RPGC #10: Voting and Discussion!
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Iโll keep this brief because we have a lot of entries โ NINE OF THEM. Good job, people, this is I think the best showing weโve had since 1 and 2, and I look forward to reading what masterpieces youโve created for us!
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Now, without further ado, the entries!
My mother, when I was young, taught me to only put things in my mouth if I could say where they come from. Well, she didn't say it exactly like that... it was more of an unwritten rule, a thing I just knew I wasn't supposed to do, and that if I did my mother would scold me and give me that advice. Well, whether it was advice or a rule, it went completely out the window the same summer I turned twelve. Most people living in that prairie town could tell you exactly where they were that night in August. I was sleeping in the loft of our little farmhouse on the outskirts of town when my room filled with light. It wasn't quite like normal light. It was more like short spiky beams of pure sunlight, stabbing through the curtains and casting short flittering flashes and the brief shadows of trees onto the walls . The night was young and I was not asleep so I went to the window, placing my hand carefully on the sill to avoid splinters, and I looked up at the sky to see something I had never seen before. Straight shafts of light shot across the sky like arrows, firing past a waxing moon and disappearing just as quick as they appeared. They came a dozen and once, and only appeared for a few seconds. No sound accompanied the show, so that all I heard was the barking of dogs and the sound of other people in the house stirring, opening windows, and muttering in amazement. It kept going. My imagination bloomed with wild ideas and suspicions at what I was watching. Were they angels in transit? The Master of the Sky rearranging the planets?
A modern and scientifical theory formed in my head after a while. These were shooting stars. They were specific, and they followed a strict pattern, but that is what they were. I had seen meteor showers before, but usually on the horizon. This is the first one I had seen directly above. My theory was proven when flaming balls fell down from the sky and struck somewhere toward town. There were at least three of them. When they hit, a distant explosion like cannon fire could be heard echoing through the quiet countryside, and blooms of fiery light appeared in the distance.
The show went on for what seemed like half the night, but looking back I don't think it was even half of the time it would take to eat dinner. When it was done I saw my Pa grab a lantern and march out wearing only his scratchy woolen pajamas and his wide-brimmed hat. I saw that, and I scrambled down the ladder and outside after him before my mother could catch me. I met up with my father. He said nothing. We both walked quietly through the corn.
Night in the summer is a beautiful thing. The spring rains give way to clear skies and humid heat, which can make the days sticky and uncomfortable. But at night, when the sun is gone and the heat is put away by the breeze, the lingering humidity becomes pleasant. There was on the air the sweet and thick smell of summer foliage, and of the earthy soil. The locusts and frogs sang duets in the soft air. That was the kind of night it was.
There was a ditch, a place where a furrow had filled with water and carved a path to the creek, where the people of the town were gathered. I saw old Missus Wundersen the teacher, the Ropartides in their underclothes with Mr. Ropartide scratching his grizzly grey beard. There was Mrs. Madeline LeClerk from the General Store, and her bald-headed husband Mr. Kitchner LeClerk jogging from town with a kerosene lamp in his pale spidery hands. I also saw Mr. Damper, the old windower prospector, and his freckle-faced son Jimmy who I went to school with. They all stood dumbstruck around a couple of smoking craters in the ditch.
"Zeke." Mr Ropartide shouted greeting to my Pa. He ignored me because adults always ignore us children if there is important business being discussed.
"Jed. That wadn't no natural meteor shower." my father growled. I could hear the gunk at the back of his throat that always settled when he slept, and it made his voice harsh and forced.
"Nope." I didn't catch where that response came from.
Dad and I reached the craters and looked down to see what made everyone silent. There was a smell here; a beautiful smell, and it stole my nostrils the moment I walked up so I could hardly pay attention to anything else. It was like a steak being cooked straight on the fire, and like molasses cookies in the oven for Christmas, and like bread still bein' baked. There was sugar and pancakes and sausage and ham all in there too. All of it. All of those smells at once, making my eyes water and my mouth hang open like it was expecting to eat something. I don't think a good feast ever smelled half as enticing as these... meteorites... did.
With all that good smell, I almost forgot to actually look. There it was, one in each crater. Big, yellow-white blocks. Perfect squares; something you'd imagine God himself carving for the Temple in Jerusalem. They were about a meter by a meter, and there weren't any imperfections in them.
"It's smells right purty out here." Mr. Damper said. His faced grinned, but his eyes were confused.
"This ain't natural." Mrs. Ropartide replied in a fearful yelp. She was pulling a robe around her front. "Daniel should be here." She was talking about Pastor Daniel Porter, the Preacher at the Baptist Church.
"These don't look like nothin' from hell, Laura." her husband grumbled. His fingers plowed his beard like a uniform line of... well, plows. He looked up and his self-petting slowed for a moment. "I reckon' it's from up there." he said. Everybody in the field, including me, looked up at the moon like it had just called out our names. The moon did nothing.
"That's absolutely ridiculous." Missus Wundersen fretted. "The moon is a rock, Jed. Surely you've heard that before. Rock doesn't smell like... that."
Mr. Ropartide shrugged. "Ain't nobody ever smell the moon before."
That was true. I always liked hearing Missus Wundersen disagreed with. I think all students like to hear it when their teacher ends up being proved another mortal.
The argument was about to continue until morning, I was sure it would, but Mr. Damper hopped into a crater like it was one of his mines and studied the cube for a moment. He held his hand close to the surface, then closer and closer, until he was touching it. I thought he'd burn himself, but that didn't happen.
"It ain't rock." he announced to everybody. "It's..." he pushed his hand into the cube and it gave way like it was a down pillow. Then he did something really weird. He took his hand and licked it. He looked up and flicked his tongue, thoughtful like a lizard that just clinched a vintage fly. A smile conquered his face all at once. He slapped his knee and cackled.
"Well hot damn!" the old Prospector shouted. The women looked offended (you aren't supposed to say 'damn' in front of women), but everybody was too curious to say anything. "It's just cheese, boys!" Mr. Damper squealed. "And this is damned good cheese!"
I believed him the moment he said it. Everybody did. It was almost a compulsion. The smell had made me hungry, and all I wanted to do was go down and... try some of that cheese. Just a little bit. I started walking toward it. So did everybody. Adults walk quicker though when they want to, so soon there was no room for me or Jimmy. They scooped themselves handfuls until the cubes looked like used salt-licks.
"Can I have some?" Jimmy Damper yelled down.
"Yeh!" I agreed.
The adults looked at us... well, suspiciously. Like dogs at a foodbowl when a cat walks up. It caught us off guard. I could see the same thought play across Jimmy's face that I surely wore on my own. They didn't act right at all. Was this the cheese of the devil?
--
The adults in the field did not eat all of the moon cheese. Rather, they ate their fill and then argued about what to do with the uneaten cheese until the first purple shadow of dawn peeped on the horizon. They decided to keep it in the church, and there was a big to-do where Jimmy had to go get a wagon, hitch it up by his own little self so the adults could eye one another in the field, and then he brought the wagon into the field so the moon cheese could be loaded into the back. I watched the blocks during the whole ride into town. They didn't move or jiggle, but they reflected light on a wet surface sort of like mud does. There was a marbled look to them like pale white of alabaster. I noticed a symbol on the surface of the least-eaten block; a circle, with a bunch of webbing triangles in the middle, right in the center of the cheese.
I did not get much sleep that day. I don't think many others slept at all. It was late in the morning when I got around to my chores: slopping the pigs, milking the dairy cow, shoveling stinking manure to be spread in the field. I wasn't until late in the afternoon that I had any free time at all, and by then I was so tired I felt like a Zombie. Nothing really sounded fun. I ended up wandering toward town. A part of me, I think, was still curious about the cheese.
Jimmy was fishing in the creek between home and town. He was sitting on the sun-cooked bank, a line cast into the center, tall prairie grass waving all around his chosen spot under the shade of a dogwood tree.
"They bitin'?" I yelled from the bank of the ford.
Jimmy looked up at me, and his eyes squinted from looking out of the shade into the sunbathed farmland. "Naw" he drawled, stood up, and placed his make-shift pole in a safe place in the grass. The breeze picked up and the trees whispered. "Nothin' been biting all day." Jimmy said.
He joined me on my walk into town.
"Your Pa didn't make you do chores?" I asked him.
"He's been in town all day." Jimmy said.
Funny I hadn't thought about it until then, but I didn't know where my Pa was. It was normal for me to not see him after breakfast, at least not until it was time for dinner. Our paths usually didn't cross in our work. I assumed he was in the fields, but was he? I couldn't say.
"Funny how the adults acted when they saw that moon cheese, huh?" I said.
Jimmy shrugged. "It must be good cheese. Did you see the way Missus Wundersen looked at me when I asked if we could have some? I thought she was going to bite me."
"I never ate something so good it made me mad at other people." I replied, looking up at where the moon had been the night before. "I've seen animals do that though. But I didn't think people could."
"Maybe they were just hungry." Jimmy said. We were coming into town then, and that made me nervous. What would we find? I had the feeling something was very wrong.
Whistling Meadow is a small hamlet on the edge of everything. In those days there were only a handful of proper wooden buildings at the center of town; the Church, the General Store, the stable, and a black smith. All other buildings were made from sod, and a number of stunted sod houses orbited the town in a loose cluster. Today it was unusually quiet, and the quiet seemed... wrong, somehow. Maybe it was just that I was already nervous? It felt eerie though, like passing a haunted house in the daylight. I wasn't scared, but I was not comfortable either.
The first person I saw was Mr. Kitchner LeClerk staring out from his store. His long fingers strangled at a mop handle, and he was making eyes at the church. That was not a look a person was supposed to give to a church. I knew immediately that whatever happened the night before was still happening. Jimmy saw it too. He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked down at the ground as if looking for a rock to kick. I looked around.
In the sod doorway of the post office I saw my Pa. He was standing there, eyeing the church like Mr. LeClerk. How many people were hiding in town, staring the same way? I didn't want to look. "Pa!" I called out. He looked at me blankly.
"What are you doin' out here boy?" he growled.
"I thought you was in the fields." I stopped and stared. My heart dropped. When your parents talk to you like that, you can't be anything but afraid.
"I got business." the last syllable was barely audible, squeezed out between his gnashing teeth.
"In the church, Pa?"
He grumbled his reply.
"Is it that big a deal, Pa?" I was trying not to cry. "It's nothin'! It ain't nothin!. Look, imma go into the church right now."
That caught his attention, but I started marching right toward the church before he could grab me. "Whadaya doin boy?" I heard him growl after me. Jimmy followed and we marched across the street like young drummer boys. I could hear doors opening, clicking, creaking, from all over town, but I didn't care. My shoes punched defiantly into the dusty ground. I wiped a tear at the steps to the church and forced the heavy whitewashed doors open.
Here it was, that familiar room. Church on Sunday, school the rest of the week. Long benches varnished dark in the places where people's butts rest, a creaking floor, a simple alter at the end with a large homemade cross. In one corner was a cheaply made organ, in the opposite an equally cheap baptismal font. The Moon Cheese had been placed at the end of the room and covered with black sheets. Not too far away, almost cowering in front of the altar, was Pastor Daniel Porter. He was a middle aged balding man with black clothes and a face that was always scrunched up like he was smelling something foul.
But he certainly wasn't smelling anything foul today. That earthy smell, the scent of aging wood that was always in the church, lingered behind all the beautiful and conflicting aromas of that damned cheese. I felt instantly hungry. Though I did not look at Jimmy, I knew he must be looking the same as I did.
"Pastor Porter!" I shouted like I was some sort of walkin' boss. "We need to destroy the cheese!"
He looked at me. Pale, feverish, covered in sweat. Was it getting to him? I marched with Jimmy at my heels. As we approached, the Pastor's lips quivered. He never looked like that. This was a man who could normally scream a hellfire sermon with the best of them. A regular Savonarola. Now he was acting like a coward!
"What the heck is going on!" I yelled, gesticulating awkwardly.
"I... do you smell that, boys?" the preacher pleaded. "That... its temptation. I can't... I don't know if I can fight it."
I rolled my eyes and charged behind the altar, a little soldier into battle, but I stopped dead cold in front of the cheese. The smell was so strong that my nose hurt. It effected me in another way too. I was scared. Fearful scared. My heart stopped. When the door to the church slammed open, I was almost relieved for the excuse to step away from that strange cheddar.
"BOY!" my father's voice boiled with unfamilial hatred. He was followed by what seemed to be the entire township. I did did a headcount; it was the same adults who had been at the crater. Sophie Ropartide was among them; a girl two years my junior who I went to school with.
"This cheese is wrong!" I cried out. "We have to do something about it, Pa! You know that!"
"Step away from that." Mr. Damper pleaded.
"Do what Mr. Damper is saying." Missus Wundersen backed them up. There they were, the adults I had always held complete faith in, all pleading at me not to destroy the demon. The world had turned upside down!
"It is damning our town, Pa!" I squealed. A cuss. That stopped them for some reason. You are not supposed to cuss in front of women, and children are never supposed to cuss at all.
"Watch your language. This is a house of God!" the Pastor said to me. Everyone acted strange, like I had just cussed in a normal church service. But damn that! Damn all of that!
"It's destroy our town!" I cried out. Certainly tears were running down my face, but I couldn't feel it. I was numb all over. "Listen to what you are doing! Do you do your chores? Do you take care of your kids? You are chasing after this stuff, this cheese. It ain't worth it! It ain't worth it at all! If us kids were acting like you are, we'd get in trouble!"
"You never tasted it, boy." Pa grumbled.
"And I don't wanna!" I pouted. "I don't wanna at all!"
There was a silence as I fell down to sitting on the ground. "We gotta destroy it." I mumbled. "Just get rid of it."
The silence returned. Everybody stood, not knowing what came next.
"Why don't..." Jimmy spoke up, his voice tentative and quiet. "Why don't we eat it?"
Everyone looked at him.
"Why not?" Mr. Damper spoke up for his son. He drooled as he talked. "It ain't got no power over us if it is et and gone."
"It hasn't hurt us." Pa thought it over. "We et some last night and it ain't hurt us a bit."
It was a dumb idea, but I suppose it made sense. I dunno. I just wanted this whole thing to end. And that smell... it was weakening me. I had given my speech right there in front of it, and my nosed burned with the delicious scent. All I wanted to do was jump up and tear into it, but I had to hold myself back.
"Wonderful!" the Pastor jumped up. "Let's get it done with!"
--
And so we ate the Moon Cheese. It was amazing! The taste was so much better than the scent, so much so that I find it impossible to explain how absolutely great it was. It must be how a baby feels when they taste their first real solid food, and realize what can be done with flavors. I dunno. Maybe this is what food tastes like in heaven or something. They gotta have stuff like that in heaven, or it ain't no heaven at all.
That night I watched the skies. I saw no shooting lights, but something did crash from the sky and into the head of the creek. I don't know if anyone else saw it, but I didn't want to take chances. Didn't even take time to put on boots, I just bounded across the corn at full run and went to investigate.
I ran into Jimmy right near the place I had saw him fishing the day before. He was wearing a woolen gown and was going barefoot. In his hand was a kerosene lamp, which swayed as he struggled to keep hold of its heavy weight.
"You done seen that didn't ya?" he called out to me. I nodded. We walked silently for a while, along a creek bed that was nearly dry. A snaking trickle of water carved back and forth between the dry pebbles of the creek bed and bulging sandbanks. A thin string of smoke could just barely be seen against the moonlit sky. Somewhere far away, a hound was barking, and a whippoorwill sung in the woods on the other side of the creek.
I felt sand cake on my feet. It was still vaguely warm from the summer heat. As we approached the place where the smoke was, I started to feel nervous. I noticed my own breathing, staggered and awkward, and I was trying not to notice it which made me notice it even more. Weak orange light from Jimmy's lamp bounced off trees and made the world beyond the glow seem darker than the devil.
"There it is." I heard Jimmy say. He was keeping his voice low, as if he didn't want the whippoorwill to hear him.
And there it was. It looked like a shadow from far away, but as we got closer I realized it had charred the ground around it. There was bits of a rounded something that looked like shattered pieces of a charcoal egg. In the middle of it all was a pristine circle, white as a new church, with glowing writing scrawled in small clusters across the surface. The writing was... it was all the colors at once, like somebody had writ it with rainbow pen.
"This like some bible miracle." I muttered. I think Jimmy agreed, but he didn't say nothin', and we just stared at it for a moment.
"What do you think it is?" I said.
"Do you think the..." he looked up. He finished his thought in a whisper. "...moon sent it?"
I looked up. There it was, half the moon shining down at us pearly and white. I never gave the moon much thought, but at that moment all I could do is gawk and dream about the thing.
"What is it like up there you reckon?" I asked.
"I wonder... who made the cheese?" Jimmy said quietly.
I gasped. "You think there is people livin' up there, Jim?"
"Maybe the moon made it." he replied.
What was on that moon? What is between here and there? Was there just miles and miles of sky, or was there something about the sky of the moon that was different? Maybe there were some smart men somewhere who knew about it. Could a really smart man have visited that place once? If they had, nobody never told me about it.
My gaze turned back to the strange glowing object. I built up the courage to reach down at it, moving my hand slowly afraid of being burned. It was cool to the touch, cold even. Infinitely cold, like touching ice on a summer day. I grasped the object with both hands and pulled it up. To my surprise, I could recognized some of the scrawling. They were letters of some sort! One was written in French, another in ol' Egyptian picture writing. The sixth one down was in English. I read it out loud.
"SORRY FOR DISRUPTION FOODCUBE AVAILABLE SEE MAP"
The map was nuthin' I could read. It was a random set of dots, with one dot circled.
"Suppose that's the moon." Jimmy said thoughtfully when he was done reading it for himself. "Them might be craters then."
I stared at the moon. Couldn't see craters that well. Squinting didn't help much either. I kept lookin though, and lookin and lookin until I saw something else.
I gasped.
"It's the stars, Jim!" I pointed up at a patch above us. "Right up there, see that big one? Look at all the stars around it! That's it!"
"The cheese is from the... stars?" Jim squinted. He sounded confused.
"From that star!" I squealed. "Don't you get it Jim, the Cheese is from that star!" I was just about hopping. Everything I ever thought about the sky was done for. All that I ever knew was done for, and the entire of everything was going to be different forever.
That was the last time anything like that ever happened. The message from the star went to a University, and it caused some noise. Even now that I have kids of my own and the farm is mine, people from the big cities visit to see the place where the star message landed. It hasn't changed much else though. All I know is that up there, on every dot and every little speckle of light, somethin' is happening.
A modern and scientifical theory formed in my head after a while. These were shooting stars. They were specific, and they followed a strict pattern, but that is what they were. I had seen meteor showers before, but usually on the horizon. This is the first one I had seen directly above. My theory was proven when flaming balls fell down from the sky and struck somewhere toward town. There were at least three of them. When they hit, a distant explosion like cannon fire could be heard echoing through the quiet countryside, and blooms of fiery light appeared in the distance.
The show went on for what seemed like half the night, but looking back I don't think it was even half of the time it would take to eat dinner. When it was done I saw my Pa grab a lantern and march out wearing only his scratchy woolen pajamas and his wide-brimmed hat. I saw that, and I scrambled down the ladder and outside after him before my mother could catch me. I met up with my father. He said nothing. We both walked quietly through the corn.
Night in the summer is a beautiful thing. The spring rains give way to clear skies and humid heat, which can make the days sticky and uncomfortable. But at night, when the sun is gone and the heat is put away by the breeze, the lingering humidity becomes pleasant. There was on the air the sweet and thick smell of summer foliage, and of the earthy soil. The locusts and frogs sang duets in the soft air. That was the kind of night it was.
There was a ditch, a place where a furrow had filled with water and carved a path to the creek, where the people of the town were gathered. I saw old Missus Wundersen the teacher, the Ropartides in their underclothes with Mr. Ropartide scratching his grizzly grey beard. There was Mrs. Madeline LeClerk from the General Store, and her bald-headed husband Mr. Kitchner LeClerk jogging from town with a kerosene lamp in his pale spidery hands. I also saw Mr. Damper, the old windower prospector, and his freckle-faced son Jimmy who I went to school with. They all stood dumbstruck around a couple of smoking craters in the ditch.
"Zeke." Mr Ropartide shouted greeting to my Pa. He ignored me because adults always ignore us children if there is important business being discussed.
"Jed. That wadn't no natural meteor shower." my father growled. I could hear the gunk at the back of his throat that always settled when he slept, and it made his voice harsh and forced.
"Nope." I didn't catch where that response came from.
Dad and I reached the craters and looked down to see what made everyone silent. There was a smell here; a beautiful smell, and it stole my nostrils the moment I walked up so I could hardly pay attention to anything else. It was like a steak being cooked straight on the fire, and like molasses cookies in the oven for Christmas, and like bread still bein' baked. There was sugar and pancakes and sausage and ham all in there too. All of it. All of those smells at once, making my eyes water and my mouth hang open like it was expecting to eat something. I don't think a good feast ever smelled half as enticing as these... meteorites... did.
With all that good smell, I almost forgot to actually look. There it was, one in each crater. Big, yellow-white blocks. Perfect squares; something you'd imagine God himself carving for the Temple in Jerusalem. They were about a meter by a meter, and there weren't any imperfections in them.
"It's smells right purty out here." Mr. Damper said. His faced grinned, but his eyes were confused.
"This ain't natural." Mrs. Ropartide replied in a fearful yelp. She was pulling a robe around her front. "Daniel should be here." She was talking about Pastor Daniel Porter, the Preacher at the Baptist Church.
"These don't look like nothin' from hell, Laura." her husband grumbled. His fingers plowed his beard like a uniform line of... well, plows. He looked up and his self-petting slowed for a moment. "I reckon' it's from up there." he said. Everybody in the field, including me, looked up at the moon like it had just called out our names. The moon did nothing.
"That's absolutely ridiculous." Missus Wundersen fretted. "The moon is a rock, Jed. Surely you've heard that before. Rock doesn't smell like... that."
Mr. Ropartide shrugged. "Ain't nobody ever smell the moon before."
That was true. I always liked hearing Missus Wundersen disagreed with. I think all students like to hear it when their teacher ends up being proved another mortal.
The argument was about to continue until morning, I was sure it would, but Mr. Damper hopped into a crater like it was one of his mines and studied the cube for a moment. He held his hand close to the surface, then closer and closer, until he was touching it. I thought he'd burn himself, but that didn't happen.
"It ain't rock." he announced to everybody. "It's..." he pushed his hand into the cube and it gave way like it was a down pillow. Then he did something really weird. He took his hand and licked it. He looked up and flicked his tongue, thoughtful like a lizard that just clinched a vintage fly. A smile conquered his face all at once. He slapped his knee and cackled.
"Well hot damn!" the old Prospector shouted. The women looked offended (you aren't supposed to say 'damn' in front of women), but everybody was too curious to say anything. "It's just cheese, boys!" Mr. Damper squealed. "And this is damned good cheese!"
I believed him the moment he said it. Everybody did. It was almost a compulsion. The smell had made me hungry, and all I wanted to do was go down and... try some of that cheese. Just a little bit. I started walking toward it. So did everybody. Adults walk quicker though when they want to, so soon there was no room for me or Jimmy. They scooped themselves handfuls until the cubes looked like used salt-licks.
"Can I have some?" Jimmy Damper yelled down.
"Yeh!" I agreed.
The adults looked at us... well, suspiciously. Like dogs at a foodbowl when a cat walks up. It caught us off guard. I could see the same thought play across Jimmy's face that I surely wore on my own. They didn't act right at all. Was this the cheese of the devil?
--
The adults in the field did not eat all of the moon cheese. Rather, they ate their fill and then argued about what to do with the uneaten cheese until the first purple shadow of dawn peeped on the horizon. They decided to keep it in the church, and there was a big to-do where Jimmy had to go get a wagon, hitch it up by his own little self so the adults could eye one another in the field, and then he brought the wagon into the field so the moon cheese could be loaded into the back. I watched the blocks during the whole ride into town. They didn't move or jiggle, but they reflected light on a wet surface sort of like mud does. There was a marbled look to them like pale white of alabaster. I noticed a symbol on the surface of the least-eaten block; a circle, with a bunch of webbing triangles in the middle, right in the center of the cheese.
I did not get much sleep that day. I don't think many others slept at all. It was late in the morning when I got around to my chores: slopping the pigs, milking the dairy cow, shoveling stinking manure to be spread in the field. I wasn't until late in the afternoon that I had any free time at all, and by then I was so tired I felt like a Zombie. Nothing really sounded fun. I ended up wandering toward town. A part of me, I think, was still curious about the cheese.
Jimmy was fishing in the creek between home and town. He was sitting on the sun-cooked bank, a line cast into the center, tall prairie grass waving all around his chosen spot under the shade of a dogwood tree.
"They bitin'?" I yelled from the bank of the ford.
Jimmy looked up at me, and his eyes squinted from looking out of the shade into the sunbathed farmland. "Naw" he drawled, stood up, and placed his make-shift pole in a safe place in the grass. The breeze picked up and the trees whispered. "Nothin' been biting all day." Jimmy said.
He joined me on my walk into town.
"Your Pa didn't make you do chores?" I asked him.
"He's been in town all day." Jimmy said.
Funny I hadn't thought about it until then, but I didn't know where my Pa was. It was normal for me to not see him after breakfast, at least not until it was time for dinner. Our paths usually didn't cross in our work. I assumed he was in the fields, but was he? I couldn't say.
"Funny how the adults acted when they saw that moon cheese, huh?" I said.
Jimmy shrugged. "It must be good cheese. Did you see the way Missus Wundersen looked at me when I asked if we could have some? I thought she was going to bite me."
"I never ate something so good it made me mad at other people." I replied, looking up at where the moon had been the night before. "I've seen animals do that though. But I didn't think people could."
"Maybe they were just hungry." Jimmy said. We were coming into town then, and that made me nervous. What would we find? I had the feeling something was very wrong.
Whistling Meadow is a small hamlet on the edge of everything. In those days there were only a handful of proper wooden buildings at the center of town; the Church, the General Store, the stable, and a black smith. All other buildings were made from sod, and a number of stunted sod houses orbited the town in a loose cluster. Today it was unusually quiet, and the quiet seemed... wrong, somehow. Maybe it was just that I was already nervous? It felt eerie though, like passing a haunted house in the daylight. I wasn't scared, but I was not comfortable either.
The first person I saw was Mr. Kitchner LeClerk staring out from his store. His long fingers strangled at a mop handle, and he was making eyes at the church. That was not a look a person was supposed to give to a church. I knew immediately that whatever happened the night before was still happening. Jimmy saw it too. He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked down at the ground as if looking for a rock to kick. I looked around.
In the sod doorway of the post office I saw my Pa. He was standing there, eyeing the church like Mr. LeClerk. How many people were hiding in town, staring the same way? I didn't want to look. "Pa!" I called out. He looked at me blankly.
"What are you doin' out here boy?" he growled.
"I thought you was in the fields." I stopped and stared. My heart dropped. When your parents talk to you like that, you can't be anything but afraid.
"I got business." the last syllable was barely audible, squeezed out between his gnashing teeth.
"In the church, Pa?"
He grumbled his reply.
"Is it that big a deal, Pa?" I was trying not to cry. "It's nothin'! It ain't nothin!. Look, imma go into the church right now."
That caught his attention, but I started marching right toward the church before he could grab me. "Whadaya doin boy?" I heard him growl after me. Jimmy followed and we marched across the street like young drummer boys. I could hear doors opening, clicking, creaking, from all over town, but I didn't care. My shoes punched defiantly into the dusty ground. I wiped a tear at the steps to the church and forced the heavy whitewashed doors open.
Here it was, that familiar room. Church on Sunday, school the rest of the week. Long benches varnished dark in the places where people's butts rest, a creaking floor, a simple alter at the end with a large homemade cross. In one corner was a cheaply made organ, in the opposite an equally cheap baptismal font. The Moon Cheese had been placed at the end of the room and covered with black sheets. Not too far away, almost cowering in front of the altar, was Pastor Daniel Porter. He was a middle aged balding man with black clothes and a face that was always scrunched up like he was smelling something foul.
But he certainly wasn't smelling anything foul today. That earthy smell, the scent of aging wood that was always in the church, lingered behind all the beautiful and conflicting aromas of that damned cheese. I felt instantly hungry. Though I did not look at Jimmy, I knew he must be looking the same as I did.
"Pastor Porter!" I shouted like I was some sort of walkin' boss. "We need to destroy the cheese!"
He looked at me. Pale, feverish, covered in sweat. Was it getting to him? I marched with Jimmy at my heels. As we approached, the Pastor's lips quivered. He never looked like that. This was a man who could normally scream a hellfire sermon with the best of them. A regular Savonarola. Now he was acting like a coward!
"What the heck is going on!" I yelled, gesticulating awkwardly.
"I... do you smell that, boys?" the preacher pleaded. "That... its temptation. I can't... I don't know if I can fight it."
I rolled my eyes and charged behind the altar, a little soldier into battle, but I stopped dead cold in front of the cheese. The smell was so strong that my nose hurt. It effected me in another way too. I was scared. Fearful scared. My heart stopped. When the door to the church slammed open, I was almost relieved for the excuse to step away from that strange cheddar.
"BOY!" my father's voice boiled with unfamilial hatred. He was followed by what seemed to be the entire township. I did did a headcount; it was the same adults who had been at the crater. Sophie Ropartide was among them; a girl two years my junior who I went to school with.
"This cheese is wrong!" I cried out. "We have to do something about it, Pa! You know that!"
"Step away from that." Mr. Damper pleaded.
"Do what Mr. Damper is saying." Missus Wundersen backed them up. There they were, the adults I had always held complete faith in, all pleading at me not to destroy the demon. The world had turned upside down!
"It is damning our town, Pa!" I squealed. A cuss. That stopped them for some reason. You are not supposed to cuss in front of women, and children are never supposed to cuss at all.
"Watch your language. This is a house of God!" the Pastor said to me. Everyone acted strange, like I had just cussed in a normal church service. But damn that! Damn all of that!
"It's destroy our town!" I cried out. Certainly tears were running down my face, but I couldn't feel it. I was numb all over. "Listen to what you are doing! Do you do your chores? Do you take care of your kids? You are chasing after this stuff, this cheese. It ain't worth it! It ain't worth it at all! If us kids were acting like you are, we'd get in trouble!"
"You never tasted it, boy." Pa grumbled.
"And I don't wanna!" I pouted. "I don't wanna at all!"
There was a silence as I fell down to sitting on the ground. "We gotta destroy it." I mumbled. "Just get rid of it."
The silence returned. Everybody stood, not knowing what came next.
"Why don't..." Jimmy spoke up, his voice tentative and quiet. "Why don't we eat it?"
Everyone looked at him.
"Why not?" Mr. Damper spoke up for his son. He drooled as he talked. "It ain't got no power over us if it is et and gone."
"It hasn't hurt us." Pa thought it over. "We et some last night and it ain't hurt us a bit."
It was a dumb idea, but I suppose it made sense. I dunno. I just wanted this whole thing to end. And that smell... it was weakening me. I had given my speech right there in front of it, and my nosed burned with the delicious scent. All I wanted to do was jump up and tear into it, but I had to hold myself back.
"Wonderful!" the Pastor jumped up. "Let's get it done with!"
--
And so we ate the Moon Cheese. It was amazing! The taste was so much better than the scent, so much so that I find it impossible to explain how absolutely great it was. It must be how a baby feels when they taste their first real solid food, and realize what can be done with flavors. I dunno. Maybe this is what food tastes like in heaven or something. They gotta have stuff like that in heaven, or it ain't no heaven at all.
That night I watched the skies. I saw no shooting lights, but something did crash from the sky and into the head of the creek. I don't know if anyone else saw it, but I didn't want to take chances. Didn't even take time to put on boots, I just bounded across the corn at full run and went to investigate.
I ran into Jimmy right near the place I had saw him fishing the day before. He was wearing a woolen gown and was going barefoot. In his hand was a kerosene lamp, which swayed as he struggled to keep hold of its heavy weight.
"You done seen that didn't ya?" he called out to me. I nodded. We walked silently for a while, along a creek bed that was nearly dry. A snaking trickle of water carved back and forth between the dry pebbles of the creek bed and bulging sandbanks. A thin string of smoke could just barely be seen against the moonlit sky. Somewhere far away, a hound was barking, and a whippoorwill sung in the woods on the other side of the creek.
I felt sand cake on my feet. It was still vaguely warm from the summer heat. As we approached the place where the smoke was, I started to feel nervous. I noticed my own breathing, staggered and awkward, and I was trying not to notice it which made me notice it even more. Weak orange light from Jimmy's lamp bounced off trees and made the world beyond the glow seem darker than the devil.
"There it is." I heard Jimmy say. He was keeping his voice low, as if he didn't want the whippoorwill to hear him.
And there it was. It looked like a shadow from far away, but as we got closer I realized it had charred the ground around it. There was bits of a rounded something that looked like shattered pieces of a charcoal egg. In the middle of it all was a pristine circle, white as a new church, with glowing writing scrawled in small clusters across the surface. The writing was... it was all the colors at once, like somebody had writ it with rainbow pen.
"This like some bible miracle." I muttered. I think Jimmy agreed, but he didn't say nothin', and we just stared at it for a moment.
"What do you think it is?" I said.
"Do you think the..." he looked up. He finished his thought in a whisper. "...moon sent it?"
I looked up. There it was, half the moon shining down at us pearly and white. I never gave the moon much thought, but at that moment all I could do is gawk and dream about the thing.
"What is it like up there you reckon?" I asked.
"I wonder... who made the cheese?" Jimmy said quietly.
I gasped. "You think there is people livin' up there, Jim?"
"Maybe the moon made it." he replied.
What was on that moon? What is between here and there? Was there just miles and miles of sky, or was there something about the sky of the moon that was different? Maybe there were some smart men somewhere who knew about it. Could a really smart man have visited that place once? If they had, nobody never told me about it.
My gaze turned back to the strange glowing object. I built up the courage to reach down at it, moving my hand slowly afraid of being burned. It was cool to the touch, cold even. Infinitely cold, like touching ice on a summer day. I grasped the object with both hands and pulled it up. To my surprise, I could recognized some of the scrawling. They were letters of some sort! One was written in French, another in ol' Egyptian picture writing. The sixth one down was in English. I read it out loud.
"SORRY FOR DISRUPTION FOODCUBE AVAILABLE SEE MAP"
The map was nuthin' I could read. It was a random set of dots, with one dot circled.
"Suppose that's the moon." Jimmy said thoughtfully when he was done reading it for himself. "Them might be craters then."
I stared at the moon. Couldn't see craters that well. Squinting didn't help much either. I kept lookin though, and lookin and lookin until I saw something else.
I gasped.
"It's the stars, Jim!" I pointed up at a patch above us. "Right up there, see that big one? Look at all the stars around it! That's it!"
"The cheese is from the... stars?" Jim squinted. He sounded confused.
"From that star!" I squealed. "Don't you get it Jim, the Cheese is from that star!" I was just about hopping. Everything I ever thought about the sky was done for. All that I ever knew was done for, and the entire of everything was going to be different forever.
That was the last time anything like that ever happened. The message from the star went to a University, and it caused some noise. Even now that I have kids of my own and the farm is mine, people from the big cities visit to see the place where the star message landed. It hasn't changed much else though. All I know is that up there, on every dot and every little speckle of light, somethin' is happening.
by @Ellri
Three hundred years of war. That tends to leave its mark. Not that anyone were sure that those numbers were correct. It was not as if anyone kept an accurate record of how long they had fought. Winning the war was the goal, not keeping any accurate records about it. For Mellin, fighting those accursed Wildborn was all she knew. From the moment she began to understand speech, her family taught her the horrors of the Wildborn.
They burned Wildborn dens and forests, the Wildborn destroyed their villages and fortresses. It was a never-ending cycle. Sheโd seen it all, it felt like. At just shy of twenty years old, Sheโd seen many a battle. Few things could surprise her any longer. Where she and her fellow warriors shouted to each other, their foe never spoke a word. It was eerie even after so many years of fighting.
Usually, they had no warning when the Wildborn attacked, which is why they were always on alert when at the front lines, crooked though the lines were. She had heard tales of how the lines had once been clearer, of how people had lived without war, but she did not really believe them.
One moment, she and the others stood upon their circular fort of good coruban marble, the field surrounding it bare and empty, the occasional roots of severed trees sticking up from the ground. The next moment, a large horde of Wildborn were rushing out of the forest edge. Mellin could immediately see that the horde outnumbered them at least three-to-one. This would be a tough fight, she knew.
By the time their foe had crossed a third of the field, her bow was strung and drawn. She needed but a second to aim and loose her first arrow. She saw it arching across the field, burrowing itself in the throat of a Wildborn, killing it instantly. By the time it hit, her second arrow was already in the air and all her companions were firing their bows too. Scores of foes had fallen before the Wildborn had even crossed half the field. Though focused only on the fight before her, Mellin could hear the spearmen below readying themselves and the axemen climbing the ladders.
It was well-known that walls, even of good coruban marble, would not stop their foe long. Wildborn were superb climbers and they carried picks excellent for climbing even vertical walls. The spearmen below would thrust through the wall, their spears fitting through the slots in the wall, but it would never be enough for all. Atop the wall, she and her fellow archers would try to eliminate as many as possible, with the axemen soon replacing them.
Once done with her first two quivers, Mellin ran for the nearest tower, an axeman taking her place on the wall. Archers like her were too valuable to waste on close combat. Though some of her arrows had missed, she had downed at least a dozen Wildborn. From atop the tower, she would down dozens more, protected behind large and thick shields.
As she climbed the tower, small rocks had begun to fly. Enemy slingers had come onto the field. A rock hit right beside her, but thankfully none hit her. Shortly afterwards, right before she reached the top, she heard a grunting yelp from below, followed by a scream and a sickening thud. She did not have to look to know a fellow archer had fallen to her death.
She quickly slid between the shields, drawing forth her bow once more and began drawing arrows from the ample quivers at the towerโs top loosing them on their foe with the ease of years of experience. From her high vantage point, she could see that Wildborn had already come up against the wall like a wave of water breaking against a rocky shore. Climbers were already climbing, the spearmen doing their best to push them off, even as the axemen prepared to chop them apart if they reached the top.
But despite the importance of them not gaining the wall, the climbers were not her task. Her task was the slingers. Though not as precise as a longbow, she had long ago learned not to underestimate Wildborn slingers. Their rocks were powerful enough to shatter the thick skulls of horses at a distance equal to that of a longbow, though most slingers could fire less frequently than an archer.
She spotted one within seconds. She did not hesitate to shoot, even as other archers mounted the tower and took up places beside her. Her first arrow struck true, burying itself in the Wildbornโs right ear, the head going deep into his skull. He fell to the ground, dead.
Before, down on the wall, she had not been at a high enough vantage point to spot the slingers. Now that she was, they would begin focusing on her. Seconds after remembering that lesson, the rocks began to strike at the towerโs shields.
Mellin did not pay them any heed. Her only focus was downing as many as possible. She lost all thought of time. All that mattered was shooting arrows. The slingersโ rocks hammered against the shields, who in turn elicited ominous cracking sounds. She was just about to take aim at a particularly bulky slinger when a pair of rocks struck the shield right before her at the same time. She heard as much as saw something in the shield break and it fell straight down, its supports broken off. This left her very much exposed and her focus evaporated, her arrow going wild. She instinctively crouched down, watching through a small gap between parts of the tower as the slinger she had aimed to shoot make a strange gesture with his right hand. A bear pelt covered much of his body, tied down with some sort of straps. The ground beneath his hand churned and a rock the size of a childโs fist leapt up into his hand, the ground having spat it out.
Only when one of the other archers shook her hard did she jolt out of her fascination at his mystical action. She wondered if any others knew their foe could do such. Rising back to her feet, she pulled another arrow, taking aim at a wolfskin-covered Wildborn. Only then did she realize that the Wildborn she had observed shortly before had picked her as his target, and that his shot was already moving through the air. She started to dodge, but it was too late.
She had just begun to crouch down and to the side when the rock slammed against the lower part of her left pauldron. Unfortunately, a leather pauldron is nowhere near as strong as a horseโs skull, let alone stronger. Everything seems to move slower as the stone causes the pauldron to fold inwards from the impact. There is a sickening crack and her bowstring snaps forward as her arm can no longer hold it firm.
Her arrow flies from the bow, not even halfway aimed as her arm is pulled out of shape as a result of the slingshot. Blood starts flowing down her arm even as she sees her arm bend in a place it decidedly should not bend. To say this was painful and shocking would be putting it lightly. She falls down onto the tower floor, her eyes involuntarily eliciting a stream of tears as she screams in pain, all thought of the battle lost. One of the other archers crouches beside her, grabbing the halves of her upper arm and realigning them. The moment the archer does this, Mellin falls unconscious, being naturally oblivious to the fact that her arm is wrapped and splinted.
~|~
Down on the field before the fortress, Werek smiles to himself. It was a good shot. Not only did he take out one of the foul Settled archers with a single stone, but he managed to draw another from the battle and unnerve the rest of the archers in that tower. He could not have done anything else but to aim for her, for he knew she had seen him summon a stone from the depths.
Their foe knew they could call on Nature, but not the degree to which they could do so. One of their greatest advantages lay in that lack of comprehension. Though he had aimed for the archerโs heart, he did not mind that it had been unsuccessful at killing her. The important bit was taking her out of the fight. But he did not pause in his fight the way she had. Already he had begun summoning another stone, his store depleted long ago. It jumped up from the ground and he slid it into the sling, taking aim for another archer in another tower.
As expected, the stone struck true, right between the archerโs eyes. It was a gift from Nature that the archers remained so still while aiming, for it made them perfect targets. The ground was with him, providing stones as needed. As the battle moved on, it became more and more apparent that it was turning in their favor. The number of archers fell rapidly, even as more of the climbers reached the top of the wall.
He knew he could thank the seers for this, for they had told them which fort to attack, which fort was undermanned. Even with their disgusting wall, they would not stand a chance against their assault. Many of his brethren would fall, but that did not matter. Some died so that others would live. It was the way of Nature.
When an arrow flew at him, he rolled to the side, hurtling a stone straight at the shield the archer hid behind, shattering the final support that held it up. Mere moments later, his cousin Nalen, whoโas was properโalso wielded a sling, hit the selfsame archer right in the eye with a small rock. It was a good, clean hit. He gave his cousin a respectful nod, then found a new target of his own.
Soon enough, they had taken an entire section of the wall and eliminated all the archers in one of the towers. The defenders appeared demoralized. He kept firing stones till the last defender was down. It took less than half an hour. It was a good fight. Their foe eliminated, Werek and the others moved forward, searching the fort for foes who were still alive. The most grievously wounded were given mercy and killed, the rest were tied up and taken captive.
He found that he was pleased to note that the archer whose arm he had broken was still alive. Though a foe, she was nonetheless worthy of respect. It was not at all a hard choice to decide to put her among the prisoners.
After they had removed anything of value from the fort, they gathered outside, lining up in a loose, large circle around it. Each of them held both hands towards the ground, calling on its power. At first, nothing happened, then ever so slowly, the ground began to shudder. Had he not been doing this many times before, he would have fallen from his feet. Ever so slowly, a spire of clean stone began to rise in the middle of the fort. Within minutes of its first appearance, it had grown taller than the tallest tree, and still it was growing both taller and thicker.
The fort was not large enough to contain it in the end, the walls crumbling as the displaced soil was pushed out. Any bodies still remaining in the fort were quickly buried. Soon enough, no trace remained of the fort at all. Far and wide, word of their victory would spread. The forest would quickly reclaim the field and all would be good. Nature always won out in the end. As the Wildborn picked up their prisoners and the loot, trees had begun to sprout forth upon the ground surrounding the spire. They returned to the forest from whence they had come, their duties to Nature done for the day. Other tribes would continue the advance.
~|~
On a far grander scale, far above all of these rather petty conflicts, events were moving on their own. As it is wont to do, the planet moved along its orbit, and the moon orbited around it again. At a distance far greater than any individual down on the planet would ever travel on their own, lay a vast field of meteoric ice. The planet and the moon were not limited by such things. They moved much faster. In fact, they would reach that field within a day.
~|~
Waking up was not easy for Mellin. She knew deep down that something was wrong. She had been in some battle, but the details escaped her mind. Something had happened and her arm broke. A swing? A wing? No. Neither of these made sense. As she thought and tried to get it all to add up, she felt soothing waves strike at her. Some part of her fought against it, but they were relentless.
In the end, she found it impossible to resist and slid back into unconsciousness. At the end she knew on some level that her body was still broken. In her stupor, she had not once asked important questions like where she was or why she could not see or move. Those thoughts did not enter her mind.
~|~
Their victory in battle demanded a party. It was the tradition. Werek knew that well, as did the others, for none needed to say anything. They had successfully incarcerated the prisoners, preparing them for the truth, for Nature. Meanwhile, as Nature had its way, the tribe prepared for the celebration. Foragers foraged, hunters treated the meat and cooked it and the rest set up everything else. Nothing was spared, for Nature always provided for those who deserved.
Come evening, and everyone gathered beneath the sacred ash canopy. They knew well that no danger was to be had, for their much-hated foe never ventured this deeply into their domain. Especially after a defeat like the one they had been served this time. It was a good time. In one cycle of the seasons, no doubt there would be many new younglings, as was the way of nature.
~|~
Things were also happening elsewhere, deep within the lands of those called the Settled. The mood there was not one of partying. It was not joyful. In fact, the people in that particular roomโboth of them menโwere beyond angry. They were furious. One of them was dressed in clothes of fine weave and cut, but lacking in ornamentation. The other wore clothes considerably more opulent, with ample embroidering and ornamentation.
The former was seated in a large chair with thick padding and a tanned animal fur, while the latter stood nearby. Though it was clear that there was a significant difference in rank between them, it was also clear that there was common respect.
The highest-ranking of them, without a doubt a Lord, looked up from the letter in his hands, furious. โAnother! Another fort has fallen with no survivors! And just to mock us, they've put up one of those accursed spires where the fort stood!โ
โWhich one, my lord?โ the other man asked, curious. โWhich fort is down?โ
The Lord crumbled up the letter, rose to his feet and tossed it in the fire. โGlendale. One hundred and fifty-one trained warriors lost.โ
The Seneschal was silent for a moment, clearly digging through his memories. โMost unfortunate. There were many veterans stationed there to train and inspire the recruits. The recruits are easily replaced in a few months. Veterans of the caliber lost there will take years.โ
โHow is it possible that they know exactly which forts are weakest and most vulnerable? It should not be possible.โ
The Seneschal smiled grimly. His Lord was both wise and experienced for his age, but he was also young and idealistic. He simply did not know many of the things that came with experience. โThe answer is simple, my lord. Traitors and spies. Training and spies. It is the only plausible explanation. Trust none who do not owe you their lives.โ
โEasier said than done, my friend. In my position I have to deal with far too many to only have to rely on the few who owe me their lives. The spies have proven themselves hard to find. The only confessions of espionage have been acquired by the inquisitors, and they're not even worth the ink they're written with, let alone the parchment they're written upon.โ
As he agreed with that, the Seneschal nodded. He found inquisitors beyond useless for anything other than delivering pain to captives. Interrogation had never been their forte.
The Lord muttered beneath his breath. โIs it even possible to win still? We've fought the Wildborn for centuries, not once gaining any significant ground. They never meet our armies on the open field of battle, and when we send forces to hunt them, the forces never returnโฆโ
โStop that, my lord! We have to win this war! For the sake of our nation, for our way of life! Would you want your children's children to roll about in the mud, never knowing their noble heritage? To rut out in the open like animals?โ
โNo, my friend. I would not want that... We must raise larger armies. Cut down their forests. Burn their dens. Anything to win this war, once and for all!โ
To this his companion smiled, knowing his liege was once more in a good mood. โTo victory!โ he said, raising a tankard of sweet mead.
โTo victory!โ The lord shouted, raising his tankard in turn and taking a deep quaff.
~|~
Back within the forest, Mellin once more found herself waking up. It was a slow, timeless process. All the while, the comfortable, soothing waves urged her to relax, to go back to sleep, but she was not ready. Her mind desired answers. Needed to understand.
She could not see, but did not think about that. Her body ached and tingled all over, especially her left arm. Not really knowing why or understanding how, she could feel how the break was already fading. Some part of her said it should not be possible, but the other more logical part decided that it had to be possible, otherwise it would not be so. Neither of those questioned the how. The first part could not accept it, while the second did not care about the how. It only cared about results, not the reasons for them.
All she could do was continue thinking about what had happened to her. About what had broken her arm. For an indeterminate amount of time, she found no logic to explain it. The words from before seemed related, but not right. Out of the green, she drew a word. โSlingโ. It rang true. Her arm had been hit with a sling!
Some part of her found satisfaction in that discovery, even if it had a lackluster understanding of what exactly it all meant. It certainly couldnโt have been a big problem, seeing how she was almost mended already. Maybe she had done something against her nature? Maybe it had been a moment of madness? She did not know. As she lay wherever she lay, she was oblivious to her surroundings. To what they were doing to her.
Already, her clothes had begun to dissolve, the sum of the holes in her tunic being larger than the remaining cloth. The leather of her half-armor had fared better, but it would never again protect anyone from anything. Whatever she lay in, had eaten halfway or more through it all. Of her boots, the soles were the only part still recognizable. But this she did not know. Nor would she have cared. Her thoughts were elsewhere. Whatever it was that ate at her clothes, it seemed not to affect her body the same way. She certainly had no wounds, no scrapes and her skin covered all it should.
Satisfaction flowed through her for her success at figuring out what had broken her arm. Now all that remained was figuring out what this โslingโ was. Slowly she began to think, even as the waves flowed over her once more, soothing her back into unconsciousness.
~|~
The planet was oblivious to all of this. Or rather, it knew of it, but did not care. All it cared about at the moment was the field of meteoric ice it was currently passing through. Soon, the ice would begin raining down upon both planet and moon. By the time it would reach the ground, it would no more hold the form of ice. It would rain.
The people knew of this rain season, but they did not know its origins. None of them were aware of how this had already begun to affect their moon. As more and more ice struck the moon, its mass had over the eons increased and the rudiments of an atmosphere had formed. None had any idea that more would happen this season. No idea at all.
Had any been able to watch the moon at this time, they would have seen just how spectacular the impacts were. Ice hurtling down onto the surface, breaking apart and throwing out scintillating shards in all directions. Alas, none were able to watch, for the rain obscured the skies.
~|~
Waking was always a slow process for the tribe the day after a full-fledged celebration. Some nursed regrets, others nursed hangovers. Some just wanted to sleep in. Whatever their reasons, none were up with the sun. Most weren't up and about by noon. None cared or complained.
In Werekโs case, it was a hangover. A particularly strong hangover. And a rather large hole in his memory. Hopefully he had not been doing anything he'd regret. Or at least not anything regrettable that anyone else both had observed and would remember. After all, if nobody remembered it, it had effectively not happened. In order to clear his head, he decided to jump into the nearby stream.
As expected, the water was anything but warm. But then, it was morning and it did come from the mountains. But he had not jumped in to get warm. He did it to wake up and cure his hangover. After climbing back out, he shook himself dry and got dressed. First priority would be to check on his prisoner.
He walked to the appropriate tree, a shadowbirch. Though it was an important tree for the entire tribe, they did not live beneath its vast canopy. Nor were any dens constructed in its branches. It was far too sacred for that. Werek approached it with great reverence. Its bark had a cobalt black tone, virtually without any roughness to its texture. A full dozen men and women could link arms and still not manage to circle the trunk.
Had he not known better, he could have thought it a pillar of black stone, so smooth was it. But he knew better, and as he circled the trunk, he found what he sought. At its bottom, massive roots fanned out. Between two of these lay a capsule of sorts, sort of like a cocoon, only grown from vegetative matter and not from flesh and blood or insect silk. Within it lay his prisoner. With the same gentleness as he would use on a newborn, he laid his hand upon its surface.
It was smooth and slick to the touch, yet his hand did not get wet. If he were to press against it, it would give. Though it was not a thick shell, it was impossible to see through. No light could pass through it. It was ever so slightly warm to the touch, so the one within was clearly still alive. He could only smile. The woman had no idea what was happening to her. No idea at all.
The elders had described the process to him in detail. Just yesterday, she had been a hated foe, but already that was no longer the case. For now, she simply was. She had no sides at the moment. The sins of the so-called Settled folk were being washed away, her body restored to how Nature had intended it to be. Untainted. Pure.
Satisfied that she had survived the ordeal of joining with the shadowbirch he pulled back, being careful not to step on any of the more fragile roots. At this point, there was nothing for him to do where the prisoner was concerned. She would most likely live, that was the important bit.
~|~
Eleven days had passed since the last spire sprouted. The lord looked over the reports from the various forts across the fluctuating borderlands. Though there had been numerous skirmishes, there had been no real battles. But he knew that would soon change. Ever since the discussion following the sprouting of the last spire, the forges had been working day and night, ceaselessly smithing axes for what was to come next.
Thousands had been conscripted. Trained to wield axes, both for battle and for cutting trees. When he finished, the border would once again be a straight line. The wood would be ferried back, where it would be used for something productive. If only those accursed Wildborn would understandโฆ but of course they would never do that. A real shame.
But it would be their loss. Society had long ago moved on from the time of living like beasts in the woods. The Wildborn had failed to adapt. Soon they would truly face the consequences of their choice. They would move in all at once, companies from the army spread evenly among the conscripts, for he had no doubts that the Wildborn would not appreciate progress. It was too bad the rains had come. Burning the forest would have been extremely satisfying.
~|~
Time was gone. Mellin no longer had any concept of it. Nor did she care about the loss. How could she, when the concept was no more? Her body surrounded her. This she knew. Fluid, thick and viscous, surrounded it. And then there was some sort of membrane. Beyond that she knew nothing.
Nothing remained of her clothes, not even a scrap of leather. She did not care. There was no light and the fluid felt good against her bare skin. Some part of her knew that her body was undergoing changes, but no part found that to be worrying. Her knowledge of the conflict between the Wildborn and the Settled, knowledge which had shaped her entire life previously, was gone. The only conflict of relevance was the eternal conflict of nature and life: prey versus predator.
At one point, the choice had been before her. Prey or predator. She had chosen predator. She would not be subject to othersโ whims any longer. There was no knowledge in her mind about what the choice entailed, only knowledge that it had been the right choice.
Nature was all around her. She knew this. She was part of Nature. Nature was part of her. That was the way it should be. The way it had to be. At some point past, present or future, she had been blind to Nature. Which she did not know. She could not know. Logic implied that it could not be future, though. But that did not matter, for her place is where she is and was and will be. Everything would be right. As this happened, she let the soothing waves flow over herself once more.
~|~
Tens of thousands of men marched towards the forest. The lord observed all from a distance. He had no need or wish to be at the front. With the aid of skilled officers, the line remained straight. When the first met the trees, the line halted to give them time to cut them down. Others, behind the lines, would then delimb the fallen trunks and move the logs to the carts.
It was methodical and effective. Many would not have work for a long time, but the lord did not care. All he cared about was making the border a straight line which would be possible to monitor properly. His efforts were greater than any in decades at least, if not since the war itself started all those years ago.
He had grand plans for the border once it was straightened out. He would build forts, dig spiked trenches and set up walls all along it. No Wildborn band would ever catch his forces off-guard again. That the lumber could be sold at a premium was only a bonus. Whole villages would be built with the major forts. In time, those villages might even grow into cities. One way or another, the forest would be pacified. He would see to it.
~|~
Initially, the Wildborn tribes did not pay much attention to the increased effort by the Settled. They had observed the forces at the forestโs edges, but had quickly seen they were far too large to contend with as individual warbands. They were unaware of the goal these Settled invaders had. The rains renewed the forest around them, lulled them into a sort of complacency. As the nutrient-rich rains fed the greater forest, the pain of the falling trees was dulled, rendering the seers blind to the scale at which it all was happening.
But it was not to last. As hundreds of trees fell each day, Natureโs pain grew to overwhelm the bounty granted by the rains. The forest was hurting. Nature began screaming in their minds. Something had to be done.
~|~
Far out, in the depths of space, the planet and the moon were passing the far edge of the field of meteoric ice. This naturally meant the end of the rains, and the sun began to shine in full once more. Enriched by the rains, the moonโs atmosphere had at long last thickened to the point where it could truly absorb sunlight. Within hours of the sunโs return to full majesty, the long-awaited changes began upon the moon. It was a slow process, yet far faster than many wouldโve said it should be.
All over its surface, small growths had begun to sprout. Within days, they would begin to cover the moon, bringing it to full life. But of course none upon the planet could see such yet, being far more focused upon their petty conflicts.
But there was one thing that did notice. The spirit of nature that inhabited the world below. Nature, its denizens called it. The ones that knew of it. The others were oblivious, fought against it. But they were as children to it. Eventually they would grow up. Or they would pass. Others had done so before, others would do so later. It noticed the birth of a smaller, more primitive being akin to itself upon the moon. It rejoiced. At long last, it would have company.
~|~
Deep within the forest, the shadowbirch creaked softly. Beneath its boughs, rested a series of large, roughly spherical orbs, each and every one made from its roots and bark. It had no sentience to speak of, nor was it truly aware, but like all the other trees, like the animals and insects, it was part of the forest. It was alive.
Though technically separate organisms, the trees had ages ago grown tightly enough together to nonetheless be connected. A root here, a pair of twigs there, a den beneath an ancient oak elsewhere. Sometimes, these connections were faint, other times they were strong. And connected as they were, they felt the deaths of their brethren. And then there were the sages.
These elders of the tribes had once been great hunters and craftsmen. Blessed mothers. Unfortunate youths. They each had a unique story, yet all were part of a single whole. Upon becoming sages, they had given up their lives as regular people for the betterment of all. Some were kind, others were cantankerous. Some were brave, others cowardly. In the end, they were the representation of the sum and parts of all the tribes. Born of man, joined with tree, they had become parts of the forest. They felt what it felt, and in return, they offered it what it could not have on its own. Sentience. A true symbiosis.
As the edges of the forest were cut down, they felt the pain. They interpreted it. And then they informed their flesh and blood brethren, even as their sap-filled brethren had informed them. The eldest of them who still lived had long ago merged so deeply with the forest that their essence was less flesh and more tree. Some could neither see nor eat, speak nor drink. Only the other seers could communicate with them. It was a strange fate, but one that was respected more than any other in the forest or the tribes.
They felt it all. Every axe, every footstepโshoed or notโas the Settled violated their forest. Initially, it was as it had always been, a mild ache, an itch that would not go away. But now it had grown like a festering sore, it became impossible to ignore. One by one, if they retained the capability for it, they began to scream and sob in pain. Deep down, they knew it had to be stopped. Before it was too late.
~|~
The Lord smiled. The plan was working out exactly as he had intended. Not one of his lumbering camps had been hit by the Wildborn. His men were too numerous, too powerful. Already the frontier had begun straightening out. Soon he could begin fortifying the border. Or rather, soon the men he had conscripted could do it. He certainly had no intent of ever touching a shovel, pickaxe or any other tool. He would, with the aid of surveyors and architects, plan the new border defense. Once his neighbors saw how much more efficient his border was, they too would fall in line. It was inevitable.
Those brutish Wildborn would learn not to cross him. If they tried, he would see them dead. Quite simple, really. The question was whether the forest would dry out enough for fires to ravage them, and whether he should use such. On one hand, a fire was so much more effective, but on the other it reduced profits. The new wood was selling at a premium. Old growth oaks, ashes and birches were worth fortunes in the right hands. In his hands.
But he also knew that he should not let profit blind him to the real purpose of this whole venture; winning the war. If he needed to burn it all to do so, he would. Without batting an eye. He and his ancestors had invested far too much in this war to let it end in anything other than victory.
~|~
Discord had entered the cocoon. Mellin could feel that something was wrong outside. She did not know what. She could feel how she was needed, but she also knew that she was not yet ready. That held her back. Over the past indefinite time, she had begun to once more have a sense of time. It was both strange and disconcerting. But even with the new sense of time, something told her it was not the one she had had before.
She no longer cared about before. There was now, and there was the future. The past was of little import, for it could not change. The present was where changes were made, and the future was what could be changed. When ready, she would change the world. It was as inevitable as the seasons passing. Like her cares, she knew her body had changed. Her arm had not only healed, but it was stronger than ever before. Her entire body was stronger than before. She knew this.
The discord flowed through her. It hurt to feel the forestโs pain. She wanted to help, but she could not do so yet. Slowly she began willing her body to adapt faster. She had no way of telling if it had any effect, but it certainly did not slow things down. She was looking forward to fixing the world. It was her purpose.
~|~
The spirit which by many was called Nature could feel its children being in conflict. It was not happy, but as of yet, it could not fix it all properly. Its agent was not ready, nor were its agentโs agents. Its agent was not even aware it would have agents. So young, it was.
However, the conflict was not yet serious in its mind. It would take some effort to mend, but only some. That would be a suitable initiation for its agent. Till then, it would have to consider means of slowing down the conflict. Not doing so would make its agentโs task more difficult than necessary. That would not do.
At the same time, it could feel its newborn sibling slowly taking shape upon the moon. The sibling was already exploring the confines of its domain. That made the spirit joyous. It was not yet mature enough to be reached out to. But that did not matter. It would get there eventually. That knowledge made it wish to reward its own children, good and bad alike. Perhaps that would make them fight less?
~|~
The suffering of the seers moved the Wildborn as no other force had, save nature itself. No matter what his or her origin, each seer had their universal respect. Unlike the Settled, mustering a force of trained fighters did not take months. Most among them knew how to hunt, and it wasnโt particularly hard to switch from four-legged targets to two-legged ones. Especially not when the latter did not try to flee.
As hunters, they were already trained, and they never used complex tactics the way the Settled did. They fought as individuals working towards a common goal. The Settled were foolish enough to think they could fight as a single whole. Men simply weren't built for that degree of cooperation.
Thus, all the Wildborn needed to do to muster the equivalent of an army was to collect the hunters. A simple thing done in less than a day. To teach them the nuances of hunting men, if they did not already know, a few days at most.
As such, but a few days after the seers revealed how they suffered, a thousand hunters moved towards the borderlands. Not as a single cohesive force, but as independent individuals, all happening to go in the same direction. The Wildborn detested moving in a single large horde.
Although Werek sought to join them, he was denied the opportunity by the Seers. Only those approved by them were permitted to depart. He begged, but was refused. Apparently they needed him to watch over his prisoner. They claimed his prisoner wasโฆ special.
He had to remain in the environs of the tribeโs shadowbirch. Though he may have wished to be with the ones going to fight, he would never disobey the seers. His loyalty to tribe and forest was far too deeply entrenched to disobey a direct command.
~|~
The Lord heard about the Wildborn counter-strike shortly after it came and went. He had been expecting it. How could he not have been? Heโd done his best to ensure they were provoked, even as he tried to ensure safety for his own.
Though the counterstrike happened a while before he was notified, that did not matter. His men knew exactly what to do. They pulled back momentarily, luring the Wildborn into the well-prepared trap. All at once, hundreds of archers let loose. Veteran axemen jumped out of the shallow pits wherein they had hid, killing all those who had been hit but not killed outright. And dismembering the corpses, just to be on the safe side. A battle which no doubt the Wildborn expected to be in their favor he had instead caused to become a slaughter. The lord could not complain about that turn of events.
Though some of his warriors wanted to pursue, his seneschal made sure that the officers stopped that. Killing them at the new edge of the forest was the plan. Pursuing them into the forest would be playing into the enemyโs hands. It would be venturing into their domain. Ambushes would practically be guaranteed there. This had been a victory. Neither he nor the seneschal wanted to have that balanced out by a foolish pursuit.
Thus, their forces did not pursue. All they did was remain at alert, even as the woodcutters prepared to continue their work of straightening the border. Though it was doubtful the Wildborn would attack like that again, the lord knew well that nothing was 100% certain with such primitives.
~|~
The survivors of the hunters returned. Less than a third of those who had left. Werek was stunned. He heard all about how much of a slaughter it had been. About how his brethren had been cut down by archers beyond count, how axemen had appeared seemingly out of nowhere to chop everyone who had been hit to pieces. The entire tribe and scores of other tribes went into mourning. Fathers, brothers and sons had been lost. Even some mothers and sisters.
If he had not hated the Settled before this, he certainly did so now. His cousin nalen was among the fallen. A good man, cut down in his prime, a young son and daughter left behind. Orphaned. Nalenโs wife had died giving birth to them.
Werek went to the shadowbirch, standing before the cocoon. In its presence, he swore to avenge Nalen, to take care of his children as if they had been his own, to teach them all he could. The shadowbirch did not react. Nor had he expected it to. The forest knew of his vow. That was all that mattered.
~|~
Far away from there, distanced both from death and human emotions, the moonโs infant spirit began to gain a rudimentary sentience. Already large swathes of its surface were beginning to get covered by vegetation, all of it lush. As spoken of in the ancient prophecies known not to it, the moon was turning green.
It had begun to understand what it was and what potential it had. But it still moved about with a childlike glee, causing ripples of sudden growth in the vegetation. The spirit called Nature could only watch with mirth. The young were careless but innocent. Nature knew the young one could not yet harm the moonโs ecosystem through its behavior. It was too limited still for that.
As it was pleased, so too were events in its domain aided. Plants everywhere grew just a hint better. Animals and people alike more productive and effective. Not enough for most to notice, but enough to make a subtle difference. Life was good.
~|~
The forest told Mellin about what happened to the hunters. She mourned them and her eagerness to be reborn only increased. She was needed. More so now than ever before. She could feel Nature surrounding her. It made her feel good. How she had once been so distant from Nature, she did not know. Nor did she particularly care, for she was close now. She could feel its joy even past the loss of the hunters. That made it easier to change. That pleased her. Soon, she would be able to emerge. That would be good. She had a role to play.
From the forest, she could feel someone watching her cocoon. She could feel the determination flow from the individual. It matched her own determination to act once complete. The forest told her of his vow. She liked it. He seemed like a good man. Taking care of family was paramount in her eyes. How could it not be?
The soothing waves of the forest were still there, but Mellin no longer had a need to obey them the way she had before. Now instead she listened to them, learned from them. It would soon enough be time for her to act on them. Understanding would be needed. Until then, she could only wait and change.
~|~
Spirits were high among the troops following the resounding victory against the wildborn. In the days following the victory, they progressed further than ever before. Hundreds of trees were cut down, debranched and ferried away each day. Each hour, the men moved the border further. With the increasing pace, the lordโs dream of a straight-line border seemed achievable. As the lordโs seneschal, he had the task of ensuring that the lordโs will was upheld in the field as well as on the parchment.
At the end of each day, they would put down a series of stones to mark the point of deforestation reached that day. With aid of the foliage removed from the logs before transport, they could easily work into the night, effectively getting a head-start on the next dayโs deforestation.
Many of the men, the seneschal had noted while moving up and down the line, needed no convincing to work harder and longer. Paying the Wildborn back for the thousands of friends and relatives murdered and the countless lives and villages destroyed was more than worth it.
The most telling part of the border having moved deeper than ever was how they passed fewer and fewer of the spires marking where forts had been destroyed. Some four weeks after the deforestation began, they no longer saw any. Their pace by this time was steady. At night the wildborn occasionally struck against sentries and lone cutters, but never in the numbers they had struck with that fateful day.
Thus, in the eyes of many, the wildborn were beaten. All they foughtโor rather, encounteredโwere the crushed remnants of a people defeated. Sure, they did not find any of the wildborn dens, nor any real numbers, but most people had never much of any idea of exactly how many the wildborn numbered in the first place. After all, who cared about the numbers of rats in the sewers? In the eyes of those, the wildborn were much like rats. Their success was inevitable.
The Seneschal did not quite share this opinion, but neither did he have any good explanation for the lack of resistance. It did not make sense. He suspected something was off, but he had no idea what. In his letters to his lord, he stated as much, but did not get much support. His lord believed his own success too much in the opinion of the Seneschal.
~|~
Though pained constantly, the seers had collected themselves again. With the steadiness of the enemy deforestation, They could focus better. It was not comfortable for them. But they subsisted nonetheless. The hunters sought to strike again, to pay the Settled back for the slaughter of their brethren, but the seers kept them back, only letting the occasional hunter strike in the night. Their communion with the forest told them to do it that way. As young as many of the hunters were, they did not always understand the reasons for this, but being allowed to strike occasionally alleviated many of these.
Never were these hunters pursued as they struck. The settled were too cowardly. That only made it more exciting for hunters. They regularly dared each other to aim for more challenging foes, just to outdo each other. The seers let them continue, simply because they were waiting. Waiting for something completely different.
~|~
The lord read his servantโs latest letter with curiosity. They had had almost universal success, yet his seneschal claimed there was some unseen danger, that the wildborn werenโt defeated yet, despite the clear evidence to the contrary. He simply couldnโt understand why his friend could not accept the truth. But at the same time, his friend had always been a wise advisor, both to him and to his father before him.
Perhaps there was something to it? Perhaps he had seen something that was not apparent to the others? Perhaps it was better to err on the side of caution? He thought it over for more than an hour before composing his reply.
In the reply, he authorized his seneschal to initiate whatever measures he thought necessary to ensure the success of the plan. That was easier than trying to dictate from far away what should and shouldnโt be done. After sending it on its way with a rested messenger, he decided to look over the schematics for the signal towers an up-and-coming architect had sent to him.
To say these towers would be unique would be putting it lightly. They would use massive concave crystals transmit simple light signals to neighboring towers. If he could build such towers, he could have large forces stationed only every second or third tower, or even further apart, cutting the costs of the border watch almost in half. They showed great promise, yet he had no idea how to make or acquire such crystals. In other words, impressive yet implausible. Whatever it ended with, these would not be a top priority. He resolved to let someone tell the architect to provide a source for the crystals before heโd ever approve funding for such projects. It was only fair.
~|~
Seeing the light of day was something Mellin had not done in months. Or at least she thought it was that long. Her time in the cocoon had been without any sort of way to keep track of things like time. In fact, she knew it had been timeless as the forest worked on her, for her view of time was not what it had been before. Not that she cared. What she had been before was not what she was now.
Now she knew she was ready. Nature had made her whole. Given her a purpose unlike any she had had before. She was more alive than ever. It was time to emerge. The time of cocooning was over. At her request, the forest called for the one who had brought her to this. Had given her this opportunity.
It would be joyous to move once more. She stretched a little in preparation, but did not try to break the cocoon. Her hands and feet ached to break it, but she would wait just a little longer.
~|~
It was the middle of the night. Werek was sleeping, his cousinโs twin children were asleep in his cabin when he found himself suddenly utterly awake. There was a strange whisper in the air. He had never before felt anything like it, but he knew it was important. The forest called.
He had no idea how he knew it, but he knew the shadowbirch needed him. Crawling out of his sleeping alcove in the den, he moved as softly as only a skilled hunter could, careful not to wake the children. It was ease itself to move silently through the center of the area the tribe had built their dens. Nobody else were awake. Nobody saw him pass. Other than the trees that is. But he could never hide from them. Especially not seeing how they had summoned him.
The canopy overhead was thick, the night as dark as night could be, yet never did he stumble. Never did he miss a step or hook his feet beneath exposed roots. It was as if the ground changed its shape to ease his movement. One could almost say that it was magical.
Maybe twelve, thirteen minutes after he had been woken, he stood beneath the shadowbirch. If the light in the forest elsewhere had been dim, here it simply wasnโt. The tree itself, solitary as it was, seemed almost to absorb light. But it was not all black, for the cocoons seated in its roots glowed. It was a dim, yellow glow, diluted by the thickness of the roots and tendrils covering the surface of the cocoons, but it made them strangely visible.
Most of the cocoons were quiet, unmoving, just glowing faintly. But not all. The cocoon containing his prisoner, the woman archer he had captured those months ago, was not quiet. It pulsed, the glow fluctuating. Somehow, he knew he had to touch it. He was no genius, but he knew well that it was Nature telling him to do so.
Without giving it any thought, he placed his left hand upon the handprint-like area that had appeared upon the cocoon. When he did, the roots began shifting, and he could see a vaguely humanoid shape within, the glow revealing it, yet the cocoon was not quite thin enough to truly tell anything about exactly what the former prisoner looked like.
~|~
When her former captor touched the cocoon, Mellin shuddered. The cocoon started vibrating. As this happened, the tendril-like roots who had for so long kept her in the dark shifted, letting her see just a hint of outside. The Nature encouraged her.
First she curled herself into a ball. Then she lashed out with her feet and arms at once, pressing hard against the cocoon. It stretched, distending against her outstretched limbs. She could hear it creaking, then there was a snap, and the cocoon ruptured.
The fluid in which she had rested and changed flowed out through the sudden holes in the cocoon, even as the roots pulled back, opening it up. She blinked her eyes, the cold air strange against them as she tried to get them to work right.
As the fluid flowed away, she sank to the floor, not quite ready to stand on her own. She rolled over onto her stomach, then coughed, spitting out the fluid that had filled her mouth, belly and lungs, then she sucked in air once more. Like upon her eyes, the air felt both cold and strange. But it also felt both good and right.
~|~
Nature sang out in joy as its agent was born out of the tree it had been within for so long. Its child was already taking its first breaths. At long last it could make the world right once more. Nothing, not even its other children misbehaving could make it anything but pleased. Time was at long last ready.
But for now, all it could do was watch. Its child would have to comprehend itself first. To get used to its new form. But Nature did not think in minutes and seconds. It did not even think in days. It thought in seasons, years and ages. It was the agent that would think in short timeframes. That was the purpose behind crafting an agent.
~|~
Mere moments after he had touched the cocoon, it ruptured. Had he not known it was right, Werek mightโve feared he had broken it, that he had done something he should not be doing. The fluid that flowed over and past his legs was like a sudden, strong current in a wide stream, only to fade away moments later. The fluid itself contained the strange glow he had seen and drained into the ground, leaving a faint light behind in the groundโs surface. At the same time, the branches above him began glowing with the same color, something he had never before seen a shadowbirch do. This illuminated the cocoon and the roots all around him, showing him exactly what was there. It wouldโve been mesmerizing, except his eyes were locked upon the being within what remained of the cocoon.
She looked both like the woman he had once captured and nothing like it. Her skin was smooth in some places, rough in others. No single word could be used to describe its color, but the life within was so apparent that he could only stare in wonder.
The woman had not been overweight, but neither had she been thin. As one of the Settled, he wouldโve said sheโd been just a touch plump. After all, the Settled were well-known for not moving as much as the wildborn did, eating more than they truly needed. Thus, she hadnโt been the ideal woman.
What lay before him now had none of that Settled plumpness. None of the excess fat. She was sleek, her muscles well-defined, even more so than any wildborn woman he had seen before. As she coughed out the rest of the cocooning fluid, he saw how her body moved. The strength inherent to it. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her hair, which had once been a pale golden color, was now the color of autumn grass mixed with the bark of triannual ash trees, seemingly shifting between the two all the time. Her ears held a slight point to them, and her legs were longer than before. Her hands were smooth, her nails almost claw-like, but tiny. As she curved her back, he could see the hairs on her back rising, and he realized it was not her skin that held so many colors, but a thin, sleek coat of fur. Like that of many watery animals.
And there was that small bit about her tail. Last time he had seen her, that had not been there. It was almost as long as her legs, but covered in the same sleek fur as the rest of her.
Shaken out of his shock, he gently knelt beside her. โIt will be all right.โ he said, gently placing a hand upon her back, stroking the fur there gently. She made no sound, but seemed appreciative of his contact. Ever so slowly, she stopped coughing, sucking alternating deep and shallow breaths, as if breathing was unfamiliar to her.
โCome, try to sit up. Maybe that will help?โ was all he said then, gently grabbing her shoulder and helping her sit back against a large root. She shifted her legs to do so, and he could at last see her face. It was like a humanโs, yet not. Her lower face was elongated just a little, and her open mouth held sharply pointed teeth. Her nose seemed darker, like that of many animals, and her eyes had a definitive wolven cast to them. And they were yellow.
Like on her back, her front was covered in the same thin coat of fur, from her uncomfortably bare crotch to the top of her head. Even her six small but well-defined breasts had the fur. He averted his eyes from her private parts as best as he could, simply smiling at her and looking over how her body had changed. Aside from the appearance of fur and a half-defined snout, the greatest difference mustโve been her feet. They were nothing like what they had been before. They were elongated, bent in new places and had a set of four sharp claws at the end of the toes. Her heels were almost gone, and what had been her last toe seemed to have shifted up there, the tiny reverse-articulated claw all that remained of it.
Her toes, once close together, were widely splayed out and more than twice as large as before. All in all, she had the look of a true, two-legged wolf to her. As a hunter who respected wolves, Werek could not find her anything but stunningly beautiful.
Stroking the small of her back in the same way had before, he looked at her kindly. โCan you speak yet? Do you have a name?โ During the battle, he naturally could not have asked her, and from the moment of capture till he had placed her into the cocoon, she had not once regained consciousness. Thus the questions were natural to ask.
~|~
The kindness of the man beside her did not go unnoticed to Mellin. She was still trying to fully understand her new body, to learn how to control it. His gentle strokes were relaxing, and even as he looked over her, she looked over both herself and the man beside her. He wore a large bear pelt over much of his body, though now she could see that it had been sewn into a tunic of sorts. It was not simply draped over him the way it had appeared during the battle she could vaguely recall.
Her body only bore passing resemblance to what she had once looked like. She could both see and feel the animalistic traits now inherent to it. Because of her connection to Nature, these traits did not freak her out. They pleased her. She could feel how her body was stronger than ever. She could control her toes and claws to a level she had never been able to do before. Her tail, both familiar and unfamiliar, easily obeyed her. Her chest looked decidedly odd, with six small breasts instead of the two larger ones she had had before, but her chest muscles would clearly keep them from bouncing about. She explored the confines of her mouth, feeling how different her jaw was compared to before, and found she did not mind. Her ears could hear more than ever, and her nose picked up scents she had never before noticed.
It was almost overwhelming. All that kept her mind from drowning in all this, was the connection to Nature and the gentle stroking of the man beside her. He was clearly a wildborn, but what fear and hatred she had held for him and his before was gone. She had been ignorant then. Now she knew they were innocent, that they listened Nature the way the Settled did not.
The silence was almost deafening. Then he spoke, his voice a clear but soft baritone. She looked at him, at his soft but scraggly beard, at she short-cropped hair on his head. She smiled.
โI can.โ The sounds were a bit strange, her mouth not quite working the same way as before, but her tongue compensating, fixing the changes to the sound that her elongated mouth made. โMy name is Mellin. What is yours?โ
~|~
He chuckled a little as her response came out half-garbled at first. It didnโt take a genius to figure out that she had never spoken with such a mouth before. But mere moments later, she spoke clearly, telling him her name and asking for his.
โWerek, son of Kalen, son of Algus.โ
~|~
Mellin heard his reply, then sniffed the air. She could smell that he found her attractive, but she did not have time to deal with such right now. Besides, her body was not in the right part of the cycle to reproduce. She knew men and women found it enjoyable to try even when outside optimal time in the cycle, but she saw no reason for that herself.
She would mate when Nature deemed it appropriate, not a moment before. It was not that she found him unappealing. It simply was not relevant at this point. โHave you a spare tunic? I find myself without one. The changes destroyed my old clothes. Not that they would fit me now in any case.โ
~|~
That was most certainly not the question Werek expected her to ask. He stared blankly out for a few moments, then remembered that the other tribesfolk had brought over a couple of baskets of his cousinโs belongings, including all his cousin had left from his long-dead wife. โYes, yes. I think I can find one. Do you feel up to walking yet? Or do you want to remain here while I find it?
~|~
With her clawed hands, Mellin pushed off from the root, stumbling about for a bit as her tail swished back and forth, messing with her balance. Only when the man, Werek, jumped up to steady her did she manage to keep from falling over. Her feet felt decidedly odd with the lack of a heel to rest upon the ground.
Add to that how her tail wanted to move on its own, and balancing was not easy. โI think Iโll walk with you. I need to get used to walking if I am to do what I have to do. But I wonโt say no to a steadying arm to lean on.โ
~|~
Werek nodded, and steadied her as he led the way to his den. It was situated halfway underneath a grand old oak, at the other side of the tribeโs settlement. Even as unsteady as her walk was, she did not make a single sound as she walked, her feet missing the few dry twigs that lay there. She truly was a natural hunter. He could only wonder at what it would look like if she ran through the forest. Though he naturally desired her, some part of him told him that she had no interest in him. Or rather, that she desired no mating at this time.
Though one part of him was naturally disappointed, another was relieved. He did not think that he was quite ready to have children of his own, especially not with his dead cousinโs twins to raise. It took but a minute to find the right basket, then another minute to find a tunic that had belonged to his cousinโs wife. As he dug through the basket, she steadied herself on the roof, holding onto an exposed root there. He passed it over to her, doing his best to avert his eyes from her very alluring nudity.
~|~
The offer of a tunic, even one that belonged to a woman now dead, was sufficient. Mellin pulled it on, noting how it did not quite fit right, but at least it covered up her nudity. That might help her companion ignore his animalistic urges to mate.
It was a nice enough tunic. She sniffed it, noting that it was made from the hide of a pair of does and had been treated well. It was remarkably flexible, not all that much changed from living skin when it came to flexibility. With a bit of fumbling, she managed to tie it up, not poking more than a couple of holes in it with her claws. Getting used to having sharp claws would definitely take more time, she realized.
โLet us go back to the shadowbirch. I need to awaken the others. They will help me do what I need to do.โ She did not offer alternatives. There were none. Nature needed her. It was her purpose. She would need the others, as primitive as they would be. Nature did not need them to be like her, so they would not be.
~|~
Guiding her back to the shadowbirch was easy. Not only did she seem to know the way already, but her walk had balanced out pretty well. If she could learn everything as easily and naturally as she did that, he had no idea how far she could go. Would he be able to tag along, or would he be left behind?
She stopped before the tree, looking at the faintly glowing cocoons wherein the other prisoners had been placed. They were smaller than hers had been, and unlike hers had so short a time ago, they did not pulsate. Werek did not know what would happen next.
To his surprise, she did nothing. She simply stood there, her legs spread apart and her hands at her sides. Then she spoke, raising her hands as she did. โAwaken. Serve your purpose. Rise!โ her shout was loud, clear and would probably wake up half the tribe, if not more.
At first, nothing happened, then the glow increased a hundredfold, both in the foliage and the cocoons. As one, all twenty-two of them broke apart and something came out. If he had not known better, he could never have thought that these creatures had once been men and women. Their hair had been replaced by foliage, their skin by bark. Their faces were unnaturally smooth, their hands resembled twigs. Their legs resembled woven branches more than anything else. He could see as their parts moved about. Where she had a wolf merged into her, these people had various trees spliced into them. The fluid of their cocoons flowed away, even as they lined up in pairs of identical tree types. Two birchfolk, two oakers, a pair of ashes, and eight other species of tree. Their eyes were a bright green, glowing clearly even in the light of the shadowbirch.
He saw no real sign of intelligence in them, though they were clearly alive and able to move about. He wondered about what their purpose was. Of the treefolk, he could see that the pairs included one of each of what had once been men and women. He could see that Mellin smiled as they emerged, moving among them and greeting them like old friendsโsomething he suspected they technically wereโbut she did not speak again. All she did was begin walking in the direction of the border. He did not know whether she wanted him to follow until she looked back and smiled at him. โCome.โ
The living, humanoid trees followed her, even as he found himself unable to resist following her too.
~|~
Nighttime always felt ominous to the Seneschal. This night, the forest was particularly quiet. Some uncertain feeling told him that it was the calm before the storm, but what storm? Were the wildborn planning to retaliate? Was he right about them not being as crushed as so many others thought? If they did attack, how would they do it? Would they strike openly, with a large army? Or would they strike from the shadows, like how the occasional wildborn took down sentries and such? There were so many questions and so few answers.
He did not like that. Nor did he like being incapable of sleeping. Though he had several tents at his disposal, all spread out along the line, he did not spend his time in any of them. Not being able to sleep, there was no point in trying. Besides, the moon was out tonight, though it looked strange, a curious tint to it. It almost looked splotched.
Making a mental note, he decided to ask some of the historians if they had ever seen such before. Following his lordโs reply with a blanket permission to do what he deemed necessary, he had doubled the patrols, tripled the sentry counts. No wildborn should get through the lines without him learning. He would see to it.
~|~
Being a sentry was a boring job. Usually, nothing at all happened. If you were lucky. Heโd heard of more than a few sentries who were less lucky. Most of those were dead or crippled. Heโd seen a dozen sentries all in the healersโ tents with shattered arms or legs. Worst of all, not one of those sentries had seen their attackers. It was almost as if the forest wanted them dead. He could only shudder at that thought.
He did not want to be crippled, but being dead did not sound any better. If there were any wildborn out there, he really hoped theyโd leave his stretch of border alone. It was impossible to see far into the forest, even with the sparse undergrowth in this section. Yawning, he stretched a little to loosen up his body.
Nothing was happening. The forest was quiet, only creaking a little in the wind. He looked to the east. There he could see the fires of a couple of camps and a few other sentries. Then he looked to the west. Again, fires and sentries. All quiet. It was almost eerie how straight the border was. Heโd been guarding the border before, and it had been more than once heโd been lucky if he couldโve seen more than the sentries on either side of him.
~|~
The journey to the border was uneventful for Mellin. She let her mind feel the forest around her, let it guide her to the place she needed to be. Neither she, Werek nor any of the others spoke. Though she had her doubts the others were capable of speech at this point. Though vaguely humanoid, she knew they were more tree than anything else. Like her, Nature had given them purpose. Unlike her, theirs was not independent. They had no true free will. She guided their path with her mind, just as the forest granted her way of passage.
Like so many other parts of the forest, it was a true symbiosis. Moments before they reached the edge of the forest, they stopped. Where they stood, the shadows kept them out of sight of the Settled sentries. Not that the sentries were all that observant. Even to her eyes it was clear they were bored.
โTime to give them a little excitementโฆโ she muttered, grinning at Werek as she knelt down, placing her hands upon the ground in front of her.
~|~
Nature was watching its agent begin doing as it had both intended and wanted. Its focus upon the agent could only be described as intent. The spirit continued watching everything else, but its attention was upon the agent and what happened there. It was not every age it created an avatar for its power.
The spirit had great hopes for this particular avatar. She showed great promise. Within hours of her birth she had already begun her work. It would find it interesting to see how she used the power invested in her.
~|~
For the sentry, no warning came of the attack. One moment he had stood on his post, thinking about what heโd do once off duty. The next moment, the ground all around him was roiling. He did not even have time to begin a shout of alarm before hundreds of roots shot up all around him, wrapping their tendrils around his body, immobilizing him and preventing him from raising the alarm.
He could only watch as something began walking out of the forest. At first he thought it was a woman, but something about the silhouette was off. Heโd been standing about a hundred paces from the forest edge when it happened. The individual did not run, but it kept a steady pace, heading straight for him.
Tied up as he was, he could not do anything. Not scream, not pull any weapons or even move his arms. When she got closer, he could feel the roots begin to shift again, digging into his uniform. To his horror, he saw the woman was only so in passing, for her head was crowned with ash leaves, not hair. Her skin appeared to be made of bark and her hands twigs. She did not stop before him, but walked at the same pace straight at him, slamming into his body, enveloping it. The roots dismantled his clothes and he could feel the woman-like tree flowing around him. Had he not been horrified, he mightโve found the whole event arousing. All light disappeared as the bark sealed around him.
He could not see as other tree-folk walked into and absorbed the sentries to both sides of him. It went on like that in a wave-like fashion to either side. Seeing how they all were positioned well outside the camps of the workers and warriors, nobody noticed that the sentries were all incapacitated. The moment the last sentry was enveloped, things changed.
The enveloped sentry could literally feel as his captor grew into him. Had he been able to speak, he would have screamed in pain. The tree fed on his blood and his flesh, growing huge in a matter of minutes. He could feel himself sprouting roots as the tree rapidly merged him into itself. Then he could feel his roots spreading to the stumps of the trees on all sides of him. It was strange yet horrifying.
Hundreds of stumps merged with his new form as his mind was absorbed. Soon all that remained was his bones, buried within the wood that had replaced the rest of his body. Then a new wave hit. It demanded growth. He could feel the energy triggering something within him. Energy flowed out, spreading along his roots to the stumps of trees cut down.
The stumps stretched taller, twigs sprouting from seemingly dead stumps, then they grew taller, into saplings and finally into new trees. As it was the middle of the night, few in the lumber camps were awake. The sentry tree felt joy as its brethren were reborn. Less than half an hour after it began, each of the sentry trees stood in the middle of forests reborn. They towered over their brethren in both height and girth, but their brethren nonetheless appeared to have been there for three centuries or more at minimum.
~|~
Werek could see that Mellin was focused the entire time. He literally saw the trees grow forth. As the forest returned to claim its lands back, They moved forward, and they could see how the forest continued expanding well after the first waves. The forest clearly sought to claim more land, and he had a strong suspicion that they would not be happy to be cut down again. That they would fight against such.
Besides, the Settled invaders were now stuck deep inside the forest. They were at its mercy now. And the forest would not be gentle with them. It remembered the pain they had caused. He smiled.
~|~
Making the forest grow back was easy. Expanding it further than it had been in a century was simplicity itself. Dividing the Settled camps was effortless. She had never before been as powerful as she was now. She sent a notice to the seers to send the wildborn out to deal with the invaders who suddenly found themselves deep inside the forest.
Then she instructed the wood of the invadersโ axe handles to grow into trees too. The wood was all too willing to obey. When she finished for the night, no dead would would remain in the reborn forest. Be it axe handle, log, cart or chest. All would be restored to how nature had meant it to be. The power was there, her duty demanded she use it. And use it she did.
~|~
The next day, thousands of Settled awoke to find themselves deep inside a forest that had not been there before. Their tents had collapsed, trees had grown around and out of their equipment. Their camps divided. And all around them, wildborn stood by the hundreds. Some tried to fight, despite having few weapons remaining at their disposal. Others surrendered. The majority were simply in shock, not understanding what had happened.
Those who fought died. The rest found themselves taken captive. Never before had so many Settledโincluding an entire armyโbeen captured. They were tied up, split into groups and led deeper into the forest, where they would be contained for judgement by the seers.
Some would be killed, others would not die. Time would determine their fates.
~|~
The Seneschal woke to find himself trapped beneath a tree, its roots having grown over his feet. How he had not been awoken by this, he did not know. But he knew that his fears had been true. And that he had failed. That there were several wildborn standing around him, made that fact obvious. When they saw his predicament, they laughed and departed.
He did not understand how they could leave him there. He was their enemy! Then he felt it. A stabbing pain in his leg. It was slow but persistent. It gnawed into him. He felt a chill down in his trapped leg. It was like he was bleeding, but no blood pooled upon the ground.
The stabbing increased in strength and depth. Its magnitude grew with each heartbeat, and he became weaker and weaker. The roots in turn, grew thicker and thicker. He soon began to realize that they were literally sucking him dry. He screamed with what voice and energy he had left, even as the roots dug their way deeper into his leg.
Upon the second day, roots had expanded all the way up to his hips. The agony was beyond words at this point. He shouldโve been dead long ago, but he was not. Something kept him alive. That horrified him more than anything else.
~|~
The lord in turn never got any word from his troops at the border. Not that he needed to. Overnight, the forest had regrown and expanded all the way to the fields outside his own castle. โImpossibleโฆโ he muttered when he saw the new forest. It simply wasnโt possible for such forest to have appeared overnight. But clearly it was so despite being supposed to be impossible.
All he had gained, all his success, ruined. His promise to his peers all for naught. The full strength of his army slain. He had overnight gone from being one of the most powerful nobles in the lands to a pauper. Only once he got over that shock did he go to where the unsold logs had been stored. To his horror, even they had sprouted. A small, thick forest covered the yard these had been in. He simply couldnโt comprehend it.
There was no alternative. He would not accept this shame. He could not. Thus, before any could speak with him, he climbed onto his own battlements and jumped down onto the ground below. The drop was quick, his death instantaneous. Simple, yet effective.
~| Epilogue |~
Over the following month, in particular following the loss of their lord, that entire region fell under the sway of the wildborn. The forest itself reclaimed lands not covered in forest for more than an eon.
About three months after the birth of the agent, thousands of new wildborn appeared, Nature having taken care of those taken captive by the wildborn on that fateful night. Some were fully human, others were not. The war which had been at a standstill for centuries continued to go in favor of the wildborn. Occasionally, raids and strikes were led by a two-legged wolf. She controlled the forest itself, and fortresses were laid to waste in her wake.
Peace began to return to the land.
Three hundred years of war. That tends to leave its mark. Not that anyone were sure that those numbers were correct. It was not as if anyone kept an accurate record of how long they had fought. Winning the war was the goal, not keeping any accurate records about it. For Mellin, fighting those accursed Wildborn was all she knew. From the moment she began to understand speech, her family taught her the horrors of the Wildborn.
They burned Wildborn dens and forests, the Wildborn destroyed their villages and fortresses. It was a never-ending cycle. Sheโd seen it all, it felt like. At just shy of twenty years old, Sheโd seen many a battle. Few things could surprise her any longer. Where she and her fellow warriors shouted to each other, their foe never spoke a word. It was eerie even after so many years of fighting.
Usually, they had no warning when the Wildborn attacked, which is why they were always on alert when at the front lines, crooked though the lines were. She had heard tales of how the lines had once been clearer, of how people had lived without war, but she did not really believe them.
One moment, she and the others stood upon their circular fort of good coruban marble, the field surrounding it bare and empty, the occasional roots of severed trees sticking up from the ground. The next moment, a large horde of Wildborn were rushing out of the forest edge. Mellin could immediately see that the horde outnumbered them at least three-to-one. This would be a tough fight, she knew.
By the time their foe had crossed a third of the field, her bow was strung and drawn. She needed but a second to aim and loose her first arrow. She saw it arching across the field, burrowing itself in the throat of a Wildborn, killing it instantly. By the time it hit, her second arrow was already in the air and all her companions were firing their bows too. Scores of foes had fallen before the Wildborn had even crossed half the field. Though focused only on the fight before her, Mellin could hear the spearmen below readying themselves and the axemen climbing the ladders.
It was well-known that walls, even of good coruban marble, would not stop their foe long. Wildborn were superb climbers and they carried picks excellent for climbing even vertical walls. The spearmen below would thrust through the wall, their spears fitting through the slots in the wall, but it would never be enough for all. Atop the wall, she and her fellow archers would try to eliminate as many as possible, with the axemen soon replacing them.
Once done with her first two quivers, Mellin ran for the nearest tower, an axeman taking her place on the wall. Archers like her were too valuable to waste on close combat. Though some of her arrows had missed, she had downed at least a dozen Wildborn. From atop the tower, she would down dozens more, protected behind large and thick shields.
As she climbed the tower, small rocks had begun to fly. Enemy slingers had come onto the field. A rock hit right beside her, but thankfully none hit her. Shortly afterwards, right before she reached the top, she heard a grunting yelp from below, followed by a scream and a sickening thud. She did not have to look to know a fellow archer had fallen to her death.
She quickly slid between the shields, drawing forth her bow once more and began drawing arrows from the ample quivers at the towerโs top loosing them on their foe with the ease of years of experience. From her high vantage point, she could see that Wildborn had already come up against the wall like a wave of water breaking against a rocky shore. Climbers were already climbing, the spearmen doing their best to push them off, even as the axemen prepared to chop them apart if they reached the top.
But despite the importance of them not gaining the wall, the climbers were not her task. Her task was the slingers. Though not as precise as a longbow, she had long ago learned not to underestimate Wildborn slingers. Their rocks were powerful enough to shatter the thick skulls of horses at a distance equal to that of a longbow, though most slingers could fire less frequently than an archer.
She spotted one within seconds. She did not hesitate to shoot, even as other archers mounted the tower and took up places beside her. Her first arrow struck true, burying itself in the Wildbornโs right ear, the head going deep into his skull. He fell to the ground, dead.
Before, down on the wall, she had not been at a high enough vantage point to spot the slingers. Now that she was, they would begin focusing on her. Seconds after remembering that lesson, the rocks began to strike at the towerโs shields.
Mellin did not pay them any heed. Her only focus was downing as many as possible. She lost all thought of time. All that mattered was shooting arrows. The slingersโ rocks hammered against the shields, who in turn elicited ominous cracking sounds. She was just about to take aim at a particularly bulky slinger when a pair of rocks struck the shield right before her at the same time. She heard as much as saw something in the shield break and it fell straight down, its supports broken off. This left her very much exposed and her focus evaporated, her arrow going wild. She instinctively crouched down, watching through a small gap between parts of the tower as the slinger she had aimed to shoot make a strange gesture with his right hand. A bear pelt covered much of his body, tied down with some sort of straps. The ground beneath his hand churned and a rock the size of a childโs fist leapt up into his hand, the ground having spat it out.
Only when one of the other archers shook her hard did she jolt out of her fascination at his mystical action. She wondered if any others knew their foe could do such. Rising back to her feet, she pulled another arrow, taking aim at a wolfskin-covered Wildborn. Only then did she realize that the Wildborn she had observed shortly before had picked her as his target, and that his shot was already moving through the air. She started to dodge, but it was too late.
She had just begun to crouch down and to the side when the rock slammed against the lower part of her left pauldron. Unfortunately, a leather pauldron is nowhere near as strong as a horseโs skull, let alone stronger. Everything seems to move slower as the stone causes the pauldron to fold inwards from the impact. There is a sickening crack and her bowstring snaps forward as her arm can no longer hold it firm.
Her arrow flies from the bow, not even halfway aimed as her arm is pulled out of shape as a result of the slingshot. Blood starts flowing down her arm even as she sees her arm bend in a place it decidedly should not bend. To say this was painful and shocking would be putting it lightly. She falls down onto the tower floor, her eyes involuntarily eliciting a stream of tears as she screams in pain, all thought of the battle lost. One of the other archers crouches beside her, grabbing the halves of her upper arm and realigning them. The moment the archer does this, Mellin falls unconscious, being naturally oblivious to the fact that her arm is wrapped and splinted.
~|~
Down on the field before the fortress, Werek smiles to himself. It was a good shot. Not only did he take out one of the foul Settled archers with a single stone, but he managed to draw another from the battle and unnerve the rest of the archers in that tower. He could not have done anything else but to aim for her, for he knew she had seen him summon a stone from the depths.
Their foe knew they could call on Nature, but not the degree to which they could do so. One of their greatest advantages lay in that lack of comprehension. Though he had aimed for the archerโs heart, he did not mind that it had been unsuccessful at killing her. The important bit was taking her out of the fight. But he did not pause in his fight the way she had. Already he had begun summoning another stone, his store depleted long ago. It jumped up from the ground and he slid it into the sling, taking aim for another archer in another tower.
As expected, the stone struck true, right between the archerโs eyes. It was a gift from Nature that the archers remained so still while aiming, for it made them perfect targets. The ground was with him, providing stones as needed. As the battle moved on, it became more and more apparent that it was turning in their favor. The number of archers fell rapidly, even as more of the climbers reached the top of the wall.
He knew he could thank the seers for this, for they had told them which fort to attack, which fort was undermanned. Even with their disgusting wall, they would not stand a chance against their assault. Many of his brethren would fall, but that did not matter. Some died so that others would live. It was the way of Nature.
When an arrow flew at him, he rolled to the side, hurtling a stone straight at the shield the archer hid behind, shattering the final support that held it up. Mere moments later, his cousin Nalen, whoโas was properโalso wielded a sling, hit the selfsame archer right in the eye with a small rock. It was a good, clean hit. He gave his cousin a respectful nod, then found a new target of his own.
Soon enough, they had taken an entire section of the wall and eliminated all the archers in one of the towers. The defenders appeared demoralized. He kept firing stones till the last defender was down. It took less than half an hour. It was a good fight. Their foe eliminated, Werek and the others moved forward, searching the fort for foes who were still alive. The most grievously wounded were given mercy and killed, the rest were tied up and taken captive.
He found that he was pleased to note that the archer whose arm he had broken was still alive. Though a foe, she was nonetheless worthy of respect. It was not at all a hard choice to decide to put her among the prisoners.
After they had removed anything of value from the fort, they gathered outside, lining up in a loose, large circle around it. Each of them held both hands towards the ground, calling on its power. At first, nothing happened, then ever so slowly, the ground began to shudder. Had he not been doing this many times before, he would have fallen from his feet. Ever so slowly, a spire of clean stone began to rise in the middle of the fort. Within minutes of its first appearance, it had grown taller than the tallest tree, and still it was growing both taller and thicker.
The fort was not large enough to contain it in the end, the walls crumbling as the displaced soil was pushed out. Any bodies still remaining in the fort were quickly buried. Soon enough, no trace remained of the fort at all. Far and wide, word of their victory would spread. The forest would quickly reclaim the field and all would be good. Nature always won out in the end. As the Wildborn picked up their prisoners and the loot, trees had begun to sprout forth upon the ground surrounding the spire. They returned to the forest from whence they had come, their duties to Nature done for the day. Other tribes would continue the advance.
~|~
On a far grander scale, far above all of these rather petty conflicts, events were moving on their own. As it is wont to do, the planet moved along its orbit, and the moon orbited around it again. At a distance far greater than any individual down on the planet would ever travel on their own, lay a vast field of meteoric ice. The planet and the moon were not limited by such things. They moved much faster. In fact, they would reach that field within a day.
~|~
Waking up was not easy for Mellin. She knew deep down that something was wrong. She had been in some battle, but the details escaped her mind. Something had happened and her arm broke. A swing? A wing? No. Neither of these made sense. As she thought and tried to get it all to add up, she felt soothing waves strike at her. Some part of her fought against it, but they were relentless.
In the end, she found it impossible to resist and slid back into unconsciousness. At the end she knew on some level that her body was still broken. In her stupor, she had not once asked important questions like where she was or why she could not see or move. Those thoughts did not enter her mind.
~|~
Their victory in battle demanded a party. It was the tradition. Werek knew that well, as did the others, for none needed to say anything. They had successfully incarcerated the prisoners, preparing them for the truth, for Nature. Meanwhile, as Nature had its way, the tribe prepared for the celebration. Foragers foraged, hunters treated the meat and cooked it and the rest set up everything else. Nothing was spared, for Nature always provided for those who deserved.
Come evening, and everyone gathered beneath the sacred ash canopy. They knew well that no danger was to be had, for their much-hated foe never ventured this deeply into their domain. Especially after a defeat like the one they had been served this time. It was a good time. In one cycle of the seasons, no doubt there would be many new younglings, as was the way of nature.
~|~
Things were also happening elsewhere, deep within the lands of those called the Settled. The mood there was not one of partying. It was not joyful. In fact, the people in that particular roomโboth of them menโwere beyond angry. They were furious. One of them was dressed in clothes of fine weave and cut, but lacking in ornamentation. The other wore clothes considerably more opulent, with ample embroidering and ornamentation.
The former was seated in a large chair with thick padding and a tanned animal fur, while the latter stood nearby. Though it was clear that there was a significant difference in rank between them, it was also clear that there was common respect.
The highest-ranking of them, without a doubt a Lord, looked up from the letter in his hands, furious. โAnother! Another fort has fallen with no survivors! And just to mock us, they've put up one of those accursed spires where the fort stood!โ
โWhich one, my lord?โ the other man asked, curious. โWhich fort is down?โ
The Lord crumbled up the letter, rose to his feet and tossed it in the fire. โGlendale. One hundred and fifty-one trained warriors lost.โ
The Seneschal was silent for a moment, clearly digging through his memories. โMost unfortunate. There were many veterans stationed there to train and inspire the recruits. The recruits are easily replaced in a few months. Veterans of the caliber lost there will take years.โ
โHow is it possible that they know exactly which forts are weakest and most vulnerable? It should not be possible.โ
The Seneschal smiled grimly. His Lord was both wise and experienced for his age, but he was also young and idealistic. He simply did not know many of the things that came with experience. โThe answer is simple, my lord. Traitors and spies. Training and spies. It is the only plausible explanation. Trust none who do not owe you their lives.โ
โEasier said than done, my friend. In my position I have to deal with far too many to only have to rely on the few who owe me their lives. The spies have proven themselves hard to find. The only confessions of espionage have been acquired by the inquisitors, and they're not even worth the ink they're written with, let alone the parchment they're written upon.โ
As he agreed with that, the Seneschal nodded. He found inquisitors beyond useless for anything other than delivering pain to captives. Interrogation had never been their forte.
The Lord muttered beneath his breath. โIs it even possible to win still? We've fought the Wildborn for centuries, not once gaining any significant ground. They never meet our armies on the open field of battle, and when we send forces to hunt them, the forces never returnโฆโ
โStop that, my lord! We have to win this war! For the sake of our nation, for our way of life! Would you want your children's children to roll about in the mud, never knowing their noble heritage? To rut out in the open like animals?โ
โNo, my friend. I would not want that... We must raise larger armies. Cut down their forests. Burn their dens. Anything to win this war, once and for all!โ
To this his companion smiled, knowing his liege was once more in a good mood. โTo victory!โ he said, raising a tankard of sweet mead.
โTo victory!โ The lord shouted, raising his tankard in turn and taking a deep quaff.
~|~
Back within the forest, Mellin once more found herself waking up. It was a slow, timeless process. All the while, the comfortable, soothing waves urged her to relax, to go back to sleep, but she was not ready. Her mind desired answers. Needed to understand.
She could not see, but did not think about that. Her body ached and tingled all over, especially her left arm. Not really knowing why or understanding how, she could feel how the break was already fading. Some part of her said it should not be possible, but the other more logical part decided that it had to be possible, otherwise it would not be so. Neither of those questioned the how. The first part could not accept it, while the second did not care about the how. It only cared about results, not the reasons for them.
All she could do was continue thinking about what had happened to her. About what had broken her arm. For an indeterminate amount of time, she found no logic to explain it. The words from before seemed related, but not right. Out of the green, she drew a word. โSlingโ. It rang true. Her arm had been hit with a sling!
Some part of her found satisfaction in that discovery, even if it had a lackluster understanding of what exactly it all meant. It certainly couldnโt have been a big problem, seeing how she was almost mended already. Maybe she had done something against her nature? Maybe it had been a moment of madness? She did not know. As she lay wherever she lay, she was oblivious to her surroundings. To what they were doing to her.
Already, her clothes had begun to dissolve, the sum of the holes in her tunic being larger than the remaining cloth. The leather of her half-armor had fared better, but it would never again protect anyone from anything. Whatever she lay in, had eaten halfway or more through it all. Of her boots, the soles were the only part still recognizable. But this she did not know. Nor would she have cared. Her thoughts were elsewhere. Whatever it was that ate at her clothes, it seemed not to affect her body the same way. She certainly had no wounds, no scrapes and her skin covered all it should.
Satisfaction flowed through her for her success at figuring out what had broken her arm. Now all that remained was figuring out what this โslingโ was. Slowly she began to think, even as the waves flowed over her once more, soothing her back into unconsciousness.
~|~
The planet was oblivious to all of this. Or rather, it knew of it, but did not care. All it cared about at the moment was the field of meteoric ice it was currently passing through. Soon, the ice would begin raining down upon both planet and moon. By the time it would reach the ground, it would no more hold the form of ice. It would rain.
The people knew of this rain season, but they did not know its origins. None of them were aware of how this had already begun to affect their moon. As more and more ice struck the moon, its mass had over the eons increased and the rudiments of an atmosphere had formed. None had any idea that more would happen this season. No idea at all.
Had any been able to watch the moon at this time, they would have seen just how spectacular the impacts were. Ice hurtling down onto the surface, breaking apart and throwing out scintillating shards in all directions. Alas, none were able to watch, for the rain obscured the skies.
~|~
Waking was always a slow process for the tribe the day after a full-fledged celebration. Some nursed regrets, others nursed hangovers. Some just wanted to sleep in. Whatever their reasons, none were up with the sun. Most weren't up and about by noon. None cared or complained.
In Werekโs case, it was a hangover. A particularly strong hangover. And a rather large hole in his memory. Hopefully he had not been doing anything he'd regret. Or at least not anything regrettable that anyone else both had observed and would remember. After all, if nobody remembered it, it had effectively not happened. In order to clear his head, he decided to jump into the nearby stream.
As expected, the water was anything but warm. But then, it was morning and it did come from the mountains. But he had not jumped in to get warm. He did it to wake up and cure his hangover. After climbing back out, he shook himself dry and got dressed. First priority would be to check on his prisoner.
He walked to the appropriate tree, a shadowbirch. Though it was an important tree for the entire tribe, they did not live beneath its vast canopy. Nor were any dens constructed in its branches. It was far too sacred for that. Werek approached it with great reverence. Its bark had a cobalt black tone, virtually without any roughness to its texture. A full dozen men and women could link arms and still not manage to circle the trunk.
Had he not known better, he could have thought it a pillar of black stone, so smooth was it. But he knew better, and as he circled the trunk, he found what he sought. At its bottom, massive roots fanned out. Between two of these lay a capsule of sorts, sort of like a cocoon, only grown from vegetative matter and not from flesh and blood or insect silk. Within it lay his prisoner. With the same gentleness as he would use on a newborn, he laid his hand upon its surface.
It was smooth and slick to the touch, yet his hand did not get wet. If he were to press against it, it would give. Though it was not a thick shell, it was impossible to see through. No light could pass through it. It was ever so slightly warm to the touch, so the one within was clearly still alive. He could only smile. The woman had no idea what was happening to her. No idea at all.
The elders had described the process to him in detail. Just yesterday, she had been a hated foe, but already that was no longer the case. For now, she simply was. She had no sides at the moment. The sins of the so-called Settled folk were being washed away, her body restored to how Nature had intended it to be. Untainted. Pure.
Satisfied that she had survived the ordeal of joining with the shadowbirch he pulled back, being careful not to step on any of the more fragile roots. At this point, there was nothing for him to do where the prisoner was concerned. She would most likely live, that was the important bit.
~|~
Eleven days had passed since the last spire sprouted. The lord looked over the reports from the various forts across the fluctuating borderlands. Though there had been numerous skirmishes, there had been no real battles. But he knew that would soon change. Ever since the discussion following the sprouting of the last spire, the forges had been working day and night, ceaselessly smithing axes for what was to come next.
Thousands had been conscripted. Trained to wield axes, both for battle and for cutting trees. When he finished, the border would once again be a straight line. The wood would be ferried back, where it would be used for something productive. If only those accursed Wildborn would understandโฆ but of course they would never do that. A real shame.
But it would be their loss. Society had long ago moved on from the time of living like beasts in the woods. The Wildborn had failed to adapt. Soon they would truly face the consequences of their choice. They would move in all at once, companies from the army spread evenly among the conscripts, for he had no doubts that the Wildborn would not appreciate progress. It was too bad the rains had come. Burning the forest would have been extremely satisfying.
~|~
Time was gone. Mellin no longer had any concept of it. Nor did she care about the loss. How could she, when the concept was no more? Her body surrounded her. This she knew. Fluid, thick and viscous, surrounded it. And then there was some sort of membrane. Beyond that she knew nothing.
Nothing remained of her clothes, not even a scrap of leather. She did not care. There was no light and the fluid felt good against her bare skin. Some part of her knew that her body was undergoing changes, but no part found that to be worrying. Her knowledge of the conflict between the Wildborn and the Settled, knowledge which had shaped her entire life previously, was gone. The only conflict of relevance was the eternal conflict of nature and life: prey versus predator.
At one point, the choice had been before her. Prey or predator. She had chosen predator. She would not be subject to othersโ whims any longer. There was no knowledge in her mind about what the choice entailed, only knowledge that it had been the right choice.
Nature was all around her. She knew this. She was part of Nature. Nature was part of her. That was the way it should be. The way it had to be. At some point past, present or future, she had been blind to Nature. Which she did not know. She could not know. Logic implied that it could not be future, though. But that did not matter, for her place is where she is and was and will be. Everything would be right. As this happened, she let the soothing waves flow over herself once more.
~|~
Tens of thousands of men marched towards the forest. The lord observed all from a distance. He had no need or wish to be at the front. With the aid of skilled officers, the line remained straight. When the first met the trees, the line halted to give them time to cut them down. Others, behind the lines, would then delimb the fallen trunks and move the logs to the carts.
It was methodical and effective. Many would not have work for a long time, but the lord did not care. All he cared about was making the border a straight line which would be possible to monitor properly. His efforts were greater than any in decades at least, if not since the war itself started all those years ago.
He had grand plans for the border once it was straightened out. He would build forts, dig spiked trenches and set up walls all along it. No Wildborn band would ever catch his forces off-guard again. That the lumber could be sold at a premium was only a bonus. Whole villages would be built with the major forts. In time, those villages might even grow into cities. One way or another, the forest would be pacified. He would see to it.
~|~
Initially, the Wildborn tribes did not pay much attention to the increased effort by the Settled. They had observed the forces at the forestโs edges, but had quickly seen they were far too large to contend with as individual warbands. They were unaware of the goal these Settled invaders had. The rains renewed the forest around them, lulled them into a sort of complacency. As the nutrient-rich rains fed the greater forest, the pain of the falling trees was dulled, rendering the seers blind to the scale at which it all was happening.
But it was not to last. As hundreds of trees fell each day, Natureโs pain grew to overwhelm the bounty granted by the rains. The forest was hurting. Nature began screaming in their minds. Something had to be done.
~|~
Far out, in the depths of space, the planet and the moon were passing the far edge of the field of meteoric ice. This naturally meant the end of the rains, and the sun began to shine in full once more. Enriched by the rains, the moonโs atmosphere had at long last thickened to the point where it could truly absorb sunlight. Within hours of the sunโs return to full majesty, the long-awaited changes began upon the moon. It was a slow process, yet far faster than many wouldโve said it should be.
All over its surface, small growths had begun to sprout. Within days, they would begin to cover the moon, bringing it to full life. But of course none upon the planet could see such yet, being far more focused upon their petty conflicts.
But there was one thing that did notice. The spirit of nature that inhabited the world below. Nature, its denizens called it. The ones that knew of it. The others were oblivious, fought against it. But they were as children to it. Eventually they would grow up. Or they would pass. Others had done so before, others would do so later. It noticed the birth of a smaller, more primitive being akin to itself upon the moon. It rejoiced. At long last, it would have company.
~|~
Deep within the forest, the shadowbirch creaked softly. Beneath its boughs, rested a series of large, roughly spherical orbs, each and every one made from its roots and bark. It had no sentience to speak of, nor was it truly aware, but like all the other trees, like the animals and insects, it was part of the forest. It was alive.
Though technically separate organisms, the trees had ages ago grown tightly enough together to nonetheless be connected. A root here, a pair of twigs there, a den beneath an ancient oak elsewhere. Sometimes, these connections were faint, other times they were strong. And connected as they were, they felt the deaths of their brethren. And then there were the sages.
These elders of the tribes had once been great hunters and craftsmen. Blessed mothers. Unfortunate youths. They each had a unique story, yet all were part of a single whole. Upon becoming sages, they had given up their lives as regular people for the betterment of all. Some were kind, others were cantankerous. Some were brave, others cowardly. In the end, they were the representation of the sum and parts of all the tribes. Born of man, joined with tree, they had become parts of the forest. They felt what it felt, and in return, they offered it what it could not have on its own. Sentience. A true symbiosis.
As the edges of the forest were cut down, they felt the pain. They interpreted it. And then they informed their flesh and blood brethren, even as their sap-filled brethren had informed them. The eldest of them who still lived had long ago merged so deeply with the forest that their essence was less flesh and more tree. Some could neither see nor eat, speak nor drink. Only the other seers could communicate with them. It was a strange fate, but one that was respected more than any other in the forest or the tribes.
They felt it all. Every axe, every footstepโshoed or notโas the Settled violated their forest. Initially, it was as it had always been, a mild ache, an itch that would not go away. But now it had grown like a festering sore, it became impossible to ignore. One by one, if they retained the capability for it, they began to scream and sob in pain. Deep down, they knew it had to be stopped. Before it was too late.
~|~
The Lord smiled. The plan was working out exactly as he had intended. Not one of his lumbering camps had been hit by the Wildborn. His men were too numerous, too powerful. Already the frontier had begun straightening out. Soon he could begin fortifying the border. Or rather, soon the men he had conscripted could do it. He certainly had no intent of ever touching a shovel, pickaxe or any other tool. He would, with the aid of surveyors and architects, plan the new border defense. Once his neighbors saw how much more efficient his border was, they too would fall in line. It was inevitable.
Those brutish Wildborn would learn not to cross him. If they tried, he would see them dead. Quite simple, really. The question was whether the forest would dry out enough for fires to ravage them, and whether he should use such. On one hand, a fire was so much more effective, but on the other it reduced profits. The new wood was selling at a premium. Old growth oaks, ashes and birches were worth fortunes in the right hands. In his hands.
But he also knew that he should not let profit blind him to the real purpose of this whole venture; winning the war. If he needed to burn it all to do so, he would. Without batting an eye. He and his ancestors had invested far too much in this war to let it end in anything other than victory.
~|~
Discord had entered the cocoon. Mellin could feel that something was wrong outside. She did not know what. She could feel how she was needed, but she also knew that she was not yet ready. That held her back. Over the past indefinite time, she had begun to once more have a sense of time. It was both strange and disconcerting. But even with the new sense of time, something told her it was not the one she had had before.
She no longer cared about before. There was now, and there was the future. The past was of little import, for it could not change. The present was where changes were made, and the future was what could be changed. When ready, she would change the world. It was as inevitable as the seasons passing. Like her cares, she knew her body had changed. Her arm had not only healed, but it was stronger than ever before. Her entire body was stronger than before. She knew this.
The discord flowed through her. It hurt to feel the forestโs pain. She wanted to help, but she could not do so yet. Slowly she began willing her body to adapt faster. She had no way of telling if it had any effect, but it certainly did not slow things down. She was looking forward to fixing the world. It was her purpose.
~|~
The spirit which by many was called Nature could feel its children being in conflict. It was not happy, but as of yet, it could not fix it all properly. Its agent was not ready, nor were its agentโs agents. Its agent was not even aware it would have agents. So young, it was.
However, the conflict was not yet serious in its mind. It would take some effort to mend, but only some. That would be a suitable initiation for its agent. Till then, it would have to consider means of slowing down the conflict. Not doing so would make its agentโs task more difficult than necessary. That would not do.
At the same time, it could feel its newborn sibling slowly taking shape upon the moon. The sibling was already exploring the confines of its domain. That made the spirit joyous. It was not yet mature enough to be reached out to. But that did not matter. It would get there eventually. That knowledge made it wish to reward its own children, good and bad alike. Perhaps that would make them fight less?
~|~
The suffering of the seers moved the Wildborn as no other force had, save nature itself. No matter what his or her origin, each seer had their universal respect. Unlike the Settled, mustering a force of trained fighters did not take months. Most among them knew how to hunt, and it wasnโt particularly hard to switch from four-legged targets to two-legged ones. Especially not when the latter did not try to flee.
As hunters, they were already trained, and they never used complex tactics the way the Settled did. They fought as individuals working towards a common goal. The Settled were foolish enough to think they could fight as a single whole. Men simply weren't built for that degree of cooperation.
Thus, all the Wildborn needed to do to muster the equivalent of an army was to collect the hunters. A simple thing done in less than a day. To teach them the nuances of hunting men, if they did not already know, a few days at most.
As such, but a few days after the seers revealed how they suffered, a thousand hunters moved towards the borderlands. Not as a single cohesive force, but as independent individuals, all happening to go in the same direction. The Wildborn detested moving in a single large horde.
Although Werek sought to join them, he was denied the opportunity by the Seers. Only those approved by them were permitted to depart. He begged, but was refused. Apparently they needed him to watch over his prisoner. They claimed his prisoner wasโฆ special.
He had to remain in the environs of the tribeโs shadowbirch. Though he may have wished to be with the ones going to fight, he would never disobey the seers. His loyalty to tribe and forest was far too deeply entrenched to disobey a direct command.
~|~
The Lord heard about the Wildborn counter-strike shortly after it came and went. He had been expecting it. How could he not have been? Heโd done his best to ensure they were provoked, even as he tried to ensure safety for his own.
Though the counterstrike happened a while before he was notified, that did not matter. His men knew exactly what to do. They pulled back momentarily, luring the Wildborn into the well-prepared trap. All at once, hundreds of archers let loose. Veteran axemen jumped out of the shallow pits wherein they had hid, killing all those who had been hit but not killed outright. And dismembering the corpses, just to be on the safe side. A battle which no doubt the Wildborn expected to be in their favor he had instead caused to become a slaughter. The lord could not complain about that turn of events.
Though some of his warriors wanted to pursue, his seneschal made sure that the officers stopped that. Killing them at the new edge of the forest was the plan. Pursuing them into the forest would be playing into the enemyโs hands. It would be venturing into their domain. Ambushes would practically be guaranteed there. This had been a victory. Neither he nor the seneschal wanted to have that balanced out by a foolish pursuit.
Thus, their forces did not pursue. All they did was remain at alert, even as the woodcutters prepared to continue their work of straightening the border. Though it was doubtful the Wildborn would attack like that again, the lord knew well that nothing was 100% certain with such primitives.
~|~
The survivors of the hunters returned. Less than a third of those who had left. Werek was stunned. He heard all about how much of a slaughter it had been. About how his brethren had been cut down by archers beyond count, how axemen had appeared seemingly out of nowhere to chop everyone who had been hit to pieces. The entire tribe and scores of other tribes went into mourning. Fathers, brothers and sons had been lost. Even some mothers and sisters.
If he had not hated the Settled before this, he certainly did so now. His cousin nalen was among the fallen. A good man, cut down in his prime, a young son and daughter left behind. Orphaned. Nalenโs wife had died giving birth to them.
Werek went to the shadowbirch, standing before the cocoon. In its presence, he swore to avenge Nalen, to take care of his children as if they had been his own, to teach them all he could. The shadowbirch did not react. Nor had he expected it to. The forest knew of his vow. That was all that mattered.
~|~
Far away from there, distanced both from death and human emotions, the moonโs infant spirit began to gain a rudimentary sentience. Already large swathes of its surface were beginning to get covered by vegetation, all of it lush. As spoken of in the ancient prophecies known not to it, the moon was turning green.
It had begun to understand what it was and what potential it had. But it still moved about with a childlike glee, causing ripples of sudden growth in the vegetation. The spirit called Nature could only watch with mirth. The young were careless but innocent. Nature knew the young one could not yet harm the moonโs ecosystem through its behavior. It was too limited still for that.
As it was pleased, so too were events in its domain aided. Plants everywhere grew just a hint better. Animals and people alike more productive and effective. Not enough for most to notice, but enough to make a subtle difference. Life was good.
~|~
The forest told Mellin about what happened to the hunters. She mourned them and her eagerness to be reborn only increased. She was needed. More so now than ever before. She could feel Nature surrounding her. It made her feel good. How she had once been so distant from Nature, she did not know. Nor did she particularly care, for she was close now. She could feel its joy even past the loss of the hunters. That made it easier to change. That pleased her. Soon, she would be able to emerge. That would be good. She had a role to play.
From the forest, she could feel someone watching her cocoon. She could feel the determination flow from the individual. It matched her own determination to act once complete. The forest told her of his vow. She liked it. He seemed like a good man. Taking care of family was paramount in her eyes. How could it not be?
The soothing waves of the forest were still there, but Mellin no longer had a need to obey them the way she had before. Now instead she listened to them, learned from them. It would soon enough be time for her to act on them. Understanding would be needed. Until then, she could only wait and change.
~|~
Spirits were high among the troops following the resounding victory against the wildborn. In the days following the victory, they progressed further than ever before. Hundreds of trees were cut down, debranched and ferried away each day. Each hour, the men moved the border further. With the increasing pace, the lordโs dream of a straight-line border seemed achievable. As the lordโs seneschal, he had the task of ensuring that the lordโs will was upheld in the field as well as on the parchment.
At the end of each day, they would put down a series of stones to mark the point of deforestation reached that day. With aid of the foliage removed from the logs before transport, they could easily work into the night, effectively getting a head-start on the next dayโs deforestation.
Many of the men, the seneschal had noted while moving up and down the line, needed no convincing to work harder and longer. Paying the Wildborn back for the thousands of friends and relatives murdered and the countless lives and villages destroyed was more than worth it.
The most telling part of the border having moved deeper than ever was how they passed fewer and fewer of the spires marking where forts had been destroyed. Some four weeks after the deforestation began, they no longer saw any. Their pace by this time was steady. At night the wildborn occasionally struck against sentries and lone cutters, but never in the numbers they had struck with that fateful day.
Thus, in the eyes of many, the wildborn were beaten. All they foughtโor rather, encounteredโwere the crushed remnants of a people defeated. Sure, they did not find any of the wildborn dens, nor any real numbers, but most people had never much of any idea of exactly how many the wildborn numbered in the first place. After all, who cared about the numbers of rats in the sewers? In the eyes of those, the wildborn were much like rats. Their success was inevitable.
The Seneschal did not quite share this opinion, but neither did he have any good explanation for the lack of resistance. It did not make sense. He suspected something was off, but he had no idea what. In his letters to his lord, he stated as much, but did not get much support. His lord believed his own success too much in the opinion of the Seneschal.
~|~
Though pained constantly, the seers had collected themselves again. With the steadiness of the enemy deforestation, They could focus better. It was not comfortable for them. But they subsisted nonetheless. The hunters sought to strike again, to pay the Settled back for the slaughter of their brethren, but the seers kept them back, only letting the occasional hunter strike in the night. Their communion with the forest told them to do it that way. As young as many of the hunters were, they did not always understand the reasons for this, but being allowed to strike occasionally alleviated many of these.
Never were these hunters pursued as they struck. The settled were too cowardly. That only made it more exciting for hunters. They regularly dared each other to aim for more challenging foes, just to outdo each other. The seers let them continue, simply because they were waiting. Waiting for something completely different.
~|~
The lord read his servantโs latest letter with curiosity. They had had almost universal success, yet his seneschal claimed there was some unseen danger, that the wildborn werenโt defeated yet, despite the clear evidence to the contrary. He simply couldnโt understand why his friend could not accept the truth. But at the same time, his friend had always been a wise advisor, both to him and to his father before him.
Perhaps there was something to it? Perhaps he had seen something that was not apparent to the others? Perhaps it was better to err on the side of caution? He thought it over for more than an hour before composing his reply.
In the reply, he authorized his seneschal to initiate whatever measures he thought necessary to ensure the success of the plan. That was easier than trying to dictate from far away what should and shouldnโt be done. After sending it on its way with a rested messenger, he decided to look over the schematics for the signal towers an up-and-coming architect had sent to him.
To say these towers would be unique would be putting it lightly. They would use massive concave crystals transmit simple light signals to neighboring towers. If he could build such towers, he could have large forces stationed only every second or third tower, or even further apart, cutting the costs of the border watch almost in half. They showed great promise, yet he had no idea how to make or acquire such crystals. In other words, impressive yet implausible. Whatever it ended with, these would not be a top priority. He resolved to let someone tell the architect to provide a source for the crystals before heโd ever approve funding for such projects. It was only fair.
~|~
Seeing the light of day was something Mellin had not done in months. Or at least she thought it was that long. Her time in the cocoon had been without any sort of way to keep track of things like time. In fact, she knew it had been timeless as the forest worked on her, for her view of time was not what it had been before. Not that she cared. What she had been before was not what she was now.
Now she knew she was ready. Nature had made her whole. Given her a purpose unlike any she had had before. She was more alive than ever. It was time to emerge. The time of cocooning was over. At her request, the forest called for the one who had brought her to this. Had given her this opportunity.
It would be joyous to move once more. She stretched a little in preparation, but did not try to break the cocoon. Her hands and feet ached to break it, but she would wait just a little longer.
~|~
It was the middle of the night. Werek was sleeping, his cousinโs twin children were asleep in his cabin when he found himself suddenly utterly awake. There was a strange whisper in the air. He had never before felt anything like it, but he knew it was important. The forest called.
He had no idea how he knew it, but he knew the shadowbirch needed him. Crawling out of his sleeping alcove in the den, he moved as softly as only a skilled hunter could, careful not to wake the children. It was ease itself to move silently through the center of the area the tribe had built their dens. Nobody else were awake. Nobody saw him pass. Other than the trees that is. But he could never hide from them. Especially not seeing how they had summoned him.
The canopy overhead was thick, the night as dark as night could be, yet never did he stumble. Never did he miss a step or hook his feet beneath exposed roots. It was as if the ground changed its shape to ease his movement. One could almost say that it was magical.
Maybe twelve, thirteen minutes after he had been woken, he stood beneath the shadowbirch. If the light in the forest elsewhere had been dim, here it simply wasnโt. The tree itself, solitary as it was, seemed almost to absorb light. But it was not all black, for the cocoons seated in its roots glowed. It was a dim, yellow glow, diluted by the thickness of the roots and tendrils covering the surface of the cocoons, but it made them strangely visible.
Most of the cocoons were quiet, unmoving, just glowing faintly. But not all. The cocoon containing his prisoner, the woman archer he had captured those months ago, was not quiet. It pulsed, the glow fluctuating. Somehow, he knew he had to touch it. He was no genius, but he knew well that it was Nature telling him to do so.
Without giving it any thought, he placed his left hand upon the handprint-like area that had appeared upon the cocoon. When he did, the roots began shifting, and he could see a vaguely humanoid shape within, the glow revealing it, yet the cocoon was not quite thin enough to truly tell anything about exactly what the former prisoner looked like.
~|~
When her former captor touched the cocoon, Mellin shuddered. The cocoon started vibrating. As this happened, the tendril-like roots who had for so long kept her in the dark shifted, letting her see just a hint of outside. The Nature encouraged her.
First she curled herself into a ball. Then she lashed out with her feet and arms at once, pressing hard against the cocoon. It stretched, distending against her outstretched limbs. She could hear it creaking, then there was a snap, and the cocoon ruptured.
The fluid in which she had rested and changed flowed out through the sudden holes in the cocoon, even as the roots pulled back, opening it up. She blinked her eyes, the cold air strange against them as she tried to get them to work right.
As the fluid flowed away, she sank to the floor, not quite ready to stand on her own. She rolled over onto her stomach, then coughed, spitting out the fluid that had filled her mouth, belly and lungs, then she sucked in air once more. Like upon her eyes, the air felt both cold and strange. But it also felt both good and right.
~|~
Nature sang out in joy as its agent was born out of the tree it had been within for so long. Its child was already taking its first breaths. At long last it could make the world right once more. Nothing, not even its other children misbehaving could make it anything but pleased. Time was at long last ready.
But for now, all it could do was watch. Its child would have to comprehend itself first. To get used to its new form. But Nature did not think in minutes and seconds. It did not even think in days. It thought in seasons, years and ages. It was the agent that would think in short timeframes. That was the purpose behind crafting an agent.
~|~
Mere moments after he had touched the cocoon, it ruptured. Had he not known it was right, Werek mightโve feared he had broken it, that he had done something he should not be doing. The fluid that flowed over and past his legs was like a sudden, strong current in a wide stream, only to fade away moments later. The fluid itself contained the strange glow he had seen and drained into the ground, leaving a faint light behind in the groundโs surface. At the same time, the branches above him began glowing with the same color, something he had never before seen a shadowbirch do. This illuminated the cocoon and the roots all around him, showing him exactly what was there. It wouldโve been mesmerizing, except his eyes were locked upon the being within what remained of the cocoon.
She looked both like the woman he had once captured and nothing like it. Her skin was smooth in some places, rough in others. No single word could be used to describe its color, but the life within was so apparent that he could only stare in wonder.
The woman had not been overweight, but neither had she been thin. As one of the Settled, he wouldโve said sheโd been just a touch plump. After all, the Settled were well-known for not moving as much as the wildborn did, eating more than they truly needed. Thus, she hadnโt been the ideal woman.
What lay before him now had none of that Settled plumpness. None of the excess fat. She was sleek, her muscles well-defined, even more so than any wildborn woman he had seen before. As she coughed out the rest of the cocooning fluid, he saw how her body moved. The strength inherent to it. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her hair, which had once been a pale golden color, was now the color of autumn grass mixed with the bark of triannual ash trees, seemingly shifting between the two all the time. Her ears held a slight point to them, and her legs were longer than before. Her hands were smooth, her nails almost claw-like, but tiny. As she curved her back, he could see the hairs on her back rising, and he realized it was not her skin that held so many colors, but a thin, sleek coat of fur. Like that of many watery animals.
And there was that small bit about her tail. Last time he had seen her, that had not been there. It was almost as long as her legs, but covered in the same sleek fur as the rest of her.
Shaken out of his shock, he gently knelt beside her. โIt will be all right.โ he said, gently placing a hand upon her back, stroking the fur there gently. She made no sound, but seemed appreciative of his contact. Ever so slowly, she stopped coughing, sucking alternating deep and shallow breaths, as if breathing was unfamiliar to her.
โCome, try to sit up. Maybe that will help?โ was all he said then, gently grabbing her shoulder and helping her sit back against a large root. She shifted her legs to do so, and he could at last see her face. It was like a humanโs, yet not. Her lower face was elongated just a little, and her open mouth held sharply pointed teeth. Her nose seemed darker, like that of many animals, and her eyes had a definitive wolven cast to them. And they were yellow.
Like on her back, her front was covered in the same thin coat of fur, from her uncomfortably bare crotch to the top of her head. Even her six small but well-defined breasts had the fur. He averted his eyes from her private parts as best as he could, simply smiling at her and looking over how her body had changed. Aside from the appearance of fur and a half-defined snout, the greatest difference mustโve been her feet. They were nothing like what they had been before. They were elongated, bent in new places and had a set of four sharp claws at the end of the toes. Her heels were almost gone, and what had been her last toe seemed to have shifted up there, the tiny reverse-articulated claw all that remained of it.
Her toes, once close together, were widely splayed out and more than twice as large as before. All in all, she had the look of a true, two-legged wolf to her. As a hunter who respected wolves, Werek could not find her anything but stunningly beautiful.
Stroking the small of her back in the same way had before, he looked at her kindly. โCan you speak yet? Do you have a name?โ During the battle, he naturally could not have asked her, and from the moment of capture till he had placed her into the cocoon, she had not once regained consciousness. Thus the questions were natural to ask.
~|~
The kindness of the man beside her did not go unnoticed to Mellin. She was still trying to fully understand her new body, to learn how to control it. His gentle strokes were relaxing, and even as he looked over her, she looked over both herself and the man beside her. He wore a large bear pelt over much of his body, though now she could see that it had been sewn into a tunic of sorts. It was not simply draped over him the way it had appeared during the battle she could vaguely recall.
Her body only bore passing resemblance to what she had once looked like. She could both see and feel the animalistic traits now inherent to it. Because of her connection to Nature, these traits did not freak her out. They pleased her. She could feel how her body was stronger than ever. She could control her toes and claws to a level she had never been able to do before. Her tail, both familiar and unfamiliar, easily obeyed her. Her chest looked decidedly odd, with six small breasts instead of the two larger ones she had had before, but her chest muscles would clearly keep them from bouncing about. She explored the confines of her mouth, feeling how different her jaw was compared to before, and found she did not mind. Her ears could hear more than ever, and her nose picked up scents she had never before noticed.
It was almost overwhelming. All that kept her mind from drowning in all this, was the connection to Nature and the gentle stroking of the man beside her. He was clearly a wildborn, but what fear and hatred she had held for him and his before was gone. She had been ignorant then. Now she knew they were innocent, that they listened Nature the way the Settled did not.
The silence was almost deafening. Then he spoke, his voice a clear but soft baritone. She looked at him, at his soft but scraggly beard, at she short-cropped hair on his head. She smiled.
โI can.โ The sounds were a bit strange, her mouth not quite working the same way as before, but her tongue compensating, fixing the changes to the sound that her elongated mouth made. โMy name is Mellin. What is yours?โ
~|~
He chuckled a little as her response came out half-garbled at first. It didnโt take a genius to figure out that she had never spoken with such a mouth before. But mere moments later, she spoke clearly, telling him her name and asking for his.
โWerek, son of Kalen, son of Algus.โ
~|~
Mellin heard his reply, then sniffed the air. She could smell that he found her attractive, but she did not have time to deal with such right now. Besides, her body was not in the right part of the cycle to reproduce. She knew men and women found it enjoyable to try even when outside optimal time in the cycle, but she saw no reason for that herself.
She would mate when Nature deemed it appropriate, not a moment before. It was not that she found him unappealing. It simply was not relevant at this point. โHave you a spare tunic? I find myself without one. The changes destroyed my old clothes. Not that they would fit me now in any case.โ
~|~
That was most certainly not the question Werek expected her to ask. He stared blankly out for a few moments, then remembered that the other tribesfolk had brought over a couple of baskets of his cousinโs belongings, including all his cousin had left from his long-dead wife. โYes, yes. I think I can find one. Do you feel up to walking yet? Or do you want to remain here while I find it?
~|~
With her clawed hands, Mellin pushed off from the root, stumbling about for a bit as her tail swished back and forth, messing with her balance. Only when the man, Werek, jumped up to steady her did she manage to keep from falling over. Her feet felt decidedly odd with the lack of a heel to rest upon the ground.
Add to that how her tail wanted to move on its own, and balancing was not easy. โI think Iโll walk with you. I need to get used to walking if I am to do what I have to do. But I wonโt say no to a steadying arm to lean on.โ
~|~
Werek nodded, and steadied her as he led the way to his den. It was situated halfway underneath a grand old oak, at the other side of the tribeโs settlement. Even as unsteady as her walk was, she did not make a single sound as she walked, her feet missing the few dry twigs that lay there. She truly was a natural hunter. He could only wonder at what it would look like if she ran through the forest. Though he naturally desired her, some part of him told him that she had no interest in him. Or rather, that she desired no mating at this time.
Though one part of him was naturally disappointed, another was relieved. He did not think that he was quite ready to have children of his own, especially not with his dead cousinโs twins to raise. It took but a minute to find the right basket, then another minute to find a tunic that had belonged to his cousinโs wife. As he dug through the basket, she steadied herself on the roof, holding onto an exposed root there. He passed it over to her, doing his best to avert his eyes from her very alluring nudity.
~|~
The offer of a tunic, even one that belonged to a woman now dead, was sufficient. Mellin pulled it on, noting how it did not quite fit right, but at least it covered up her nudity. That might help her companion ignore his animalistic urges to mate.
It was a nice enough tunic. She sniffed it, noting that it was made from the hide of a pair of does and had been treated well. It was remarkably flexible, not all that much changed from living skin when it came to flexibility. With a bit of fumbling, she managed to tie it up, not poking more than a couple of holes in it with her claws. Getting used to having sharp claws would definitely take more time, she realized.
โLet us go back to the shadowbirch. I need to awaken the others. They will help me do what I need to do.โ She did not offer alternatives. There were none. Nature needed her. It was her purpose. She would need the others, as primitive as they would be. Nature did not need them to be like her, so they would not be.
~|~
Guiding her back to the shadowbirch was easy. Not only did she seem to know the way already, but her walk had balanced out pretty well. If she could learn everything as easily and naturally as she did that, he had no idea how far she could go. Would he be able to tag along, or would he be left behind?
She stopped before the tree, looking at the faintly glowing cocoons wherein the other prisoners had been placed. They were smaller than hers had been, and unlike hers had so short a time ago, they did not pulsate. Werek did not know what would happen next.
To his surprise, she did nothing. She simply stood there, her legs spread apart and her hands at her sides. Then she spoke, raising her hands as she did. โAwaken. Serve your purpose. Rise!โ her shout was loud, clear and would probably wake up half the tribe, if not more.
At first, nothing happened, then the glow increased a hundredfold, both in the foliage and the cocoons. As one, all twenty-two of them broke apart and something came out. If he had not known better, he could never have thought that these creatures had once been men and women. Their hair had been replaced by foliage, their skin by bark. Their faces were unnaturally smooth, their hands resembled twigs. Their legs resembled woven branches more than anything else. He could see as their parts moved about. Where she had a wolf merged into her, these people had various trees spliced into them. The fluid of their cocoons flowed away, even as they lined up in pairs of identical tree types. Two birchfolk, two oakers, a pair of ashes, and eight other species of tree. Their eyes were a bright green, glowing clearly even in the light of the shadowbirch.
He saw no real sign of intelligence in them, though they were clearly alive and able to move about. He wondered about what their purpose was. Of the treefolk, he could see that the pairs included one of each of what had once been men and women. He could see that Mellin smiled as they emerged, moving among them and greeting them like old friendsโsomething he suspected they technically wereโbut she did not speak again. All she did was begin walking in the direction of the border. He did not know whether she wanted him to follow until she looked back and smiled at him. โCome.โ
The living, humanoid trees followed her, even as he found himself unable to resist following her too.
~|~
Nighttime always felt ominous to the Seneschal. This night, the forest was particularly quiet. Some uncertain feeling told him that it was the calm before the storm, but what storm? Were the wildborn planning to retaliate? Was he right about them not being as crushed as so many others thought? If they did attack, how would they do it? Would they strike openly, with a large army? Or would they strike from the shadows, like how the occasional wildborn took down sentries and such? There were so many questions and so few answers.
He did not like that. Nor did he like being incapable of sleeping. Though he had several tents at his disposal, all spread out along the line, he did not spend his time in any of them. Not being able to sleep, there was no point in trying. Besides, the moon was out tonight, though it looked strange, a curious tint to it. It almost looked splotched.
Making a mental note, he decided to ask some of the historians if they had ever seen such before. Following his lordโs reply with a blanket permission to do what he deemed necessary, he had doubled the patrols, tripled the sentry counts. No wildborn should get through the lines without him learning. He would see to it.
~|~
Being a sentry was a boring job. Usually, nothing at all happened. If you were lucky. Heโd heard of more than a few sentries who were less lucky. Most of those were dead or crippled. Heโd seen a dozen sentries all in the healersโ tents with shattered arms or legs. Worst of all, not one of those sentries had seen their attackers. It was almost as if the forest wanted them dead. He could only shudder at that thought.
He did not want to be crippled, but being dead did not sound any better. If there were any wildborn out there, he really hoped theyโd leave his stretch of border alone. It was impossible to see far into the forest, even with the sparse undergrowth in this section. Yawning, he stretched a little to loosen up his body.
Nothing was happening. The forest was quiet, only creaking a little in the wind. He looked to the east. There he could see the fires of a couple of camps and a few other sentries. Then he looked to the west. Again, fires and sentries. All quiet. It was almost eerie how straight the border was. Heโd been guarding the border before, and it had been more than once heโd been lucky if he couldโve seen more than the sentries on either side of him.
~|~
The journey to the border was uneventful for Mellin. She let her mind feel the forest around her, let it guide her to the place she needed to be. Neither she, Werek nor any of the others spoke. Though she had her doubts the others were capable of speech at this point. Though vaguely humanoid, she knew they were more tree than anything else. Like her, Nature had given them purpose. Unlike her, theirs was not independent. They had no true free will. She guided their path with her mind, just as the forest granted her way of passage.
Like so many other parts of the forest, it was a true symbiosis. Moments before they reached the edge of the forest, they stopped. Where they stood, the shadows kept them out of sight of the Settled sentries. Not that the sentries were all that observant. Even to her eyes it was clear they were bored.
โTime to give them a little excitementโฆโ she muttered, grinning at Werek as she knelt down, placing her hands upon the ground in front of her.
~|~
Nature was watching its agent begin doing as it had both intended and wanted. Its focus upon the agent could only be described as intent. The spirit continued watching everything else, but its attention was upon the agent and what happened there. It was not every age it created an avatar for its power.
The spirit had great hopes for this particular avatar. She showed great promise. Within hours of her birth she had already begun her work. It would find it interesting to see how she used the power invested in her.
~|~
For the sentry, no warning came of the attack. One moment he had stood on his post, thinking about what heโd do once off duty. The next moment, the ground all around him was roiling. He did not even have time to begin a shout of alarm before hundreds of roots shot up all around him, wrapping their tendrils around his body, immobilizing him and preventing him from raising the alarm.
He could only watch as something began walking out of the forest. At first he thought it was a woman, but something about the silhouette was off. Heโd been standing about a hundred paces from the forest edge when it happened. The individual did not run, but it kept a steady pace, heading straight for him.
Tied up as he was, he could not do anything. Not scream, not pull any weapons or even move his arms. When she got closer, he could feel the roots begin to shift again, digging into his uniform. To his horror, he saw the woman was only so in passing, for her head was crowned with ash leaves, not hair. Her skin appeared to be made of bark and her hands twigs. She did not stop before him, but walked at the same pace straight at him, slamming into his body, enveloping it. The roots dismantled his clothes and he could feel the woman-like tree flowing around him. Had he not been horrified, he mightโve found the whole event arousing. All light disappeared as the bark sealed around him.
He could not see as other tree-folk walked into and absorbed the sentries to both sides of him. It went on like that in a wave-like fashion to either side. Seeing how they all were positioned well outside the camps of the workers and warriors, nobody noticed that the sentries were all incapacitated. The moment the last sentry was enveloped, things changed.
The enveloped sentry could literally feel as his captor grew into him. Had he been able to speak, he would have screamed in pain. The tree fed on his blood and his flesh, growing huge in a matter of minutes. He could feel himself sprouting roots as the tree rapidly merged him into itself. Then he could feel his roots spreading to the stumps of the trees on all sides of him. It was strange yet horrifying.
Hundreds of stumps merged with his new form as his mind was absorbed. Soon all that remained was his bones, buried within the wood that had replaced the rest of his body. Then a new wave hit. It demanded growth. He could feel the energy triggering something within him. Energy flowed out, spreading along his roots to the stumps of trees cut down.
The stumps stretched taller, twigs sprouting from seemingly dead stumps, then they grew taller, into saplings and finally into new trees. As it was the middle of the night, few in the lumber camps were awake. The sentry tree felt joy as its brethren were reborn. Less than half an hour after it began, each of the sentry trees stood in the middle of forests reborn. They towered over their brethren in both height and girth, but their brethren nonetheless appeared to have been there for three centuries or more at minimum.
~|~
Werek could see that Mellin was focused the entire time. He literally saw the trees grow forth. As the forest returned to claim its lands back, They moved forward, and they could see how the forest continued expanding well after the first waves. The forest clearly sought to claim more land, and he had a strong suspicion that they would not be happy to be cut down again. That they would fight against such.
Besides, the Settled invaders were now stuck deep inside the forest. They were at its mercy now. And the forest would not be gentle with them. It remembered the pain they had caused. He smiled.
~|~
Making the forest grow back was easy. Expanding it further than it had been in a century was simplicity itself. Dividing the Settled camps was effortless. She had never before been as powerful as she was now. She sent a notice to the seers to send the wildborn out to deal with the invaders who suddenly found themselves deep inside the forest.
Then she instructed the wood of the invadersโ axe handles to grow into trees too. The wood was all too willing to obey. When she finished for the night, no dead would would remain in the reborn forest. Be it axe handle, log, cart or chest. All would be restored to how nature had meant it to be. The power was there, her duty demanded she use it. And use it she did.
~|~
The next day, thousands of Settled awoke to find themselves deep inside a forest that had not been there before. Their tents had collapsed, trees had grown around and out of their equipment. Their camps divided. And all around them, wildborn stood by the hundreds. Some tried to fight, despite having few weapons remaining at their disposal. Others surrendered. The majority were simply in shock, not understanding what had happened.
Those who fought died. The rest found themselves taken captive. Never before had so many Settledโincluding an entire armyโbeen captured. They were tied up, split into groups and led deeper into the forest, where they would be contained for judgement by the seers.
Some would be killed, others would not die. Time would determine their fates.
~|~
The Seneschal woke to find himself trapped beneath a tree, its roots having grown over his feet. How he had not been awoken by this, he did not know. But he knew that his fears had been true. And that he had failed. That there were several wildborn standing around him, made that fact obvious. When they saw his predicament, they laughed and departed.
He did not understand how they could leave him there. He was their enemy! Then he felt it. A stabbing pain in his leg. It was slow but persistent. It gnawed into him. He felt a chill down in his trapped leg. It was like he was bleeding, but no blood pooled upon the ground.
The stabbing increased in strength and depth. Its magnitude grew with each heartbeat, and he became weaker and weaker. The roots in turn, grew thicker and thicker. He soon began to realize that they were literally sucking him dry. He screamed with what voice and energy he had left, even as the roots dug their way deeper into his leg.
Upon the second day, roots had expanded all the way up to his hips. The agony was beyond words at this point. He shouldโve been dead long ago, but he was not. Something kept him alive. That horrified him more than anything else.
~|~
The lord in turn never got any word from his troops at the border. Not that he needed to. Overnight, the forest had regrown and expanded all the way to the fields outside his own castle. โImpossibleโฆโ he muttered when he saw the new forest. It simply wasnโt possible for such forest to have appeared overnight. But clearly it was so despite being supposed to be impossible.
All he had gained, all his success, ruined. His promise to his peers all for naught. The full strength of his army slain. He had overnight gone from being one of the most powerful nobles in the lands to a pauper. Only once he got over that shock did he go to where the unsold logs had been stored. To his horror, even they had sprouted. A small, thick forest covered the yard these had been in. He simply couldnโt comprehend it.
There was no alternative. He would not accept this shame. He could not. Thus, before any could speak with him, he climbed onto his own battlements and jumped down onto the ground below. The drop was quick, his death instantaneous. Simple, yet effective.
~| Epilogue |~
Over the following month, in particular following the loss of their lord, that entire region fell under the sway of the wildborn. The forest itself reclaimed lands not covered in forest for more than an eon.
About three months after the birth of the agent, thousands of new wildborn appeared, Nature having taken care of those taken captive by the wildborn on that fateful night. Some were fully human, others were not. The war which had been at a standstill for centuries continued to go in favor of the wildborn. Occasionally, raids and strikes were led by a two-legged wolf. She controlled the forest itself, and fortresses were laid to waste in her wake.
Peace began to return to the land.
by @Keyguyperson
"Roger that Tรกysha, no problems here, proceed as planned." Said Kaguya, her distinct Akitsukuni accent making her words barely understandable to the Hesperian ear. "We've got plenty of time to abort if the situation changes."
The tiny cabin wasn't all that conductive to communication. With all the fans and electrical equipment it was all but impossible to hear yourself talk, and it was even harder to hear whoever happened on the other end of the radio. One would have thought that the engineers would have done their best to make talking as easy as possible, but it seems that they never go the memo that communications means safety. Either that, or they considered strapping yourself to a giant tower of explosive liquids with the intent of activating the detonator about as dangerous as a walk in the park on a summer Sunday.
In fact, the only part of the ship's design that was at all good for communication was its incredibly small interior. There was barely enough room for the three astronauts inside, with their seats being so close that their spacesuits rubbed against each other. Once they had made it into orbit they would (ironically enough) be able to take off their spacesuits, which would give them a bit more mobility. What everyone was really looking forward to was docking with the landing module, which was essentially a teardrop trailer in space. Though they were supposed to sleep in the specialized restraints set up on the walls of the command module, everyone knew that two of them would be claiming the lander's beds.
Or perhaps it was just administration that screwed up with the communications, since they decided to put inclusion above communications themselves by hiring a pilot who needed a crash course in Cymmurian before even entering the training program. Then they did the exact same thing by getting a Teutonian to build the thing, then putting him on the ship. Sure, they were both Hesperian citizens, but both had fought for the Axis in the war. At least it had helped ease the tensions between the locals and occupation forces in the two countries, and certainly helped Hesperia's image.
"Ah... I ain't the only one who's nervous, right?" Said Conner, the only native Hesperian on the entire ship, in his own distinct South Hesperian accent. It seemed as though they had designed the crew specifically to make it hard to talk.
"You are." Said Gunther. "I designed the rocket, we'll be just fine,"
"Didn't ya also design the one that burnt down with three men in it?"
"That was me. But we got a lot of good data out of that accident, so that can't happen again. We've even got an internal quick release hatch now, so you can jump out whenever you want to."
"It'd be nice to do that right about now."
"And yet you're not." Said Kaguya, interrupting the conversation between the two. "Not every day you go to the moon, after all."
"Well that's why we're all here." Said Gunther, his accent turning the sentence into an onslaught of V-sounds. "The temptation to know outweighed our survival instinct."
"I'd say that's why our species in general is here." Said Gunther.
"You do have that-" Began Kaguya, only to be cut off by a radio message coming in through her headset. A short pause later she spoke again. "Mission control wants us to put on our helmets, we're getting close to the final countdown."
"Roger that." Said Conner as he attached his helmet to its corresponding ring on his suit, while Gunther did the same. What they didn't both do, however, was take a couple deep breaths to make sure the oxygen systems were working. Only Conner did that.
"So why'd they choose an Akitsukuni lady to pilot the ship for the moonshot?" Asked Conner, this time over his suit's internal radio.
"I was a military pilot, you know. I shot down two hundred Hesperian planes over the ho... hodeh... uhhh..."
"Hodรฉezyรฉรฉl." Said Conner. "The Hodรฉezyรฉรฉl Ocean."
"Why do you call it that anyways? It doesn't sound like it's related to the Cymurrian language at all."
"It isn't, the people native to this are called it that, so we do too. It's the same way with Tรกysha."
"That makes you a vigintuple ace." Said Gunther, who was significantly less disturbed by her past than Conner. Teutonia and Akitsukuni had been allies in the war, so there weren't any negative connotations to that number of kills to Gunther. For Conner, it meant that she might have killed his best friend. "Impressive, that makes you the second-best pilot in history. Second-best fighter ace isn't a bad choice for a spacecraft pilot."
"Oh, please. I'm just a bamboo cutter's daughter. I might have been a pilot, but that comes second."
"Still, that's incredible! You're second only to Hertz!"
"I actually knew Hertz, in the last few days of the war they flew him over to Akitsukuni in the hopes that the Reich would live on there. We flew escort for the battleship Kinai. Watching her get sunk by torpedo bombers admittedly wasn't my best point. You know, they asked him to be the pilot."
"They asked Hertz? You're telling me that the number one ace in all of history let someone else go to the moon?"
"He owed me a favor." Said Kaguya, just before another radio message interrupted her. "Roger that, Tรกysha. All systems green, you are clear to go into final countdown."
The cabin fell silent at that point, save for the whirring of machinery. Kaguya focused herself entirely on the spacecraft's controls in case the automated systems failed, while everyone else was given ten seconds to figure out just how absolutely horrified they were. Though the rocket was well-constructed, there was always a chance that it could simply explode. Everyone started to count down in their heads, if only to prevent them from being shocked by the liftoff.
10...
9...
"Ignition sequence start!"
The rocket started shaking wildly, an unpleasant sensation, but at least it let everyone know that they were counting right.
8...
7...
6...
5...
4...
3...
2...
1
They were still shocked.
The rocket lurched off of the launchpad, the deafening noise of its engine filling the command module. Within a a few moments, they saw the clouds go past their window. All the worries they had before the launch were replaced with pure excitement. They were going to the moon, more than that, they were going to be the first crew to ever actually land on it. Mere days after the launch, they would catapult humanity into an entirely new age.
Even Kaguya, who still had her hands on the controls, couldn't resist the urge to let out a spirited scream of exhilaration.
With a great lurch, the separation charges between the command module and the fourth stage of the spacecraft fired. And thus began the third hardest part of the entire mission: docking with the lander. There wasn't any automated program for the maneuver, since it could change drastically depending on the situation. It would all have to be done manually, which made things significantly harder since the entire lander module was encased within the fourth stage of the rocket. They had to be a 180 degree turn in orbit, then dock with the target all before the slight differences in velocity between the two craft made them drift apart too far.
"I really wish I could get out of this suit." Said Kaguya as she took hold of the controls with her gloved hands. "At least my arms aren't going to go numb like they did when we practiced on the ground."
She fired the maneuvering thrusters to pull the command module away from the now-defunct fourth stage. According to the book, she was supposed to do a single burst, then allow the spacecraft to drift before firing another burst to slow it down before performing the turn. She fired two extra bursts. Unlike the actual rocket engines, the maneuvering thrusters were purposefully over-provisioned to avoid a situation in which the vessel ran out. The rockets were to be used for planned burns, takeoffs, and landings. The thrusters were to be used for everything else. In the words of Gunther himself, they had "Taken how much thruster fuel you could ever possibly need according to the plan, and doubled it".
The small change of plans let the command module reach the required safe distance significantly faster than planned, and Kaguya performed the braking maneuver (which required her to fire the thrusters three times again) and began the spin using the thrusters. Even with her little breach of protocol, the entire docking maneuver as a whole was still rather tedious. Had she not been used to the tedious operation thanks to the training, she probably wouldn't have been able to handle the already near-insatiable urge to fidget around.
Slowly but surely, the craft began to rotate around to face the lander encased within the fourth stage. Kaguya could have fired the thrusters multiple times like she had done to pull away from the fourth stage, but spins were far more delicate. Putting more thrust into starting the spin meant putting more thrust into stopping it, a situation which could easily lead to her overcompensating and pointing the craft the wrong way. She had a problem with overcompensating for maneuvers anyways, no reason to push it.
"Steady... steady..."
She also had a problem with talking to herself while working.
"Theeeeeeeeeere we go." She said, stopping the command module's spin with the opposing thrusters. "Looks like there's plenty of room, let's do this quick."
The craft lurched forward four times, each one the result of her firing the thrusters. She fired them a few more times to keep it on the right trajectory, then started to fire the fore thrusters to slow down for the docking. At the point of connection, she couldn't let the command module be moving any faster than a particularly sluggish snail. Any more would cause damage to the docking mechanism, which would make the entire mission impossible to complete.
"Don't worry guys, I'm on top of it."
She fired the fore thrusters again.
"Forty feet... twenty feet... ten feet..."
The entire vessel creaked like an old wooden ship of line hitting a rock as the docking ports began to touch. Within a couple seconds it was over, and Kaguya breathed a sigh of relief.
"We have capture."
At that point, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. If not physically, they did so in their minds.
"Oh thank the lord!" Said Conner, who had taken off his helmet and was already working on the rest. "I can finally get out of this damned suit!"
"The sentiment is shared." Said Gunther, doing the same. "We've been in these things for what, three hours?"
"Thee hours and twenty four minutes, to be exact." Said Kaguya. "We've got about forty-five minutes before we need to eject from the fourth stage, so you two can take that time to do whatever you like. Stir the oxygen tanks or something. I'm going to go get the landing module operational because I desperately need to pee."
"This is why they shouldn't have put a woman on a spaceship with two men on it. Either send three men or three women, dammit!" Said Conner. "It'd be a hell of a lot easier for all of us if we didn't need to go into separate modules to do our business."
"You know, that's an interesting point." Said Gunther. "Kaguya and I are going down to the moon, and while I already had to give the lander two separate beds to keep things decent there simply wasn't enough room in the design for a bathroom. It's all bags and chutes. Am I supposed to just turn around and look at the wall?"
"I can go outside, the suits have waste disposal systems."
Conner started laughing at the comment.
"Ain't that something! You're planning to take a roadside bathroom break on the moon!"
"Hey, if it works it works. Now let me go get the lander in working order, because you don't want me performing the translunar injection burn with a full bladder. It's impossible to use these waste bags anyways, I'll bet it's even worse in microgravity."
"Don't you worry your pretty little head, we want the lander opened up as soon as possible too. It'll be nice to have some room to move around."
"We'll be holed up in this ship for ten days, and then there's the medical quarantine once we get back. You ought to get used to small spaces."
"Don't remind me, now get the lander started up! It's no good to float around without any room to float around in!"
"Don't have to tell me twice." Said Kaguya, pushing herself through the hatch and closing it behind her.
"Helios 11 to Tรกysha, we have main engine cutoff. All the numbers check out, we've successfully established Lunar orbit." Said Kaguya, just before she turned off the radio. "The air's a bit stale."
She quickly flicked a switch on the command module's vast control panel, ordering the spacecraft to stir the oxygen tanks. There were specific times they were supposed to stir them to keep the air as fresh as possible, but all the meticulous planning didn't account for random anomalies. The air might have been stale for some other reason, but in such a controlled environment, there weren't many other explanations. She then undid her restraints, as did the rest of the crew. It was hard to believe, but they were just a couple hundred miles from making history. The three of them were the tenth crew to have entered lunar orbit, and she and Gunther would be the first humans to land on it. All three of them flocked to the tiny windows of the command module to get a better look at the moon's grey, lifeless surface.
"Never thought I'd see it this close." Said Conner. "Wish I could go down there like the two of you. I guess the view from up here is pretty good though."
"Maybe you'll get to go on a later mission, we've got plenty planned." Said Gunther. "Hell, the Army even wants to build a base here."
"A base on the moon? Now what in the name of God are they gonna do with a base on the moon? Give the bird to the entirety of the Communist Bloc?"
"Probably. Not much else you can do from up here, I suppose they could make it an ICBM base. I guess they'd be interplanetary missiles instead of intercontinental ones, though."
"Great, so now wars are going to be fought on the moon and the Earth." Said Kaguya. "You would think that humanity would've stopped fighting when the absolute destruction of the biosphere became a possibility."
"I assumed you were against nukes, what with being from Akitsukuni and all, but I didn't realize you were an outright pacifist." Said Gunther. "It's not exactly something you'd expect from a fighter ace."
"I felt like I had to defend my country, so I did. Propaganda can get to you. You're Teutonian, you should know that better than anyone."
"That's true. I even voted for the NSTAP in the elections, nobody expected them to actually attempt to commit genocide. Once I found out what was happening, I wanted nothing to do with them."
"And yet you made the missiles they used to bombard Caerdydd."
"I just make the rockets. Where they land was never my department. The only reason I made those was because it got me closer to the moon."
"Uh... y'all should see this..." Said Conner, subconsciously pushing himself to the side to make room for the other two at his window.
"What is it, Conner?" Asked Gunther, who floated over to the window alongside Kaguya. He didn't need an answer. Upon the lunar surface there was some kind of bright flash, like that of a detonating bomb. Were that the case, however, it would have to have been more powerful than any explosive known to man purely due to its brightness. Within mere seconds, it had faded.
"I'll bet that was an asteroid impact, it's too bad we haven't started the TV broadcast yet." Said Gunther. "That would've made for some great content."
"Y'know, Helios 10 had an equipment failure during lunar insertion. Everything just shut off." Said Conner. "And then they saw something outside the window, it looked like one of those little flecks that you see when we empty the waste tanks, but they hadn't done that for hours. It disappeared, and that's when their systems turned back on all on their own."
"So we've already got a Flying Dutchman for space?" Said Gunther. "Are you trying to say this is related to that? I don't see how."
"I'll tell you how." Said Conner, in a voice one might expect to hear in a campfire ghost story. "It's aliens. I'll bet that dot of light outside their window was another spacecraft, which means that flash we saw might be related to it. Maybe they just launched something."
Gunther burst out laughing, a fact which would later be used by countless people to refute the arguments of conspiracy theorists regarding the Teutonian war effort and extraterrestrials.
"Oh, that's rich!" He exclaimed, barely able to control his laughter. "What would aliens want with humanity? It's not like they would eat us, and it would be a hassle to conquer a planet for its resources when there are God knows how many others out there without pesky natives. Besides, the moon is a barren wasteland. No species could possibly survive there, and there isn't any reason for them to go there either. Why would they attack a human spacecraft anyways? Especially in that manner. It's the equivalent of blowing on an anthill to mess it up, only for the ants to rebuild it in a few minutes."
"What, you never did that? It's fun to watch them build it up again, y'know."
"I don't think aliens would knock out our electrical systems for fun."
"Well, maybe they just didn't want us to see them. Could've been sizing us up or something, trying to see if Helios 10's lander could actually make it all the way down and back up again."
"If that's true we would all be dead right now."
"Do they have to be hostile?" Asked Kaguya. "It's not like hating humanity is an essential component of extraterrestrial life. If that speck of light that the crew of Helios 10 saw was actually an alien ship interfering with their systems, the aliens were probably the ones that fixed the problem."
"Does it really mater?" Said Gunther. "I mean, there definitely aren't aliens on the moon. We should be getting ready for the broadcast, Tรกysha's probably going to radio us soon and tell us to get ready."
"That's right, we really ought to be prepared for that." Said Kaguya. "I'll get the camera."
Kaguya flicked a switch on the control panel, then pushed the throttle forward.
"Helios 11 to Tรกysha, we have begun powered descent."
She and Gunther had departed the command module in the lander two hours ago, heading down to the lunar surface. The tiny craft would be their home for the next two days, though thanks to the demands of administration to "Keep things decent, goddammit!" it was significantly roomier than had been originally planned. It had cost multiple million more dollars to launch the extra mass into space, but it was all worth it in the government's eyes in order to have the population boost of sending two immigrants to the moon. The fact that one was a woman was even better, since the Communist Bloc had sent one into orbit a couple years back. It would have been absolutely pathetic if Hesperia had taken multiple decades to do the same thing.
They had needed to use a slight bit more fuel in their de-orbiting maneuver due to a small discrepancy in their original lunar insertion burn, but there was little doubt that the landing could go anything but perfectly. The lander had, after all, been designed to handle minor course changes in the event that the landing site was obstructed for some reason. Since the landing site couldn't possibly be disrupted (it wasn't as if rockslides or some other such event would occur on a geologically inert world) it would likely be a rather uneventful trip down.
And it was, until Kaguya stopped muttering things to herself and said something out loud.
"Tรกysha, we've got a 1201 alarm." She said in a calm tone.
FUCK. She thought to herself, in a significantly less calm tone.
A 1201 alarm meant that the onboard guidance computer was experiencing a 1201 error. There wasn't a worse error to have. A 1201 error might as well have just been called the "You're going to die" error, because it meant that the computer just ran clean out of memory. It had essentially crashed. She didn't have any navigational data. No connection to the command module, no altitude readout, no radar data, and no way to know just where she was. She was flying blind.
"1201, roger that Helios. 1201 alarm." Came the reply from mission control. A few seconds latter, they added onto it. "We're go. Hang tight. We're go."
Had Kaguya been at mission control then, she probably would have ordered a total mission abort. Activate the ascent stage and give up on the landing entirely, after all, you could always send an identical rocket back up. You couldn't send an identical crew back up if they were part of a new lunar crater.
"Gunther!" She said. "Reboot the computer and be fast about it!"
He did as he was told and got the computer back online within seconds. They didn't even have time to breathe a sigh of relief before the next error came through.
"1202!" She said to mission control, this time slightly less calm about it. "We have a 1202 error with the guidance computer!"
FUCK. She thought again, with even more exasperation in her mental voice.
"Roger, 1202. We copy."
The 1202 error was better than a 1201 error in the same way thirty day old rotten egg smells better than a thirty-one day old rotten egg. The computer's memory wasn't entirely used up, but it was pretty damn close. Instead of simply being off, the computer was now just crashing and recovering over and over again without stopping in either state. So she was still flying blind.
And the ground was coming up fast.
"Tรกysha, this is Helios. Should we abort?" She asked.
"Negative on that abort, Helios. There's not enough fuel left for orbital maneuvering."
"I told them they should have gone and prepared rescue launches just in case." Muttered Gunther.
"Okay then, guess it's Operation Ten-Go all over again! Tรกysha, I'm going in for a blind landing!" Said Kaguya. "Gunther, can you do something?"
"Yes, what?"
"Pray."
She pulled the throttle back, letting the lander fall even faster towards the surface. As the craft got closer and closer, she realized that things had gone from bad to worse.
"There are stones the size of Volkswagens all over the landing site." She said. "I'm going to try to find some flat land on the mountain."
As she steered the lander towards the towering mountain they were supposed to land at the base of, Gunther began to mutter something in Teutonic.
"There's a clearing, I'm going in. Guessing it's about a hundred feet down."
"Sixty seconds, Helios." Warned mission control, referring to the lander's fuel supplies. Given the fact that they had used up more than they should have on the deorbit burn, it was probably even less.
I can do this.
"Thirty seconds."
I can do this!
"Contact light engaged!" Exclaimed Gunther six seconds later.
"Ok, engine stopped."
The sound of the rocket faded away, and for a few moments all the two could hear was their own breathing. Then a message came through from mission control.
"We copy you down, Helios."
"Tรกysha, uh..." Began Kaguya. "Huygens base here, the Eagle had landed."
"Roger Huygens. We copy you on the ground. You got a lot of guys about to turn blue here. We're breathing again, thanks a lot."
"Holy shit." Said Gunther, breathing a sigh of relief. "We made it. How much fuel did we have left?"
"Nothing. We ran out just before hitting the surface."
"But the engine-"
"Yeah. It was still running."
"The rocket can't fire without fuel!"
"Well then remind me to ask a priest about converting when we get back."
"Wow." Said Kaguya. "I certainly didn't expect to see this when I was flying a crop duster for training."
She was on the outside of the lander, slowly climbing down the ladder one step at a time. She was supposed to be inside the craft sleeping, but both she and Gunther and pestered mission control enough to let them perform the EVA instead of using the time ahead to recover from having almost died. Perhaps it wasn't the best choice, but the barren surface of an alien world was taunting them from the other side of a window for hours. How could they not ask to go outside?
"The surface looks... almost like powder." She said as she reached the final step of the ladder. "Must be a thin layer if it hasn't swallowed up the lander yet."
She took the final step.
Her boot hit the soft powder, which burst up off the ground at the force to uncover the regolith below. She was the first person from Earth to even walk upon the lunar surface.
"There's no air on the moon." She said, forming the first part of the statement that would be remembered forever by the people of Earth. "This footprint will never fade away. After the stars have grown cold and all life has ended, this footprint will remain. With this step, humanity has become immortal."
Gunther climbed down the ladder shortly afterwards, uttering the words "Magnificent desolation" on his first step. Kaguya had created a string of words that, like her footprint, would live forever. He had created a fun fact. Neither of them knew it at the time, but that's what the two of them had done.
Then again, most people don't get to create fun facts.
Kaguya circled around to the equipment bay on the back of the lander, with Gunther following close behind with a compact TV camera. They didn't walk so much as they hopped, which made for quite the amusing sight. Kaguya picked up a small pole from the bay, and stuck it into the powdery ground. Seeing that it wouldn't stay, she kicked more powder on until it seemed to be stable. Then she pulled out the fabric on top of it.
Her actions revealed the tricolor of Hesperia, three vertical red, white, and blue striped with two crossed muskets in the center. It was the only flag to bear the image of any sort of gun, all other flags which sported weapons on them used swords or other such older weapons. Hesperia's flag was different purely by virtue of their history; it was made up of a hodgepodge of colonies that had declared independence from their home nations well after gunpowder had been made common in warfare.
As had been planned since the launch, the two of them saluted the flag. It was, of course, far more than just an act of respect. It was an affirmation of allegiance, proving their loyalty to Hesperia. After all, the purpose of the mission was to deliver Hesperian personnel to the moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Both were citizens, but to drive the point home to the millions watching their actions on their television sets, it had been decided that they would salute and recite the pledge of allegiance.
"I strongly pledge, in front of the proud Hesperian flag, allegiance to my homeland, its people, and to devote both body and soul to protect the eternal freedoms which it affords both citizen and guest."
Following that, they began their work. Unpacking equipment, carrying out experiments, and learning (mostly through their own mistakes) how to move around on the moon. Time faded away quickly while they worked, but they made sure to take in every moment of it. They had two days until they had to leave for good, likely never to return. Neither wanted to miss a single second of it.
And how the time flew.
There hadn't nearly been enough time.
As they prepared to head back inside after their final EVA, both Kaguya and Gunther lamented the fact that they wouldn't be seeing much more of the moon. Their two days were just about up, and those two days seemed like just a few minutes in their eyes. The only difference was that Kaguya decided to do something about it.
"We've still got a bit of oxygen left." She said. "Before we go inside, follow me. There's something you should see."
He decided not to question her demand. After all, it would at least buy him a precious few extra moments outside on the lunar surface.
"Can you read Akitsukuni?" She asked him, seemingly completely out of the blue.
"Yeah, I took a class in it during the war. The Fรผhrer wanted me to work with an Akitsukuni plane designer, so I had to know it. Why?"
"Because there's something I want you to read."
The two walked for a good five minutes in silence towards the edge of the little flat area they had landed on, until Gunther finally piped up.
"What on Earth do you have for me to read in Akitsukuni way out here? Why would you write something so far from the landing site?"
"You'll see."
Possibly more confused than he had ever been before in his life, Gunther followed Kaguya all the way to the edge. Their landing site was far from easy to access, with cliffs on every side of it save for one small passage they had been using to descend and ascend the mountain. To Gunther's relief, she had not taken him to that passage. He was in enough suspense already.
"Pretty view, isn't it?" Said Kaguya.
"I don't see how this relates to me knowing Akitsukuni."
"Just bear with me." She replied as she knelt down to the ground and began to clear away the powdery lunar dirt with her hands. "Take a look at this."
He leaned in to see what she had just uncovered, and found what seemed like a plaque of some kind. It was covered in Akitsukuni writing. Finally, he thought, he would be able to clear up his confusion over the whole thing.
"This facility is dedicated to the memory of the men and women who died in the Great War... and the hope that the memory of this land be carried on in its surviving children."
His confusion definitely wasn't cleared up.
"W-what is this?" He asked Kaguya. "Facility? What's it talking about? Why is it here?"
"Read the last signature."
"Princess Kaguya?" He said. "You aren't trying to say-"
"There is a reason I use the third person when speaking of the human species, Gunther."
"I'm not sure what part of this is less believable, you claiming to be a princess or you claiming to be an alien."
"Perhaps it isn't believable, but it's true." She said. "I ought to thank you, for making this possible. I didn't think it would be possible for me to see my home again... though it isn't quite the same as how I left it. Make sure to remind me to tell the government not to station missiles here, this world has had its fair share of weapons of mass destruction."
There comes a point in every seemingly ridiculous situation where those involved simply accept it. Generally, that point comes at different times for different people. If the situation is fictional and the only ones involved are those experiencing the story, then instead of simply accepting it they may instead choose to berate the creator of the work for his or her bad storytelling. Sometimes that even happens in real life. For Gunther, though, it went as it normally did. He had just spent two days on the moon, he could accept a few more ridiculous things.
"I designed all those rockets only for myself. I wanted to go to the moon, so I did everything I could in order to. Don't thank me for that."
"I agreed to join the military because I knew a pilot would have a better shot at coming here. After I heard the news of your missiles being used in the war, I knew that there was a chance. It doesn't matter if you were selfish with everything you did, because it inspired everyone else. I'll bet there's some little kid out there who watches us take our first steps and now has his mind set on being the first person on Mars."
"I didn't think I'd ever say this in relation to me making it to the moon, but that just helped me feel a lot better about what I did during the war. Everyone back at Tรกysha will get worried if we don't check in on schedule, though. We ought to get going, princess."
"Oh, please. That was a long time ago." Kaguya said.
"I'm just the bamboo cutter's daughter."
The Bamboo Cutter's Daughter
T-000:05:00
"Roger that Tรกysha, no problems here, proceed as planned." Said Kaguya, her distinct Akitsukuni accent making her words barely understandable to the Hesperian ear. "We've got plenty of time to abort if the situation changes."
The tiny cabin wasn't all that conductive to communication. With all the fans and electrical equipment it was all but impossible to hear yourself talk, and it was even harder to hear whoever happened on the other end of the radio. One would have thought that the engineers would have done their best to make talking as easy as possible, but it seems that they never go the memo that communications means safety. Either that, or they considered strapping yourself to a giant tower of explosive liquids with the intent of activating the detonator about as dangerous as a walk in the park on a summer Sunday.
In fact, the only part of the ship's design that was at all good for communication was its incredibly small interior. There was barely enough room for the three astronauts inside, with their seats being so close that their spacesuits rubbed against each other. Once they had made it into orbit they would (ironically enough) be able to take off their spacesuits, which would give them a bit more mobility. What everyone was really looking forward to was docking with the landing module, which was essentially a teardrop trailer in space. Though they were supposed to sleep in the specialized restraints set up on the walls of the command module, everyone knew that two of them would be claiming the lander's beds.
Or perhaps it was just administration that screwed up with the communications, since they decided to put inclusion above communications themselves by hiring a pilot who needed a crash course in Cymmurian before even entering the training program. Then they did the exact same thing by getting a Teutonian to build the thing, then putting him on the ship. Sure, they were both Hesperian citizens, but both had fought for the Axis in the war. At least it had helped ease the tensions between the locals and occupation forces in the two countries, and certainly helped Hesperia's image.
"Ah... I ain't the only one who's nervous, right?" Said Conner, the only native Hesperian on the entire ship, in his own distinct South Hesperian accent. It seemed as though they had designed the crew specifically to make it hard to talk.
"You are." Said Gunther. "I designed the rocket, we'll be just fine,"
"Didn't ya also design the one that burnt down with three men in it?"
"That was me. But we got a lot of good data out of that accident, so that can't happen again. We've even got an internal quick release hatch now, so you can jump out whenever you want to."
"It'd be nice to do that right about now."
"And yet you're not." Said Kaguya, interrupting the conversation between the two. "Not every day you go to the moon, after all."
"Well that's why we're all here." Said Gunther, his accent turning the sentence into an onslaught of V-sounds. "The temptation to know outweighed our survival instinct."
"I'd say that's why our species in general is here." Said Gunther.
"You do have that-" Began Kaguya, only to be cut off by a radio message coming in through her headset. A short pause later she spoke again. "Mission control wants us to put on our helmets, we're getting close to the final countdown."
"Roger that." Said Conner as he attached his helmet to its corresponding ring on his suit, while Gunther did the same. What they didn't both do, however, was take a couple deep breaths to make sure the oxygen systems were working. Only Conner did that.
"So why'd they choose an Akitsukuni lady to pilot the ship for the moonshot?" Asked Conner, this time over his suit's internal radio.
"I was a military pilot, you know. I shot down two hundred Hesperian planes over the ho... hodeh... uhhh..."
"Hodรฉezyรฉรฉl." Said Conner. "The Hodรฉezyรฉรฉl Ocean."
"Why do you call it that anyways? It doesn't sound like it's related to the Cymurrian language at all."
"It isn't, the people native to this are called it that, so we do too. It's the same way with Tรกysha."
"That makes you a vigintuple ace." Said Gunther, who was significantly less disturbed by her past than Conner. Teutonia and Akitsukuni had been allies in the war, so there weren't any negative connotations to that number of kills to Gunther. For Conner, it meant that she might have killed his best friend. "Impressive, that makes you the second-best pilot in history. Second-best fighter ace isn't a bad choice for a spacecraft pilot."
"Oh, please. I'm just a bamboo cutter's daughter. I might have been a pilot, but that comes second."
"Still, that's incredible! You're second only to Hertz!"
"I actually knew Hertz, in the last few days of the war they flew him over to Akitsukuni in the hopes that the Reich would live on there. We flew escort for the battleship Kinai. Watching her get sunk by torpedo bombers admittedly wasn't my best point. You know, they asked him to be the pilot."
"They asked Hertz? You're telling me that the number one ace in all of history let someone else go to the moon?"
"He owed me a favor." Said Kaguya, just before another radio message interrupted her. "Roger that, Tรกysha. All systems green, you are clear to go into final countdown."
The cabin fell silent at that point, save for the whirring of machinery. Kaguya focused herself entirely on the spacecraft's controls in case the automated systems failed, while everyone else was given ten seconds to figure out just how absolutely horrified they were. Though the rocket was well-constructed, there was always a chance that it could simply explode. Everyone started to count down in their heads, if only to prevent them from being shocked by the liftoff.
10...
9...
"Ignition sequence start!"
The rocket started shaking wildly, an unpleasant sensation, but at least it let everyone know that they were counting right.
8...
7...
6...
5...
4...
3...
2...
1
They were still shocked.
The rocket lurched off of the launchpad, the deafening noise of its engine filling the command module. Within a a few moments, they saw the clouds go past their window. All the worries they had before the launch were replaced with pure excitement. They were going to the moon, more than that, they were going to be the first crew to ever actually land on it. Mere days after the launch, they would catapult humanity into an entirely new age.
Even Kaguya, who still had her hands on the controls, couldn't resist the urge to let out a spirited scream of exhilaration.
T+003:15:23:00
With a great lurch, the separation charges between the command module and the fourth stage of the spacecraft fired. And thus began the third hardest part of the entire mission: docking with the lander. There wasn't any automated program for the maneuver, since it could change drastically depending on the situation. It would all have to be done manually, which made things significantly harder since the entire lander module was encased within the fourth stage of the rocket. They had to be a 180 degree turn in orbit, then dock with the target all before the slight differences in velocity between the two craft made them drift apart too far.
"I really wish I could get out of this suit." Said Kaguya as she took hold of the controls with her gloved hands. "At least my arms aren't going to go numb like they did when we practiced on the ground."
She fired the maneuvering thrusters to pull the command module away from the now-defunct fourth stage. According to the book, she was supposed to do a single burst, then allow the spacecraft to drift before firing another burst to slow it down before performing the turn. She fired two extra bursts. Unlike the actual rocket engines, the maneuvering thrusters were purposefully over-provisioned to avoid a situation in which the vessel ran out. The rockets were to be used for planned burns, takeoffs, and landings. The thrusters were to be used for everything else. In the words of Gunther himself, they had "Taken how much thruster fuel you could ever possibly need according to the plan, and doubled it".
The small change of plans let the command module reach the required safe distance significantly faster than planned, and Kaguya performed the braking maneuver (which required her to fire the thrusters three times again) and began the spin using the thrusters. Even with her little breach of protocol, the entire docking maneuver as a whole was still rather tedious. Had she not been used to the tedious operation thanks to the training, she probably wouldn't have been able to handle the already near-insatiable urge to fidget around.
Slowly but surely, the craft began to rotate around to face the lander encased within the fourth stage. Kaguya could have fired the thrusters multiple times like she had done to pull away from the fourth stage, but spins were far more delicate. Putting more thrust into starting the spin meant putting more thrust into stopping it, a situation which could easily lead to her overcompensating and pointing the craft the wrong way. She had a problem with overcompensating for maneuvers anyways, no reason to push it.
"Steady... steady..."
She also had a problem with talking to herself while working.
"Theeeeeeeeeere we go." She said, stopping the command module's spin with the opposing thrusters. "Looks like there's plenty of room, let's do this quick."
The craft lurched forward four times, each one the result of her firing the thrusters. She fired them a few more times to keep it on the right trajectory, then started to fire the fore thrusters to slow down for the docking. At the point of connection, she couldn't let the command module be moving any faster than a particularly sluggish snail. Any more would cause damage to the docking mechanism, which would make the entire mission impossible to complete.
"Don't worry guys, I'm on top of it."
She fired the fore thrusters again.
"Forty feet... twenty feet... ten feet..."
The entire vessel creaked like an old wooden ship of line hitting a rock as the docking ports began to touch. Within a couple seconds it was over, and Kaguya breathed a sigh of relief.
"We have capture."
At that point, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. If not physically, they did so in their minds.
"Oh thank the lord!" Said Conner, who had taken off his helmet and was already working on the rest. "I can finally get out of this damned suit!"
"The sentiment is shared." Said Gunther, doing the same. "We've been in these things for what, three hours?"
"Thee hours and twenty four minutes, to be exact." Said Kaguya. "We've got about forty-five minutes before we need to eject from the fourth stage, so you two can take that time to do whatever you like. Stir the oxygen tanks or something. I'm going to go get the landing module operational because I desperately need to pee."
"This is why they shouldn't have put a woman on a spaceship with two men on it. Either send three men or three women, dammit!" Said Conner. "It'd be a hell of a lot easier for all of us if we didn't need to go into separate modules to do our business."
"You know, that's an interesting point." Said Gunther. "Kaguya and I are going down to the moon, and while I already had to give the lander two separate beds to keep things decent there simply wasn't enough room in the design for a bathroom. It's all bags and chutes. Am I supposed to just turn around and look at the wall?"
"I can go outside, the suits have waste disposal systems."
Conner started laughing at the comment.
"Ain't that something! You're planning to take a roadside bathroom break on the moon!"
"Hey, if it works it works. Now let me go get the lander in working order, because you don't want me performing the translunar injection burn with a full bladder. It's impossible to use these waste bags anyways, I'll bet it's even worse in microgravity."
"Don't you worry your pretty little head, we want the lander opened up as soon as possible too. It'll be nice to have some room to move around."
"We'll be holed up in this ship for ten days, and then there's the medical quarantine once we get back. You ought to get used to small spaces."
"Don't remind me, now get the lander started up! It's no good to float around without any room to float around in!"
"Don't have to tell me twice." Said Kaguya, pushing herself through the hatch and closing it behind her.
T+077:13:00:00
"Helios 11 to Tรกysha, we have main engine cutoff. All the numbers check out, we've successfully established Lunar orbit." Said Kaguya, just before she turned off the radio. "The air's a bit stale."
She quickly flicked a switch on the command module's vast control panel, ordering the spacecraft to stir the oxygen tanks. There were specific times they were supposed to stir them to keep the air as fresh as possible, but all the meticulous planning didn't account for random anomalies. The air might have been stale for some other reason, but in such a controlled environment, there weren't many other explanations. She then undid her restraints, as did the rest of the crew. It was hard to believe, but they were just a couple hundred miles from making history. The three of them were the tenth crew to have entered lunar orbit, and she and Gunther would be the first humans to land on it. All three of them flocked to the tiny windows of the command module to get a better look at the moon's grey, lifeless surface.
"Never thought I'd see it this close." Said Conner. "Wish I could go down there like the two of you. I guess the view from up here is pretty good though."
"Maybe you'll get to go on a later mission, we've got plenty planned." Said Gunther. "Hell, the Army even wants to build a base here."
"A base on the moon? Now what in the name of God are they gonna do with a base on the moon? Give the bird to the entirety of the Communist Bloc?"
"Probably. Not much else you can do from up here, I suppose they could make it an ICBM base. I guess they'd be interplanetary missiles instead of intercontinental ones, though."
"Great, so now wars are going to be fought on the moon and the Earth." Said Kaguya. "You would think that humanity would've stopped fighting when the absolute destruction of the biosphere became a possibility."
"I assumed you were against nukes, what with being from Akitsukuni and all, but I didn't realize you were an outright pacifist." Said Gunther. "It's not exactly something you'd expect from a fighter ace."
"I felt like I had to defend my country, so I did. Propaganda can get to you. You're Teutonian, you should know that better than anyone."
"That's true. I even voted for the NSTAP in the elections, nobody expected them to actually attempt to commit genocide. Once I found out what was happening, I wanted nothing to do with them."
"And yet you made the missiles they used to bombard Caerdydd."
"I just make the rockets. Where they land was never my department. The only reason I made those was because it got me closer to the moon."
"Uh... y'all should see this..." Said Conner, subconsciously pushing himself to the side to make room for the other two at his window.
"What is it, Conner?" Asked Gunther, who floated over to the window alongside Kaguya. He didn't need an answer. Upon the lunar surface there was some kind of bright flash, like that of a detonating bomb. Were that the case, however, it would have to have been more powerful than any explosive known to man purely due to its brightness. Within mere seconds, it had faded.
"I'll bet that was an asteroid impact, it's too bad we haven't started the TV broadcast yet." Said Gunther. "That would've made for some great content."
"Y'know, Helios 10 had an equipment failure during lunar insertion. Everything just shut off." Said Conner. "And then they saw something outside the window, it looked like one of those little flecks that you see when we empty the waste tanks, but they hadn't done that for hours. It disappeared, and that's when their systems turned back on all on their own."
"So we've already got a Flying Dutchman for space?" Said Gunther. "Are you trying to say this is related to that? I don't see how."
"I'll tell you how." Said Conner, in a voice one might expect to hear in a campfire ghost story. "It's aliens. I'll bet that dot of light outside their window was another spacecraft, which means that flash we saw might be related to it. Maybe they just launched something."
Gunther burst out laughing, a fact which would later be used by countless people to refute the arguments of conspiracy theorists regarding the Teutonian war effort and extraterrestrials.
"Oh, that's rich!" He exclaimed, barely able to control his laughter. "What would aliens want with humanity? It's not like they would eat us, and it would be a hassle to conquer a planet for its resources when there are God knows how many others out there without pesky natives. Besides, the moon is a barren wasteland. No species could possibly survive there, and there isn't any reason for them to go there either. Why would they attack a human spacecraft anyways? Especially in that manner. It's the equivalent of blowing on an anthill to mess it up, only for the ants to rebuild it in a few minutes."
"What, you never did that? It's fun to watch them build it up again, y'know."
"I don't think aliens would knock out our electrical systems for fun."
"Well, maybe they just didn't want us to see them. Could've been sizing us up or something, trying to see if Helios 10's lander could actually make it all the way down and back up again."
"If that's true we would all be dead right now."
"Do they have to be hostile?" Asked Kaguya. "It's not like hating humanity is an essential component of extraterrestrial life. If that speck of light that the crew of Helios 10 saw was actually an alien ship interfering with their systems, the aliens were probably the ones that fixed the problem."
"Does it really mater?" Said Gunther. "I mean, there definitely aren't aliens on the moon. We should be getting ready for the broadcast, Tรกysha's probably going to radio us soon and tell us to get ready."
"That's right, we really ought to be prepared for that." Said Kaguya. "I'll get the camera."
T+102:33:05
Kaguya flicked a switch on the control panel, then pushed the throttle forward.
"Helios 11 to Tรกysha, we have begun powered descent."
She and Gunther had departed the command module in the lander two hours ago, heading down to the lunar surface. The tiny craft would be their home for the next two days, though thanks to the demands of administration to "Keep things decent, goddammit!" it was significantly roomier than had been originally planned. It had cost multiple million more dollars to launch the extra mass into space, but it was all worth it in the government's eyes in order to have the population boost of sending two immigrants to the moon. The fact that one was a woman was even better, since the Communist Bloc had sent one into orbit a couple years back. It would have been absolutely pathetic if Hesperia had taken multiple decades to do the same thing.
They had needed to use a slight bit more fuel in their de-orbiting maneuver due to a small discrepancy in their original lunar insertion burn, but there was little doubt that the landing could go anything but perfectly. The lander had, after all, been designed to handle minor course changes in the event that the landing site was obstructed for some reason. Since the landing site couldn't possibly be disrupted (it wasn't as if rockslides or some other such event would occur on a geologically inert world) it would likely be a rather uneventful trip down.
And it was, until Kaguya stopped muttering things to herself and said something out loud.
"Tรกysha, we've got a 1201 alarm." She said in a calm tone.
FUCK. She thought to herself, in a significantly less calm tone.
A 1201 alarm meant that the onboard guidance computer was experiencing a 1201 error. There wasn't a worse error to have. A 1201 error might as well have just been called the "You're going to die" error, because it meant that the computer just ran clean out of memory. It had essentially crashed. She didn't have any navigational data. No connection to the command module, no altitude readout, no radar data, and no way to know just where she was. She was flying blind.
"1201, roger that Helios. 1201 alarm." Came the reply from mission control. A few seconds latter, they added onto it. "We're go. Hang tight. We're go."
Had Kaguya been at mission control then, she probably would have ordered a total mission abort. Activate the ascent stage and give up on the landing entirely, after all, you could always send an identical rocket back up. You couldn't send an identical crew back up if they were part of a new lunar crater.
"Gunther!" She said. "Reboot the computer and be fast about it!"
He did as he was told and got the computer back online within seconds. They didn't even have time to breathe a sigh of relief before the next error came through.
"1202!" She said to mission control, this time slightly less calm about it. "We have a 1202 error with the guidance computer!"
FUCK. She thought again, with even more exasperation in her mental voice.
"Roger, 1202. We copy."
The 1202 error was better than a 1201 error in the same way thirty day old rotten egg smells better than a thirty-one day old rotten egg. The computer's memory wasn't entirely used up, but it was pretty damn close. Instead of simply being off, the computer was now just crashing and recovering over and over again without stopping in either state. So she was still flying blind.
And the ground was coming up fast.
"Tรกysha, this is Helios. Should we abort?" She asked.
"Negative on that abort, Helios. There's not enough fuel left for orbital maneuvering."
"I told them they should have gone and prepared rescue launches just in case." Muttered Gunther.
"Okay then, guess it's Operation Ten-Go all over again! Tรกysha, I'm going in for a blind landing!" Said Kaguya. "Gunther, can you do something?"
"Yes, what?"
"Pray."
She pulled the throttle back, letting the lander fall even faster towards the surface. As the craft got closer and closer, she realized that things had gone from bad to worse.
"There are stones the size of Volkswagens all over the landing site." She said. "I'm going to try to find some flat land on the mountain."
As she steered the lander towards the towering mountain they were supposed to land at the base of, Gunther began to mutter something in Teutonic.
"There's a clearing, I'm going in. Guessing it's about a hundred feet down."
"Sixty seconds, Helios." Warned mission control, referring to the lander's fuel supplies. Given the fact that they had used up more than they should have on the deorbit burn, it was probably even less.
I can do this.
"Thirty seconds."
I can do this!
"Contact light engaged!" Exclaimed Gunther six seconds later.
"Ok, engine stopped."
The sound of the rocket faded away, and for a few moments all the two could hear was their own breathing. Then a message came through from mission control.
"We copy you down, Helios."
"Tรกysha, uh..." Began Kaguya. "Huygens base here, the Eagle had landed."
"Roger Huygens. We copy you on the ground. You got a lot of guys about to turn blue here. We're breathing again, thanks a lot."
"Holy shit." Said Gunther, breathing a sigh of relief. "We made it. How much fuel did we have left?"
"Nothing. We ran out just before hitting the surface."
"But the engine-"
"Yeah. It was still running."
"The rocket can't fire without fuel!"
"Well then remind me to ask a priest about converting when we get back."
T+109:23:28
"Wow." Said Kaguya. "I certainly didn't expect to see this when I was flying a crop duster for training."
She was on the outside of the lander, slowly climbing down the ladder one step at a time. She was supposed to be inside the craft sleeping, but both she and Gunther and pestered mission control enough to let them perform the EVA instead of using the time ahead to recover from having almost died. Perhaps it wasn't the best choice, but the barren surface of an alien world was taunting them from the other side of a window for hours. How could they not ask to go outside?
"The surface looks... almost like powder." She said as she reached the final step of the ladder. "Must be a thin layer if it hasn't swallowed up the lander yet."
She took the final step.
Her boot hit the soft powder, which burst up off the ground at the force to uncover the regolith below. She was the first person from Earth to even walk upon the lunar surface.
"There's no air on the moon." She said, forming the first part of the statement that would be remembered forever by the people of Earth. "This footprint will never fade away. After the stars have grown cold and all life has ended, this footprint will remain. With this step, humanity has become immortal."
Gunther climbed down the ladder shortly afterwards, uttering the words "Magnificent desolation" on his first step. Kaguya had created a string of words that, like her footprint, would live forever. He had created a fun fact. Neither of them knew it at the time, but that's what the two of them had done.
Then again, most people don't get to create fun facts.
Kaguya circled around to the equipment bay on the back of the lander, with Gunther following close behind with a compact TV camera. They didn't walk so much as they hopped, which made for quite the amusing sight. Kaguya picked up a small pole from the bay, and stuck it into the powdery ground. Seeing that it wouldn't stay, she kicked more powder on until it seemed to be stable. Then she pulled out the fabric on top of it.
Her actions revealed the tricolor of Hesperia, three vertical red, white, and blue striped with two crossed muskets in the center. It was the only flag to bear the image of any sort of gun, all other flags which sported weapons on them used swords or other such older weapons. Hesperia's flag was different purely by virtue of their history; it was made up of a hodgepodge of colonies that had declared independence from their home nations well after gunpowder had been made common in warfare.
As had been planned since the launch, the two of them saluted the flag. It was, of course, far more than just an act of respect. It was an affirmation of allegiance, proving their loyalty to Hesperia. After all, the purpose of the mission was to deliver Hesperian personnel to the moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Both were citizens, but to drive the point home to the millions watching their actions on their television sets, it had been decided that they would salute and recite the pledge of allegiance.
"I strongly pledge, in front of the proud Hesperian flag, allegiance to my homeland, its people, and to devote both body and soul to protect the eternal freedoms which it affords both citizen and guest."
Following that, they began their work. Unpacking equipment, carrying out experiments, and learning (mostly through their own mistakes) how to move around on the moon. Time faded away quickly while they worked, but they made sure to take in every moment of it. They had two days until they had to leave for good, likely never to return. Neither wanted to miss a single second of it.
And how the time flew.
T+134:22:00
There hadn't nearly been enough time.
As they prepared to head back inside after their final EVA, both Kaguya and Gunther lamented the fact that they wouldn't be seeing much more of the moon. Their two days were just about up, and those two days seemed like just a few minutes in their eyes. The only difference was that Kaguya decided to do something about it.
"We've still got a bit of oxygen left." She said. "Before we go inside, follow me. There's something you should see."
He decided not to question her demand. After all, it would at least buy him a precious few extra moments outside on the lunar surface.
"Can you read Akitsukuni?" She asked him, seemingly completely out of the blue.
"Yeah, I took a class in it during the war. The Fรผhrer wanted me to work with an Akitsukuni plane designer, so I had to know it. Why?"
"Because there's something I want you to read."
The two walked for a good five minutes in silence towards the edge of the little flat area they had landed on, until Gunther finally piped up.
"What on Earth do you have for me to read in Akitsukuni way out here? Why would you write something so far from the landing site?"
"You'll see."
Possibly more confused than he had ever been before in his life, Gunther followed Kaguya all the way to the edge. Their landing site was far from easy to access, with cliffs on every side of it save for one small passage they had been using to descend and ascend the mountain. To Gunther's relief, she had not taken him to that passage. He was in enough suspense already.
"Pretty view, isn't it?" Said Kaguya.
"I don't see how this relates to me knowing Akitsukuni."
"Just bear with me." She replied as she knelt down to the ground and began to clear away the powdery lunar dirt with her hands. "Take a look at this."
He leaned in to see what she had just uncovered, and found what seemed like a plaque of some kind. It was covered in Akitsukuni writing. Finally, he thought, he would be able to clear up his confusion over the whole thing.
"This facility is dedicated to the memory of the men and women who died in the Great War... and the hope that the memory of this land be carried on in its surviving children."
His confusion definitely wasn't cleared up.
"W-what is this?" He asked Kaguya. "Facility? What's it talking about? Why is it here?"
"Read the last signature."
"Princess Kaguya?" He said. "You aren't trying to say-"
"There is a reason I use the third person when speaking of the human species, Gunther."
"I'm not sure what part of this is less believable, you claiming to be a princess or you claiming to be an alien."
"Perhaps it isn't believable, but it's true." She said. "I ought to thank you, for making this possible. I didn't think it would be possible for me to see my home again... though it isn't quite the same as how I left it. Make sure to remind me to tell the government not to station missiles here, this world has had its fair share of weapons of mass destruction."
There comes a point in every seemingly ridiculous situation where those involved simply accept it. Generally, that point comes at different times for different people. If the situation is fictional and the only ones involved are those experiencing the story, then instead of simply accepting it they may instead choose to berate the creator of the work for his or her bad storytelling. Sometimes that even happens in real life. For Gunther, though, it went as it normally did. He had just spent two days on the moon, he could accept a few more ridiculous things.
"I designed all those rockets only for myself. I wanted to go to the moon, so I did everything I could in order to. Don't thank me for that."
"I agreed to join the military because I knew a pilot would have a better shot at coming here. After I heard the news of your missiles being used in the war, I knew that there was a chance. It doesn't matter if you were selfish with everything you did, because it inspired everyone else. I'll bet there's some little kid out there who watches us take our first steps and now has his mind set on being the first person on Mars."
"I didn't think I'd ever say this in relation to me making it to the moon, but that just helped me feel a lot better about what I did during the war. Everyone back at Tรกysha will get worried if we don't check in on schedule, though. We ought to get going, princess."
"Oh, please. That was a long time ago." Kaguya said.
"I'm just the bamboo cutter's daughter."
Well... that wasn't exactly my most engaging short story. For all of you who have seen Apollo 13 or are enough of a history or space nerd to have seriously researched that mission on your own time, I can only hope I kept you guessing at least a little bit with those references to stirring the oxygen tanks. Even if you got that reference, you would need to be at least somewhat familiar with The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in order to have that final scene look like anything but something I pulled directly out of my ass when I ran out of time. I would explain that story, but I linked to it instead because making a loose adaptation of a Japanese myth already makes me look like enough of a weeaboo.
The reason I wrote this was because I was drifting off to sleep one night thinking about the contest (and my severe case of writer's block with what I was already trying to use for it) and I thought "Hey, what if I replaced Neil Armstrong with Princess Kaguya?" So in other words, I based this entire story on one of those stupid thoughts you have just before going to bed. I unfortunately didn't have the time to write what I originally wanted to, so I decided to write this significantly shorter story.
The research for this one was actually pretty fun. You see, after I had decided on adding in a header to each section in the form of a mission time, I wondered if there was a timeline of the Apollo 11 mission. There was, and all the header's are based on that timeline. Only the last one is chronologically inaccurate for the mission, since Armstrong and Aldrin spent just under a day on the moon while Kaguya and Gunther spent two full days. In the actual Apollo 11 mission, the crew had already been reunited and the lunar module had already been discarded. The pledge of allegiance I wrote up for Hesperia (AKA "America But This Time With A Backwards French Flag") is based on an amalgamation of the South Korean pledge and an alternative pledge of allegiance I found on some American political fringe newspaper's website (It was either Libertarian or Constitutionalist). Fun fact, the South Korean pledge of allegiance (up until 2007) had the speaker promise "to devote my body and soul to the eternal glory of the race". I decided to leave that out of the Hesperian pledge for obvious reasons, likely the same reasons as why they changed it to "Eternal glory of country, liberty, and justice" in 2007. Namely, to have it not be mistaken for a quote from Mein Kampf.
As a final note, here is that mission timeline I used. In case you happen to be interested.
The reason I wrote this was because I was drifting off to sleep one night thinking about the contest (and my severe case of writer's block with what I was already trying to use for it) and I thought "Hey, what if I replaced Neil Armstrong with Princess Kaguya?" So in other words, I based this entire story on one of those stupid thoughts you have just before going to bed. I unfortunately didn't have the time to write what I originally wanted to, so I decided to write this significantly shorter story.
The research for this one was actually pretty fun. You see, after I had decided on adding in a header to each section in the form of a mission time, I wondered if there was a timeline of the Apollo 11 mission. There was, and all the header's are based on that timeline. Only the last one is chronologically inaccurate for the mission, since Armstrong and Aldrin spent just under a day on the moon while Kaguya and Gunther spent two full days. In the actual Apollo 11 mission, the crew had already been reunited and the lunar module had already been discarded. The pledge of allegiance I wrote up for Hesperia (AKA "America But This Time With A Backwards French Flag") is based on an amalgamation of the South Korean pledge and an alternative pledge of allegiance I found on some American political fringe newspaper's website (It was either Libertarian or Constitutionalist). Fun fact, the South Korean pledge of allegiance (up until 2007) had the speaker promise "to devote my body and soul to the eternal glory of the race". I decided to leave that out of the Hesperian pledge for obvious reasons, likely the same reasons as why they changed it to "Eternal glory of country, liberty, and justice" in 2007. Namely, to have it not be mistaken for a quote from Mein Kampf.
As a final note, here is that mission timeline I used. In case you happen to be interested.
HOLD UP A MINUTE! THAT'S NOT ALL THE ENTRIES! Scroll down to the next post to see the rest of these fabulous pieces of writing!
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