Prelude to the End of Season Three

A league under the waves, where no sunlight reaches, the Sea-Dragon people known as Sasarrans flitted from luminescent coral apartments to begin their patrols of the surface. The sacred obligation must never be permitted to lapse, even for a moment, into lackadaisical disinterest. Eternal vigilance was required of their whole people to contain the demons who create in order to consume.

Ceralon, a proud matriarch of her people, was not headed to the surface with the others. She swam with strength and purpose deeper into the coral city, headed for the sacred sanctuary, where all the matriarchs would confer. The departing patrol was a delicate rainbow of fronds, fluttering up toward the sunlight. She watched them as they went, proud of their dedication.

Ahead of her the sanctuary entrance yawned - a cavernous opening in the coral leading through twisting passages into the vast heart of the city. It was too sacred a local for common warriors, outsiders or men to enter, but even matriarchs like Ceralon felt a quickening of the heart when approaching it.

The others would want to have her wisdom concerning the strangers who passed from the East a few days ago. She had spent her whole rest-cycle contemplating the matter. It remained perplexing to her that anyone would desire to go to the Emerald Isle who was not a servant of the demons. However, she would shock the matriarchs today by declaring what she believed to be truth - the strangers were genuine. Perhaps events beyond our horizons are underway, she thought. The idea gave her shivers.

Whatever the reality, she would ask the gathered matriarchs to pray for the success of those strangers. Pray for the end of all demons everywhere. Yes, that would be a good prayer.

***

They first named it Shadowfang in the logging camps south of Geneva Prime. In a day and age when teleportation is real, communication is fast. So it was no surprise to find that news of this mysterious killer made it to all the rural outposts and logging camps between Epsis Four and Ithica. It became popular among the easily frightened Mechified laborers to blame any unexplained death on the Shadowfang. Most foremen, just shook their heads and tried to dispel unhelpful superstitions. There were all sorts of things in the jungle that could kill a man.

What was more disturbing than all the reports was the fact that Shadowfang was real and on the move. It was notoriously hard to get any reliable sightings of the beast, but members of a secretive information brokerage out of Marina had been paid quite well to keep track of it. Even they didn't learn much, but they tracked a pattern of violent killings, some by Jevumm, some with Cheldrun weapons, that appeared to be moving along the edges of wilderness toward the north. At best guesstimate it was now somewhere in the vicinity of the Wreck of the Bosporus and still moving.

Goshi had no interest, when informed of the matter. Just another sighting of the Enemy, they alleged, and used it as an argument for beefing up security. But someone on the Biomade Oversight Council was quite convinced otherwise. It appears to be some kind of Karian-Cheldrun hybrid, he wrote in the memo. We should bring it in if we can and study it for interesting genetic properties...

***

"Good Bye, my beloved Moon."

Those had been his words, carried on the wind over countless kilometers. She sang them and re-sang them in her heart and every time it was a song of such sorrow that no one could hear it without weeping. The Grand Chantry, her choir, the prophecies, Karia itself, could dissolve and become nothing for all she cared. Her love, her Mokuzai, was gone and nothing else mattered.

From the balcony of the highest tower in the Grand Chantry she nightly composed songs of rage at the heavens. She waited for the Wandering Star to rise - late as it had been doing every night recently, an omen of doom. She waited and when it came she unleashed everything within her, calling all the power of the winds, all the vastness of the sky to her obedience, begging them to tear the Wandering Star down.

Once Twilight was sent by the Elders to fetch her down since her shrieking was causing such a disturbance that people below were being sent into a panic. Twilight was nearly blown over the edge by her rage and no one had made the mistake of disturbing her mourning from that moment.

The Wandering Star winked at her malevolently from its spot just above the horizon.

"You took my mate from me," she screamed back at it. "But I swear by the Dusk Sages, by Karia, by the primal foundations of music itself that I shall outlive you! I will live to see the day that you never rise again."

Her screams echoed over the forest and the effect was satisfying, but no amount of screaming would ever close the wound in her soul.

***

Ryuunosuke did not believe he could ever hate anyone more than he hated Lord Daitokuji Ichirou. And Kiyoshi. He hated Kiyoshi and Ichirou. And the stupid First Minds. Fucking First Minds and their fucking artifacts. He hated First Mind artifacts and he especially hated Kiyoshi and Ichirou when they used their First Mind artifacts. Fuck fuck fucking hate. Like really loathe...

There was no way to describe his fight with Ichirou without using the words utter and humiliation - two words that Ryuunosuke also hated (unless they were being applied to someone else). It would have been bad enough to die in that duel, but Ichirou had allowed nothing of the sort. He systematically dismantled Ryuunosuke, broke his Katana in seven pieces, and refused to accept his surrender until he had pissed himself in front of the whole Silver Phoenix clan while begging for mercy.

Ichirou still insisted that he would face justice for all the members of the Silver Phoenix clan he had killed, especially Kiyoshi, but he refused to say precisely when that would take place. Until then Ryuunosuke had been dragged along, shackled, behind the caravan as they headed overland toward the city of Stardown. Ryuunosuke only stopped brooding on his inchoate rage when he first glimpsed the enormous purple energy dome - and then only for a moment.

They reached the city a few nights ago, entering to fanfare and celebrations. Stardown had become the hub of the resistance to Goshi almost overnight with the creation of the dome. A feat supposedly accomplished by a giant talking lizard - which just proved that the world had gone mad. Lord Daitokuji Ichirou immediately became a general in the resistance and began lending his tactical advice. From time to time he would appear in his enormous silvery Mecha with purple veins of stone all over its surface to impress the citizens and drum up support for the resistance.

Ryuunosuke thought the whole thing was absurd. He hoped Goshi would sweep in here and destroy all of these clowns with a sweep of their hand. He hated purple domes, and giant lizards, and the resistance. He hated it all. Most especially himself.

***

The silhouette of the Geneva Prime skyline receded into the distance at a very slow rate. Every last man, woman and child in this troop was a kill on sight target. So Matthew knew they couldn't draw attention to themselves. Slow and steady, that was the way to go unnoticed. So that was the way they traveled.

Looking back over the ragtag group of 65 or so individuals that were all that remained of the Cheldrun Freedom Coalition, he couldn't help but be very proud. What they were doing was terribly risky, it is true, but since all of their hideouts in the city were ferreted out there really was no place for them to go back to. Hence, they'd agreed to Matthew's proposal that they strike out overland and try to get to Stardown to join the resistance.

Matthew had plenty of worries. He worried that he was an incompetent leader. He worried that he would get all of these men and women killed pointlessly, after he had persuaded many of them to take actions which made an accommodated life impossible. He worried, more simply, that he would get lost on the way to Stardown - geography was never his strong suit. Or that they would arrive too late and Goshi would already have crushed the uprising there.

But he couldn't let his worries distract him now. There were miles to cross. There were mouths to feed. There were Hei-shi to kill. This last part was by far the easiest.

***

Deep in the slums of Geneva Prime battles continued to rage, but the war had long ago been lost. For Cog, a broken shell of a young Mechified with his first adult-sized implant, the war would never end, which meant that he would just go on losing and losing. His whole life was confined to that moment in the alley next to his collapsed tenement, weeping over the body of his mother. He could never escape it, and so he spent his time trying to take vengeance on the Goshi soldiers who brought the tenement crashing down.

His vengeance was the frustrated pointless vengeance of the impotent. He committed vandalism, or threw garbage at soldiers when their backs were turned. Once in a while he was daring enough to shout curses before running away. On most days this would just be ignored, but apparently he'd picked the wrong soldiers to fling garbage at today. They chased him down into an alley and pinned him against a brick wall. One pulled out a military knife and the other joked about practicing cybernetic surgery.

Cog closed his eyes before the pain started. He gritted his teeth, trying not to scream, but it was futile when the knife dug into his arm. They laughed as his adolescent voice cracked when he shouted.

Then, suddenly, they were dead. Cog opened his eyes to see both men with wide eyes. A 3 meter length of rebar had gone through the ear of one and out the neck of the other. They collapsed and the pain in Cog's arm decreased.

He had heard of a hero lurking in the streets of the city. The Bronze God they called him. Cog looked to the end of the alley and saw a figure retreating around the corner. Could it be him?

***

Rumors suggested that one could see the whole of Karia from the top floor of the Goshi Tower. It wasn't true, but Katashi Blade had other ways of keeping tabs on things happening far away. It didn't stop him from peering out the panoramic windows up here in appreciation. Who can say what he saw, but whatever it was he could not have missed the landscape indelibly marked with his hand.

Behind him, Sever and Stitch shifted their weight back and forth uneasily. The Executor was prone to these long moments of silence and it was extremely unsettling. Eventually, Sever couldn't keep it in any longer.

"We really don't know where she is, Executor."

Silence.

"We've checked everywhere. We would have sworn she'd come to us at some point. Maybe she really did die when the Rodan sank."

Silence.

"Anyway, if she's incompetent or a traitor we'll deal with her in our customary way. Just because she's our sister don't me we love her..."

"much." Stitch added helpfully.

Blade made no motion to respond while the brothers kept on prattling in their own defense. Eventually, he cut them off.

"Aimi is most definitely alive, and if you two knew about it you couldn't hide it from me anyway. If you find her, bring her to me. Otherwise, leave me alone."

They both headed for the exit as fast as they could. On the way out Sever asked over his shoulder, "So we're good then?"

The Executor's look was icy, "You two aren't creative enough to betray me. Get out."

***

Far higher than Goshi Tower, from a porthole under the wing of Sennin, Julian looked at Karia Vitalus. From this distance it was a huge blue disk, filling most of his vision. Still, it meant that everything he had ever known was incomprehensibly tiny, overall. A disturbing realization.

He tried to express this to Tara, but he wasn't a very eloquent person, and it was difficult to stay on topic when she was quivering and balling like she was right now. Something about nearly everyone dying and space being a horrible dark place and there being too much blood for her to ever erase from her mind.

When she gets in these moods, she's not very uplifting, he thought.

It was true that the experience of the Rusty Nail Rogues in space had been less than glamorous, and more than a little harrowing. Even now, they drifted without power a short distance from the Wandering Star, hundreds of kilometers above the ground, when at any moment a terrifying Oni or thousands of mutated eyeless might pore out of the gaping crater Moses had created. Presumably Kiyoshi would turn the engines on soon and they would go home. At least Julian hoped so.

The planet is such a small place. I never want to see it like this again.

***

As for Karia herself? The words of the Dusk Sage kept rippling through her thoughts... there is no Peace.

Her fragile little self was wounded to the core by such a pronouncement. She felt the emptiness where her chosen soul should have been. She felt the edges unraveling and knew the horrible truth of the saying. There is no Peace.

She wanted to know the answer. Every blade of grass and pebble of sand quivered in anticipation of the climax of the cosmic drama, but once answered there would be no more mystery. Would the absence of mystery feel like the death of Mokuzai? Like a hole collapsing at the edges and dragging meaning and hope with it into the abyss?

There is no Peace. Karia did not like this answer at all. Not one little bit.

3 comments:

Aric Clark said...

Dramatic enough of a lead-in for tomorrow night's session?

Douglas Underhill said...

Yeah, I'd say so

Joshua M Lee said...

Cheeky. Very cheeky. I like it.


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