NationStates Jolt Archive

The Present …

A single flake of snow drifts lazily through the chill air, glowing pale in the light of the moon as the dark cloud that birthed it slinks away. Down it falls, the beautiful shape: a brief flirtation with a gust of air that rises from a crevasse blows it sideways before it continues its path to the glacier top. But it is does not join its fellows, the ones that carpet the ground. Instead it touches cold flesh, settling on the open, iced eye of a corpse haloed in red. The man – or boy, really – he cannot have been a day older than sixteen – has rimed ridges of blood over his heart, and waist. Sanguine lipstick kisses a white uniform. Beneath the body, his life is spread out in trickles spiderwebbed across the ground, its warmth having time to form and melt little channels before it was stolen away. A loss, a tragic loss of a life that could have made a difference, wasted as surely as the rifle clutched in his fingers.

One of many thousands, frozen on the face of the glacier. The occasional howl of the gathering wolves sings a hymn to the lost. There is other sound, too. One man, a gore-caked branch from a stunted pine tree rising angry from his throat, has a small radio clipped to his belt. From it, muted voices sing out into the night …

We turn away to face the cold, enduring chill
As the day begs the night for mercy love
The sun so bright it leaves no shadows
Only scars carved into stone
On the face of earth
The moon is up and over One Tree Hill
We see the sun go down in your eyes

You run like river, on like a sea
You run like a river runs to the sea

The wolves draw closer, and closer. Huge creatures, their coats are shaggy and long, white and almost invisible against the landscape. They are cautious, of course. Despite man’s occasional status as meal, more often he is a threat. Their noses rise into the air as they sift through the scent of the feast for any sign of a threat. For centuries, they have consumed the men, and women, and children too weak to survive in this land, and the behaviour is bred into them, by now. But no, it is clear. Nothing lives, all is dead or – better yet, a warmer fresher meal – dying.

And in the world a heart of darkness
A fire zone
Where poets speak their heart
Then bleed for it
Jara sang, his song a weapon
In the hands of love
You know his blood still cries
From the ground

It runs like a river runs to the sea
It runs like a river to the sea

One of the wolves – Whisperwolves, in folk tales, their shining blue eyes that speak of secrets, mesmerising their red-eyed prey – approaches the young boy, light steps leaving no pawprints in the snow. Were the land any warmer, strings of drool would have hung from its mouth – but to walk with one’s mouth open here would steal precious warmth, leave one hungrier and more dependent on the vagaries of an often cruel fate. It nuzzles him, fur brushing away new snowflakes in little clouds. A sniff of the weapon brings out a faint growl, and it swats at his chest – electronic circuitry producing a hum that is audible to it – audible, and aggravating. The paw, wicked claws extended, punches through uniform, body armour, and ribcage as if they were not there. The hum stops, and the wolf lowers its muzzle to feed before the warmth – already fleeing from the exposed innards – leaves entirely in its misted form.

I don't believe in painted roses
Or bleeding hearts
While bullets rape the night of the merciful
I'll see you again
When the stars fall from the sky
And the moon has turned red
Over One Tree Hill

A different wolf – slimmer, smaller, sleeker than the others – ignores the frozen bodies, and looks mournfully at the largest of its brethren, the ones cracking the bones of the dying with their jaws to drink the marrow. Instead, it hunkers down in a small dip on the glacier, filled with frozen blood. The warmth of its body begins to melt the stuff, and it laps at the salty nutrition eagerly.

We run like a river
Run to the sea
We run like a river to the sea
And when it's raining
Raining hard
That's when the rain will
Break my heart

Raining...raining in the heart
Raining in your heart
Raining...raining to your heart
Raining, raining...raining
Raining to your heart
Raining...raining in your heart
Raining in your heart..
To the sea

Oh great ocean
Oh great sea
Run to the ocean
Run to the sea

Indeed, were one to look at the glacier – the mighty crystalline expanse of the Mördeskälte – from above, the little wolf would seem to have picked the richest source of food of them all. The dead spanned miles, shattered bodies littering the arctic valley like the needles beneath a pine in winter. Blood had trickled down the sides, into crevasses and cold-forged runnels in the jagged shards of rock that punctured the Mördeskälte’s body. The roiling foaming waters of the river that split it in two and ran to the Still Water were tinged with glistening, foaming red that ran distantly to the northern sea.


OOC:
This is a story thread, really. Intended to illustrate my nation (for the few that care) a little better. Tagging and OOC constructive criticism is welcome: IC interaction is hard to justify. My country was originally inspired (in a vague, vague way!) by the U2 album the "Joshua Tree". Hence, I've slotted in songs and used them to form the story. I like mixing music and writing, it's my own personal weakness.

Ten days earlier …


Far below the howling, grasping winds of winter, cradled within the bosom of the earth, a meeting takes place. It has little to distinguish it from other meetings, save that the fate of a nation rests upon the emotional and impassioned creatures taking part.

But, because it’s our nation, we’ll go and look, shall we, poppet?

A silver-haired man, strong but fading and dressed in shining armour with a cross emblazoned across the chest and a mitre in one hand is the first speaker who catches our attention. He’s not saying anything particularly new – the argument has been going in circles for a while – but it’s as good a place to join in as any. After all, we can’t be pay constant attention to the bickering little humans, can we?

“ … will not happen. Knight Inquisitor Arelle acts with the full and total backing of the Ordo Sancti Mundi. Her decision was not only just, it was generous. Had it been Lord Inquisitor Edwards there your lapdog would have been Confessed, there and then.” Doesn’t he sound highly strung? Obviously something’s eating away at him. Those shadows under his eyes … well. He’s had a long day. Then again, when we look at the … person … he is arguing with, I think we can understand him.

And poppet, although we dislike this speaker – Master Solomon, head of the Endless Regrets Ordo Sancti Mundi, second only in ecclesiastical power to the Prince Bishop – at least show some respect. His link to his God is so strong only the most ancient and powerful of our kind can even get close enough to look at him – if I wasn’t here to sustain you, you’d evaporate away. So take that hungry look out of your eyes, little one, and let’s see who he is speaking too.

Ah. Metallic chicken-legs folded, the mineral tang of this one is well known to us, isn’t it? The Hater. See how he is forced to crouch down in that hulking scrapmetal shell, to bring him to a level where he does not dominate the room. Isn’t his aura tasty-looking … all those deep, dark colours. That is the man who makes all their little energy machines run, the ones that leave the other men torn and bleeding on the ground. Scott, his name is. Or was, when he was still a real person and not a machine.

“It was not the jurisdiction of the Church. That operation was requested by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and executed by the Ministry of Defence. The Diocesal Administration had no place within it. Knight Inquisitor Arelle had no say in the matter and you will hand her over!”

Ohhh, sounds like something fun happened, doesn’t it poppet? Maybe this speaker will have something to say that can shed some light. Oh, dear. That wasn’t expected. That’s Voice-of-Summer – the sweet little auburn one – and does her vessel ever look upset. She’s been crying, poor dear – look at the streaks on her face. Must be quite distressed for that to happen whilst she’s under the effects of parlay, don’t you think?

“Lord Commander Scott,” the little girl says as fresh tears well up from her eyes, “jurisdiction is not the issue at hand. Your subordinate raped Joanna von Sachhausen. With a pistol. He made a concerted effort to humiliate her, dehumanise her, and destroy her mind. That is not a matter of politics, that is evil. He did not show her the rights we would accord to a prisoner of war, let alone the respect someone of her standing and efforts should receive. Abusive, bullying, evil. And contrary to what the world may think of us, or what you seem to want to believe, we are not an evil country. Knight Inquisitor Arelle was incorrect to give a citizen to another country from a pragmatic viewpoint, but morally I agree with her choice. Etienne de Savoir deserves to die at her hands. The High Council has spoken, and he is officially exiled from our country. Master Solomon has excommunicated him from the See. And to prevent this ever happening again, all future similar missions are to take place with a group of three leaders, not one. Of whom no more than two are to be from any one Ministry. And … ”

Oh dear. Some foreigner gets something jammed into her birthing hole, and suddenly everyone’s crying. Silly, isn’t it poppet? Anyone would think she’d been some sort of sacrificial virgin, and defiling her was going to unleash a hungry dragon.

“You what? Absolutely not. I will not see the Ministry of Defence controlled by other Ministries. And I will not let Etienne go without trying to get him back. Not only is he now a security risk, but knowing that Whispering Voices does not stand fully behind my men in the event of accidents happening will be devastating to morale. That is out of the question.”

Ooooooooooh, oh dear. Standing up to a High Councillor, that won’t go down so well. She may be as soft as a baby’s throat but she can’t let one of them get away with standing up to us. That would be positively disastrous, poppet. They must serve us. Look at her cheeks, though. Flushed with red. And still those pretty little tears – when I last had a vessel, he couldn’t shed tears. I was most disappointed, sorrow can be so nourishing. I can even see Summer inside that morass of emotions, trying to reign in the child and barely succeeding.

“If you will not let him go, Thomas Scott, then I suggest you find a replacement who will.” That’s the way, Summer. Remind him who’s in charge! “Your poor choice of emissary let this happen, Scott. The lack of moral fibre in the old noble families is frequently bemoaned by the Diocesal Administration – and you put one of the worst in charge of a defenceless woman. You’ve seen the tapes, you know what he put her through. I cannot believe that you are defending him.”

Hah, that’s told … oh. He can’t be thinking of confronting her, can he? He’s standing though, those massive thick legs of metal rising around their pivots, his arms-that-are-weapons uncoiling. Solomon is donning his ceremonial helm, and Summer is drawing her power together. But no … no fight, poppet, not now. He’s stalking out, away from her red-burning eyes and the priest’s contemptuous expression. Not many men can make the very ground shake when they walk, can they now? You know, poppet … this could be interesting. It could mean many things – all of which are fun. I’m going after Scott, poppet – come with me, and I’ll keep describing to you that which you are too small to see for yourself ...

[tag]

Quality...

and [Taggage]

OOC:
#tag#
Both good quality, very nice, though I cannot make much sense of the first posting the second one is clear... *tries to place this in the Kidnapped! timeline*

*tag*

always enjoy your stuff WV

Poor etienne... i liked that guy :?

<tag>

soo much WV to read..........

<Tag>

(Still holding the record of most-words-in-one-post)

OOC:
#tag#
Both good quality, very nice, though I cannot make much sense of the first posting the second one is clear... *tries to place this in the Kidnapped! timeline*

Occurs post-kidnapping - hopefully obvious from the mention of the kidnap in it ^_^

Ten years earlier …

” … do you, Thomas, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife? To have and to hold, through sickness and in health, until death do you part?”

“I do.”

“And do you, Sarah, take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? To ha … “

“I do!”

Feeling dizzy, and still a little sick, Thomas squeezed his beloved’s hand as the best man – his brother, and his aide - presented the wedding rings. The band of gold was thin, fragile in his grasp, although not so much as Sarah: not for the first time he felt crude and clumsy compared to his delicate bride. He lost track of time, dazed, until the elderly, smiling priest told him that he could kiss his bride. Thomas lifted her veil, looked into her eyes, and kissed her as outside, the military salute of cannon shook the ground.

Together, they turned to walk down the isle, and …

You know he got the cure
You know he went astray
He used to stay awake
To drive the dreams he had away
He wanted to believe
In the hands of love

His head it felt heavy
As he cut across the land
A dog started crying
Like a broken hearted man
At the howling wind
At the howling wind

”This is Private 50491 Petersen, come in command. It was a trap, the … “

Thomas felt sick as the report – the sixth in as many seconds – came in. His men were being massacred, and it was his fault. He had known – at heart – that the Aranians could not be trusted. But he could not bear the idea of millions of innocents dying, trapped underground when Nisil crumbled; and so he had offered a temporary truce, a ceasement of his guns pounding the cavern ceiling, so that the civilians, the women and children, could be evacuated. The first loss had been a soldier who had ‘fallen’ down an elevator shaft whilst inspecting the refugees. The rest had been fast to follow. Men, good men, dying thousands of miles from home, and miles underground – the daggers in their backs clear.

“Give the order to the flatbeds to resume bombardment of the cavern ceiling.” His voice sounded chill, even to him. But he was not going to permit the far-larger Arani force the time needed to surround him and cut him off from the surface … from the light. He could not die down here … he had left his new wife a month pregnant for this mission. “Bring this sinkhole down.”

He went deeper into black
Deeper into white
Could see the stars shining
Like nails in the night
He felt the healing
Healing, healing
Healing hands of love
Like the stars shiny shiny
From above

Tears ran down his face, then. His eyelids fluttered, barely able to remain open. But they did not need to, he could see the truth. Sarah looked down upon him, his shattered torn and broken body resting in slings on the hospital bed, her face twisted in … dislike? Distaste? No … worse. Worse than that. Contempt. His country had never treated those who became crippled kindly, and thanks to the shards of adamantine embedded in parts of his frame, no medicine developed could save his dying body in the limited time it had.

“Sarah,” he had croaked, his voice as jagged as his wounds. “Don’t go … “

But she had, a last lying kiss on his scarred forehead, away from his sight and life to plead her case for seperation.

Hand in the pocket
Finger on the steel
The pistol weighed heavy
His heart he could feel
Was beating, beating
Beating, beating oh my love
Oh my love, oh my love
Oh my love

My love

Saw the hands that build
Can also pull down

The hands of love

<SPOCK>Fascinating...</SPOCK>
<TAG>

<tag>

I envy your writing ability.

Poor etienne... i liked that guy :?

Freak!

:tag:

Nine days ago …

Ah, poppet. Ah-ha-ha, if only the High Council could see this, eh? What little fits they’d have. Seven sprawled sycophants on luxurious divans, waiting on Scott’s every word. Let alone the Diocesal Administration … those two, you feel the auras just here? Green and yellow, the colour of rotting puss? Yes, bitterness, jealousy, frustration. Half-siblings, poppet. Ranulf de Savoir, brother of the disgraced Etienne. How positively scandalous, pet, him with his noble head lying on his sister’s chest. But wait …

“ … you see, now is the time. If you don not strike now, you and your children and their children, on through the generations, will fade and die.” An odd, synthesised laugh draws the heads of the dazed, drugged nobles back around to face the robotic once-man, the men and women struggling to fight through the daze of cocaine. “Even if you – we – fail, at least it will be with a bang, not a whimper. Rhys will have manipulated you out of existence long before another chance like this comes. Look at the ‘Better World’ project – centuries of selective breeding, of your ancestors fighting wars over fit mates, weeding out the weak and the crippled – undone in a mere instant, a single broadcast as Rhys and his Institute fund genetic restructuring for the whole population. In a single stroke, he raised himself high and cast your heritage to the wolves. Don’t tell me … ”

Ah. Now Ranulf finally speaks – or will, once he’s inhaled that line of white powder through that wrought-silver tube. And his voice will be noble, and strong – and proud, and arrogant.

“Scott, we are quite aware of the full ramifications of the Better World project, and were when we found out about it – along with the peas … populace. You are sure, you are positive that the Rhys on the throne is merely a … clone? That the real article is gone?”

Oh-ho-ho, poppet. Whilst the wolves are away, the babes will play it seems. I bet the High Council are cursing the fact that Rhys has no heirs, now. There hasn’t been a civil war in … not a full one, at least – well, in all the time I’ve been here. And that, my little sweet protégé, is quite a while.

An electronic sigh. “Yes, de Savoir. Rhys is still imprisoned at the leisure of that Nos Feänor creature, for his abduction of her from within the middle of her own capital city. One of his many doubles sits on the throne, “guiding” the people, continuing your downfall in the absence of the real thing. Hence the whole business with Etienne even being able to happen. Rhys would not have permitted such a thing, but his imperfect replicas are not so good at micromanaging the country. ”

The sister Tara is now sitting up. She’s almost as powerful as her half-brother, and the de Savoirs are rich and powerful indeed – comfortably the match in genetic heritage and wealth, now that the Valacrofts are fallen on hard times. She seems a little more awake, doesn’t she, poppet? Maybe she’s had too little cocaine … if I can just reach out … no. Her mind is too chaotic, too wild. She is just better able to deal with the side-effects of that nasty, nasty drug I suppose.

“Scott,” – my goodness, poppet, isn’t she an imperious thing? What a strident tone! – “what then do you suggest? Where would we start? Even if we get every noble house to contest with the loyal elements of the Ministry, we’ll be outnumbered by a great deal. And not even our entire family is loyal – look at our bastard cousin, the governor of the Garden, giving my little brother to Lavenrunz. The High Council has been devoting greater and greater amounts to the military every year. The fleets won’t get involved: from what I hear Richards’ successor is a cautious woman. But the High Council controls the Mördeskälte facility, where the Wisps and Jack O’Lanterns are produced … and heaven alone knows what Rhys has in the Royal Institute.” Lovely voice though, poppet – all soft and silky, the kind of voice that makes me want to possess someone and swim in chocolate.

“This is true. But I have several loyal high-up members of the command staff. Those that served in Arani, mainly, and Glubbdubdrib – those mandated for retirement. I’ve laced the Townsend-Hutchison Facility with supporters: it’ll fall to us. That will give us what we need to destroy the Royal Institute of Genetic Research. I’ve been there, when Rhys’ father tried to make amends for what happened in Arani by telling his son to fix me. I know the Institute – even if it was ten years ago – and I can remember it. With surprise, we can take it, and … ”

“And what about the Royal Guard, Scott! Or had you forgotten them? Rhys keeps ten stationed in there permanently, if rumours spring true. We don’t have anyone as strong, and neither the time nor the resources to make them.”

“Ah, now you see, that’s the wonderful thing. Menelmacar raided the Royal Institute, some while ago – the whole catalyst for the kidnapping of their slattern leader. There was a pair of brothers in the Royal Guard, one of them died that night to the weapons of the Mornahossë. His brother, Simon, has been approached and found willing. Note ‘approached’, past tense. If he was going to turn us in he would have before now. He hates Rhys for not executing Sirithil or the leader of the Mornahossë whilst he had the chance. He’s our man, and promises me he can incapacitate the others. They trust each other implicitly; not since the inception of the order has one of them turned against his liege.”

Oh, poppet! Isn’t this just delicious! Not only is metal man going to lead a rebellion, he even has plans. Government money well spent on the Officer’s Acadamy, yes? Ah-ha! No, we don’t have a duty to tell the Council. We’re exiles littling, they pushed us out. If vengeance is a dish best served cold, then here it will truly be an extravaganza …

<tag>

Two hundred years ago …

The groan of the hull rose up through the open hatches, as beneath Admiral Kinehine his ship began to buckle. Slats of caulked wood exploding out into the glaring sunlight as the Pride of Eire gave her last gasps, the cannonballs from the opposing fleet raping her fragile form. His knuckles were white as he gripped the aft rail of her stern, blood and grime matting the shreds of his uniform that had once been as green as the pastures of his farm. The smoke from the conflict was not being blown away: the sea was becalmed, and it had been the death of his naval strike. The fates had truly abandoned him and his when his fast, agile ships attempted to penetrate deep into the enemy’s convoy and befoul them with fire and flame – and lost all their wind power. He gave up a prayer to his goddess, commending his soul to her trust, as grapeshot swept the decks of his ship clear of life, leaving only blood and death and mangled human debris slurping along the shattered deck. He said his farewells to his little son Daniel, who had accompanied him for honour and pride, the boy he had been teaching his craft to. As he stood up from kissing the quailing lad on the forehead, a measure of chain-shot whirled across the breadth of sea from the lumbering enemy flagship, wrapping its serpentine coils around the aft mast and turning Kinehine into a red spray with one of its two angry heads.

From father to son
The blood runs thin
See faces frozen still
Against the wind

The seam is split
The coal face cracked
The lines are long
There's no going back
Through hands of steel
And heart of stone
Our labour day
Has come and gone

Yeah you leave me holding on
In Red Hill Town
See lights go down, I'm...

Hanging on
You're all that's left to hold on to
I'm still waiting
I'm hanging on
You're all that's left to hold on to

The spirits of the people of Eire had crumpled as fast as their ships of war had sunk into the endless depths. The invading fleet, in the year of our Lord Anno Domini 1905, had been as efficient as it was aggressive. The Erin Navy had been splintered like an egg crushed in a gauntlet of iron and cordite. The foe, their white coats and breeches, their pale faces, and their relentless red eyes, had routed the army sent against them. Those who did not fight were left unharmed, but the worship of the fae had been stamped down upon viciously. The very heritage of Eire was under threat, as with shocking speed factories had been built and mines enlarged. In some ways, the people lived better because of it – if a man was fit, he could work in the new industry; if clever, he could run the new industry. Those distant from the old ways seemed to bear the loss of their freedoms with greater grace than the rest.

And that’s just what I am: one of the rest … the forgotten, Siobhan thought as she stood in the long line of women waiting to enter the wool mill. Ah, poor Ciolan. How he wept with joy, when he saw the mill was being built into the cliff, to hide its ugly workings. She took a deep breath as the mill-employed guardsman – known to her, Patrick, a lad she’d seen at the Crookshank Arms a few times raising a pint – stood stoically in the face of glares he received from the workers. Glares given to a sell-out. She didn’t meet his eyes, and his face fell. He once wanted me too, she recalled as she stepped into the gloom of the mill, lit by window shafts built into the cliff face and by fires, but he could not match Ciolan. She sat down, shivering a little with the remembered pleasure of the night before, when her lord from under the Hill had claimed her in the moonlit meadow around his barrow. Automatically, unthinkingly, she picked up the first skein, looping it round the spindle and slowly pumping the treadle with her foot. Her throat remembered the touch of his tongue, her breasts the kneading of his fingers, her hair the stag-like antlers it had wound around, and she daydreamed of the need for her that had lit his piercing green eyes as she sat in the cold, efficient factory. Desperately trying to reaffirm her individuality, to reassure herself she was more than just a weaver at a loom, one of thousands.

The glass is cut
The bottle run dry
Our love runs cold
In the caverns of the night
We're wounded by fear
Injured in doubt
I can lose myself
You I can't live without

Yeah you keep me holding on
In Red Hill Town
See the lights go down on
I'm hanging on
You're all that's left to hold on to
I'm still waiting
Hanging on
You're all that's left to hold on to
Hold on to

Siobhan hugged her linen shawl close as she stepped lightly through the forest arbours. She wore no wool, not now: it reminded her of her waking life, a barren and destitute life. Here, at night, she was happy; walking tentatively into the dark unknown that had loved her mother, her grandmother, and the women of her family back through countless generations. The antlered lord of Cwmbhéir Sleáth ruled his kingdom of the mound here, vassal court to the Seelie of Tir Ná Nog: and he exercised his right choosing one bride at a time, for the whole of their lives. Dew kissed her feet, although dawn was still mercifully far away. The trees called to her, leaves brushing her clothes, nature itself greeting the lonesome girl, welcoming her. Eventually, she stepped out of the darkness into the soft-lit clearing where Ciolan’s world brushed hers. He was waiting for her there, reclining against a menhir. White light etched his muscular nude body, and cast his eyes into deep pits of shadow. Siobhan let her shawl drop away as he rose to greet her, turned her head up to the moon to receive his kisses. His feral scent was strong, loamy, crushed grass and rain and unborn flowers. With a roughness that thrilled her he bore her to the ground, greedily, immensely strong hands ripping away her clothes, parting her legs, lifting her up and …

And she started from up from her straw mattress as the hovel door splintered, torches flickering in as men, white coats painted red with the fire light, stood framed by blackness in the doorway. She could still feel the imprints of Ciolan’s flesh upon hers, feel the blades of grass and dew on her feet and back and in her hair. She had never woken from a dream before, and she felt an aching loss. Her youngest brother, Philip, began crying as their mother scooped him up, putting him over her shoulder, hiding the intruders from his sight.

One of them, a man a little older, his eyes slightly colder, looked around the room. Saw her. Strode across, and pulled the covers away. It was not being stared at that made Siobhan quake, then. She knew what he was looking for – the grass stains on her skin, the dew glistening, and most telling of all – the glitter, the sparkle, the faerie dust that betrayed her otherworldly lover. He grabbed her by the hair, and dragged her out of the bed, out of the hovel. Away from her family. Most of all, away from Ciolan’s need of her.

We'll scorch the earth
Set fire to the sky
We stoop so low to reach so high
A link is lost
The chain undone
We wait all day
For night to come
And it comes
Like a hunter child

I'm hanging on
You're all that's left to hold on to
I'm still waiting
I'm hanging on
You're all that's left to hold on to

Love...slowly stripped away
Love...has seen its better day

Hanging on
The lights go out on Red Hill
The lights go down on Red Hill
Lights go down on Red Hill town
The lights go down on Red Hill

Drums beat throughout the night. The hosts of Lords and Ladies had issued from their barrows to meet this threat, this mortal army that had ground their worshippers into the ground. Lights flared above in the sky, dancing sprites scouting the way in clouds. The forerunners padded not far behind, great wisht hounds with their eyes hellish ruddy-green, their paws melting the ground as they loped and their black heads raising now and then to howl greedily at the moon above. Then came the Lords and Ladies, the Tuatha on their mighty chargers and the ghostly will’o’wisps casting light around them. Jack’o’th’Chains dragged his grating links behind him, leading scarecrows and annises. Selkies danced up the river, fomorians marched, and the souls of those who had accepted faerie hospitality and entered the mounds rode in glimmering armour behind.

They could not be defeated, not here, not on their land. They knew it, they willed it, they were it. Bullets and knives and swords and spears were weapons for killing things of this world, not the next. And they were furious. This had been, this land, one of their favoured. No white-dressed human would remain here when they were done, once the cruel Sidhe blades had been raised in fury.

The three men who rode the meet them – dressed in white, on white horses, with eyes tinged with red and pale faces – were doomed to die. But they rode on, under flags of truce, and the Lord of the Court – Ciolan, his anger wreathing his perfect body in mist – was bound to meet them under it in peace. And he rode forwards, his steed standing six hands again above the largest of their warhorses.

“Come to beg for mercy?” he taunted as he approached, anger roiling in heatwaves from his skin, his mightly antlers high. They stayed silent, as he drew closer. Their horses whickered nervously, but they kept them calm. “What is it you want, dead red and white men?”

“Subservience,” the reply rang out loud and clear. It was all Ciolan could do to keep his temper, to resist lashing out in fury and smearing the flag of peace in blood.

“The Lord of Cwmbhéir Sleáth owes allegiance only to the Court of the Sidhe, mortal,” he bellowed. His breath curled up into vaporous tendrils, as hot as his blood.

There was no argument, though, no threat. The leader, or at least the man forward of the other two, spoke again. “We have Sher-vaughn.” The name was strange to him, he pronounced it oddly. “We have Maire. We have your brides, Shee-oh-lahn of Coom-ay-arh Slee-ath. Yours and those of your folk. If I die here, or if you lead this army against our men, we will take your brides beyond your grasp, and the husbands of your womenfolk. We will take everyone, and those that we do not take shall die and nevermore shall the Sidhe mix their blood with that of men, nevermore shall your numbers swell – only dwindle, as you make war upon each other.”

Ciolan tensed, his retort dying on parted lips as he attempted to understand the nature of the threat against him. No mortal brides … no Sidhe. For a Sidhe to breed with one of its own kind took many millenia of preparation, of gathering energy. For a Sidhe to die took just one thought in a world of glamour and dreams. He remembered Siobhan, soft and writhing beneath him, around him; her mother, Sian, and her mother, and so back into the mists of the ages. His mortal brides and loves, and the children they had borne him.

He looked back at the man who had threatened the future of his people, every fibre of his body aching to end that life. Gallifrey de Savoir, the commander of the Whispering Voices assault upon Eire, looked unconcerned.

“What is it you wish?” Ciolan snarled, his love of his folk overriding his pride.

“Well … “

Seven days ago …

The commissioned officers at the Townsend-Hutchison Institute were up late, this night. Most of them, at least. Shift rotas had been arranged so those loyal to the Crown and to the Council were asleep, at ease in a military facility deep within the sanctity of Whispering Voices’ borders, surrounded by their comrades. Those awake were loyal to Scott and his promises of rebellion, vengeance, and unity. The soldiers were trained to obey their officers, and part of the armed forces selection process involved mixing like with like to reduce unit tensions, one of the consequences of the battery of psych tests administered to every raw recruit. Units that had common ground performed more effectively in every situation, studies had shown – reducing intra-group tensions, increasing ability to meld into an effective team, and allowing greater and more efficient specialisation. A great strength and yet – now, a great weakness.

Colonel Hartside smiled grimly at his non-commissioned officers, gathered around him in the armoury. Syringes full of cocaine were in their hands, ready to administer to their sleeping men. Never before had anyone rebelled against the rule of the beings that controlled Whispering Voices – but an incident with a drug-addicted scientist who had escaped several years ago had paved the way. He had discovered that narcotics which randomised thought processes threatened to destroy the ordered being of the Voices, causing them to either go mad or to leave the host. And so, all of the men under his command were dosed, sent high into the sky on wings of white dust before being woken up. Their eyes faded from the red, returning to their natural colours – blues, and browns, greens and greys. The men groaned awake at the jabbing pain, senses reeling from the unexpected assault – but they were trained, well trained, and their officers convincing and able to work touch a nerve in each of them.

That night, the loyalists died without raising a weapon, or setting off an alarm.


Three hours later …

The three white Black Hawks descended through the bank of mist and snow, following the radio signals that guided them in their blindness. Scott crouched in the back of one, folded up small. He was alone in that hold, his heavy form straining the lift capacity of the helicopter to breaking point. The other two held his personal bodyguard – hand picked, the men best able to retain operational capability through the essential haze of cocaine. He had told the Royal Institute part of his frame had undergone severe stress during a training exercise and needed a look over. Heightened tensions ‘warranted’ an escort, he’d said: and there the helicopters were, flying into the thin layer of snowflakes that had built up over the entrance, rotor blades sending it into tiny hurricanes. Inside, automated turrets tracked the helicopters from the walls and ceiling with perfect accuracy – not just aiming at the helicopters, but at specific parts he knew – the Jesus bolt, the cockpit, the pilot himself. Taking the place by direct force had been made nigh on impossible since the last assault upon it. And yet … he was being invited in.

The helicopter bay doors opened, and he smoothly stretched himself out of the thing, unfolding to his full height. The guards came to salute and greet him as his men disembarked from their own escorts.

“This way, Lord Commander!” The young lad saluted him – he looked no more than seventeen, so probably a veteran of only one war. He turned smartly, clearly determined to leave his superior with a good impression of him. Once, that would have made Scott

Proud, as he stepped forwards in front of his assigned troop from training, the cold air howling through the then-occupied streets of Silence. King Llewellyn stood with his young son, the Crown Prince Rhys, on a balcony of the Royal Palace. “Attention. Present, arms!” he had said, his voice shaking as the men and women who had signed up to live, or to die, under his orders prepared to honour the royal family. The King, never one to hide his emotions – good or bad – had his son up on his shoulders, and the boy was pointing down at them and smiling at the white uniforms with splashes of red and gold, the snow for once not falling. Llewellyn’s lips were moving, he could see, as he gestured towards the men.

“We swear our lives to the Crown of our homes, our blood to their blood, our flesh to die that theirs might live. Sacrosanctus Ap’Gwidion! Sacrosanctus Ap’Gwidion! Sacrosanctus Ap’Gwidion!” He, as did the others there, shouted the words as loudly as they could, vying to outdo each other. And then, that magical moment as Llewellyn spoke, his voice as clear and warm as a rare summer’s wind.

“Your lives are ours to lead and to guide, to pastures green. Your blood is ours to watch, ours to purify. And your flesh is ours to guard, your service rewarded with peace. Sancrosanctus Dominis!” He paused, as they cheered: each man and woman letting off a single shot from their guns. “And, men and women – soldiers - of the First Century of the Second Expedition … it is my intention to swear you into service not to me, but to my son … “ He had held the young boy up, then, supporting him with strong hands under his arms, standing him on the balcony rail, the child trusting his life to his father on the icy stone. “Will you do this for me, my people? Will you acclaim Rhys your patron?” The answer had been a resounding cheer, and the firing of an entire second salute as the Second Century acknowledged the honour accorded to them. It was a measure of faith that so many were allowed near royalty, armed – the bond between King and men unshakeable, unbroken … until now.

“Until now … “ he muttered to himself, through the taut flaps of flesh that held together part of his skull embedded within the machine. He was descending the Ramp, a massive and slick construct carved from the rock. He knew that it could be iced over, should alarms be sounded: dooming those on it to a slick slide into the Pit that went down into the roots of the earth. Out of sight and memory. This descent always made him nervous, the clumsiness and lack of control over his robotic form potentially lethal.

The airlock doors at the bottom opened, and he stepped in. The reception area beyond, with its tranquil pool that acted as a motion sensor through ripples, was empty save for the three identical clones of Wanda, the secretary that Crown Prince Rhys had found so efficient he had reproduced her for each of his facilities. They looked up, and smiled at him as he exited the venting airlock. His soldiers entered behind, the young hospitality officer talking and laughing in their middle. The two Shepherds, malevolent-appearing guard robots that were a match for a main battle tank and far more agile, focused on him.

And he on them.

He noticed one Wanda was buffing her fingernails, the other two talking animatedly about a hairstyle in the magazine they were reading. The leader of the two squads he had brought, a Sergeant Hoffner, dropped something metallic on the floor. A signal, and a covering sound for the soft ‘clicks’ that denoted the removal of safeties. The young soldier, enemy soldier, bent down to pick up the plate …

As the Shepherds detected the movement of guns, powered up …

And as Scott opened up, one arm focused on each Shepherd. The whir of his rotary cannons whined throughout the room as hundreds of rounds pumped into each. It would have been futile, even then, even with depleted uranium bullets, had he not known their exact weak spots, and aimed for them. The sensors shut down, hits on the tiny array concealed in the body; bullets cut through wiring and hydraulics in the soft joints of the arms and legs.

As the first of the bullets hit the robots, Hoffner shot their guide twice. The gun, smart-linked via a series of electrodes to muscles that could stimulate the arm to point it wherever desired, put a bullet straight through the lower spine and the heart. Guaranteed paralysis, almost instantaneous death. He crumpled with a gurgle, blood spilling from the exit wounds.

The three Wandas screamed and ducked behind their desk as the soldiers fanned out.


One hour later …

The Royal Institute was dead. Nine Royal Guardsman lay with blood-dripping knives next to their decapitated heads, a clear message from the tenth: their own Judas, their armour untouched on hangers. Soldiers, scientists, and three pretty clones lay shredded by hollow-point bullets with parts of their bodies leaking from the internal shredding caused by the deadly, spinning metal flowers.

Scott remembered the smiling face of the young Prince as his helicopters took off, and explosions inside the mountain sent giant cakes of snow and ice rolling down the mountainside.

Betrayal for betrayal … you consort with the subhumans that destroyed me, and I in turn destroy you … His words sounded convincing, in his mind.

Almost.

tag

and blah...don't really like U2

tag

and blah...don't really like U2

(Other than the Joshua Tree ... nor do I ... )

tag

and blah...don't really like U2

(Other than the Joshua Tree ... nor do I ... )

One last OOC post so that you can get back to your good writing....check your TG's if you haven't.

Two years ago …

Crown Prince Rhys had almost laughed as the cameraman gave him the thumbs up that meant he was about to go live. He didn’t, though. He hid his feelings well, and so his young face glowed with a paternal look as he addressed his people.

“It is my pleasure and my great pride, my subjects,” he had said, his lilting voice clear and sweet and rich, gentle enough to tuck the sons of the country into bed at night, and forceful enough to protect the honour of its daughters. “To announce today the opening of the Thistledown Clinic, here in the capital of Silence.” The cameras had panned around the underground hospital, showing the insides of the huge facility with its warm, cheering colours and its pretty nurses and handsome doctors smiling in the background. “Never more shall any mother worry about her birth, nor father his child’s form.” The press conference had been somewhat of a surprise – security and confidentiality measures taken to the extreme to prevent his enemies from finding out. “For here, for the first time, the Royal Family shall take upon itself wholly the burden of birth: in this place, free monitoring and genetic treatment provided to all. Not only will the Thistledown cones and rods essential for seeing unaided in our new cities be introduced into the foetus here, but all hereditary and genetic diseases will be eradicated. Your child will be healthy, and strong, and free from the crippling diseases that the onset of age brings.”

A lock of his dark hair had fallen boyishly across his face as he smiled. “The newborn of our nation shall be the best, fit and proud! None will fall by the wayside, no matter how poor. The sons of the miners of the pit shall enjoy the health of the daughters of the noble families, and their sons, and their grandsons.” The smile had slowly disappeared, then. “And we shall end forever the barbaric practice of setting out the unfit.” The smile returned, fast. He was thinking of the nobles, the scions of the land in their fortified keeps, watching the broadcast in horror as his vengeance struck them out of nowhere. What he said was “And today shall be a festive day, a holiday, for now until the fifth generation when such recessive genes are finally eliminated as to make these clinics unnecessary. In honour of these festivities, the High Council has generously agreed to sponsor musical engagements – free and open to all. The daily restriction on alcohol is lifted, and food and drink shall be available for free. God Bless, my people.”

Wow, very nice writing. I don't know exactly what's going on, but it's still very nice writing.

OOC:

Hopefully it'll all be clear by the end. :)

Well, I can kinda get an idea of whats going on(ish), but getting to understand the specifics would be good for me, too, I guess. :wink:

I am sooo lost, I can barely understand each scene, let alone how it all fits together. Too many time warps..........<insert more complaints>

Still some very impressive writing though :P

*ponders on ECTOS'ing the hell out of WV so that he doesn't freaking post threads with a minimum of gozillion words in them*

#tag# http://snk-universe.com/Board/html/emoticons/dry.gif

Three hundred years ago …


The cries of a woman rang out through the frigid stone corridors of the mountainous stronghold of the noble family of Valacroft. Outside the winter raged at its worst. Outside the whisperwolves called for blood, and the serving maids hugged their men and the men avoided one each other’s eyes. It was a portent of doom, to hear the wolves howling during the birth time.

Deep in the ground, where the howl of the wolves was drowned out by the sound of a precious, crackling fire, the midwives pressed damp cloths to the brow of a moaning girl no older than fifteen. She was lying in a pool of warm water, legs splayed as she attempted to give birth and squeeze the young life out of herself and into freedom. Standing nearby, nervous, a handsome young man watched. His face was worn and his hair wet from the blizzard outside. An expensive coat was dusted in the remnants of a snow covering, melting rapidly in the warm room – a rich red coat that matched the concerned rubies of his eyes. His brother sat stiffly on a chair, eyes closed but back stiff, listening. Listening to the sound of the wolves outside.

“That’s it, Eliza. The child is almost out … push harder!” The woman speaking was naked in the pool so that impurities from her clothes would not harm the infant she was trying to bring into the world. Old, and missing most of her teeth, she had a reputation for bringing luck to births and was in high demand amongst the nobility of the country. A herbal compress of her own concoction infused the water, and the young girl screamed herself hoarse as the baby was expelled into water murky with placenta. All eyes watched as the other woman in the water reverently brought the new life up into sight, to have the umbilical cord cut.

There was silence, for a few seconds. And then the man standing in the coat shrieked as if in pain, and sank to his knees, tears running down his cheeks. His beloved young wife looked at the babe held in the midwife’s arms, and began to sob. The sitting man gripped the arms of the chair with white knuckles. The old woman’s lip trembled, and as a young serving maid cut away the cord with a heated sharp knife, she reverently laid the newborn in white swaddling clothes, wiping it clean with a cloth – its head, its face, its chest, its arms. But not its legs, for it had been born with none.

It was not long before the sitting man stood, and with a look of pity touched his younger brother on the shoulder. “I am sorry,” he said simply. Edard Valacroft looked up at him, his blue eyes wet and silent pleas. “You know this is her second malformed child by her second husband, Edard. You know what must be done. Kiss Eliza farewell.”

That night, two guards held Edard in place as his beloved wife, his hours-old son in her arms, was exiled into the blood-freezing cold and blizzard. The tears ran cold and froze on his face as she struggled out of sight, enacting the age-old requirement for self destruction of one not fit to bear children. As the white snowflakes enveloped her, he thought she turned and looked at him. He could not move, the soldiers as strong as the rock they were standing upon.

And in the darkness, the whisperwolves ceased their howls and came to collect their due.


One year later …

The heat of Ville de Triomphe was oppressive in the heat of summer. It made no account of birth, nor dignity. The powdered faces of the haughtiest ladies ran with sweat as much as the grubby soldiers billeted in the barracks. The rich hid beneath parasols and verandhas, watching their black slaves work themselves to exhaustion picking the coffee beans and cotton buds, tilling fields and digging the irrigation channels ever deeper into the rich and fertile soil.

The blood of the French nobleman – or at least, descendant thereof – ran true in the veins of those who controlled the lands. Steeped in cruelty, ruthless in keeping profits high, the men and women of the colony’s elite had their overseers whip their flagging chattels by day, and whipped themselves by night. There was no king, no claim to divine right nor duty here. They did as they wanted, when they wanted. Their slaves earned the money to pay the soldiers that beat them, abused them, and kept them ground underfoot. Orgies masked in the scents of the Orient that cost more than the lives of a hundred blacks were the current trend, both amongst the fair-skinned imperialists and their bastard mulattos that sought so hard to ape them.

This particular day, however, there was a new entertainment: a brief interlude from the sex and pain and death and wealth of the capital of Rire Silencieux. He wore white clothes, and a white hat. His face and body were pretty enough for most of the ladies and a few of the gentlemen to lust after, and his odd red eyes only added to his exotic air. He had arrived alone, save for three black slaves – one to drive his horse and carriage, and two riding horses. Armed, and well dressed – an oddity, and one that had made Sylvie de Charetté nervous.

She reclined stretched out upon her padded silk cushions stuffed with swan feathers, a well-muscled and tanned French soldier fanning her. Some of her girlfriends preferred blacks or mulattos, but she feared those not of her colour. Egault, she trusted implicitly. A family retainer forever, he had been a loyal servant for as long as she could remember – at least ten, possibly fifteen years. The stranger across from her was safe, she thought. But he had refused a man to fan him, although he seemed ill suited to the heat – his powdered forehead was still dry, but his throat glistened with sweat. He claimed not to be British, although his accent was remarkably similar. He was from a northern country, closely related, he said – she thought possibly closer to Denmark than Britain. Although cultured, and the Danes were isolationist.

“So, monsieur Valacroft, how are you finding the Ville?” He was good looking, and untouched as far as she knew. So she lowered her voice a little, made it a little husky, sat in such a way that her breathing emphasised her chest. Amongst the jaded aristocrats and their noveau-riche merchant rivals, seductions indicated beauty, and therefore power. And she liked people to know she had plenty of both.

“Please, madame, call me Edard. Unpleasantly hot. The streets are cluttered with beggars, and the listless. My apologies for my bluntness, ma’amselle. Your city is beautiful, where it is not filled with begging dogs in human form.” He reached out towards a bowl, and picked off a small cluster of grapes.

“Ah, it is sad but true, monsieur Edard. Sad but true. At least they know their place, here – in New Orleans they have had an uprising, I hear. Along the Mississippi, in fact.” She shuddered, visibly, allowing the frilled lace of her neckline to dip slightly and show the tops of her breasts. He shifted slightly, his red eyes watching her closely. She smiled, drew one leg up close, bending her knee whilst keeping the slippered foot firmly on the cushions, allowing him a glimpse of an ankle covered by white stockings.

“I had heard,” he murmured. “You do not think, then, that such will occur here? That the … Africans will rise up against their masters … and their mistresses? Some truly horrible tales I have heard. Murders of noblemen … the burning of their property … the ravishing of their women … “

Indeed, she thought, although it is not always ravishing during the hot season. Just an excuse for jealous husbands. However, she raised her hand to her brow. “Please do not say such things, monsieur! No lady could bear the thought of being touched … by a negro.”

The red eyes stared back, glowing. “Egault, please fetch me some chill water from the well,” she murmured. Emphasised her point with a dismissive hand gesture. “Come sit with me, monsieur,” she patted the chaise-long. He rose, and sat, and they talked and tested each other and teased each other, and they kissed, and she straddled him, and she took him. The overseers outside lashed the slaves who had turned to watch.

Afterwards, she lay against him, and whispered little things in French. He was quiescent, exhausted by the heat of the day and the heat of her, and only spoke softly now and then. She didn’t feel it coming on, the grand mal, the fit. She rarely did, although often it happened after times of great exertion. The first warning was a spasm, and she cried out for Egault who she knew would be near whilst she still had control. She rolled off the chaise, fell onto the ground, her limbs convulsing as her faithful servant ran in, taking the wooden bit from a discrete drawer in an elegant dresser. Foam bubbled from her mouth as she thrashed, and she distantly saw the foreigner pull himself from his dazed heat dream, his eyes wide with … shock? Mercifully her man got the cylinder of beech between her jaws, then, to stop her biting out her own tongue. She didn’t really register Egault fall over from a blow to his head with a carved wooden ornament, made by one of the blacks as a present. She did feel it however when the same ornament hit her own head, caving in part of her cranium. She spat out the bit, screamed, and choked on her own tongue and spittle. It hit her, again, on the crown. The pressure of the bone tearing jagged into her brain sent her blind, and her spasms died down into whimpers and twitches. The third crushed her cortex, sending cranial fluid and skull fragments and brain and blood and the fourth destroyed her spinal stem, paralysing her. She didn’t die instantly, the wounds weren’t fatal enough. She suffocated, an excruciating period of minutes before the last of her nervous system failed.

Casting aside the ornament as if it were diseased, the monsieur Edard Valacroft stared down at her. There was no hatred, no violence, no sign of any emotion save disgust on his face.

“Unworthy seed bearer,” he said to her sprawled corpse, although Egault would later on hear the words echo in his mind and his nightmares. He picked up a silk cushion and rubbed his hands on it, cleaning away the detritus of the wrecked human on the ground. “No child of mine shall be born with le grand mal.”


Three months later ...

The roaring fire sent smoke spiralling lost into the night air. Crickets played and toads warbled in the dark jungle that surrounded the clearing around the small part of the army that was there. Long, low white tents showed red in the firelight, and sentries were equally visible to the eyes of Mtung Omiri as he led his group of warriors to parlay with the newcomers to his land. His tribe – the oldest, to hear his shamans speak, and the most blessed – was also now the smallest. It had been ground down by oppression of the French, based in Ville de Triomphe; torn apart by medical blankets infested with the white man’s diseases, and almost obliterated by the power of its neighbouring tribes the Szomuru and the Zumbizi. As the most aggressive and prominent tribe in the area, it had been both the first conquered and the tribe with the most enemies. A vicious, losing battle had ceased only when the French had put all the tribes in shackles, including those who had allied with them.

He called out the password sent to him, and was escorted to the commander’s tent. He sniffed the air – he smelled the sickness, thick and strong. He smiled, grimly, as he was lead in – pistols covered him, he saw, so he held his head high. He did not know if this was some white trick against him, but it did not matter. His tribe was almost dead, under a thousand strong.

Incense was burning, a cloying clogging smell that drowned out all other scents, trapped by the canvas walls. A man in an exquisite and clean red coat lounged on cushions, red eyes sizing up at Mtung. He waved to a separate pile of cushions, and the tribesman squatted as his cousins guarded his back, inadequate spears showing bravely.

“Mtung,” the man said, speaking accented French. “Welcome.”

The chieftain waved dismissively. “Speak,” he said. “The morning waits for no-one, and if the overseer sees that we are gone … “ he shrugged.

“Of course. I shall be to the point then. I want to make a deal with you, Mtung. I want to give you guns, and in return, I want you to fight the French.”

This is not as expected, Mtung thought. Guides to strike, I thought, or telling secrets. To arm us?

“With guns?” He had not intended to say it allowed, but the man nodded.

“Yes. With guns.”

“To kill all the French?” Mtung’s blood stirred at the thought.

“No. Not to kill. The French will be needed to govern the area for us. You will fight the French with us, the French will surrender. In return, you will be raised in favour above all other tribes, the ones that howl at your heels like wolves after … “ his voice strained, but he looked at the soldiers in the tent. “Like wolves after a newborn.”

The opportunity seemed too good to be true. Mtung did not want to leave a Frenchman alive in the country. He blamed them for his tribe’s downfall. He did not want to seem too eager, however.

“What if we refuse? We are few, the French have many soldiers, many mercenaries. The war could destroy us.”

The white man shrugged, smiled. “Then we will arm the Szomuru. The war will destroy you anyway, and the warriors of the Szomuru will slaughter your children. Szomuru seeds will grow in your land and your women.”

Mtung grimaced. “I accept, then. We will fight alongside you, with your guns.” For a while.

“And we will supply you with the ammunition for the guns. During the war, and after it when you keep the peace – and let the French govern for us and pay us taxes, Mtung Omiri.”

The tall black growled, then. He had forgotten that the guns needed powder and shot. His people would need this man to keep the Szomuru at bay … whilst the Szomuru lived. But if they destroyed the Szomuru, there would no longer be a threat of armed rebellion, and his own tribe would be slaughtered … or him killed, his people scattered and interbred with other tribes to destroy their identities such as he had heard of in the far south of the country. Still … if his tribe were to bear the brunt of the attack with enough to survive … well, his enmity for the Szomuru was older than his enmity for the French. But there would be, must be an acknowledgement of his tribe as equal rulers, at least.

“A wife.” The man raised one eyebrow. “I want a French wife. From now until the end, the leader of the Omiri is to have a French wife.”

He smiled. “I understand. Very well. The leaders of the Szomuru are to be allowed a pick of their choice, one French wife each, chosen on their ascension to tribal leader.”

Mtungu smiled at the thought of Szomuru blood, of polluting their women with the men of other tribes until only the Omiri were pure.

“When do the Omiri strike?"

Well, I can kinda get an idea of whats going on(ish), but getting to understand the specifics would be good for me, too, I guess. :wink:

OK. The basic idea is to have a civil war (resulting from Lavenrunz's abuse) which resolves some of the issues that make no sense for the country and are splitting it (it's not inherently evil, for example.)

Aside from the first post, and the post about the 'Better World' project, you can view it as two stories.

The first storyline is the ten days leading to the first post, i.e. the progress of the civil war.

The second storyline is going backwards in time, with snippets of IC events to show why Whispering Voices has turned out like it has.

"... ago" denotes it was that many years ago. " ... later" denotes the following bit occurs ... later in relation to that particular post.

Tag. Just tag. No pretense at writing, it'd get overshadowed.

Tag. Just tag. No pretense at writing, it'd get overshadowed.

High praise indeed when from you :)

Six days ago ...

Simon paused, waved to his men. They lay low in the snow, plastic blankets sheathing them against the elements. The trap was set, the bait planted. Crown Prince Rhys was too protective of the Institute to not investigate, too arrogant to consider himself endangered. He had no way of knowing ...

What I know.. "Check, check. Go through again. Flechettes?" The responses came through affirmative. He settled back down to watch the narrow gap between the Grey Sisters, as night drew in.

It was evening before he heard the distinctive whir of the Black Hawk helicopter. Simon was more than a little relieved; bio signs from two of the nine men with him showed severe frostbite. Much longer, and they would have started to freeze to death. He scoped up. It was hard to make anything out - the light of the setting sun glowed through the snowflakes: red on the carpeted ground, but still bright enough to hurt the eyes. It took him a moment of squinting and adjusting the visual filters to look at the helicopter, discern the imprint of the dragon that denoted the royal household.

He raised his arm in the air. Radio silence was necessary, the helicopter would be scanning for transmissions from the silent base. He took aim at the central bolt of the helicopter, and waited as it fought its way along the valley base, shaken by screaming currents of air ...

He breathed out, relaxed his muscles, the sniper rifle propped up on a snow-drifted tripod ... and squeezed the trigger. The recoil jolted his arm, despite the gas suppresser, as the high-caliber depleted uranium round shot out into the freezing air. It severed the front rotor blade, which scythed off into the distance. The lift-deprived Black Hawk plummeted nose-first into a bank of snow, and an explosion shot debris and steam into the air.

"Move in," he called over the radio, breaking the now unnecessary silence. He stood, crampons gripping into the subsurface ice ... and moved through the blizzard cautiously. His men - those that could walk; the other two, the ones with the frostbite, were just waiting to die - fanned out around him, watching carefully for any sign of movement.

As he knew it would, it came. The movement, the shift of snow, the change in the patterns of the air and the roiling smoke from the burning hulk of the helicopter. His Crown Prince, the man he had sworn to serve eternally. Simon replaced his image with that of his brother, murdered in a raid on the Institute by an elven slattern whom Rhys had later forbade him to kill.

The man was burned severely, although his wounds were healing at an unnatural rate. His clothes were almost blasted away, showing muscles and flesh beneath scarred by the force of the explosion. Blood dripped everywhere, deeper and warmer than the setting sun - including into the young man's eyes. He struggled to focus as he saw through the men approaching as if through a sanguine veil.

"Simon?" he ventured uncertainly, before Simon pulled the trigger of a pistol that had managed to slip into his hand without even him knowing. The prince staggered as the flechettes hit him. Tried to rise, but failed, and gave out an agonized mewling sound as he sank sideways into the snow.

The traitorous Royal Guard moved closer, stepping over a steaming pile of detritus that had once been part of the helicopter's pilot. "Silver bullets, your highness." He grinned down at the twitching form. "'Patience is the greatest virtue, Simon'" he mimicked in the voice of the young, dying man. "'Your brother is in Heaven now, Simon.' Guess you get to find out for yourself now, sir.

He crouched by a still intact part of the helicopter - one of the ski runs, to allow it to land on ice and snow. He simply wrenched it away, took it clear of the destruction of the crash site, to where his prince was dying. He hummed as he went.

"Hey there," he sang, as he hefted the huge length of metal, "Mister Blue Sky, Mister Blue ... " He swung once, hard.

After all, he laughed, five minutes until death can be a long time.

Seven hundred years ago …

Aurelius Blackdon twisted in his sheets, as dreams of a burning sun beating on an exotic city came to him. His mother had had the dreams, she had told him: and so on for many generations. He had tried to trace the lineage of the dreams, once; worked his way back to the marriage between a de Savoir and a Scott, twisted and tangled over the generations as the noble families attempted to strengthen their own genetic heritage.

She called, the city. A siren’s call, haunting and beautiful, alluring and tantalising. He could almost smell the sweet fruits on her stalls, the perfume of the brightly-wrapped women, the baking bread that glistened with honey inside. Every night as his head touched the pillow he would go there, and stare in wonderment and joy at a place so different from his own country. But as dawn approached, the city would darken. The laughter would ring false in the ears of his dreams and the scents turn from sweet to sickly. The fruit would rot as maggots wormed their way to the surface, their soft wet white heads casting shadows in the light of the dying sun. The slim, athletic children that played in the streets would turn to skeletons; the laughing soldiers that would scold them at mid-day drew scimitars and sliced the youngsters up as night approached.

Elise, his wife – a commoner married for her exceptional physique, her poise and her grace and her intellect – lay awake next to him. As the days passed, his dreams grew more and more vivid and his sleep less restful. His movements kept her awake, weakened her. He had offered to provide her with a room of her own, but the thought of being without her beloved husband in a castle full of cold strangers who viewed her as a prize mare, or a fattened sow – a creator of young - was terrifying. Aurelius had been the same, originally. He hadn’t talked to her, even. Just grunted when she talked, or ignored her totally. It had taken her the best of four months to win him over, and she feared that with separation he would become as cold as he had been. But, as he tossed and turned and muttered, every hour of every night, she grew fretful. Nervous.

And so she woke up
Woke up from where she was
Lying still
Said I gotta do something
About where we're going

Step on a steam train
Step out of the driving rain, maybe
Run from the darkness in the night
Singing ha, ah la la la de day
Ah da da da de day
Ah la la de day

The Blackdon household mourned the loss of their lord’s first son, dead from childbirth and with his adored wife fighting oblivion tooth and nail. She had been weakened, affected by a malaise that no physician had been able to cure, although the servants had murmured that she was feeling the ill effects of the lord’s painful dreams – which had grown so bad that the unfortunate man's screams echoed through the night air. The city of the east was burning him up with its midnight visions. Aurelius was weakened, even more than his fair lady - and he was an only heir.

Which was how his widowed mother, the Lady Seria Blackdon, came to call on her paramour - she had borne children, and was therefore left to her own devices. A handsome woman in her middle age, once beautiful, she had taken as consort the deputy of the commander of the Blackdon family's armies. He was older than her, grim, unyielding - and highly efficient in his duties. The two sat, Lady and common soldier, openly upon a ledge that looked out from its mountain bluff down into the valleys below.

"This cannot continue, Marlin," she whispered as she lay her head upon his shoulder. The screams of her daughter-in-law fighting the infection that had possessed her womb from the miscarriage played eerie counterpoint to her words. "We must end this. Somehow, we must. Alas my consort and his cursed legacy, he will destroy us yet. And curse the physicians for not being able to know the minds of the men they studied when it became time for me to marry." She sighed, stroking the emblem of the Blackdons - a raven worked in silver - that adorned his tunic.

The soldier nodded, and kissed the top of her head. "Whatever it takes, milady. My heart is yours, and my duty your sons. Have you a plan?" He could hear the worry in her voice, and it hurt his heart.

She curled up, bringing her feet to rest on the stone sill and catching a scandalised look from a servant - who departed rapidly upon meeting Marlin's eyes. "I've had our purchasers talk to merchants, spice merchants. My husband drew, a little. His ancestry had several artists - a point that worked in his favour, although as you know he rarely had time to do so. They showed his paintings to the easterners, and some of the sounds he had written from what he remembered of the things he heard. They have a name, now. A name for the city, a place where it can be found. The City of Brass, they say it is named - it makes fine jewels, and laces, silks and spices. And magic such as has been cast out of our nation since we Turned Away. We must lead our armies there, Marlin, to save my son. I have spoken to Ehair Ap'Gwidion, he will give the armies of the nation to our cause - as long as he takes control of what we conquer."

"Are you ready for a war in the desert sun, my darling?"

Sweet the sin
Bitter taste in my mouth
I see seven towers
But I only see one way out

You got to cry without weeping
Talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice

You know I took the poison
From the poison stream
Then I floated out of here
Singing...ha la la la de day
Ha la la la de day
Ha la la de day

The deciding battle for the City of Brass lasted over a year. Not on the whole field - it occurred on a region of steppe land where it seemed, from the piles of bones that rose to the height of a tall man's neck, many similar fights had taken place - but for that year, fighting was always occurring at one point of the White Plains or another. Lady Seria - long forlorn of her beloved, as he fell to a poisoned arrow within the first year of the campaign - became withdrawn and merciless. She led her troops into battle, and those loaned to her, and those that her coffers and those of her country allowed her to hire. To the warriors from Whispering Voices, the sight of a mother fighting for her imperilled bloodline was an inspiration. To the mercenaries, the precious carved woods that she paid them in spoke more eloquently. It had taken them four months simply to sail to the closest shore and travel along the Southern Road to reach the outlying areas of the magical country; a further month to purchase maps or torture them out of locals, and plan the attack. Marlin had died in the first assault on one of the outlying cities, an assassin bringing him to an end before he had even raised a sword against the foe.

As the shining walls of the City promised further heat and pain to the invaders, its defenders fell to their swords, their own curved delicate blades simply shattering under the weight of the blows. Their finely-worked chain mail protected them from slashes, but not from the brute bludgeoning impact behind the troops of the northern country. Protection from the incantations worked by the Caliph of the city, steeped in evil and sacrifice and promises to things that should not have been able to understand them had been provided by the spirits that stayed with the warriors, growing ever stronger as they ate the energy of the foreigners. However, they did not deign to protect man nor beast from arrow, spear or scimitar - although the heavy plated armour of the crusaders did. Still, had it not been for the jealous countries around the citystate, a war of attrition would have resulted in the destruction of the hopes of the Blackdons long ere they saw the seven spires of the Caliph's palace.


The storming of the city itself was bloody - concentric walls filled with archers took their toll on the attackers, as they were forced through a maze. The mercenaries broke, and ran.

She runs through the streets
With her eyes painted red
Under black belly of cloud in the rain
In through a doorway she brings me
White gold and pearls stolen from the sea
She is raging
She is raging
And the storm blows up in her eyes
She will...

Suffer the needle chill
She's running to stand...

Still.

The sound of screams, the humming of the flights of arrows through the scorching hot air pounded into Seria's head. She had been trained for war, and was a noble of a country that had undergone enforced and unnatural selection since forever ... but the heat, so unnatural, was getting to her. The quilting woollen padding that kept her plate mail from crushing into her was sodden with her sweat, and the blood that trickled down her neck from a slash on the cheek. Above her she saw two dark-skinned men holding crossbows collapse with arrows in their eyesockets.

My archers, at least, are doing well, she found time to think. The maze was almost at an end, here. A burnished bronze portcullis stood between her and the city. Almost literally, for only four men were still with her. She ducked down behind a barrel. Outside, she knew, her forces had destroyed the city's army. But they had no siege engines, nor wood to make them - and no supplies for a siege. The desert steppes were not lifeless, but they could not support so many. The rich trade routes had been cut off to prevent the City of Brass gaining supplies; now that applied to her men, too.

"We have to take this place ... and now." Her voice was hoarse. She hadn't drunk still water in over two months; living on small beer instead. Her hair was dusty, matted, and her face lined. But she didn't care. The pounding of the blood through her veins was all she knew, and all she needed.

"Milady, there's a small egress door just over there ... " one of the men whispered. Above them, dusky crossbow men ran to die on the walls as the western arrows flew up with deadly accuracy. There was indeed a concealed door. Wood, painted white like the wall. Wide enough for one man only. They waited until it was quiet on the battlements above, and then headed for the portal. They did have some advantage: there was no stone in the area, other than sandstone. The wall was soft, and crumbled underneath the heavy blades they carried around the lintel. It took only a few moments to crack enough stone to allow a small saw-edged knife to poke through the gap, saw through the bar that kept the door shut.

And then they were inside, sprinting along dusty roads, heading into the city. It was eerily quiet, with the women and children and old men hiding away, presumably. Lines ran from window to window, with bright-coloured clothes on them. Clay urns and empty food stalls lined the wide streets, and wicker baskets that smelled of oranges and slavery.

The Caliph's palace was ahead ... guarded. Archers were on balconies, and men with spears on the steps. Thomas, the archer with her, loosed arrows in quick succession that took the archers in the eyes and throats. They tumbled forwards or backwards, out of sight or down onto the marble steps that led upwards to the palace doors, with wet thumps that threw droplets of blood into the air and slickened the steps. But one got a shot off, before Thomas' own arrow took him. It arced out from on high, and plummeted, and Seria took the arrow in her arm. It dripped with a poison that scratched claws across the inside of her skull, grating. Her vision swayed and she cried out. The artery was pressed against the bone of her upper arm. Even as she watched her three swordsmen charge the palace, and slaughter the guards - inferior, not the result of uncounted generations surviving in a land not intended for man nor beast. Thomas helped her up, and she screamed with every step. It was a relief when her arm went dead from the poison, although a fleeting one.

The palace had more guards, and they died like hogs running to the slaughter. Eventually, one of the Whispering Voices men went down - five spears penetrated his plate mail, his blood discolouring the white tunic he wore so that the red cross of Christ upon it spread out to cover the whole garment. The Caliph himself cowered with three demons in his upper tower. He had hoped that the bindings would prevent the demons disappearing; he was right, and wrong. They could not disappear, but the fiends he had sent out had never disappeared or broken their words. They, like the three that now howled litanies of agonised curses to their master, were consumed by the spirits that accompanied the group; energy stolen, eaten, along with their minds and their pathetic worm-eaten souls. The Caliph fell to his knees in fear, and begged for mercy. Tears ran down his face, dragging slug trails of kohl under his eyes across his dark skin.

Seria could barely talk, now. It was an effort, her jaw was almost locked. "Release my son from your curse," she gasped out. "He is the one in the far west, the one in the land of snow and cold winds." The Caliph nodded, and the spirits permitted his magics to end the malaise, the curse laid upon her son's ancestors by his own. She shook with the effort of movement. "Now ... you must swear fealty upon your life and that of your sons ... " her other arm stiffened. The despairing guard held her upright. "To ... Ehair Ap'Gwidion and the line of Ap'Gwidion. From now until ... the end." She moaned, but held her eyes open, staring into his, as he yelped out "by my life and spirit and that of my sons and daughters and theirs, forever, I swear this!" She closed her eyes as the red faded into bright blue, and passed from the world.

Away, far away, to the west, Aurelius Blackdon slept easily.

Three years ago ...

Lucia Valacroft forced herself to smile as the priest and doctors led her along the sanctuary corridor, with Father Benedict chattering constantly. Her confessor was a friendly man, even if part of the Ordo Sancti Mundi, as her bloodline demanded: the clergy watched the nobles carefully, if cautiously.

She had been expecting this day, it was true. Her birth had been auspicious, and the Valacroft family was amongst the foremost and most powerful of the Dominion. Only the Blackdons held greater influence, through the massive monies they made from the fiefdom of Murderous Tendencies, and they had married into the Royal lineage within the last six generations and hence were not eligible to do so for several more. In a nation obsessed with eugenics and bloodlines, the balance of inbreeding against polluting the ever-more-superior noble blood was hard to strike. She had taken confession, and communion. Confirmed to her priest that she was indeed a virgin, and had never lain with a man. But that wasn't enough, not now.

The room Lucia was led into was spartan and antiseptic. A metal table with stirrups stood in the middle, and benches surrounded it, with instruments and other unpleasantness. Father Benedict left them at the door, waiting out in the corridor.

Somewhat uncomfortably, she stripped her clothes away and laid them neatly on hangers as the doctors prepared the room, checking the instruments. Held up against the light, they looked hard and cold and aggressive. Lucia's eyes fell, a little ashamed at the way they glinted. She went stood on the medical scales, watched one doctor read off her height and felt another grip her with calipers, the flesh around her stomach. She then - a little reluctantly - went and sat down on the inspection table. One doctor - an elderly man, beginning to develop a paunch and a turkey-like wattle of skin dangling from his chin - held up a miniscule endoscope and a tiny speculum to show her - her very future in life depended upon her virginity both being intact and remaining so. It looked cold.

But it felt freezing. The day went slowly, as she was checked for defilement - physical, genetic, emotional. To become a suitor to the royal bloodline required the most strenuous tests.

One thousand years ago …

Yeah

Desert sky
Dream beneath a desert sky
The rivers run but soon run dry
We need new dreams tonight

Desert rose
Dreamed I saw a desert rose
Dress torn in ribbons and in bows
Like a siren she calls to me

Sleep comes like a drug
In God's Country
Sad eyes, crooked crosses
In God's Country

Manfred Scott sat huddled in his blanket as the night swamped the earth. The warmth of the sun that had beat down on the creaking wooden boats had long fled – now an unforgiving wind carried the horde towards their goal – the nation of Endless Regrets. Repeated raids carried out by the longships of his people had revealed the soft underbelly of the nation of priests – wealthy scribes, devout men, precious artefacts given in homage to a distant God and stored in big houses of stone. His family had been offered the opportunity to take the land, a reward borne of the union between his house and the more powerful Blackdons, one of whom waited in the furs of his tent at that moment – her fine tunic of green-dyed wool already torn to ribbons by the harsh wind.

His tangled red hair was white with salt and his beard matted from the wind before he walked back along the shifting centre of the deck, exchanging muttered words with the men at the oars. He could hear the strokes of the oars and the snap-crack sound of the sails – somewhere beyond sight, but reassuringly close. His companion of long years – an axe with a worn-smooth wooden handle wrapped in hide – stood sentinel over the canvas awling he shared with his buxom, milky bride. He had not wanted to bring her over the rough and oft-stormy seas, but it was known that the tides of war made a man’s blood run stronger, and his seed more like to find fertile ground within a woman’s womb. Besides, the mixing of noble blood with foreign blood was disallowed, lest the bloodlines bred and strengthened over countless years and generations be tainted or weakened. And he did not want to have to stand dry as his men raped their way through the villages. He grinned as the tillerman caught his eye, gave him a crude leer. He ducked under the flap of his quarters, and that night set busily to breeding the next generation as the longboats drew closer to the land of weak and fattened churchmen.

The dreams came, after. They always did, a flaw in his makeup and that of his family that no physician could detect – some legacy of a past marriage, a past ancestor that haunted the nights of his lineage. He dreamed of cities, cities of the east gleaming in the scorching heat. Pearls and jewels flowed, and the rich scents seemed to tease his palate and wipe away the salt. He saw, as the dream went on, that the city was less than perfect. Clear yellow dust was underfoot when he looked down, but if he raised his feet he saw grime and filth caked in blood on his soles. Happy children, playing with rings and hoops and coloured rags that they waved in circles ran towards him, chattering and laughing … and when his gazed followed them as they ran past, he saw rotting flesh hanging from white, wet-sheened bones.

Set me alight
We'll punch a hole right through the night
Everyday the dreamers die
See what's on the other side

She is liberty
And she comes to rescue me
Hope, faith, her vanity
The greatest gift is gold

Sleep comes like a drug
In God's Country
Sad eyes, crooked crosses
In God's Country

Four days ago …

Thomas Scott drifted gently through the midnight gloom. A massive parachute clutched at the air around him, guiding and supporting his bulk along with that of his best unit …

Although, by now, when I think of my best unit I just mean the one that’s had to take the least number of cocaine hits in the last one hundred forty-four hours … Although the rebellion had started well – crucial bases secured by treachery, and ones that could not be secured, destroyed – they were meeting resistance now. Only simultaneous attacks on the Royal Institute of Genetic Research, the Life and Arts Directorate, and other low-profile, defence critical bases had given them a chance.

And now, we need to capitalise upon that chance … by ensuring that bastard Rhys doesn’t rise from the dead again. And to do that … history needs to repeat itself …

The awe-inspiring Cathedral of Saint Cuthbert was the target. Spiritual centre of the entire Dominion, capital of the Palatinate, capital of Endless Regrets … and the place from which Rhys periodically rose from the dead, a sign of the Creator’s blessing on His chosen Fidei Defensor. It was also the home of not only the Prince Bishop, Edward Hatfield, but the Ordo Sancti Mundi, the military order that ran the country and its Inquisitors.

Fortunately, it was on a hill separate a way from the community that had sprung up around it. A steep hill, with wooded slopes that lead down to the river that wound its way round the peninsula that was home to the monument to the Divine. It was tranquil – the Cathedral itself brooked no noise, and no violence had been committed near it for over a thousand years, due to the vigilance of God’s chosen. A vigilance that, this night, had been thwarted – as the fact that the Halo drop had been able to proceed attested.

Mendehl’s squad must have succeeded in bringing down the comms network the embittered soldier thought as he landed. The servomotors of his legs groaned as he touched down – even with the parachute, which he released so it would not tangle him.

His squad – come down faster, due to their ability to guide their descents – were waiting from him. The area was a small cloistered courtyard: a hard target to get, and he was pleased to see that despite the cocaine in their systems, fully forty of the fifty dropped had both survived and landed where they were needed.

The cathedral was no more than a hundred yards away … through the arch, here, along the cobbled streets. They set out through the pleasantly cold air, splitting into covering fire teams. Four teams of two split off from the group, to set up covering and sniping positions at each corner in designated vantage spots – ensuring each man was covered by five others, and the cathedral covered from all angles. The rest flitted through the trees – except Scott. He stayed in the courtyard – he simply wasn’t stealthy enough, in that big metal frame, to be in the initial assault. He stayed and set up the evacuation point – a high speed helicopter extraction, relying on nape-of-earth approaches. Not that it would be needed, of course.

Not until after bomb had been planted, anyway.

Naked flame
She stands with a naked flame
I stand with the sons of Cain
Burned by the fire of love
Burned by the fire of love

One thousand years ago …

Manfred grimaced as the handle of his axe span in his blood-slick hands, the grip long since reduced to worthless by his sweat. A knight armoured in plated metal swung a morning star at him, and he dropped to one knee as it arced over his head and stove in the chest of the warrior by his side. He cursed as he pushed himself back to his feet, the muddy ground reluctant to relinquish its grip on his knee. The war had been harder than he had thought, and the men of the cloth far more dangerous than he had known. He blinked as tears of sweat stung his eyes, and he hurled himself backwards before the man could bring the spiked ball on its grinding chain down on his spine.

It’s not their skills with weapons, he found time to think as he ducked between a pair of fighters, and tripped the one that wasn’t on his side before moving away again, it’s the way that they have denied us our guidance. But … but how?

It had started as headaches, really. Brief headaches, when they looted monasteries or when he let the men rape the nuns before stealing their gold. As they had got further inland, closer to the older and larger churches, the headaches became more intense. They had cut a narrow swathe from ocean to cathedral – avoiding other large settlements, wanting to cut away the leader of the people.

But here, they were alone. No comforting voice to tell them what was right, and what was wrong. Nothing to console them during their periods of guilt as they trod the bodies of the conquered into the earth beneath. Red eyes became blue, in this place, as the voices fled.

And … we’re going to win, despite all that, he said exultantly as he surveyed the battlefield. The church warriors had been vastly outnumbered as they had issued out of the cathedral – almost a fortress, with its elegant buttresses and crenellated towers and iron-shod doors of oak. But they – as they were demonstrating – were willing to die for their faith.

The praying inside had stopped, the women and children hidden for their safety inside the cathedral peering out of the window arches as their fate was decided. The fight had started with a rain storm, dark clouds hurling down deprecations on the men bloodletting on hallowed ground. But as the last of the knights fell with a cry, a sword tumbling from twitching fingers, a beam of light shone down and hit the priceless window of stained glass. In a trance like state, Manfred felt once more a presence in his mind – comforting not through familiarity, this time, but through intent. He walked towards the cathedral, his axe dropped in the carnage, not noticing the others – his men, following him, their eyes also full of wonderment.

Four days ago …

Scott flicked through the transmissions of his squad, letting the electrodes that served him as optic nerves relay information. Only two men - simple security guards, not even armed with guns – had been found so far. Unarmoured, they had been tranquilised and in shadows. The ghostly green image of the light amplifiers showed nothing – the walkway up to the Cathedral; its mighty oaken doors. Nothing moving on ground level save his men, approaching in a circular formation, closing in.

And … movement, up high. The soldier looked up, but there was nothing. All was still again. No sign of motion, of snipers on the roof. Scott didn’t tense – that was a luxury reserved for those who still had muscles.

The first of the squad reached the door, and activated the terahertz-ray interference device that would deaden all the alarms. A vent of gas from the recoil system of his gun showed the light of laser motion detectors criss-crossing the door. With practiced movements, he drew out a glowing red ball from a bag that hung from his bodyarmour. A press of a button, and it sent beams of light tracking up and down the beam receptors. He placed it on the ground, and pressed a second button. Light beams lanced up from it, straight into the photovoltaic cells that monitored the door alarm. Scott flicked from his view to that of a rearguard, a sniper hidden in a clump of trees that made up the grounds of the cathedral. He saw the lead soldier reach out to touch the door, open it, and move inside. Men followed.

About this time he would have felt suspicious, had several dark shapes not dropped from the canopy of the cathedral’s roof, plummeting down to land on the men. The sniper swore into his microphone, zoomed in … and swore again. The figures seemingly had not been damaged by their rapid, bonecrushing descent. Stoney-fluid wings stretched out to encompass grotesque clawed bodies and heads – gargoyles from the roof. He flicked to the viewpoint of one of the men just outside the cathedral, just in time to see a granite fist rip into the visor of the face armour. The viewscreen went dead, the camera shattered. He switched again, to a man inside the nave of the cathedral – where the angels of death that guarded the tombs and side chapels were tearing into his men with ancient, carved swords – bullets chipped at the rock, slowly, but not one of the attackers had fallen. The blood of his assault team, in contrast, ran vivid down the aisles and under the pews.

It seemed as if the Ordo had second-guessed his actions; he called for an evacuation. Only he was able to get into the helicopter when it arrived, darting between beam searchlights that drew light across the sky.

Before the raising of the Sphinx ...

The raid was fast, and bloody. The people of lands that would - in many years time - become the countries of Los Bananos El Fuego, Austrin-Ontis, and Aegerion were favoured targets. Those lands were temperate - warm, in places; the area that would - thousands of years later - become Los Bananos El Fuego in particular was a paradise heated by the warmth of the Inner Sea and its volcanic activity. A lush jungle, full of fruits and animals - good hunting ground.

There were many raids, for many years. They all followed a similar pattern, too ...

The pounding of feet, fur coverings splashing into the damp sticky mud of the foreign jungle. The pant of breath, the warm air pumping into and out of his lungs. The burning feeling of running in his muscles.

Ihamen jumped over a rotting log, his shadow sending the insects covering it into retreat. Ahead, the village’s watcher ran for dear life, terror giving him speed enough to stay just out of the way of the fitter leaner pursuit. Echoing back through the trees, Ihamen could hear his fellow raiders – grunts and breathing changed and reflected by the old, lichen-dripping bark of the damp papayas. The watcher gave a jump, slowed down to grab onto a vine, and swung out … Ihamen did not. He ran forwards, and yelped as he was enveloped up to his waist in sucking, stinking mud. With a curse, he hurled his spear … and watched, grinning, as it skewered the man to the vine, the spear haft vibrating. A moment later, a trickle of blood started dripping into the mud from one leg.

A lucky shot – fortunate for him to run across such an open area. Now … He clutched onto a slimy, trailing root from a nearby tree, and with a horrible sucking sound began to haul his body out of the mud and gunge. The spear was lost to him, he wasn’t going to risk the sinkhole for it. He had a knife, and … a few moments with the vines, and he had more. He set to cutting.

It took about a half hour for him to reach the village, for he and the others went more slowly and stealthy as they got closer. The jungle was alien, and hard work. Their own land was cold, freezing cold: the insects here, the small animals, the snakes – none were to be found in the land of the spirits. And often men would die of sicknesses – but few enough to make the raids worthwhile. Ahead, a fire pit flickered ghostly in the darkness. Strange howls and calls obscured the sounds of rustling leaves, and dried dead thinks crackling under furred boots. The sound of talking and singing came back, and laughing. Voices were raised in song, and hearts in good cheer. The smell of roasting capybarra wafted through the noisome reek of the bush Ihamen had chosen to observe from. It smelled good, but he did not waste time on looking at it. Raids were not done for food, after all …

There. She looks strong. And the man next to her – they look similar. He must be her kin. And she has children – two around her, tugging on her hide skirts. They look strong, and healthy, and cared for. She is good. Two men there – well-muscled, sharp-eyed, well-fed. They too. Carrying knives and spears. Ihamen clutched the vine-net, bunched up in his hands. The hard part was to raid the village and carry off the strong people, without killing so many of the villagers that they would not be able to feed their young and keep supplying mates. The overwhelming smell of edelweiss filled the thick air around him, drowning out the other smells. He tensed, and began measuring time. It was a signal, the scent … strong enough to cut through a jungle smell, but not strong enough to overpower the smells of roasting food. Then …

Screams echoed up, as his fellow raiders rose up from bushes, hurling spears at the old, grizzled men – the men who had raised their children, but were strong and wise enough to be dangerous. Almost every spear hit, and with cries and the smell of rupturing bowels, the older generation sank twitching into the muddy ground. Nets were next, hurled into the faces of the young warriors – kicks levelled at their legs to knock them over, and incapacitate them. It was a risky endeavour. Some were strong, and cut through the nets, and stabbed back with their spears. A cough of agony from a voice he recognised drew Ihamen’s attention, and he saw one raider sink to the ground with a dagger erupting through his chest, the protective mother he had seen earlier twisting and turning it. The man with her tried to pull his spear out of the ground, where a missed thrust had buried it. He kicked out at the instep of her brother, leaving him to howl in pain, and Ihamen floored the woman with a single punch on the jaw.

The raid was brief, and bloody. Most of the elderly, those who had seen approaching thirty rain seasons, were dying or dead. Children had been herded into huts, kept safe. And the few men and women that had been judged capable of surviving in the harsh, alien snow fields had been gathered, bound and lined up. One dead raider lay on the ground, two more nursed wounds. The uninjured watched the captives, and hauled the dead back to the wolves that awaited him and would even now be howling for his flesh in the mountains of his birth.

It was a bloody business, acquiring mates.

Nine months later …

Ihamen paced along the floor of his house, cut out of stone by long-forgotten hands and slick with the ice of winter. His mate – the mother he had taken from the village – was giving birth. It was a tense moment, a terrifying one – moreso than any fight, for it was out of his control.

Have I chosen well? Will the child be strong, and healthy? Or … weak? There was no spare food for weak infants, or even for the mothers who would drain themselves nursing. It had taken him the best part of six years to build up enough excess food to guarantee the life of a child and mother through its early winters – he would not waste it on a weakling. Could not, even – the Voice-of-Winter forbades it. But will it be male or female? The village needs more males … we have had fewer born, of late … far too many. And …

The cry of a woman brought him back to the cold world around him, a sobbing sound. His hackles rose, and he padded through the door. The midwife frowned at him, shook her head with a sad expression. He swore, and went over to inspect the infant held in his cowering mate’s arms. It only had one eye, and a flattish forehead. Mongrel. It’s a mongrel. His own heart sank. The woman had brought up two healthy children, in that village. His fellows had witnessed them. He tore the babe away and she screamed, reached up weakened from the bed slathered in the detritus of afterbirth. Cursing savagely, he shook the newborn. It’s weak little mouth opened, crying softly like a newborn kitten. Its one good eye stared at him, uncomprehending and fearful and wet with its first tears.

First tears, and last. He took a step towards one of the smooth, granite walls. He moved his grip from its midriff to its legs … and swung it, tender new flesh and bone against the unforgiving and ageless rock. His strength was such that the first blow crushed its skull. Like little flakes of dripping, bloody snow, the bone and brain exploded outwards leaving runnels and patterns daubed like the painting of a monstrous child on the wall. With little snaps and pops and cracks, he swung it again and again as his rage built up. Bruises turned to pulp turned to bones jagging out of flesh and dripping blood. The woman – brought from the warm and lush jungle to the heartless north – wailed. Ihamen did not stop until all he was holding was sanguine mess.

“It was a boy,” the midwife called out, as he stormed outside to enact a tradition that would carry on for millenia – although after Catholicism took Whispering Voices to its breast, the direct murder of deformities became proscribed and so they were sent into the snow, still alive. But now, in Ihamen’s days, he hurled the waste of nutrients to the wolves that sang their hungery hymns to the uncaring heavens – before ever a man preached peace in the Holy Land.

Three days ago …

In the howling wind comes a stinging rain
See it driving nails
Into the souls on the tree of pain
From the firefly, a red orange glow
See the face of fear
Running scared in the valley below

Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue
Bullet the blue

The Sweet Caress glided gently through the snow-cold air, above the Still Water – the vast lake in the centre of Whispering Voices that filled a valley over two hundred miles long. A kilometre in diameter, the Townsend carrier – the first of its kind – shimmered the air beneath it with heat … and water. Snowy air was sucked in through the vents at the top, and subjected to immense heats from the electrified struts … a jet engine, but quiet, and strong, and pointing downwards. Water literally cascaded from it onto the frozen lake surface below, giving it an eerie appearance. Funnels for launching aircraft emanated out from two of its seven decks. The top and middle and bottom decks had nozzles protruding and glinting glass inset – defensive systems, whirring and humming. The other two decks sandwiched in held the crew quarters. It was light, the Sweet Caress, as befitted its name. And it was not alone. Nine more flew behind it, aircraft carriers cradled by warm air and headed towards the Mördeskälte to bring their war to their once-masters: the new pride and joy of the Whispering Voices aerospace division being turned against it. Lightning strikes against outposts, scattered around, had kept the loyal military confused – a battered fighter, standing but never sure where the next punch was going to hit. This strike, this last strike, was necessary to allow the rebellion to stay alive. For the giant glacier contained – deep down below it – the Ministry of Defence’s primary structure.

And, standing in the command room of the Sweet Caress, Thomas Scott – the man who had helped to design many of its security systems, whilst he headed the Ministry – knew exactly what had to be done. Small fuel-air bombs bloated the lower gun deck. Enough to melt a way through to one of the places where rocky tunnels brushed the surface of part of the mountain, a way to get troops inside past the legion of automated defences. And, in the scientific suite of the carrier – the weapons to allow the troops to cut through the human defenders. A large army – rebellious nobles, his own men – had been sent to assault the underground city of Echoes, a distraction carefully telegraphed. He could taste victory. It tasted of the blood that he no longer had.

In the locust wind comes a rattle and hum
Jacob wrestled the angel
And the angel was overcome
You plant a demon seed
You raise a flower of fire
See them burning crosses
See the flames higher and higher

Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue
Bullet the blue

At the other side of the Still Water, Silence, the all-but-abandoned capital city of the country, lived true to its name – save for in the council chambers. The High Council met, their child’s eyes filled with tears at the betrayals of their country and the carefully maintained chaos about the rebels that they could not risk polluting themselves with – the thousands of drug addled minds that repulsed them.

“Repulse us, and all those we command. Curse the Voice-of- Mördeskälte, and his revealing of our weakness." The girl speaking, not more than seven, had hollow rims around her brightly-glowing red eyes. Tousled blonde hair tangled its way down her back, and her cheeks were stained with tears.
“There is a two-pronged attack coming, we know; one at Echoes, and one at the command of the Ministry of Defence. But what can we do? We only have limited resources that we can send out at this point. We can help defend Echoes, and hope the Ministry can fight off whatever is going for them … and risk them losing, and the armed forces being crippled. Or abandon ten million people to their deaths, each the result of eleven thousand years of our Design. An incalculable setback, and so many lives … “ She choked back a sob, as the human emotions roiled under the surface of a mind that was spirit-possessed.

“Hush, Eleanor,” whispered a little girl, dressed up neatly in deep green. “We know what we must do. We must protect our people. We must send the First to Echoes, to stave off the attack there. The drug-crazed rebels amongst our citizens … with the weapons from the Townsend-Hutchison Institute … it will be a massacre. The loss of a city will cripple the morale of the people that is so far untouched … and one of our greatest strengths. What say you, Nicole?”

The third little girl of the group looked up from the table, where she had been looking into the eyes of a mouse – it was still, whiskers only twitching occasionally, mesmerised. Her red eyes were framed in flawless skin, she looked well-rested. Unconcerned. “I think we should guarantee the victory, and send the First to the Mördeskälte to defend the Ministry.” She smiled, but it was a smile of hunger and not of humour. “We have yet to see the effect of a city destroyed, or even if the rebels would destroy it.” She shrugged, turned back to gazing at the mouse as it whuffled fearfully in her hands.

The last of the group – and youngest, too, a little boy in white – looked thoughtful. If the eyes of the others burned with red flame, his were banked and stoked coals. When he spoke, his voice echoed unpleasantly around the dark chamber. “We will send the First to the Ministry. We cannot risk loss.” One of the little girls, the one who had been addressed as Eleanor, burst into tears. “I am sorry, Voice-of-Summer … but we cannot do otherwise. If Scott destroys the Ministry, we risk the ending of everything. The end of the Design that we have worked for time immemorial to bring about … it is the way it must be.”

This guy comes up to me
His face red like a rose on a thorn bush
Like all the colors of a royal flush
And he's peeling off those dollar bills
Slapping them down
One hundred, two hundred
And I can see those fighter planes
And I can see those fighter planes
Across the mud huts where the children sleep
Through the alleys of a quiet city street
You take the staircase to the first floor
Turn the key and slowly unlock the door
As a man breathes into a saxophone
And through the walls you hear the city groan
Outside is …
Outside is …

Across the field you see the sky ripped open
See the rain through a gaping wound
Pounding on the women and children
Who run
Into the arms
Of …

Colonel Hartside watched the images on his tactical map move, each representing men and machines, limned in glowing blue. The city, Echoes – incidentally his home town, and how he had grown bored of it – that lay ahead was projected in faint red, with glowing brightness for loyalists.

He turned back, his visored helmet and natural infra red sight throwing the military column behind him into relief. The armoured troops, the VAB APCs designed to operate as command posts underground … and, in the centre, the bomb. Twenty megatonnes of fission bomb, destined for Echoes – a message intended to be loud and clear to the unwanted and unseen masters of the country.

Once, Hartside would have found the idea abominable – the use of a weapon of mass-destruction upon a civilian population. Now, through the hallucinatory haze of the cocaine that he had been pumping into his system for the past week, he barely understood the implications. A column of men – in service to one of the noble familes: the de Savoirs, if he read their insignia correctly – marched past. Their steps were a little off, not quite synchronised. He felt a little giddy just watching … pulled his mind back to the present.

The city had been warned – barely. The garrison had mobilised, and blocked off many of the small tunnel entrances with explosives. Gleaming Shepherds strode the streets, herding their flocks – the humans – into houses and basements. Soldiers – a scant few, military action never having occurred in the cities beneath the mountains before – were being called up, heading into armouries for weapons and protective equipment.

The first sign of the attackers was mass static, as the computer monitors and detectors all around Echoes snow-crashed. Not long after, shots and screams and worse rolled around the huge underground cavern complex of the city.

Remi fled through the streets, half-carrying half-dragging her two little boys with her. The city was in chaos, as soldiers shot each other dead in the streets. Shepherds, the sinister low-slung, chicken-legged mechanoids whose controlling presence was almost universally resented, lay as quiescent debris - often buried beneath the roofs of collapsed ceilings. For once, she missed their presence. Sammy was crying, tired from the running, his little legs quavering under him. With a despairing cry, she picked him up. Her own lungs were heaving, her legs burned with lactic acids from her flight towards … an exit. An exit with soldiers entering, wearing the colours of the noble houses she had seen kill so many others. She turned … and more refugees, more people seeking to flee the devastation ran around the corner – lost sheep sticking together as slaughter sought them. Carrying her back, over the debris of a whole cluster of dying Shepherds, circuits popping as actinic blue fires raged over them, hydraulics whining. The soldiers saw the crowd, and laughed. A man fell next to her, a bullet neatly in his chest, at heart level. A woman cried and gurgled and dropped. As more soldiers opened up, little flecks of blood covered the screaming men and women and children, like the droplets of water sprayed onto pedestrians by a car driving through puddles. She fell to the ground, trying to keep both Sammy and Jamie underneath her, shielding them with her fragile body. The bullets stopped, all the civilians on the ground, dead or dying or hoping to avoid being shot. “Our Father,” she began praying. “Who art in Heaven, hallowed by Thy name … bless these, Your children, who’s innocent lives … “. The soldiers, she could see out of one eye with blood sticking together the lashes, were running along the tunnel, seeking to get out into the soft city area where they could surround submissive people and ensure their destruction. “Lives are about to be taken from me, please take their souls to Your breast.” She was not the only one praying. The man next to her, elderly with a priest’s dog collar, had a rosary in his hand. He was whispering in Latin, his voice thin and quavery. The first soldier reached the exit of the tunnel, his gun pointed at the huddled mass of prone humanity as he strove to be the first to start firing on them …

And one of the Shepherds whined. Burning, blasted by a previous attack, its legs clacked and scraped feebly on the floor. One of its arms quavered, the hydraulic fluid of its muscles leaking from gunshot joints. And … click. It clicked once, twice, rapidly. An electrical signal sparked out from one wire, into another, just enough impulse to …

Fire. The arm-gun exploded, hurling a huge cluster of little curved balls towards the tunnel entrance. The soldier who had been first out stopped, managed to turn a little, even, before one hit him, and exploded, showering parts of him through the air. The rest hit the ceiling above the tunnel, explosions that shook the ground around, burying the attackers in fire and rock.

“Amen … “ Remi whispered.

Eleven thousand years ago …

I have climbed highest mountain
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you

I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

The sun shone down on the fertile lands of the southern shore, over the City. It was the City simply because there were no others within the knowledge of the people who lived there. Men and women dressed in simple cotton shifts picked grapes from vines, or tilled rich soil, or herded the sheep that flocked on the hills that overlooked it. It was hot enough, on this day, for the white walls to shimmer. The walls were empty save for lovers strolling along their lengths – the City had been built out of sheer love of creation, and to exalt the Sun, rather than for protection.

And the Temple of the Sun dominated the City as it City dominated the lands around – glorious, ordered, sanctified. Its whitewashed walls were painfully bright to look upon, and so few bothered – however, many walked its atriums and arbours, took advantage of the coolness of the shade within with its open roof to allow the Sun to smile on its altar. And so she did. For the Sun was not just a glowing globe in the sky, but a woman. Or at least the form of a one, with a voice that spoke dulcet demands and hair that burned coppery-red and eyes so green they put the lagoon waters to shame.

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like fire
This burning desire

I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

The Sun was not one of the people, but above them, and had been since before any of them could remember. But mankind is not given to order, but to chaos – and change. The ruler of the people – that is, the one who guided them and directed them in the pursuit of the Sun’s happiness – was a restless young man, full of ideas. As the ruler before him had been, he had been chosen by the Sun – he shared her bed, and she shared her heat. But he was not happy with the City. Its walls were not to keep people out or even to keep people in, he decided one day. They just served to raise Her up. And although he enjoyed their shared passion, She did not change – before it she would speak to him and tell him of her glory, and after he was spent she would demand his compliments.

That day, as this ruler – Gideon, he was called, after his father – stood on the walls of the City, he looked out over the placid green-glinting sea. He was suffering a malaise, and avoiding the Sun – and hiding from the messengers she had sent to find him. The sea brushed up against glorious white sands, and the sands against the verdant colours of a forest, that rose up onto the hills that looped around the City … and back down, down again until they touched the beach, which bled into the sea at the limits of his eyesight. And Gideon was tired of the view – a beauty seen a thousand times grows ugly, after all. He wanted to go out, away – beyond the sea, or over the hills, or through the forest.

“And so, I will!” he decided as his fingers toyed with a loose thread of cotton from his toga. With a measured and firm step, he made towards the steps that lead down from the parapet … and stopped. There was something on the sea, a black dot. He had not seen a black dot mar the lagoon before, like some unwanted insect in a pristine goblet of mead. He waited an hour or so, during which time it got a little larger – approaching, obviously, albeit slowly. It was enough, he was excited. He ran in sandaled feet all the way to the temple of the Sun, where he fell to his knees before the angry Goddess and told her of what he had seen. To his relief, the anger in her face faded as he told her. She beckoned him forwards, and kissed his forehead.

“Visitors, guests, Gods from the Heavens come to visit me,” she told him. “You will accord them everything they desire, and escort them to my temple, Gideon. And your people will lay leaves under their feet, and fruit in their hands. You must greet them as though they were my equals.” It was hard to hide his disbelief that such a thing were to be possible, but he nodded, nevertheless.

And so a welcome was arranged by Gideon, with pomp and circumstance, and music and conch-shell fanfares and blossoms from the cherry trees scattered and pulped along the road to the Temple of the Sun. And on the shore, the children of fishermen gave voice to exaltations as the ship grounded. Men alighted from it, and women. Tall and grim, with furs matted with salt and deep set eyes that did not care for their welcome. They ignored those sent to greet them, and strode up to the Temple of the Sun, dragging a wake of children. Gideon himself was similarly ignored as he stood in ceremony on the top step of the Temple – had he not moved aside, indeed, the one in the lead would have knocked him flying had he not dodged out of the way. Feeling hurt and surprised more than angry – anger was an emotion only permitted to the Sun – the leader of the City hurried to follow them.

Across the atrium they went, and through the slender carved pillars into the Sun’s own abode, where she lay in state. The Sun motioned to Gideon, and had him kneel by her bed, whilst the visitors spoke in harsh and foreign tongue. And she laughed, and they laughed, after several hours of talks. And she told Gideon: “Make a home in my City for these people, for they have come from war far away.”

Obediently, he did.

I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
Well yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds and you
Loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I believed it

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for...

Five score sunrises had the foreigners stayed, uncouth and unfriendly. The cityfolk, originally in awe of the raw, savage giants, rapidly came to fear them. Their food would be taken from them by force, women violated and children mutilated for crimes according to incomprehensible strange dictates. Those who stood up to them were cast down, some merely to the floor but others hurled from parapets as examples to stain the white rock below.

Gideon was confronted daily by an angry husband or weeping mother, demanding to know why the Sun permitted her people to be abused by her godly guests. And he could not provide the answers and feared to ask, for she was now distant from her consort – their nights were briefly frantic and then filled with silence, and she lay with her back to him, her beautiful soft hair a barrier between them.

One bright day as the sunlight pirouetted over the clear green lagoon, Gideon himself was walking through the morning glow of the city when he heard a cry from up ahead. The sound echoed, plaintive and quavering along the dawn-illumined walls, and he hurried his pace. It did not take long for him to reach the origins of the sound - one of the newcomers, standing over the bodies of four City folk with blood dripping from his hands.

"Stop!" Gideon screamed, but the newcomer did not. One punch levelled the peaceful ruler of the city, sending him crashing into a black daze, shaking something within him ... loose.

When he woke the sun was bright overhead, and he had a splintering headache. The smell of blood - not his - was strong. He scrabbled at a wall, hauled himself up, and dragged himself back to the palace, giddy.

This has to stop, he told himself. This is terrible.

"Are you not our Protector? Do you not give us light that we may worship You?" he pleaded to the Sun, as a servant bathed his bruised and cut cheek with warm water. Her face - beautiful and fiery, full of life - did not change. She was as uncaring as the statues carved in her honour adorning the entrance of the Temple of the Sun. "Why have you cast us from your favour, Sun? Do we not serve you obediently in all things?" He was persistent, over the hour, and her cold face grew angry.

"You question your Sun?" she finally said, waving the servants from the room. "What arrogance is this? Your people have always served! I give you this city, and you will give me your love!" She glared at him, the blazing gold of her eyes transfixing him ...

But Gideon stared back, although he felt himself wither underneath her anger. "I speak for the City folk, Divine One. Your fellows abuse us terribly. Can you not at least make them ... kind to us? Kind like you have been?" He pleaded and moved to press his face to the ground, despite his injured cheek.

There was a silence, then, and far above the sky darkened. A cloud came from the east, and another, until the Temple was cast into darkness. "You will do as I command, man of the City. If you are commanded to give your food to feed my kin, give to them you will. If they want your women, so shall they have it. If you and all like you are commanded to die for them, die for them you will! That is My will, Gideon. And you shall obey! Now go, and tell your people!"

He cowered away from her wrath, the heat of it roiling steam out of the jugs of water he had been using to cleanse his face. Underneath her stare, he backed out of the room, and then the Temple.

Gideon was used to leading when following, but not used to leading by himself. He did not sleep that night in the Temple, but visited every man and woman and orphan of the City. His words were humble, and poor, but the truth of them touched every person within the realm of the Sun.

And, when the moon showed her gentle face in the night air, they left. All left, for none wished to be left alone with the angered gods. Across the far hills and forests they went, fear making them fleet of foot. And they left the warm, gentle land of the Sun, who cared not for them but only what they gave to Her.

After the leaving of the City …

The land was hard and cold and barren in front of the exiled city folk, a ruined womb that lacked the nurturing capability of the southern lands. Driven initially by fear, their flight had soon slowed as the motivation became habit. Gideon had led them over many miles, before succumbing to grief and hurling himself from a mountain pass one maudlin day as the sun above was obscured by clouds. Many of the men and women did not know what it was they sought, as they travelled. And they were farmers, not hunters. Foraging food became harder as they left the lush south, and fights – hitherto unknown amongst the people before the coming of the outsiders – broke out. Soon a ruling ‘class’ emerged: the families who’s women had borne children of outsider seed. The children grew tall, and strong, and ruthless, with beards to keep them warm in the cold weather and a clannish unity that made them kings of an itinerant people.

And it was the strongest of those children, a man named Callair Ap’Gwidion, who led them into the country where they would meet the Voices.


Two and a half years ago …

King Llewellyn clutched the porcelain sides of the sink, letting the gold-touched tap bleed water into the bowl. His fingers were white with the strain, and droplets of water sprayed up into his eyes, nose and mouth.

Do it, take her! the voice whispered, and he groaned. Think of all you’ve given him … does he now owe you even this one, small thing? It was insistent, as it had never been before. Outside he could distantly hear the sounds of the party, being held in honour of his son’s seventeenth birthday.

Think of what he owes you, Llewellyn. He should be honoured that his father takes such interest in his things. Have you not led a hundred armies to victory, to strengthen this nation he will receive from you? Have you not dedicated an entire one of your armies to his honour?

The tortured king choked back a sob as his weak tears dripped into the cascade of water in the sink.

Do not deny your heritage, Llewellyn. Eleven thousand years of your people lust, you can’t deny your instinct now. She’s so pretty, poppet, so very luscious. Can you not feel her softness in your grasp? Those sweet clear eyes staring into yours during the height of passion? I’m sure you can, Llewellyn. I’m sure you can …

The man growled, then, frustration and defeat on his face. Grabbing one of the soft towels, Llewellyn wiped his face, straightened himself, and walked back into the throng of the party.

It was rare, so rare for those of high birth to find love in their arranged marriages. But Crown Prince Rhys and Lucia Valacroft (http://raph.com/3dartists/artgallery/soa1.jpg) had eyes only for each other, and were sat in shameless solitude as the party happened around them. The king, smiling, walked up to them, his voice carefully smoothed over. “Now, son, pray do not keep your beautiful fiancee all to yourself … “

His son smiled up at him, with true filial affection. “As you say, father, and my apologies.” He stood, and helped the smiling Lucia up, releasing her hand so that she could go and dance.

A few whispered words into the minds of the musicians, and soon Llewellyn and Lucia were dancing to the slow music of the Bolero as his son, her fiancee, went round talking to guests: in blissful ignorance.

And the voice kept speaking to Llewellyn, kept talking and chiding and goading and suggesting, until he could barely speak. As he led her through a step, he murmured in her ear.

“Come with me, follow,” his voice was quavering. Confused, she looked up at him with questions in her eyes. But he was the king, and it was her duty to obey. And so, as her beloved was lost in the crowds, Llewellyn led her away from the party and towards the private rooms in that wing of the palace.

At first she resisted his advances, as he sat on the side of the bed, hands shaking with ill-concealed lust and the door key in his pocket. But the more desperate he got, the louder the voice became, until it had deadened his morals.

“Get down,” the king snarled, as far away his beloved son began to wonder where his father and wife-to-be had gone. “Do this, or I’ll tell Rhys you’re tainted and declare you unfit for marriage.” Her whimpering only drove him on, as the voice sang a cruel counterpoint, and she submitted herself as he pulled up her skirts and ripped through the virginity she had treasured forever. Her blood stained the sheets, with her tears and his sweat. Through it all, she felt a light laughing in her mind, don’t worry, poppet, your love won’t mind damaged goods … if he loves you, that is … the voice said in her guilt-ridden head.

See the stone set in your eyes
See the thorn twist in your side
I wait for you

Sleight of hand and twist of fate
On a bed of nails she makes me wait
And I wait without you

With or without you
With or without you

Had it not been for the little whisper in his ear that Rhys let guide him, he may never have found out. But Lucia’s disappearance worried him, and he could not help but follow it, to a room with a window and rumpled bloodied bed sheets, a scrap of green silk from Lucia’s dress lying in the debris of lust.

The Crown Prince had been brought up a Catholic, trained by the Ordo Sancti Mundi for his role as Fidei Defensor – spiritual head of the Dominion. By nature he was good, and kind, and forgiving, but a terrible rage gripped him. He could smell – under the other scents that made him sick – his father’s aftershave, the same he had worn forever, the aftershave that had filled the air as Rhys had been proclaimed to the First Century of the Second Expedition so long ago.

He banished the voice from his mind, now he recognised it, and with a run, poppet ringing in his ears he ran recklessly towards his father’s study. The oaken door was open, swinging in a chill wind that emanated from the flat, bleak painting that was the gateway to the realm of the spirits, the land of Voices.

Llewellyn’s own words came to him, as he stood there in the chill otherworldly wind. “And so, Callair made the bargain: the spirits would guard his line forever, if he gave the loyalty of his people to them.” Rhys had been small at the time, being taught of his role. Now, older and stronger, he felt sick.

Through the storm we reach the shore
You give it all but I want more
And I'm waiting for you

With or without you
With or without you
I can't live
With or without you

And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away

That’s right, poppet came the unwanted words. Guard his line … but now he is old, and surplus to requirements … you are the guarded one, Rhys, he is now just meat. And your girl of course. Rhys let out a cry. He could smell Lucia’s perfume in here, distantly. There’s still a way, of course … if Llewellyn were to once again become the last of his line … .

There was a knife nearby, a sharp one. Rhys grabbed it, carelessly discarded the leather sheath. But he saw the crucifix on it, as he lowered it to cut along one wrist. But is she worth it, Rhys? Suicide? Eternal damnation? For a woman who betrayed you with your own father? Was she so eager to share a royal bed? Are you that much less of a man than your own father? Don’t do it, poppet, don’t cut yourself. Why should you suffer damnation for a whore and a lech, both betrayers?

Rhys put aside the knife, and his innocence, and his love that day, and vowed to see all noble houses sink into obscurity for the helpless sin of one girl who had dared to take his love.

My hands are tied
My body bruised, she's got me with
Nothing to win and
Nothing left to lose

And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away

With or without you
With or without you
I can't live
With or without you

This morning …

The Sweet Caress and the nine other Townsend carriers floated gracefully over the Mördeskälte, their huge shadows deep and black on the white glacier, fleeing the morning sun that intruded on the frozen pools of night. It was then that the First struck. Mig-39s launched from a concealed aerodrome hurtled into the sky, and Apache Longbows hauled themselves up from mountain crevasses. Troops in concealed snow digs dug their ways out, and the skies rapidly filled the air with Starstreaks.

The attack came as somewhat of a surprise to Scott, who had counted upon the High Council electing to defend Echoes. But he had taken the Townsend-Hutchison institute for a reason, and it became readily apparent as the battle started. It was the birthplace of the new fighting force, the intended modern Whispering Voices army. Graser point defences caused massive explosions as they lightly brushed missiles heading towards the flying discs, as fusion batteries pumped energy through the highly-stable Townsend-lifter propulsion mechanisms. The targeting of the platforms was nigh on perfect. Charged particle-beam weapons hurled electrons at weaving planes, the massive energy rapidly vaporising the craft and pilot within, often with just jets of steam rising from where once the target had been. Likewise, more cut into the glacier surface: water vapour exploded upwards as ice melted in vast quantities, the weapons cutting through and leaving super-heated scars. Men simply vanished below, scythed down. SABOTs and shells failed on the walls of the point defences.

The first Townsend craft was brought down by a huge fountain of ice and water that erupted as a weapon beam impacted into a subsurface munitions dump, causing a geyser to shoot up and drench the lifter mechanism. The emergency Menelmacari “anti-gravity” motor kept the craft up briefly, but then a Wisp swept in from the side, the sounds of its hypersonic flight crashing through the mountain valley. The thin, Ununpentium-filled lashes brushed the hovering disc, and abruptly reversed its gravimetric impulse. It cratered even as grasers bounced off the diaelectric mirrored surface of the Wisp … which burned up under the withering hail of fire of charged particle beams from the nine survivors. It was enough, however. Weapons that had failed to bring down the Townsend carriers – emptied of planes, but carriers nonetheless – were redirected at points of the glacier, and the low-flying behemoths were showered with steam and ice chunks and water.

“Bring us down,” Scott ordered his captain. “Bring me my cohort. Have them bring the Planck guns.” Planck guns, he had been told, were the product of a loophole of General Theory. Planck time – 10 to the –43 of a second – was the smallest possible distance between two times: it was the smallest time frame, extant at the level of quantum foam where a multitude of singularities roiled about the universe. The horrific effect of the Planck weapon was – in essence – very simple. It caused instabilities in the quantum black holes that caused them to overrun each other, effectively via an application of a Hutchison-effect. Microwaves were bombarded through taser-generated electromagnetic fields – enough of the quantum foam was effected to enlarge a single one of the singularities within the foam. Briefly, and only for the duration of the trigger press – but that was enough time to rip a gaping hole in anything - including the nature of time itself. Horrifically bloody and utterly unstoppable, the one saving grace of the handgun was its relatively short range.

On one of the monitors, he saw the craft just behind the Sweet Caress plummet to the ground. By the time his craft landed, the top of the glacier was drenched in blood and wreckage. His goal was in sight, however. Almost in their entirety, the ground and air forces of the First Expedition were dead, so much discarded litter. Neatly, file by file, his forces and the drugged armies of the noble houses marched down the Sweet Caress’ landing ramp and onto the snowy wasteland of the Mördeskälte.

Midnight, our sons and daughters
Were cut down and taken from us
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat


In the wind we hear their laughter
In the rain we see their tears
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat

Armed with their weapons the soldiers around Scott were unstoppable, and the defenders loyal to the High Council died. Those that were not shredded internally by the Planck guns died instead to the guided bullets of the nerve-linked guns, and shot men in return. Tiny electronic impulses twitched muscles just so, removing the necessity for aiming under stress. The first shot was always a shot in the spine to ensure complete paralysis, the second a shot in the heart. Simple, and efficient. The severe cold and gusts of snow served to confuse the sensors of the guns … sometimes. Occasionally men would be left alive, but paralysed, or simply mortally wounded. One of the paths to the command centre of the army was clear ahead, Scott knew: clear saved for the doomed defenders.

Then one of his cohort dropped dead, a single shot clear through his skull. A second, a third, a fourth.

Marksman. The gun sensors can’t work in this weather. Must stop him. Every soldier was trained as a marksman – there were many terrain types in which the automated combat system simply did not work effectively. However, men were dropping like flies. He hurried his group on, leaving the majority of the army behind him, and …

The landscape shuddered, and ripped. A huge crevasse sheered clean through the glacier, splitting him and his little group away as behind them, thousands of men fell screaming to their icy deaths. Out of sight, and out of knowledge.

It’s the cocaine. My sensors can’t see through the blizzard, and my men are too drugged. He knew it was true, he had a sinking feeling. Ahead lay the entrance, a black hole covered in the static of snow. A bullet ricocheted from his armoured shell. He saw a distant heat signature, and frantically opened fire at it. He recorded the sound, rather than the sight, of a heavy anti-tank weapon exploding under the pressure of his rotary cannon.

Now, now, poppet, run away like the failed half-man you are,! a voice seemed to whisper on the wind, far away. Goaded, he ran on. Another man died, and one to his left, and then mercifully the bullets stopped as a particularly strong blizzard obscured everything between the rebels and the tunnel.

Time for one last thing,. “Simon!” The traitorous Royal Guard waved back at him, standing leaning against the wind. “One last thing. Take your five and go. Cause havoc. I know you have access to caches across the globe. You know what needs to be done. If I fail here, then I want to know the world fails with me.” The man smiled, a sick smile, spoke a word, and loped off into the blizzard.

The rest of them charged on, into cannon fire and rocket fire. Grenades were hurled into the tunnel mouth, and it briefly blazed white and red, and the guns fell still on both sides.

Alone. I’m alone, Scott thought as he slogged through melted ice towards the tunnel in the rocky protrusion. A little red warning flashed in front of his mind, as his alarm circuits went off. The surface was unstable … but the tunnel was so close.

And Lieutenant-General Stephan Bryant, Rhys’ lapdog elder cousin, was staring at him from it, down the barrel of a rifle. The first bullet snapped through the hydraulic cable of Scott’s left arm apparatus, the second his right. He understood the shots, suddenly. Bryant may have been into middle age, but he held a recent Gold medal in the Olympics for target shooting. Retaliation for the crippling shots come in the form of a brief hiss of air as his robotic form shot a grenade, the explosion from which threw Bryant out of the tunnel, shattered. Bryant was – with the absence of the real Rhys – the heart and soul of the Whispering Voices armed forces. And he was lying, now, splayed out on the ground.

It only took three steps from the metallic creature that contained the remnants of a man to cause the fragile ice to cave in. Bryant – still alive, eyes fluttering and dying thoughts mirrored in their depths that were rapidly fading to blue, fell with the crippled Scott. Down into the darkness, and the cold womb of the Mördeskälte glacier.

The present …

And so the blood ran down to the sea, far distant, as the men and women bled. Men and women who could trace their history back to a solitary City that never knew of war until it was betrayed, and who had chosen despair over servitude.

Night hangs like a prisoner
Stretched over black and blue
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat

In the trees our sons stand naked
Through the walls our daughters cry
See their tears in the rainfall

And isn’t this a lovely little story we’ve seen, poppet? Seeds sewn so very long ago finally bearing fruit, like the apple tree Snow White would have planted. Stay away from the wolves, sweetie – they’ll eat anything, and that includes us, with those nasty nasty blue eyes that see everything. But what now, you ask, now we’ve caused so much havoc here? Well, don’t concern yourself too much. The Grand Plan is still intact, if not stronger … just more to my tastes, and less to the tastes of the others. Oh, I have the most wonderful, wonderful idea, poppet! Can you sense it? That beautiful, chaotic, cocaine-filled mind? That Simon? I think I’ll merge with him for a little while.

After all, I am the one from that story all the other Voices use as a cautionary tale. What fear have I of chaos? Be good, poppet. And like I’ve shown you – don’t believe everything the High Council says. Even if it’s true …

OOC:

24,713 words (23,060 words without songs).

Anyway, that's that over. Longest story I've ever written.

Comments, likes/dislikes, and so on all appreciated (constructive if you're going to criticise, please).

I'm going to follow up with a single post that has it all in chronological order ... just because some people have been confused.

WV, another wonderful story. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Looking forward to your next one.

<bump> for constructive criticism.

EDIT: replacing obvious Tag with genuine review.

Its long... but its also good.
From the way its written, I'd guess you've read "Use of Weapons" by Iain M. Banks? It has a similar alternating pair of threads: working towards the present / working back through history.

Its a good device and seems to have worked, although I got the impression that the rhythm was lost partway through: the 'City of the Sun' post ending, then a single paragraph in the next... nitpicking I know.

All in all, I liked it. It created a wide variety of characters throughout the history, giving a feel for your nation: the character of its people and their ongoing fight against inbreeding. :) It also worked to change the face of the nation: with the 'noble' class effectively ended by their part in the revolt. The High Council came to the fore as well: a group of little kiddies possessed by the mysterious "whispering voices" spirits who are guiding the people towards some kind of goal. And the outcast and, dare I say, "evil" spirit that is trying to push things in a different direction.

Showing the conquest / conversion / subjugation of the Fiefdoms was a rather good bit of background: going some way to explain their ideosyncracies and how they all came to be following the same Nation despite their differences. Having said that: I could only place Endless Regrets by name, the other three not being mentioned specificly.

Good work: now find a publisher.

From the way its written, I'd guess you've read "Use of Weapons" by Iain M. Banks? It has a similar alternating pair of threads: working towards the present / working back through history.

Sadly, no ... if that's the author I think it is, I've read "The Crow Road" and "House of Games" (I think it's that). And this one with a weird Scottish cult that's very good.


Its a good device and seems to have worked, although I got the impression that the rhythm was lost partway through: the 'City of the Sun' post ending, then a single paragraph in the next... nitpicking I know.

That was a tough choice. It was basically: relate that paragraph to the City of the Sun, as a little 'afterthought' ... or put it into the next post, as a scene setter for the Royal family part. I chose the latter, in the end, simply because the terse last paragraph would have felt wrong just going in the same post as the (hopefully) flowy, descriptive stuff.

All in all, I liked it. It created a wide variety of characters throughout the history, giving a feel for your nation: the character of its people and their ongoing fight against inbreeding. :) It also worked to change the face of the nation: with the 'noble' class effectively ended by their part in the revolt. The High Council came to the fore as well: a group of little kiddies possessed by the mysterious "whispering voices" spirits who are guiding the people towards some kind of goal. And the outcast and, dare I say, "evil" spirit that is trying to push things in a different direction.

Thanks! Ongoing fight against nature and inbreeding, really. And yes, the noble class is perilously close to going: were it not for the fact that the real Rhys is locked away in another country, they'd be all dead by now.

Showing the conquest / conversion / subjugation of the Fiefdoms was a rather good bit of background: going some way to explain their ideosyncracies and how they all came to be following the same Nation despite their differences. Having said that: I could only place Endless Regrets by name, the other three not being mentioned specificly.

In order, Hushed Breaths (Fae land), Quiet Laughter (colonial New Orleans), and Murderous Tendencies (evil arab sorcerors).


Good work: now find a publisher.

Ego:=Ego

p.s. was also wondering if anyone had noticed the way I'd given the humans red glowy eyes and the wolves deep blue ones. ^_^

Yes, I had.

But the red glow faded from the people's eyes when the 'voices left (or were driven from) them, right?

Yes ... the voices faded away in the presence of the inquisitors.