When

Temujo

 arrived in the middle-lands, which he considered the westlands, he was astounded by how little grass there was. Every step his horse took there was grainy sand. It caused him to wonder how the people here ate anything at all. It was no wonder they were so easy to claw down. How could any man stand to fight like a warrior when there was nothing to eat.

That was there problem though. Not his or his men's. Any village they plundered happened to have enough food for their horde stored away to fill their bellies at the end of the night. Still, he wondered how the locals fed themselves all these years.

Temujo wasn't a malicious man, though in legend he was. His men and the rest of the world believed tall tales about him. In the middle-lands people heard that Temujo was fascinated with painting the sand with human blood. Coming from the grasslands of the East, the blood thirsty warmongerer derives no greater pleasure than staining the sand crimson with our blood.

None of this was true of course, but Temujo liked such myths to circulate. It made his job easier. He could see it in their body language from afar as they approached. And he could see it in their eyes when the looked back in horror and he sliced them with his blade.

Sometimes at the end of a massacre he'd look at the blood stained sand... sometimes there would be a particularly dark, almost black like stain on the ground. Sometimes when you pierced a man in a certain spot right in their belly they spilled blood that was that color. When he saw it paint the sand sometimes he did think to himself... maybe he did like painting the sand with blood.