by DJ Molles
He was stolid and unperturbed. Death was not really anything to balk at for Stuber. Just another day on this planet. But he was cautious, nonetheless. He knew he was the intruder. So he held out his hand. Didn’t touch the girl until her father and mother dragged their watery eyes to his.
He let his own eyes and his outstretched hand ask the question.
When they did not object, or fire curses at him, he slowly lowered his hand until it touched the girl’s bloody forehead. Gently pressed the eyelids closed.
He only knew one prayer for the dead. And it was a prayer to the Nine. Their names felt bitter on the back of his tongue, and he could not say them. But what were prayers for, anyways? They’d never been for the dead, had they? The ones that they were addressed to didn’t care. No. Prayers had always been for the living. The ones left behind. The ones that have to bear witness.
And the message was much the same, even if Stuber did excise the names.
“You have fought your fight,” Stuber said. “Be at peace and go to the After.”
Was there an After? Perhaps not. But the wailing of the parents trailed off. They weren’t healed. They weren’t filled with a sudden epiphany for the meaning of life. They weren’t filled with anything. Just numb souls in hollow bodies. But maybe it helped.
Stuber stood again. Looked to Teran. “The dead can’t stay here. And we can’t bury them.”
Teran glanced back to the skiff. “Can we gather stones? Make a cairn?”
It was what they’d done in the wastelands, because the ground was too hard to dig. But the amount of stones they would need…
“I can help,” Mala said, her voice surprisingly quiet. She glanced at Lux. Gave him a nod. “We can help.”
Stuber looked at her questioningly, but she raised her longstaff and he understood.
“Do it here,” a voice growled behind them.
They turned and found Legatus Mordicus standing there, looking down at the dead girl with a guarded squint. He tore his eyes away. Blinked a few times. Then nodded behind him.
“Here, in the square,” he continued, his voice betraying just the tiniest wobbled of emotion, quickly hid. “Where they can be surrounded by their own people. Don’t put them out in the wastes. My legionnaires will help.”
Slow and arduous, the process began, and continued. The sun peaked, then began to descend. Bodies were brought from every corner of the city. Some of them by family members. Some of them by the legionnaires. They were placed in the center of the temple square with as much respect as could be afforded them.
Stuber watched from a distance, his arms aching from the labor, covered in blood and dirt, made into a slick ochre mud by his own sweat. Two lines of bodies, at that point probably a hundred or so in each line. More coming all the time.
Mala on one end. Lux on the other. Their longstaffs in their hands. The blades began to glow, white hot. And then they laid the flat of those blades on the nearest bodies.
A sizzle, and a crackle. Smoke and char. Flames began to leap up.
Down the rows of bodies they went, touching one after the other. The heat so enormous from the energy in those blades that it lit the clothing, and fed the fire from the fat of the flesh beneath.
Always grizzly, when you got down to the science of it.
But there’s also something purifying about fire, Stuber thought. And none of the faces that ringed that growing fire seemed to mind. It was as though they all knew this was the best their dead could hope for.
Eventually the heat became self-sustaining. Mala and Lux stepped back from the flames as they continued to grow. Sometimes stepping in to a place where the flames had cooled, for there is a lot of moisture in a human body, and reigniting it.
The smoke stank. But the fires stayed hot enough to lift the worst of it into the sky. People became ash and took to the air. That was the romantic way to look at it.
Stuber realized he’d not moved in quite a while. He really should get moving again. The exhaustion was catching up to him, and he had to outpace it. There were still wounded to find and care for, after all. Not everyone had to end up on the pyre.
Just before he decided to start moving again, he watched Mala turn and look at him. Firelight glimmered orange on the side of her face. White sparkles at the bottoms of her eyes.
Good, Stuber thought. Let her feel something for once.
Then he turned to go find Petra, for however long he had left with her.
***
So there was a problem with flying that Perry hadn’t anticipated.
Namely that, after a while of doing it, it’s not so exciting anymore. Combine that with the fact that he hadn’t slept in…when was the last time he slept? Hard to remember at this point. And with the muted sound of the wind constantly rushing, and the fact that he was not really exerting himself physically, well, he found himself dozing off.
Which is really unsettling when you snap awake and see the ground racing up at you.
A panicked pulse to get him aloft again. A surge of adrenaline to get his heart beating and his eyes not quite so heavy. But then, inevitably, that adrenaline faded, leaving him even more tired than before.
He even considered landing so that he could simply collapse into the dirt and maybe take a nap. Take the edge off his weariness.
But there wasn’t time. Unthinkable, really. Sure, there was no one around to witness it, but he imagined himself sitting there and snoozing while the world burned. It seemed callous. Selfish. And he knew that once he stopped moving, his thoughts would catch up to him anyways and banish any chances for rest.
The sun began to sink towards the horizon. How long had he been at it? But he just kept catapulting himself along.
Gradually, as the sky ahead of him in the west turned to a watery yellow, and the sky behind him in the east began to turn a deep, darkening blue, he spotted his destination.
A great, flat, tusk of rock, silhouetted against the dusky western horizon.
It rises up out of the wastelands like it’s got no business being there, she’d said.
An apt description. A singular landmark for lonely travelers in an otherwise featureless expanse.
Snaggle-Tooth Mountain.
The sight of it invigorated him enough that over the next half hour of bouncing towards it, he didn’t doze off. Just kept his eyes fixed on it, dead ahead. A looming, growing premonition. A hope. A fear. A possibility. A place of infinite potential. A crossroads of reality. Some sort of megalithic structure parked in the center of the river of humanity’s existence, dividing the flow into two paths, and Perry didn’t know which path he would be dragged into. Wouldn’t know until he crashed into it.
Just as the sun touched the flat of its resting place, Perry vaulted himself higher and higher, as Snaggle-Tooth Mountain grew so large that it dominated his vision. Every pulse towards it seemed to be the one that would smack him face-first into the side of the sheer cliffs, only to realize that he wasn’t as close as he thought. And so it grew bigger. More impressive. Almost frightening in its size and the oddity of its structure. Like a massive pillar erected there for a specific purpose, and not some result of geological shifts. Like it had been placed, instead of grown.
Higher and higher he pulsed, until, finally, the edge of its huge plateau simply whooshed by, and Perry was staring at a great, circular field of flat, featureless stone.
He landed, more or less gracefully, near the edge, and deactivated his shield.
He stood there for a long moment, longstaff gripped in both hands, a little defensive, a little cautious. He didn’t move. Just let his eyes range over the plateau. Gods, but it was more massive than he’d ever thought when he’d spied it in the distance the handful of times that Hauten’s crew had used it as their waypoint for turning east to find Junction City.
The top of it was almost perfectly circular—might have actually been a perfect circle, though Perry would have had to fly even higher to see for sure. And he was content to have his fee
t on solid ground again. Even if it was a thousand feet up.
Guesstimation: The plateau was at least two hundred yards in diameter.
And…
Completely empty.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Perhaps a cabal of shadowy, cloaked figures waiting for him around a circle of stone runes? Some beacon of green, Confluent energy swirling in the center like an aurora?
But no. Just flat stone, and not a single figure to be seen upon it.
He walked forward, still cautious. The wind was strong up here. And surprisingly chill. It howled over the edges, keened through the cracks. Whipped his clothing flat against his body. Made him squint against it. There was no dust on the face of the plateau. If there ever had been, the winds had scoured it away.
Despite the noise of the wind, the absolute immovability of everything made it feel preternaturally still. No scrubby plants to sway in the gusts, no little dust devils to be stirred up, no figures to be spotted in billowing cloaks. A place untouched. Abandoned. Almost sacred. Or sepurchral.
“It’s Perry McGown,” he called out, feeling silly immediately as he did. Yammering to himself in the growing dusk, with nothing but wind-smoothed rock to hear him.
Kept walking. Now turning a slow circle.
“You said to meet you here?” He cringed at his own bewildered voice. “Well, I’m here!” Another slow spin as he approached the center of the plateau. “Crazy red-haired lady,” he murmured. “And-or magical hobo.”
He stopped in the center of it all, struggling with a collision of feelings that encompassed disappointment, irritation, foolishness. Like you’ve been taken for a ride. Sold a bill of goods. Victim of an elaborate con game worthy of Teran herself.
Had he really come all this way just to realize he’d been fucked with by some shadowy sorceress? In retrospect, while he didn’t particularly believe in sorcery or magic, it seemed a more ready explanation for the red-headed woman’s odd powers. And now his eager statement to his friends about knowing where to find one of the All-Kind seemed…well…a bit naïve.
He let out a long, low growl in his throat. Stamped the butt of his longstaff down. “Well, this is fucking ridiculous.”
And that’s when he heard the crackle of a fire.
He spun, longstaff coming up, and Confluence flowing down the length of it, ready to start spitting hate and death at the slightest provocation.
But what he found instead was a little campfire, not ten yards from a spot that he swore he’d just passed, and he swore there had been no fire when he’d passed it. And sitting cross-legged at the edge of that fire was a young lady with bright red hair, her firelit face smiling with amusement into the flames.
“Magical hobo, huh?” the woman said, glancing up at him as she held her hands out to the fire and rubbed them together for warmth.
Perry took a step back. “Where did you come from?”
“Ah,” she said with a wink. “Did I come from someplace? Or have I always been right here?” She peered at him with a crazy twinkle in her eyes. “And what is ‘here’ as opposed to ‘there’?”
And as she said the word “there” she disappeared. Simply winked out of existence.
A subtle whoosh of flames from behind Perry.
He spun again, and discovered that she, and her little campfire, were directly behind him now. Close enough that he felt the heat of the flames. And, as an additional oddity worthy of noting in that moment—the flames did not gutter in the wind, nor did her hair stir a single strand.
She had a look on her face like a magician expecting applause.
“How…” Perry stammered for a tangible thought.
“Here? There? Anywhere? Everywhere? Otherwhere?” Her eyebrows shot up. “Underwear?” And then she devolved into a fit of laughter.
Perry just stared, completely flummoxed by the joke. One doesn’t usually associate inexplicable cosmic powers with a juvenile sense of humor.
She frowned, though it seemed more affected than genuine. “Oh come now, Perry. Don’t be so pretentious. People that take themselves too seriously often fail to see the truth. If you’re always seeking gravitas, you’ll miss the fact that most of reality is exquisitely simple and ridiculous.” She leaned back, smiling again. “Take, for instance, your procreation, which you humans love to take so seriously. So important. So grave, you’d think you were dying when you did it, but really, the two of you are just thrashing about on top of each other, breathing hard and grunting and groaning, sticking appendages in various places, glopping each other up with your DNA. How you keep a straight face during the whole debacle I’ll never understand. It’s quite comical, really.”
Perry didn’t know how to respond to that. So he didn’t. Just stared at her.
She sighed. “Oh, alright. Fine. It’s a delicate dance of interpersonal trust. Very serious from an emotional perspective. I’ll give you that.” She waved at him. “Come. Sit.”
Everything about the situation had blasted away any sort of plan that Perry might’ve had going into it, leaving him pliable. He had no better idea of his own, so he sat, his longstaff leaning on his shoulder.
She peered at him over the impossible fire, burning on wood that couldn’t be collected anywhere on the plateau—or the wastelands for that matter. “You still don’t know quite what to make of me, do you?”
“No,” Perry admitted, a bit tonelessly. “But I think you’re an All-Kind.”
She raised her hands, patted them together in a polite little clap. “And here I was, expecting you to be as dense as before. What gave me away?”
“A friend of mine said there are All-Kind living here on earth.”
For once, Perry had the brief satisfaction of watching the woman look a little surprised. “Oh? Now that’s interesting. How did your friend come across that little bit of information?”
“He’s a mech. He connected to one of the Guardians.”
It seemed a statement that lacked a lot of needed facts, but the woman simply nodded as though it made all the sense in the world. “I see.”
“I’m sorry,” Perry squinted against the warmth of the fire. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Last we talked I gave you some options. Did none of them suit you?”
“There was a lot going on. Refresh my memory.”
“How about Niva?”
Perry nodded once, slow. “Niva works for me.”
The newly-christened—or re-christened—Niva stretched her back, languid and comfortable. “So. The Nine Sons of Primus have awakened. The Guardians have struck. The Nine have struck back. And now your entire species is at their somewhat dubious mercy. And here sits Perry McGown across a fire from me, seeking…what?”
“Answers? Ideas?” Perry squirmed. “Help?”
“Answers I can give. But help is not so simple. Your kind had a phrase, back when there was so much water and everyone lived near it: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.”
“So…you’re not going to help.”
A shrug. “Help is a loaded word. Help to some people means that you do everything for them, but like the fish fed to the man, then they don’t learn. I can help you see the truth. I can help you by teaching you things that have existed right under your nose your whole life. But…” Her cheery demeanor grew suddenly very serious. “I cannot fight your battles for you.”
“Why can’t you fight with us, then?” Perry demanded. “You say you’ve been here the whole time, and you clearly have powers of your own! If you really are this so-called All-Kind, then you’re more powerful than the Nine! With you at our side we could beat them. And how many more of you are there?”
She shook her head. “How many of us is irrelevant. If it were a question of powers, I could save all of humanity by myself. I could’ve done it long ago. Any of us could have.”
“But instead you let us fight and die. Be subjugated. Exterminated. And now enslaved.” He
felt his cheeks getting hot, and it wasn’t the fire. “Whose side are you on, anyways?”
“Oh, Perry,” she looked suddenly sad, and he felt inexplicably guilty for having caused it. “How do you explain a sunset to a blind man? Or music to the deaf? You want me to explain things to you that you cannot possibly understand.” She looked away, grief seeming to cascade down her features. “How long have I wanted to gather you all? To protect you. To save you. But it has never been a question of desire. Only a question of will.”
“And you will not help.”
“No, Perry. I will not. Nor will I soften that blow by implying that I can’t. I—we—have chosen not to help. And you may hate me for that, if you wish. But if you could know what all there is to know, which you cannot, then you would understand.”
Perry dragged a hand wide, as though encompassing all the world. “Then what the hell is this? An experiment?” He leaned forward, glaring. “The Ferox were your little attack dogs, but they betrayed you, so you got rid of them, and…now what? You’re waiting to see if the paladins can match up? Be your new Ferox? Your new attack dogs? Don’t you have the Guardians for that?”
“The Ferox…” She sighed, stared into the fire, rather than make eye contact. “They were not so different from you. Every species has its gifts. And their gifts were something that we never could have—the willingness to fight. To do violence. Much like humanity. But the agreement that we made with the Ferox was an old one. And yes, even we make mistakes. They were not ready for the power that we gave them. And, over time, it corrupted them, as power is wont to do.” Finally she looked at him. “It is a mistake that we do not intend to repeat.”
Perry snorted. “If you’re waiting for the paladins to evolve past the point of being corrupted by power, then you might have made another mistake.”
“Oh, no, Perry. We’ve never waited for the paladins. Or the Sons of Primus, for that matter. The Ferox may have granted them the power of Confluence, but it was a gift that was not theirs to give.”
“So what’s it about then? Is it just amusing for you to sit around and watch us tear each other to pieces? Maybe you’re not as different from the Nine as you think—that’s all they want, too. To watch us live in misery.”
