you, though they come not from the Waste or Wild, are as apart as you, from this world of invisible walls. Something within them is different. Perhaps they belonged to it once, forced out as you were lured in. They carry strange dreams or strange scars. At least a little, they see the ocean of souls for what it is - a great tempest of bodies. Powerful, but limited. Nothing to be worshipped. And not the only way the world can be. You will walk with them. Just as it was before, it is better not to fight alone.