A whole evening just for seven tributes. Gleur was disgruntled. Not with the soldiers, that had given the best of them. Not particularly with Treld, a clubman that had gotten stung by one of the abominations and now was suffering from fever and hallucinations. Or with Ehavi, that had stabbed the aforementioned misshapen out of fear for her life. Not either with Ald, that now stoked the fire of the camp and told him stories about Kali’s earliest childhood as they stood guard through the first hours of the night. No, the anger was directed towards fate, maybe, for how it mocked them. Sometimes misshapens came in spades. When they were a nuisance, when they were undesired, when not finding a single one would be a blessing, they emerged from the wilderness like worms from putrid meat.
“When she was fourteen months, she smeared honey all over a potato plant, because she thought it was hungry,” Ald said, looking at the flame with a genuine smile sprouted from the fond memories.
Gleur looked at him with a stern expression, yet tried to relax. There was nothing he could do against the whims of luck.
“Pretty tame for a devilry of a youngster that hadn’t had her first birthday. I never took care of a baby, but my in-house brother did and, well, he once told me the little guy tossed a kitten from atop the wall the day before turning one. Poor thing didn’t survive the fall.”
Ald shrugged. He was not in the mood to get sad for long-dead cat. “Children. What can you do about them?”
“Well, if you want a suggestion from this old rascal… Gravity doesn’t discriminate between them and kittens,” Gleur joked, and laughed alone.
“I don’t find that funny.”
“Well, yes, children are the future. Or… were the future, maybe.”
They remained silent for some solid seconds, watching the bonfire crackle, hearing the wind singing among the trees that surrounded that clearing.
“Gleur, you don’t believe the crisis to have a solution, do you?”
The old general took a stick and began poking the lumps of carbonized wood with it, absent mindedly. “I am not long for this world. I don’t know how many more springs I have, but, at my age, they cannot be that many. I won’t live to see our world perish if we find out nothing can be done, brother Ald. But I don’t want to tell that to them,” he gestured with his thumb all around at the tents were the others, except Treld and his tent mate, slept.
“Yet you undertake this sacrificial mission. This quest for blood. Why?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do, Ald. It could solve things, it could not. We need to prepare our minds for the worst, yet act in accord with the fact that there is a chance it won’t happen. By this day next year, babies could be raining all over Felsia due to our actions today, tomorrow.”
“I cannot but agree. Yet it feels wrong, these are grandchildren of the mother, Felsian or… whatever they are now. If all that descends from a dog is a dog doesn’t it follow that the misshapen are no different from our people?” argued Ald.
Gleur pointed at the cloudy night sky.
“We descend from gods and gods we are not. To be Felsian is to be an affront to nature, to abide by a different set of rules. And like birds are damned to fly or die, we are forced to depend on the rains. To live among brothers and sisters alone. And to sacrifice our own offspring, if that means our society can survive. We owe Felsia that much,” Gleur discoursed, and he believed in these words, even if he didn’t want to.
“I believe Felsia is a monster, but she is our monster, and we have to care of her until the end. Like we take care of our little brothers and sisters. I’d like Kali to one day catch a baby. Maybe adopt another one myself, just in celebration,” Ald went, and he hid his tired eyes behind his hand, so Gleur wouldn’t see him holding back the tears. “Sorry, it has been a hard day.”
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He placed his strong, wide arm across Ald shoulders and behind his neck.
“What do you plan to do if our rains never return, brother? My life won’t change, but yours surely will take a turn for the worse.”
Ald looked at his elder in the eyes, finally, and spoke. “To make Kali into a woman who can survive the end of our world. That, and maybe turn to sculpture. Scream to whatever comes after us that we, Felsians, were here. We worked these fields, we exploited these quarries, we walked this forest, we gazed at the firmament and grasped the gifts it once bestowed upon us.”
Gleur had stopped listening halfway through, the fire was more interesting. Not because of its shine or its heat, but because of how it behaved. The tips of the flames were curving unnaturally, like small cat claws, all in the same direction, pointing deeper into the forest.
“We could be cursed by the foulest magics and it would be better than whatever this luck is!” he exploded, got on his feet with a stomp, and then inhaled deeply. “It was a nice chat, Ald, but we need to wake everyone up and escape,” he said, regaining his calmed self.
Ald’s hand found its way to the handle of his sword as he frantically looked around.
“What? Why? From what?”
“A Ratchet’s masterwork, one of the reasons Felsia has ballistae mounted atop the wall. She rarely wanders this close to home. She is immortal, uncaring and, basically, a force of nature. We cannot kill her, not for long.”
“What do you talk about? A misshapen, yes, but, they cannot be that big, right?”
Gleur didn’t lose time and stood up. The fire was curving further. She was coming directly at them.
“There are things we don’t tell the citizens or most of the soldiers because they wouldn’t ever have another good night’s sleep. Wildfire is one of those things. And she comes for our bonfire like a flame-eating moth. We will have to postpone our little hunt. Wake up whoever you don’t want to be cremated alive, Ald,” he said, more as a suggestion than as an order, as he addressed the tents with his open hand.
Ald swallowed, and then, faster than he thought he could, he ran to each tent Gleur had pointed at and shook its inhabitants awake.
The others screamed, kicked at him due to the surprise, but Ald didn’t even explain, he just ordered them to grab whatever they valued most and prepare to go back to the city.
“Maybe we are cursed,” Gleur sighed before strolling up to the wagon and checking on the cages. Maybe some of the prisoners could survive a few days. At least until they planned an excursion to somewhere else.
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Rows of saggy breasts dripped searing lava tendrils as her heavy, ramified, deformed appendages moved her massive weight through the grove. The eyes sprinkled on her brown, tattered skin saw nothing but the orange light of fires far away, far above, far below. She once tried to dig towards the roaring flames at the heart of creation, but realized it was a vain task. She consumed the small flames inside the plants, inside their mitochondria, if we want to be more precise.
The fires at the heart of the world, the ones acting as souls of the sky, and the ones at the core of life. She wanted to devour them all. She had been born for so, with no other motive or purpose in her… let’s call it, mind. But we couldn’t say Wildfire thought as she cried tears of molten forgewood after eating such trees, as she excreted coal and ashes from the sphincters along her sternum. She acted out of an unquestionable, unintelligible drive. Hunger, lust, greed, call it whatever you will, whatever helps you figure out her inner workings. I know I have given up, for this was no need: it caused her no pain nor distress of any kind not to hunt, not to feed. No, the best way to describe it, perhaps, is… Pressure. Like gas flowing savagely to fill a void, the hunt for the flames filled the empty space left by all other behaviors. Wildfire wasn’t territorial, Wildfire didn’t look for a mate, wildfire didn’t purposefully avoid taking damage nor reacted when she did take it. The name fit her like a ring.
She was arriving to the abandoned encampment, where the bonfire agonized and the embers barely hung on to the last sparks. She was late, but she didn’t care. Fire called to be consumed, and she answered its call. The only thing that kept her away from Felsia was the fact that, when she sustained enough damage, her body would burn in cold, violet fire, and then reform elsewhere. Like always, the tongues arrived first. They sook by ear, because their undersides were covered in sensible tympanums that were deaf to all but the creak of the fire.
They reached the Embers, and they burned with renewed vigor, for Wildfire’s saliva was the purest of fuels.
Fortunately, Wildfire was unique, one of the few so called masterworks, a horror so degenerated by the ratchet’s spin she disobeyed reality itself, and yet coherent enough to sustain her own life, incapable of suffering, existing just for the sake of it. Wildfire was one of the few lucky ones.
When she finished engulfing the remains from the campfire, she lingered a few moments on the empty clearing, and then unrooted a tree, that was particularly active, as far as metabolism went. She consumed the trunk in a swift movement, the wood bursting in flames as it entered her multi-jawed mouth. The tree was one of the few unlucky ones, and its wood would be cried away over the forest floor, to someday be found, maybe, by some soldiers that would consider the tear-shaped bits of wood a curiosity, a talisman.