I’ve been dreaming lately
It’s strange, folks. My dreams have always been stupid stuff.
My old farm, my radio gig, whatever I had for dinner last night
But now I’m dreaming a prison of bones that grows like tulips
Dreaming death undying hungry to bite
Dreaming a new dawn stretching to wrap us all tight
And the part that worries me, folks, is that I think you’re dreaming the same thing too
Spring 60
The drums of war summoned Alisandra to Ruhum again soon. This time for a straggler’s convoy broken down in the eastern plains and beset by Briarwood.
Then again, the day after.
Then again, the day after that…
Alisandra bore witness to the true Ruhum now: army men surrounding civilians, guns at the ready. Enterprising officers, well aware of their position, took hostages in hopes of coercing divinity.
She struck down the commanders, and the next batch hid their rank. Struck down the sergeants leading the squadrons, and more were promoted for the next day.
“I turned my attention away for a matter of days,” she hissed to the clouds in despair.
Days! And the Isle of Peace devolved.
The Houses? Knee-capped with little chance to recover.
The deacons? Openly jockeying for the honor of the red robes.
The people? Adorned in black ribbons and madness!
As the drums summoned her once more, she erupted above the latest travesty awash in her own bitter echo.
So much for gentle steps
Spring 63
The tumult careened for its inevitable conclusion.
Alisandra arrived above Walter. The green forests north of Lumia, once quiet, now flickered with innumerable cooking fires. The smuggler’s retreat now bulged with the evacuation. Thousands still waited to make the guided march to the Cathedral.
To the east, the sea churned with her wake. To the south, Lumia’s red stain pulsed with memories against her halo. Finally, to the west, the forest thinned into the abandoned grain fields where men like Oliver had once slept in barns.
Now those barns hosted Ruhum’s army, come to wipe Walter clean. The army’s new tanks gleamed in a row, pointed at the tree line, and a sea of tents housed the rifle infantry on this fine morning.
Mechanized technology under the tactics of fat, old generals, she thought.
The largest cluster of tents covered a baseball field. Surrounded by heavy trucks and several portable electric generators, that would be the home of the generals. There the brass would be busy arguing how best to massacre what civilians the riots and mobs had missed.
With angelic eyes, she counted black armbands on the visible soldiers and only stopped once at five hundred.
“I am tired of repeating this scene,” the angel of Valor admitted under her breath. “Tired of watching this drunken madness of vainglory spread.”
Any student of history can see the calamity approaching, and yet they rush to the pyre. Will they be shocked when they run out of heretics and find themselves upon the altar?
What was the sense of this? She saw the calamity. She had the power to stop it. Her best attempt at gentle steps lay crumbled in the shadow of the Conclave. Should the Archangel shrug and accept the slaughter?
When this Work is done, there must be changes.
Sudden peals of thunder announced the artillery intermingled with the infantry.
The opening salvo. Why waste the men when you can remove the forest? Alisandra reasoned.
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She flickered across the sky, kicking the rounds like soccer balls.
“Useless.”
Then trees behind her exploded. Away from the campfires, at least, but close enough for her to hear the panicked screams.
The Archangel had missed one of two hundred, and it had blown a crater among the trees a few hundred feet from the nearest campfires.
Pressure gnawed at her.
They depend on me
I cannot miss one of two hundred nor one of two thousand
The Archangel cannot falter!
Scowling, she dropped to the ground before the army. She projected her voice, letting it boom like the storm across the field, and stated, “The first volley is an amusement. The second an offense. You send an army, but I ask the man. Who will answer for this?!”
How would they answer today? Lately they preferred a laundry list of demands for redress – usually for wrongs buried before even the oldest general present finished toilet training. Sometimes they would conflate her with the Wyrm. The more creative ones would simply invent grievances on the spot.
“Sight and fire!” an officer yelled.
Belatedly, she noticed pattern among the tents; a semi-circle of artillery beneath the tarps, all sighted on her.
Ah, the slightest flicker of foresight. She mentally applauded. They had predicted both her appearance and her landing – at least within the tolerance of artillery.
Rather than bursting, the rounds smashed like porcelain across the grass around her. An acrid stink rose, and the wind rang with foul echoes.
Rotted Tempest
Betrayer! Corrupter!
Blasphemer of the cold and the dark!
“Hmm. Church influence. Magicks-infused shells?”
The fragments of porcelain rang with the wet slap of leather whips against Penitent backs.
She doubted even a fresh-Bloomed angel would fall before such a self-indulgent magic. You think to gain power over sin with pain. Yes, you chose the whip; what is this to me?
Another volley started, and she stepped forward over the tanks. She caught the nearest line officer by the lapel in her right hand, crushed a porcelain offering in her left, and asked him curiously.
“Now what?”
To her mild surprise, he grabbed hold of her arm against his neck; pulled a blessed dagger; and drove it against her belly.
She felt a tickle across her skin – like the knife asking permission – denied.
The tip broke off against her shirt.
“What I really want,” the angel mulled, “is for one of you – just one! – to have an answer. What next? Suppose this dagger bled me upon this field, O hero. What then?”
I already hear your echo clear as day, though. There is no tomorrow; only the eternal embrace of glory in the moment.
His soldiers drew their own blades and charged.
Alisandra ducked the first strikes, wove between them, and struck as she pleased.
As she disarmed them, examining each blade in turn – considering the echoes of prayer and purity unique to each – the tanks ground their tires into the dirt and formed a heavy circle against her escape.
“Is each man here a martyr?” she wondered.
The tanks answered that question, firing inwards with no care for the soldiers within.
She knocked the shells skyward.
“Did they promise you heaven for your service?”
The artillery rang; she cut the fury from the metal with her Blade and watched the shells drop dead to the grass.
“Did a one of you face this day with doubts in your belly?!”
Or was the press of the simple masses too great a foe for even the reasoned and the learned?
The demands of honor a drug which could drive these young men against her armed with nothing but slivers of metal and terror in their eyes.
She struck them one by one: the solar plexus, the shoulder, the knee. Careful strikes – merciful strikes – like a mother cat pouncing for her kittens.
And the whole time, she saw this stretched before her for eternity.
Mother to a billion toddlers in a room full of especially sharp toys.
An electric roar slowly built in the background.
Fifteen years of gentle words!
Yet here I stand, yanking the knives from the hands of boys barely old enough to shave as they cry for my death!
The roar grew.
She caught artillery fire, clutched it in her hands, and let its fury patter harmlessly against her clasped palms.
The soldiers rewarded her with bullets and curses.
The roar grew.
In their faces, she beheld the product of her efforts. The utter failure of Alisandra Mishkan’s guiding hand!
The roar grew.
Finally, the officers shouted, and the stifling mob stumbled back.
***
“I don’t care how many men it takes. Keep her pinned down!”
Every one of those men was a martyr in the making; any price for this.
The electric roar built from twelve trucks.
Each truck, hidden under those canvas tents, rattled with swelling electric charge. Stray coins flew across tables to attach to the sides of the trucks as the roar grew, and men hastily tore off their belt buckles.
Each was fastened by an umbilical cord to a central hub of strange silver metal now crackling to life.
At its center waited Briarwood’s ultimate prize, reclaimed at such cost from Lumia’s ashes: a life-size doll of living metal, suspended in place and hooked into the charging coils.
Even dead and empty, Thea’s shell regarded these events with placid acceptance.
As the generals so wished, the shell answered.
Her hands flowed forward, shaping the railgun once more. It crackled with all the power Briarwood begged, borrowed, and stolen over fifteen years of experimentation and sacrifice.
“Hold steady, men!” shouted the lead scientist, his hand on the railgun barrel as though he understood the Works he dragged from the dirt.
Beneath his fingers, a thousand signatures. Each was a man brought to grief by Azure lies, inked in blood and blessed by every priest faithful to the True Fire. The combined piety of all Ruhum rested in this barrel, roaring at last to life!
“This is how you meet a god upon the field of battle!”
***
The roaring stopped.
Alisandra turned to the west and spied Thea’s vessel now filled with a new power.
An arc of Light shot across the plain and struck true.
***
With bated breath, the Briarwood army waited for the dust to clear.
Then a bolt of Light burst back the way it had come.
Alisandra the Tempest stood astride the railgun. She grasped the empty doll and tore its blessed metal in half.
Light-sharp steam hissed from her head as she locked gaze with the generals and scientists that had skulked here in the rear – sacrificing the battalions for this very moment with their noble chins raised high.
“You wish to face a god upon the field of battle,” the Tempest stated.
Each in turn regarded her face.
Half of it shattered like porcelain.
Power leaked through the cracks radiating out from her left eye.
And beneath? Beneath the mien, they beheld the Storm of eternal, raging Light.
The Tempest drew the Hand of God.
“As you wish.”