Dissolution

“Move your feet!”

“Where?”

“Anywhere! Just don’t stand in one place, or I can get your ankles and then you’re humped! Hop around if you have to, just keep moving!”

Evan rolls his eyes and begins comically hopping, thinking of Rocky Balboa in the boxing ring. Aelia, with a look of annoyance, prepares to strike again with a wooden dowel, seven feet long, the closest thing they have to a Seraph spear.

“Is-this-better?” Evan laughs, speaking with each hop. “Are-you-ready-to-give-up-yet?”

Aelia doesn’t answer, merely slaps his shin with the back end of the dowel after a quick pivot of her feet. Evan crumples to the ground, laughing and wincing at the same time.

“Why don’t you just channel? From what I’ve seen, it makes you a lot faster.”

Evan shrugs, rising with dramatic agony. “Can’t. Don’t need to. You’re not really going to hurt me and I know it, so my channeling won’t work.” Discovered, he reflects, after much frustrating trial and error.

The deck of the Century Seagull, renamed by Evan after the famous Millenium Falcon from Star Wars, is a wide, round wooden platform, balanced atop the ungraceful shape of the ship’s hull. The boat is relatively slow, especially when compared with the Silverleaf, and manouvers about as well as a brick, but it flys straight and that’s enough for the purposes of the trip.

“By the way, how’s Kari?” He hasn’t seen her, although apparently she’s on the boat, sleeping belowdecks. Already a hundred miles from Whitewall after leaving before sunrise, the Seagull’s crew consists of Evan, Aelia, Kari, and assorted mouselike creatures in the hold.

“Still sleeping. I guess she went out jumping for a couple of hours before she came to us, and she’s bushed. I feel awful about the whole thing.”

“I have to say, I sort of saw it coming.”

Aelia frowns, absently spinning the ‘spear’ in her hands, displaying an offhand grace that Evan can’t even hope to achieve. “Is that so.”

“Sure,” Evan assures her, trying to do something impressive with his practice sword and nearly dropping it, “I’ve developed a sixth sense for impending breakups.”

Aelia lunges with the dowel, affecting surprise when Evan turns the stab away with a quick swipe and returns with his own slash. Weaving out of the way, watching for an opening, Aelia frowns. “Parents?”

“Oldest story ever told. Part of what landed me here.” Evan misses a step, barely bringing up his sword in time to block. “There are signs. Tensions, little arguments. They start bringing up long-forgotten s**t, just to hurt each other. And somehow they never expect the people around them to notice. Parents are just oblivious.”

“My parents weren’t like that,” Aelia shakes her head. “I’m always amazed at the strength you show, people from Earth. If I had to deal with the things you and Kari and Oden had to, personally, I don’t know how I’d make it.”

Evan, suddenly a blur, slaps her staff to one side with his sword, pivots on his front leg, and locks the other behind her knee. An elbow, gentle but firm to her sternum, sends Aelia sprawling to the deck. Evan looks her in the eye, suddenly serious. “We didn’t make it.”`

He helps Aelia stand, frowning. “I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally? I was weak. I couldn’t handle the pressures of an everyday problem. You know how many people’s parents break up? Or beat them, or drink, or do drugs? My mother said some mean things to me and I went straight for the knife.”

“Evan, I don’t know everything about your relationship with your parents, but it wasn’t just mean things if you felt there was no way out. Whatever was said, it was cruel enough and often enough that it damaged you. Words are dangerous too, you know.”

Evan nods absently, lost in recollection. Only a few months have passed since he’s left her behind, and yet his mother’s shadow is already beginning to fade into a haze of psychological torment, episodes retreating into darkness.

Perhaps with time, she’ll be entirely forgotten. One can only hope.

* * *

Tristam ner Argus isn’t a warrior.

A Seraph man of around twenty years, Tristam has always prided himself on his piety and his sense of duty, his skill as an artisan, crafting farming implements in the old way, with hammer and forge. In the puritan colony of Providence, where Fallen’s magic-driven technology is shunned, he thrives.

And yet, when faced with the shambling, crystalline beasts, refugees from a nightmare, he wishes he owned some kind of weapon. He’d agree to any penance, accept any punishment as ruled by the council, if only he could stay as far away from those hideous things as possible and do his best to smite them from his world.

Alas, it’s not to be. Clutching a reaper, the slightly-curved tool used to cut fruit from higher branches, he stands in a row with his neighbors and prepares to fight, hand-to-hand. If the powder-laden beasts can be said to have hands.

Gentred, the mayor, speaks up at last. “Alright, friends, this is it. We’ve been retreating for too long, and waiting for help longer still. It’s time to take back our place in this world, and unfortunately it’s come to violence.”

He steps forward, gazing at the rapidly setting sun, and at the silent but now-frightening specter of the Dusk Sister. As the men watch, a series of flashes, falling stars, erupt into Fallen’s atmosphere. Unlike usual falling stars, however, these burn with a sickly, greenish light, all the way to the ground. “Ventraedi will forgive us.”

Tristam feels the earth shudder when the twenty-three objects slam into a cereal field, a mile away, igniting the dry grains in a cluster of wildfires. Through binoculars, the old glass-lens type, he can just about make out the almost-humanoid shapes clambering awkwardly from their respective craters.

Taller than a Seraph, broad in the upper body, and freakishly long in the limbs, the metal-and-crystal beings begin their nightly lurch through the landscape, all the while exuding glittering sand, the un-burned plants drying up and dying in their wake.

The things move in a halting, spastic fashion, often pausing for a quick seizure which serves to cast off a cloud of the poison dust. Tristam, watching in agony, nearly sobs at the loss of life, even that of his neighbor’s wheat. These creatures are a perversion of everything godly. Their very existence is inappropriate. The fact that they pause in their crusade, simply to ruin denfenseless crops, is evidence of their evil.

Filled with courage by his righteous anger, Tristam raises his scythe-like implement and growls. “In the gods’ names! Let us break these terrible sin-creatures!”

Taking wing, the men of Providence charge through the air. The rush of flight, never diminished by experience, serves only to bolster the courage of the men, and as Tristam looks to his sides, he sees eager expressions on his neighbors’ faces. Hands grip improvised weapons in anticipation of using them.

Then, far too soon for anyone’s liking, the mile is used up and the men drop among the death-beasts, roaring hymnal war cries and swinging weapons with every ounce of strength they posess.

The metal things do not seem surprised at the ambush, remaining silent as they turn to meet their assailants. Steel weapons, many of them built by Tristam himself, spark and scream at contact with the metal creatures, but carve encouraging gouges in the things’ narrow bodies.

Hacking with abandon at one of the things, Tristam turns at the death-scream of one of his neighbors. Unable to dislodge his scythe from the shivering beast he’s fighting, he can only watch as Droic ner Cressom is lacerated by two sets of claws, outnumbered and caught from behind.

Similar screams fill the air, his friends and cousins falling beneath otherworldly bladed hands, dropping farming tools to clutch at their gushing wounds. Tristam, beginning to panic, draws back his reaper and swings as hard as he can, burying the tool in the head and neck of his foe, and feels a rush of vindication as the lights in it’s four eyes dims.

The rush is a short one. As he yanks the weapon free, the dead beast explodes into a cloud of glittering dust, bathing Tristam, choking and clogging his throat, searing his eyes. He falls to his knees, unable to fight through the pain, barely able to breathe…

His vision clears just enough for him to see his own hands, clutching at the dirt, begin to fade away. Shining dust corrodes his flesh, eating away his skin, drinking his blood, drying and dessicating his body even as he watches in horror.

His clothes fall away, too eaten to remain on his thrashing form, and his last thought is that he wishes he’d owned a gun.

He dies cursing his gods.

* * *

Noreus marches haltingly through the field, an hour later, looking in approval on the work of his creatures. Thirty-eight Seraph men, only bones left to insist they were ever there. Bones and nails and feathers, anyway. The dead-dust seems to have trouble with some less crucial organs. It doesn’t really matter.

“You know,” he chokes out, less and less used to using his voice, “I wonder why your dust doesn’t eat me in this same way. I suppose I have breathed in quite a lot of it.”

Now the answer comes in a voice, metallic and crackling, as though through a poorly tuned radio. His skull echoes with the painstakingly pronounced words.

You… are… the… bringer. You… not… be… eat. You… not… be… fear… of… us.

“Good enough for me.” Noreus chuckles, then falls to a fit of coughing. “Tomorrow, we move into the main part of town. How many of you may I expect?”

Much… kill… eat… people?

“Oh yes, many more than you’ve had so far. And larger buildings, as well. I’ve seen that you eat those, as well?”

Not… so… good… as… life…… … but… good. We… bring… many… us. More… than… before. Will… be… much… eat.

“I’m so glad we can help each other.”

We… happy… eat.

* * *