Arrival of the Gunslinger

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In silence, the western prairies lie as they have for eons, the grass swaying gently in the wind, the scent of sage brush in the wind. A gentle silence perturbed only by the shriek of the kite and the distant thunder of bison hooves upon the sun-baked earth. On a distant hill, proud men astride graceful Appaloosas survey their domain, their homeland, as precious as it is sacred.

Oh, but the easterners who call themselves civilized are drawn ever onward on their march to the Pacific. To them, no place is sacred while it still holds a natural bounty. Nature serves merely to give work to the poor and to fatten the coffers of the rich, they say, and the noble endeavor of extracting great wealth and prosperity justifies all means used to accomplish such a feat.

Their arrival is heralded by a black column, it races west atop the steel boiler of an iron horse. The ground trembles, as though in fear, as it passes. The ancient wilds of these untamed plains are nothing but obstacles, its proud mountains mined into gravel in search of precious metals, its proud bison slaughtered for sport, its proud men, branded as savages, driven ever westward to be cornered against a boundless ocean. There is no place for ancient beauty in the new west, it must be eliminated, lest it impede the march of "progress".

In stead of this beauty, arrives the gunslinger, master of the new west. No place is sacred for this man, he seeks only his own betterment, a tract of land to call his own, to degrade as he sees fit. He, and thousand like him, flee the restrictions of urban life, to a place where order is maintained by six steel slugs, where the line between good and evil has all but vanished. There will come a time when their descendants will see the worth of their ill-gotten gains and hold them dear, but by then, only traces of the squandered beauty will remain.

With the thunder of a million horses' hooves, the train, harbinger of pestilence drums ever onward, wheels greased with the innumerable dead, leading the gunslinger on to new pastures to claim and new peoples to cheaply exploit. In later years, the path of the train will be dubbed the "Wild west", but all the horrors of the wild pale in comparison to the savagery of the new arrivals, and the only true wildness in this new west lies in the iron heart of the gunslinger.

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Heya!
I don't usually post things on my own account, but this was a big project of mine and t I was particularly proud of this one so I decided to post it on my own account! I hope you enjoyed!

This project was built on the Everbloom Studios and goCreative servers. If you haven't seen them already, and happen to have a second, go check out these teams! They do fantastic work!

Many many thanks to FlorianFunke from goCreative and Droolie from Everbloom studios for the amazing renders!