CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - EVER-BURNING

Soon.

The Tulavanta was here. The mudlands were gone, the moss-covered plains had faded, and now... water. Boundless, slow-moving water, undulating down towards the sea from its origin in distant, distant mountains, so distant they weren't remotely visible. Tanner and Marana were standing near one another, staring out into the distance, watching the horizon. Doing nothing at all. Marana was slightly drunk. Tanner wasn't. And, naturally, Marana was finding the bleary nothingness to be quite enjoyable indeed, while Tanner was starting to crave some actual work. She was honestly just revising everything she knew for fun. She was going over her memories of influential case precedent for fun. The word estoppel was now becoming a point of humour for her. She was clearly going mad. And she kept looking around for mutants, the big, smart ones that had grown fat on the meat of their kin, and now lurked in the dark waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. It was funny - they were venturing into the great, bleak unknown, and Tanner had almost expected to meet... things. Odd villages, strange cultures, people.

Instead, there were just miles upon miles of dead land. Even the animals were quiet, half the time. The strange life of the mudlands and the riverbank were exceptions to the rule, but they'd always ruled that place. Sometimes they passed the stumps of villages - the houses were gone, the stilts lingered, slowly being weathered to nubs by the wind and rain and rot. Banks of mud studded with chunks of slimy wood - like cigar stubs in an ashtray. Like the mud had swallowed them whole and left nothing behind. The mist was perpetual, the clouds were heavy and grey and sodden, it felt like the world was being unmade all around them. Fields becoming drowned in rising mud, the clouds swooping down to gobble up the sky and horizon, the water rising higher and higher until it might flood the land completely. The people were gone. The animals wouldn't be around for long. They were wandering at the edge of the world. For years, it had been. For generations upon generations, the north had been this unknown, strange expanse, difficult to reach, but providing all manner of peculiar furs and trinkets, shadowed in whispers of infinite sects of arcane religions, cults of hammer and eye, reverent of the thirty-seven towers of an ancient city. The north was a myth... then, as ships became better, as crossing the Tulavanta and its endless soggy borders became easier, it became real. And then... gone.

This felt dead. The mutants had consumed everything in sight. Their bodies had to be burned. And the fires had wiped out what was left. The disease had spread to a terminal point, and the only thing left was to chase the infection with amputation upon amputation, followed by a hundred sterilisations via every method, mundane, chemical, theurgic, even spiritual from time to time. The land had been exorcised of the demons possessing it... and the soul they'd possessed. What remained was absence, and contented absence. It desired nothing to fill the gap left behind by humanity. It desired nothing but itself, existence was satisfaction for a landscape like this. They passed by a strange mosaic on the banks - mussels, or oysters, or some sort of shellfish. Great arrays of them, lurking in the mud and sand. Black as opals, with the faintest rainbow sheen playing about their edges. Sometimes she thought she could see them moving, their rigid mouths opening a moment to lap at the air. A mosaic, tangled with beards of weeds and reeds. Marana stared at them dully.

"I suppose that's all that can live out here."

She smiled slightly.

"When the world's a grim, grizzly old thing, must be easier to just build a world around yourself. Would you call that endurance or delusion?"

Tanner didn't reply. Marana did this, sometimes. Asked random questions, without expecting an answer. Sometimes she just hummed curiously and never followed it up. And sometimes, most embarrassingly, she'd sing a few notes of some unfamiliar song, slurring them out in a drunken slurry. Or vary up her accent for a moment, which was more annoying than embarrassing, but annoyance was embarrassment riddled with veins of anger, really. Embarrassment the stimulus, annoyance the response. Her own eyes slid away from the endless mosaic to stare at the horizon, once again. The hunters were grumpy today. Stiff as boards, their breath emerging in great plumes of steam, eyes unblinking. Well, the air was damp enough, maybe blinking was unnecessary... Tanner tried to stop blinking, and... no. No, didn't work. Raised the question, though - could the air ever get so moist that blinking became unnecessary? She imagined people sprawled in humid forests, staring blindly ahead and passively accepting the moisture. Or people in mists, doing the same. Maybe that was where toads came from - humans that never blinked, just stared ahead in the moisture and eventually changed, like blinking was the vital switch that stopped people becoming frogs. Hm. Maybe Algi would complete his metamorphosis if she dumped him here. Or Eygi. No, no, that was mean, Eygi had a nice face, it was only slightly amphibious. Anyway, she made up for it by being her friend, that probably gave her immunity to Anuric metamorphosis.

Heh.

She paused.

There was a... stripe on the horizon. A black stripe, very faint, barely visible through the clouds and mist, but... it was like having a hair lying across her eye, it was there, indisputably there, and without a doubt annoying. Staining the immaculate grey. Marana stared at it for a moment, tilting her head from one side to the other, thinking things over...

"You keep tilting your head. I have a friend who does that. It's like you're shaking up a sauce bottle to make the flavouring more intense."

Marana blinked.

Shifted her gaze to Tanner.

And Tanner didn't mind what she said, really. Not like she did when she'd made that observation to Eygi.

"I suppose it is, yes. But I think it's because I'm being efficient. After all, do you take walks in order to focus your thoughts? Do you find physical exercise conducive to contemplation?"

She smiled slightly, and Tanner hummed.

"I suppose."

"There we are. You need to take a walk. I tilt my head. I've made myself much more efficient, haven't I? Makes more time for work. And for drinking, naturally. Ah, there we go again - drinking, it causes the skin to redden, warmth to spread, all the little features of exercise, but it requires none of the physical motion. Maybe we just have to dissect exercise down to its most basic components, before reproducing them in miniature. Tilting of heads, drinking of liquor, cracking of knuckles, that sort of thing. Sometimes I read awful, awful books, and let my mind drift away as a tiny percentage of my well-girthed brain studies the page. You make an interesting point, Tanner, but it needs development."

Tanner blinked.

"Sounds right."

She paused, and bit her lip.

"I think it's because the brain is a complicated organ full of complicated parts - I mean, I've seen diagrams, it's full of coils and twists, maybe when it's inside the skull it's slightly fluid, bounces around a bit. And by shaking your head, you realign it all. It's not improving it, just changing it around, giving you new perspectives. Maybe waking up parts which have gone to sleep. More like... voluntarily giving yourself pins and needles just to check that your nerves are working correctly."

Another pause.

"Also, if liquor just simulates some of the effects of exercise, but without any substance, then the creativity it inspires would probably be simulated, not genuine. You're not really... 'breaking down' exercise there, you're just skipping to the end."

"Hm. I'll reject that logic, because I don't want to stop drinking."

"It'll kill you."

Tanner's mouth shut with a click, and her eyes widened with terror. It'd just slipped out. She hadn't meant to say it. She was just... she was saying random things, they both were, and... and that meant she had less of a filter, so... nuts, she was excusing herself, shouldn't be trying to excuse herself, no excuses, no explanations, just apologise, apologise- Marana was smiling slightly.

"Already has. Delirium tremens, you see. The shakes. The rumbling. The nights filled with lizards and crawling things which bite and sting. If I stop drinking, my body shakes, my blood stills, and I keel over. Dead, and dying in fear and pain. Alcohol is no longer a comfortable bed, it's a thread holding me above the abyss."

She sipped from a small hip-flask, engraved with the symbol of a family she didn't recognise.

"Behold, my thread thickens. My safety increases. If I let it thin too often, I trace too close... well, it can be creatively satisfying, but not exactly sustainable."

"Oh."

"Oh, don't look at me like you're sorry, it's pointless for both of us. It's the way of things. Everyone's body is a laboratory, really. A set of chemicals and tools for processing them. Old alchemists had... alembics, crucibles and so on, we have the stomach, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys. A whole set of tools and reagents to work with. Now, usually, we have a prescribed set of experiments we're meant to perform, like student chemists. We breathe, and we undergo reactions where our body takes in air and exhales fixed air, which has been altered by internal processes. We eat, we break down food, and it fuels other reactions in turn. We allow a gentlemen to have some fun with us, we take up a deposit of material, and begin a complex reaction for the creation of a new human in the bubbling cauldron of the womb. Oh, don't look away, it's a natural process, don't be a prude. I have no intention to have children, and I exhausted my interest in the basic chemical processes when I was... perhaps fifteen, sixteen. Tired with the toys I'd been given, adept with the experiments I'd been taught, so, I started to experiment further. You'll use your alembic and crucible in the same way everyone does, and you'll do it over and over and over again for the rest of your life, until the equipment breaks down or the reagents run out. I wanted to do something else with my tools, to add newer and stranger reagents to see what happened, to cultivate chemical reactions of remarkable scope and power in order to fuel my creative outbursts. Trains involve shoving coal into a furnace, burning the coal, boil water, generating steam, driving an engine, and carrying the carriages in sequence. I do much the same, but I apply it to my internals. The stomach is my furnace, alcohol is my coal, and it carries me further than any mortal food could ever manage."

She took another swig.

"So, in short, I'm not stopping."

Tanner gripped the railing a little tighter.

"Alright. Do as you like. It's your prerogative."

"Quite."

And that was all. They lingered in silence for a few minutes, staring at the slowly broadening black stripe on the horizon, which wavered slightly in the wind - smoke, perhaps? A strangely shaped cloud? Tanner wasn't sure, but... well, even if she said it was smoke, which seemed likely, she had no idea what was creating it, or how long it would burn. She'd heard stories of burning peat, or the little wellsprings of crude oil that frothed up in parts of the mudlands, but the soil was simply too soft and awful to build a derrick to exploit it, really. She could actually see the graves of oil derricks out there, amidst the mud - little monoliths where wood and metal had just sunk, ground giving way, no hole lasting for long in land which healed any wound faster than it could be made. In the distance, she could hear the lowing of gorgonopsids, and the occasional sharp chirp of the leather-birds. She thought. Time passed. There was nothing to do but think, and watch the stripe become larger. It'd started thinner than a hair - now it was almost thick enough that if she raised her hand, there'd be scraps of darkness on either side of the palm. And she had a large hand. She wanted to haul something, move a little. Exertion, that was it, exertion. Not just simulation of exercise, but the real thing. When her mind was full-focused on thought, it spiralled faster and reached odder conclusions, she kept reliving random memories, going over strange facts, and songs kept on recurring, time after time after time. She kept struggling with a single line from a play she'd had to do as a sutdent, a single line, and a few words were wrong. No matter how she tried it, the sentence never aligned, it never clicked, and she scrambled with it like a cat trying to catch a smooth nut, rolling it crazily around the floor and never latching a single claw into the flawless surface. When she couldn't move, the mind's gyre widened considerably faster than usual. Needed to do something, move something. There was nothing to move, though. Everything was where it should be, except for the boat, except for the passengers. And she couldn't exactly carry those.

She spoke suddenly. A question danced across her brain, and it needed expulsion.

"Why did you leave the surrealists? They had chemicals with them. Reagents for the internal laboratory. I doubt you'll find much in that vein in the north, probably just... tinned food and rectified spirit."

"Rather too late to be dissuading me, Tanner."

"I'm curious. That's all."

Marana smiled slightly, and reared back from the railing, settling her hands on her hips. Naturally, well-dressed. Green riding dress, high boots, thick overcoat with embroidery around the cuffs, and a scarf tied just so, where it could flow behind her without tangling around anything. Just flying like a banner of green and red and white.

"I left them because they were annoying."

"...well, that's fair. But..."

"But being annoying is no reason to run away from them, I know. It was more than that, it was..."

She sighed.

"They were... well... they've been around for a long time, all of them have, and I've enjoyed warming myself in their collective glow from time to time. Participating in their little rituals and experiments. Very pleasurable, if you're in the right sort of mood, though as I grow older I find I'm not quite as fond of all the nudity. Either way. I liked them, I liked them quite a bit, if you can believe it. I liked their insights."

"Insights?"

"Don't be derisive, it doesn't become you. I liked the... reality of it. The genuine revolutionary stance against a whole host of boring old things. I'm the first daughter of a governor, trust me, I've seen the great and good of Mahar Jovan, Krodaw, and beyond, I'm aware of the boring old things. Seen the direction the world was moving, and it didn't make me especially happy. All I saw was... drudgery. Drudgery and pettiness. Krodaw, crunched up and burned by a host of raving lunatics who wanted nothing more than to oppress each other instead of being oppressed by us. Mahar Jovan, where we dress ourselves up like dolls on one side of the river, and become paranoid little wrecks on the other, while our kings wallow in their own impotence. Factories belch smoke, bureaucrats with grey eyes keep getting more powerful, Fidelizh is a state of enforced pretence where secret police rule with an iron fist. Veterans are dying off, bit by bit, and we're forgetting that the world is delicate, that things can end at any moment, and there are patterns broader than us... then I turn around, and I see people just talking about the same old things. The surrealists seemed to realise this."

Tanner didn't quite like this line of thinking. The world might not be perfect, but it was all the two of them got. Tanner had chosen to find a life amidst it, to be a judge, to seize a vocation between both hands like a wriggling snake and clutch until it stopped trying to escape. Maybe these damn jeremiads were hunky-dory for governor's daughters, but for people who actually had bills to pay, the world was quite delicate enough. If Tanner didn't work, she didn't get to be a judge, she didn't make money, she was disciplined, maybe even expelled. If she didn't work, she went insane or died. That was delicacy. She didn't say this, of course. Allowed Marana to continue as the pillar of smoke grew larger and larger.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"They seemed. They were genuine revolutionaries, they saw the absurdity of it all, how the world had gone from apocalypse to... this in a matter of moments. Had to shock people, surprise them, remind them that there's a human buried under all the mundane nonsense we wrap ourselves with. I used to draw propaganda for my father, back in Krodaw, and I wanted to be subversive with it, to support the status quo with art designed to undermine it. You know, I actually made my posters devoid of as much writing as possible - to my understanding, the Sleepless are using them as propaganda now. I was general enough. A leering figure in a cloak could be the Sleepless ready to carve out our throats, or the vicious oppressors lurking in the background. I found that... well, it was a statement. Maybe it could change something, maybe it couldn't. But the surrealists understood it."

A sigh.

"Now, I'm not sure. They're... cloistered. They do the same things, they seem to just act the way surrealists ought to, without much consideration for higher meaning. They dance naked in fields, but what does it matter if it's only them, if no-one else comes, and if they danced naked in a field a week ago? When does it stop being a protest against delusional reality, a shock to the system, and just becomes another affirming rite?"

A pause.

"Some of them keep valorising the Great War, keep talking about heroism, about how heroism is some... taproot of vitality which connects us to super-reality. How danger reawakens the spirit. They were seeing themselves as an intellectual nucleus standing beyond boundaries, some sort of... cabal, really. The world wasn't listening, so they stopped telling it anything. Let them be sages, isolated, cold, brilliant, inspiring others but not condescending to their level. History was out of their hands, so what? Spiritual power wasn't based on numbers, it was based on quality. That's what they were talking about today. I haven't met with them for some time, I didn't... realise how very isolated they'd become. It's the natural progression, isn't it? Revolutionaries out to change the world, revolutionaries rejected by the world... and either that rejection undoes your entire raison d'etre, or it makes you bitter and shrivelled, unwilling to engage because you know you won't be listened to. Becoming hermits because of rejection by civilisation, rather than some inherent benefit. Inventing justifications for failure."

Tanner turned to her lightly, her tortoiseshell hair blowing in the strong breeze.

"Where does that place you?"

"Hm?"

"You. I mean, you're a surrealist. You consider yourself one, or you consider yourself an artist. You experiment on yourself with alcohol and other substances. You accept that you're not going to have children. You sit back and paint, draw, speak, and you seem to believe in the whole... revolutionary ideal, but you've never achieved it. Where does it place you? I mean, you're doing what they do... what's your justification?"

Marana shrugged.

"I don't know. I know I don't agree with theirs. Their justification is just... lazy, bitter, almost elitist."

"Believing a tiny cabal of people painting and speaking and dancing naked in a field will change the world isn't elitist?"

Marana paused, and a coy smile crept across her face.

"You're arguing with me. That's new."

"It's not."

"No, no, no, you've made points, but with resolute certainty of reality, you make points about the law, mostly. Never actually tried to challenge my views on things - you state the law, you don't argue why I should believe in the law. This is new."

"Sorry."

"No, no, it's quite fun. Doesn't happen often. I'll... think of an answer, I promise that much. Aren't judges elitist? Judging the rest of us, lording your knowledge..."

"Not forever. The intention is to create a perfect form of law that anyone can understand. We try and avoid legal jargon for that reason - in Mahar Jovan, they use ceremonial language in the higher courts. We don't."

"How likely is this perfect law, though?"

"We're getting there."

"But it's an idealised state which might never happen."

"We still aspire to it. Do you look at the foundation of a building and say it's worthless because it hasn't become a... a god-tower, quite yet?"

She felt like all her roles were clicking into place like clockwork, spinning exactly as they were meant to. This was how a judge should speak in this moment, this was how she had to speak. Her personal inclinations towards silence were irrelevant, she wasn't really arguing, she was playing a part. But that meant she barely had to think. She wasn't creating genuine rebuttals, she was simply asking herself 'what rebuttals would a judge have', and half the time the answer was already provided to her. It was... eerily satisfying. Thought without thought.

"But if everyone was an artist, nothing would ever get done. Likewise, if everyone dedicated themselves to the law, nothing would get done. We're all elitist, it's called being somewhere that isn't the bottom of the hierarchy. The only non-elitists in all the world are farmers, but even they're elitists who rule over their livestock with an iron fist, or their workers, or the market by charging it. I dislike the justifications the surrealists come up with. Not the basic premise."

"But you don't have a justification of your own. You're still setting yourself apart from everyone to try and change the world."

"Well, people need inspiration."

"Leadership?"

"Inspiration."

"What if they misinterpret the inspiration, and you adjust your message to try and adjust the interpretation?"

"Hm."

"That's leadership, isn't it? Sending a message, then changing it when people use it for the wrong sort of inspiration?"

She paused.

"...I study the law. I preach it, and I apply it in my judgements. I don't invent more laws. And I place myself under the same restrictions as everyone else. Just because I'm a judge doesn't mean I'm immune to prosecution. I mean... you're talking about breaking boundaries, but people need boundaries, restraints. If you just provide inspiration, people will interpret it how they like, making boundaries. You adjust the inspiration, and now... well, now you're just writing more laws. I don't dislike the people at that conference, but... well, I wouldn't buy anything from them. You say 'surrealist' or 'artist', I just see people who aren't really doing anything, and are just... sitting around, being very self-satisfied."

And being bizarrely well-dressed, well-coordinated, well-organised... again, no idea how they managed to live, she'd go insane if she acted the way they did. Swanning around having lavish lunches and interesting conversations, perpetually in motion, perpetually talking and thinking, it... she didn't think a person could live that way for long, not really. She knew she couldn't imitate it, knew that this annoyed her, and she knew that the only thing she had against them, really, was the role of judge. It was all she had to set her above - her job. Her role. It gave her arguments, purpose, power, a little money... a sense of genuinely contributing to the world. It was like being a farmhand smacking a merchant over the head with a spade. Wealth was nothing if you were getting whacked by a spade, but... it didn't change that the merchant was richer than her, more powerful, better connected, and probably understood things her brain couldn't possibly grasp.

Feh.

Now she was remembering why she disliked arguing. Marana smiled gently.

"I think you might not understand surrealism. Or art. Or artists. No offence intended, Tanner, of course."

Damn.

"Hm."

"I do mean no offence. But I... do get the feeling you're not a very artistic person. Interesting, not entirely boring, and with odd thoughts on eels, but... well, it takes a certain kind of oddity to make an artist."

"And money."

"That, too. Goodness, you are being outspoken."

They'd been on this boat for days. She had nothing to do but think. And talking to those surrealists had made her think, just about who she was, what she wanted, how she related to others. In any other circumstance, she might idolise those people, with their conversation and suits and companions and lives. Their ability to just do things with limitless confidence. But... now? She was a judge, idolising them wasn't an option, being jealous wasn't an option. She knew she did useful things, she knew she was qualified and accredited, she knew she was an individual of some utility to the world, but... couldn't reserve a place at a kaff without getting paranoid and itchy, had only one friend in the whole world, and was perpetually eager to lose herself in roles which stifled thought and left her pleasingly senseless. Because the alternative was being an unrestrained weirdo who hurt people. The idea of exhibiting art and not being terrified about the audience response was... beyond her. The idea of never knowing what each day would bring, whether inspiration would strike, whether her work would satisfy her, it... the irregularity and risk of the whole endeavour of art made her skin crawl. Being an artist was something that a good judge ought to be annoyed by - it wasn't practical, solid, useful or anything of the sort, not in a legal sense. But really, it was something that Tanner found incomprehensible. She could imagine artists waking up. She could imagine them eatng breakfast. She could imagine them going to bed. But the middle of the day, there was a total blank. Maybe painting, but... could you spend hours doing that? Day after day? Wake up, work solidly, just ooze inspiration onto a canvas?

Anyway. She was rambling.

"Sorry. I don't mean to argue. I don't... even really know what I'm arguing, honestly. Sorry. I don't mean any offence."

"I think you might just be grumpy, Tanner."

She was, a bit.

"No, it's not that."

Marana's voice become infuriatingly sing-song.

"You are a little bit grumpy. It's fine, I'm grumpy too. Seeing a bunch of people I like turn into elitist, snobbish, cabbalistic fruitcakes who're just surrealist-industrial engines at this point... well, it's annoying. I don't know what makes me different than them, I haven't succeeded in anything, I'm a middle-aged artist heiress who's been sitting on a nice marble pillar my whole life, and have a very regular allowance from my parents... the world changes, and I just watch it happening. If I died, the price of fish wouldn't change one jot."

Her voice was unsettlingly cheerful.

"And yet, here I am. Here I remain. Here I continue."

Tanner looked at her.

"Are you alright?"

"Oh, most likely not. Hardly matters, though. I like you, Tanner. You're an odd duck, I'll say that. I almost want to teach you how to paint or sculpt, but at the same time, I quite like just... hearing your thoughts. Your actual thoughts. Your rambling about eels was more interesting than your rebuke of art and surrealism, given that I'm not sure you get either of them, but you're certain that judges ought to rebuke those things on a moral level."

A pause. Tanner paled.

Fuck! She knows!

Oh, crumbs, vulgarity, that wasn't becoming of a judge, not at all.

"Here's an agreement, then, Tanner Magg. You're not going to be a moralistic, supercilious judge who dismisses fruitcakes like myself, and I'll do my absolute best to avoid annoying you with my silliness. How does that sound?"

"Uh."

"I want you to actually express yourself. Tell me what you really think, not what you think you should think."

"Uh?"

"Really, talk about eels, talk about random things. This is like outsider art, it's fascinating to me. I mean, some effete, limpid, pickled debutante, who cares what her unfiltered thoughts are, I want some gigantic eel-enthusiast judge who very occasionally says something genuinely interesting to spill in front of me, to spill until she can spill nay more."

A hand clasped around her bicep with tremendous force, and Tanner froze. Marana's eyes were distressing her. Her smile was distressing her more

"You're a creative cow, Tanner, and I intend to milk you."

Tanner had never been more terrified.

"Um."

"Wonderful."

She wanted to dive off into the river and live with the gorgonopsids, thank you very much. They seemed normal.

Hm.

The pillar of smoke was close.

And now... they could almost see what it was. And Tanner remembered, suddenly, the... thing, the captain had talked about. The titan. The thing the surrealists had taken a boat out to, in order to dance in the smoke. She felt like an absolute dunce, not putting it together sooner. In her defence, Marana had been rambling, and wound up saying she was going to milk Tanner, which was a statement that awakened deep reservoirs of fear she didn't know she possessed. But now... nothing to distract her as a dark shape loomed. The hunters slowly gathered on the deck, their mottled, distorted forms crowding around the giantess and the surrealist, staring out into the great fog banks.

A titan was looming.

And as the minutes drew into hours, it became more and more visible. The entire boat was enraptured by it, like they were... soldiers, seeing the first light of home. And, indeed, lights began to dance before them. Little flames piercing the fog, studding a vast, shadowy shape that was growing more and more resolved as time wore on, yet never seemed to become normal. Each clarification was just the gate to another bundle of mysteries. Tanner felt something twitch in her at the sight of it, of how... large it was. She felt a twitch in the base of her spine, telling her to run, find shelter, do something. Hide with Marana, no matter how odd she might be, just get away from this thing. The river was stranger here, the landscape was scarred deeply by war, by engines, by construction. No more rotten stubs of villages, there were the ruins of fortresses and bunkers. Shells hollowed out by conflict and age, crates bobbing in the reeds like the cradles of abandoned children, huge, huge piles of expended ammunition just bobbing around, clinking gently against the side of the boat. A battlefield that refused to be cleaned up, as though the usually all-devouring earth was spitting this stuff back up, refusing to take it in. Bitter pills to swallow... or something else was stuck in its throat. The enormous shadow.

A mutant titan.

The captain took her small hat off, holding it at her side in a strange display of respect. The others did the same, even if they also clutched their guns tighter than ever. Mouths locked tight enough to throw the contours of their face into sharp relief, bone structure almost poking through the skin, such was the pressure. The thump-thump of the theurgic core under the deck... it might as well have been the slow, steady pulses of some monstrous heart in the distance, loud enough to shake the world. A few more came forwards, just a few, handing around gas masks. Ugly things, with long nozzles dangling weakly from the front, and eyeglasses tinted a jet black. One was much larger than the others, looked to be a repurposed horse mask, which faintly insulted Tanner, but she was too nervous to act on it, or even to dwell on it for long. The world turned to a compressed place when it went over her head, and she stuffed her hands into her pockets out of instinct, feeling the world turn into a cloying, stifling cocoon. Like that mosaic of mussels marking the muddy mire, sealing everything away, rejecting cruel reality in favour of a secluded world of her own cultivation. Preserving the only role which really mattered - human, as opposed to mutant. Gas mask, heavy coat... the most indelible costume of humanity, more than any other.

A breeze.

A scent carried over the breeze - sweet and sour, popping in the nose. Tanner, in a fit of panic, adjusted her mask, terrified of leaving a gap. Like champagne, crackling in her senses. Syrup and champagne. Contamination. Godsblood. Fruit of the underground rivers. The infiltrating death of humanity, always seeping upwards, a hand wrapped around the throat of sane, decent life.

The breeze picked up, and the mist cleared enough.

She saw it.

It was... horrific. Her breath caught in her throat.

She'd expected something like an elephant or a whale, something which the mind understood to be vast. A few legs, a torso, an abdomen, a head... the normal instruments of motion and existence. This had none. It wasn't shapeless, though. It was simply... advanced beyond the need for taking a familiar form. It was coloured a soot black, but this was purely the result of burning, which also left the flesh with the texture of carbonised wood, pulsing from time to time, chasms oozing with matter the colour of tar. The limbs were coiling, pseudopods or tentacles pressed into service as something else. Like... someone had taken a thousand spinal columns and wound them around one another, over and over and over, into cords thicker than some buildings, riddled with bristling steel-grey antennae. Dozens of them, maybe more, rigid as iron bars, latched into the soil and the river. Even slumped, the creature was titanic, looming far, far above. The pseudopods were everywhere, the coiling helices of matter that ended with enormous 'fists' of twitching blue-grey flesh, bundles that sank into the ground and seemed immovable. But must've once been mobile. Might still be. How else could this thing have arrived here? The torso wasn't much better, the carbonised-wood look omnipresent, but... it was oddly arcane. It was dramatically geometrical, smooth faces and sharp articulations, more like a machine. Enormous coral pillars speared through the faces, drawing in air, like the creature had moved by inflating its enormous torso with air, or something lighter than it. Drifting like an airship, clawing along the ground with coiling spinal columns.

And it was burning.

Why was it still burning?

Why did smoke belch from the coral pillars? Why did the carbonised flesh part and split, pulsing, revealing internal wells of oil? Why hadn't it fallen completely, why did it still seemed hunched, ready to move on with its march? Why hadn't they dismantled the metallic weapons adhered to its surface, flowing, semi-organic things which looked valuable and powerful? Why was there a faint, purple light blooming within the depths of the creature, spilling from time to time, looking like those photographs she'd seen of aurora borealis? Why was there still smoke, why hadn't it burned to a crisp by now?

The captain was silent. But the half-bandaged woman spoke, her voice almost a whisper.

"...you always... forget, how big it is."

Tanner murmured.

"Why is it burning?"

The half-bandaged woman turned, her face still, devoid of humour.

"It's not dead."

Tanner stared.

"Not dead." She repeated. "Hard to kill. Wound it, it heals. There's contamination in that thing like you couldn't imagine. Can't even get close without becoming a mutant. This is safe. Closer... no."

"But it's... why can't it be dead?"

Marana's voice was muffled by her mask.

"You chop an eel's head off, it lives for a while longer. Why not this? Why can't something this massive become mindless, brainless, dead... but still alive? Do you need a brain for your heart to beat?"

The bandaged woman snorted.

"Poetic. Not wrong, though. Not wrong. Dies slow. Contamination keeps it alive. But won't make it think. It lives, that's enough. There's oil, in its heart. Fuels the weapons. Has glands that make the stuff. Never stops burning. Like throwing a lighter into a derrick. Not even mutants come to eat it. They try... the contamination in the air just destabilises them. They get closer, the thing... the flesh parts, it swallows them whole. I've seen it. Not even mutants can hurt it."

And silence consumed them again. Reverent silence before something so utterly vast. This... there had been more of these. Many of these. Too many. Where had the rest gone? How had humanity beaten this? She tried to imagine it in battle, shambling over the rest. Truly enormous, laden with weapons, impossible to approach... probably dousing people in contamination if they even looked funny, while a screaming horde of mutants surrounded it on all sides. Hurt them, the titan would heal them, wrap them up like the prey of a jellyfish and nurture their growth. No way of getting close. No way of attacking without immediate retaliation. How had it been stopped?

They couldn't even finish burning it, how had they managed to put it down in the first place?

Maybe one day it would wake back up.

Maybe.

For now, Tanner was going in the one director she didn't want to go in. North. To the place where these things had come from, where they'd been made. The Great War was a long nightmare which had ended before her birth, and yet... how? How had... she could see bodies, burned bodies, lying in islands in the pit, high enough and strong enough for the current to be impossible to break up. Solid as rocks. The banks were practically heaving with them. Burned, half-melted, showing an infinity of contorted limbs and snarling faces, maws ripped wide, some of them still with half-intact teeth, bones softened to sludge. Burned until the contamination evaporated or disintegrated. So destroyed that the stink of contamination was gone. How many had fought here? How had humanity survived? And what... what had designed these? The titan, that couldn't have been natural, mutants didn't get that big. Contamination was stupid, it just advanced what it was given. Give it a wolf, it might make a larger wolf, but it wouldn't make a wolf the size of a building. A titan... it implied one of two things. Either there was something in the world which could form a basis for this creature, something vast, powerful, bizarre and utterly unearthly... or something had designed it.

In which case... what?

Why?

And how had it stopped?

The creature pulsed. Even now, it was still breathing, somehow. Living despite the fact that it was perpetually burning from the inside out. A living theurgic and industrial engine wrapped inside a quivering mass of mutated flesh.

And they were going to the place where it'd been made.

The burned armies all around them... she looked at the bodies, wondered how many had died, how many the hunters had killed, had many mutants had been dead and gone once the Great War had ended, and then... how many still lived. How many were watching, even now.

How many were eager for the day when they could get close, without being devoured whole or destabilised irreparably.

How many were close.

She looked around... and in the mist, there might've been none.

Or there might've been thousands.