The Second Age

Marduk’s Long War

Generations 0-1

The learned to burn the dead.

    Buried, originally. Not because it was how it had been done on Earth but because it wasn’t. They all had memories of the mass crematoria and the composters. That was not respect for the dead. Every lost settler was one of ours, worthy of more than anonymous disposal or recycling. And here was a whole world full of good rich earth. They had marked out a plot and interred their fallen just as Bartilow claimed the Ancients had. This was, after all the Ancients’ world. They’d understand.

    They’d understood, Cosimir reckoned. If you subscribed to the superstition which had grown up amongst the Marduk’s abandoned, eeled its way through them like a parasitic worm. The idea that the Ancients were out there. That every misfortune that occurred outside the fence, and plenty that happened within, were the mean-spirited gift of unseen neighbours. Those who dwelled within the darkness beneath the trees.

    Cosimir, the captain, their leader, did not believe such things. She’d said so publicly. Kieraven had encouraged her to ban the mention of the idea as bad for morale. She hadn’t. Partly because banning ideas as bad for morale was the swiftest way to spread them. Partly because she wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t true. Certainly anyone whose work took them outside the fence on a regular basis looked shifty when the topic came up. Always a sense of watching, out there. Always the feeling you weren’t alone, one more in the party than there should be. Breath at your shoulder where nobody stood. Back of your neck itching when you turned away from the trees. Plants that grew with weird galls and deformities, lmost like faces – but then just about anything looked almost like faces when the human imagination got going. Animals that acted weird – but then who were they, from a depauperate world – to know how animals should act. Bartilow said it was weird, but Bartilow had scanned scraps of ancient manuscripts where the animals had worn clothes and done human things. The Ancients made a lot of shit up, frankly, and they hadn’t been good at labelling their fantasies for later historians. Bartilow had grown fanciful in her later years.

    And then died. Which was why they were gathered here.

    They’d cut wood and let it dry. There was always a pyre on hand. Not that people were dying quite that rapidly anymore. The most obvious ways the world would kill you had been identified. Then the more subtle ways: the poisonous berries that looked like the edible ones; the killer spiders that looked harmless. It all went in the Big Book, meaning the heavily indexed data file that contained everything they’d learned about their new home. Marked up with levels of credibility depending on whether it was tested and confirmed, or just anecdotal. They still recorded the anecdotes, hedged with appropriate cautions. It was a strange and hostile world and you never knew what might turn out to be true.

    Back home, death had been a daily thing. Usually a handful of colleagues or kin turned up to see the incinerator doors close, or the slurry run into the churn of the agricultural tanks. That was about all you could spare. Out here, something more had grown up, with fewer people and each a blow to the community if they died. After the frenzied struggle of the first few years, people could spare the time to remember, say a few words. This was a special case in any event. They even had some visitors from River Fork and Dragon Hill compounds, come to pay their respects. That was a currency they could afford, here on Marduk – the world, named after their lost ship. So it was that just about everyone was gathered out under the stars, about the stacked lattice of wood.

    Burial had been abandoned after about a decade. The old original coffins had been plastic. After that they’d tried wood, or just wrapping in printed cloth. So it was that the more recent dead had shown the signs first, but even the plastic had broken down in time. The life of the world had learned some tricks of the life in orbit, to devour even the indigestible. And then grown. Grown riotously in flower and fungus. Erupting from the earth and dislodging the markers. And why? The whole world was a mess of living and dying. There couldn’t be a square metre of soil across the whole of Marduk that some critter hadn’t died in. Yet nowhere else was the greedy bouquet you got from a dead human being. A glorious fountain of unhealthy colours, yellows and blood reds and phosphorescences so you could see the ghastly display in the dark. Bartilow had tried to claim it as a celebration of the dead, but it came over to Cosimir and everyone else as dancing on the graves.

    Rank anthropomorphism obviously. The pathetic fallacy of attributing human sentiment to the weather and the world. But it was what humans did, even after all this time.

    They brought out Bartilow’s body down a path through the crowd, to the wood, and to Cosimir and Kieraven, last of Key Crew. Alongside them, those younger faces, former cargo who’d filled the vacant slots of administration here at Acceptance. Cosimir’s chosen name for their first town. Plenty who’d wanted something upbeat like Hope’s Landing, but she’d foreseen that would be a name they’d come to regret. “The world is as it is, and we work with what we’ve got,” she’d said.

    Bartilow, denied any new material of the Ancients to Classicise, had become their archivist instead, husbanding what knowledge had been brought from Earth. Even though her mind had wandered into strange speculations in her last years, she’d trained up a replacement who stood beside Cosimir now. Next to him was the most senior of Ilshir’s surviving engineers, then one of Kieraven’s people who’d proven particularly adept at coming back alive from the wilds, There was the man who played quartermaster with all the varied supplies and demands of the community, and the woman who ran their strained medical facilities. Last, there was their teacher with her class. Forty-three children, ranging from sixteen down to six, the age they left the creche. Children. Obviously they all knew they needed children, or this was going to be a short colonisation effort. Everyone had been leery of how a child might turn out, brought into this new world by Earth’s traditional ways and the medical complications of natural birth in less-than-optimal circumstances had looked dicey. Nobody wanted to have to learn caesarean sections from a manual, with a mother-to-be under the knife. So they’d relied on the medical kit that Cosimir had, with all foresight, made space for. The artificial wombs, the embryro store, all that. And two-thirds of the shuttles’ fusion generators were still going strong, so they had the power to spare for such civilized things. Nobody died in childbirth and the pharma printers had capacity for contraceptives, and nobody needed to resort to old fashioned ways of perpetuating the species yet. Cosimir had told Bartilow’s replacement to get onto resurrecting knowledge about maternal care and the like, because they’d needed to resort to those old fashions in the future, but right now nobody needed the burden in their belly or the danger of complications. It throttled their population expansion, and had left quite a gap between the old guard and the new kids in age, but there were plenty of the former cargo who’d been little more than kids themselves. Project Management back on Earth had been planning for the future. It was the crew who’d grown old. Bartilow most of all.

That was what they were marking here, why this particular funeral was special. Not that Bartilow had been Key Crew. Bartilow was the first person on Marduk to die of old age. Not of animal attack, poisoning, allergic reaction, falls, drowning, toxic shock or some disease that got through the immune boosting. She’d just lived the last years of her life. The failings that had brought her down had just been time catching up with her. Her heart, in the end. As peaceful a way as you got, on this world.

Some came up and cast flowers or other vegetable matter onto the pyre, after the body was laid there. Not offerings; a tradition that had grown up after they’d ruled out burial in the earth, so the handfuls of planet they consigned to the flames became a statement. We will win out over you. More idiot personification of the world’s brute forces, Cosimir tried to tell herself. But she remembered the Beanstalk destroying their ship. Hard not to see intent behind that, for all it was just a plant following some path it had evolved for itself. 

She’d had the conversation far too many times, and still didn’t quite believe the rational explanation.

She said a few words, then. Bartilow, her friend, the one who’d forced her off the ship. The strange, awkward woman with her moments of fire-and-brimstone oratory, like storms out of a clear sky. 

Kieraven took her hand, when she was done. She realised she was crying. It was unexpected, and almost seemed to be something else, some reaction to pollen, grit in her eyes. There was a well of loss and emotion in her, that she’d spent her time - as captain and governor of Acceptance - walling herself off from. Too much a vulnerable point for all the bastardy she’d had to resort to. The hard calls, the tough orders. And now, she realised, she could start to let go of that. They had a council and they had stability, and the world still wanted to kill them but it only took them one at a time and occasionally. As though it was waiting to see what they did.

“How did that get in?” Kieraven said suddenly. She turned and saw the funeral had one mourner more than quota. A lithe, furred thing with big amber eyes and pointed ears, watching the flames with no animal fear of fire. One of the small predator species they’d catalogued, not dangerous in itself, though maybe a vector for disease.

This creature looked at the fire as though it was some long-lost relative of Bartilow, that nobody had known about. There was an intentness to it that made Cosimir shiver. She looked sideways at Kieraven, the dark of his one functioning eye, the other one cracked and grey.

    “You ever notice how they look at you?” he said. And indeed the critter’s attention was on them now, not the flames. A direct stare, eye contact, the shock of one entity recognising another.

    Cosimir nodded.

    “Like the whole world’s looking out at you, through those eyes,” Kieraven went on. He’d been in the wilds plenty, before the eye went and he came back home to serve in less strenuous ways.

    “It’s not over,” he added quietly. “Us and this world. It’s waiting. It’s got a move to make.” And it was nonsense, obviously. It was an old man getting fanciful, like Bartilow had. But she knew he was right. 

Generation 2

Ennelise Jesper, a young woman at Bartilow’s funeral, was old herself now. More worries than she had years left to address them. 

    Captain Cosimir and Security Chief Kieraven had both passed on, by now. Natural causes, both of them, but there were enough allergens, pathogens and natural toxins just blowing about in the air that ‘natural causes’ tended to get you sooner rather than later, just through accumulated systemic stress. Ennelise and her science cadre wore facemasks and goggles when they went out of doors, which the other council members weren’t happy about. She’d presented her findings but they were both rarefied and unproven. After all, when you were talking about accumulated effects over a lifetime, it was hard to point to any given metric.

    She was still had the working kit to analyse samples, at least. Most of the shuttles retained a functioning computer core. Most of the printers were still functioning to an acceptable level and the repair teams were been abreast of the damage. Much of which was environmental, spores and lichen and plastic-eating moulds.

    They were, Ennelise thought, at war with the planet. Maybe that was the ‘natural’ state of humanity. Certainly humans had been at war with old Earth, as the ancient archive records told. At war with, then victorious over, then victims of their own success, in quick succession. The settlers on Marduk were too few to have that kind of impact on their current environment, but the archivists were making sure the knowledge wasn’t lost. Trying to inculcate a philosophy of interdependence with the wilds, of replacement and respect. All very laudable, except…

    Except the world was at war with them, even if they were trying to live in peace with the world. And peace was relative, because they’d driven roads through the forest, cleared land for agriculture, hunted the beasts and harvested the plants. 

    Reprisals, then, from insensate nature. Except Jesper had some notes preserved from Hieron’s studies into the Beanstalk, that was composed of the same stuff as the life down here. That engineered life, the oddities of which bore witness to its terraformer origins. Perhaps there was some reflexive capacity within the biosphere, to react against anything coming in from outside. She’d found no mechanism, but maybe the tools they’d rescued from the ship weren’t acute enough, or her own knowledge too abraded by time.

    She hadn’t ever raised the idea of a malign Gaia at Council. People already felt that Science was odd. She had few allies. Best not tempt fate with crazy talk. Except the current Ranger Chief – responsible for hunt, gather and pathfinder operations – had basically said exactly that, the quiet thing out loud. Her opportunity to say, Well actually and speak to the Science, either in support or denial. And she’d stayed quiet and let them argue it out, and known that she believed the man and wouldn’t ever admit it.

    Right now the most visible problem was rabbits. Not actual rabbits, as in the hardy rodent-adjacent species that had still been ekeing out a living in some parts of Earth when the Marduk left. A variety of small fast-breeding herbivore species that filled a general rabbit-shaped niche. Some hopped, many burrowed, most had fierce dentition. They ranged from the size of your thumb to the size of your forearm. At first they’d been easy to exclude from the burgeoning agricultural effort. Now they weren’t. Abruptly – within around forty days by Jesper’s records – multiple species had learned how to circumvent fences, avoid traps, shrug off poisons. They were suddenly far more canny about human hunters. They stayed underground longer and ate the roots of everything. Fields suffered massive die-off. While everyone had been talking better mousetraps, Jesper had run some calculations on the nutritional value of what was being eaten, and come up with the answer that the rabbits must be starving. The impact on the crops was greater than the benefit to the pests. Which was odd.

    Next problem: there had been exhaustive surveys of what you could eat and what you couldn’t. Jesper had been involved in a lot of the testing, isolating all the local toxins, working out which could be denatured by various means, and what was safe just to pop in your mouth. She had all her notes, exhaustively compiled.

    They were out of date. Berries and fruits that had been safe back then were toxic now. New poisons had entered the biome, many with hidden long-term effects that had been building up for years. She’d issued advisories recommending new foods to avoid, but she hadn’t made her full findings public yet. She didn’t know what they meant. She didn’t know how they were possible. The ecosystem is reacting. The things they ate, harvested, even killed, were becoming less palatable. Was that possible? Was there some medium of interspecies communication she hadn’t detected? Something was going on.

    The planet hates us.

    Recently some of the farmers had found weird boils on their plants, eating away at where seed and tuber and fruit should be. Jesper had cut them open and found grubs. Larvae of some unknown insect species, never before seen. A migrant in from some other region, perhaps. 

    An attack.

    It was going to be a major plague, she knew, unless they could find a way of combating the bugs. Complicated by thef act she didn’t know what the adult form looked like. The larvae died in captivity without metamorphosing like spies taking suicide capsules rather than talk..

    The long Marduk day was coming to a close and she’d retired home – the wood-built house made with treated timber from the forests. She shared it with her daughters, two out of the four. They’d all come out of the artificial wombs because Ennelise had no desire to strain her own biological systems. The oldest two were straight out of her own gene line, old enough to live with her now. The younger two were still with their creche classes. It had begun as a necessary tradition, because having large groups of children cared for by tutelary specialists was more efficient than every parent having to give over time for childcare. Cosimir had always wanted to weaken the idea of inheritance and family bonds, preferring to stress wider community. The fewer divisions they had, the better. 

    Ennelise’s eldest two had come back to her, on the Science team. And were absolutely supposed to be asleep in their rooms rather than moving about in the house’s common room long after dark.

    She was old, but sly. She could be quiet, creeping out to see what her second child was doing. And there was the girl, Dialine, twenty years old and stealthily preparing a pack, putting on her weatherproof coat, stepping out of the house.

    A tryst, perhaps. Jesper, who’d never trysted once in her long life, rolled her eyes. But you could kick humanity across the stars but some things didn’t change.

    When the girl stepped out, almost burlesquing stealth in her desperate attempt not to make noise, Jesper slung on her own coat and followed.

    She’d been out with the rangers a lot, in more tender years. Back in the day, Science had been a more active business, front line in the battle to secure a stable foothold on the world. Perhaps in the future her daughters would need to learn those skills anew, given the world seemed to be changing up its game. Right now, Ennelise could remember enough to ghost between the trees, old bones bedamned, and Dialine had never needed to learn how. Which meant the girl walking out into the woods was profoundly dangerous and Jesper was going to have words. With her and whichever idiot suitor had decided that the woods at night was in some way romantic.

    Except that wasn’t it. And somehow, in her heart, Ennelise had known it. Not young love, but a different atavism raising its head in the dark corners of the world.

    There was a stone out there. So what? There were stones everywhere. The world was built on them. But this was a big, flat stone, fuzzed with moss, crusted with lichen. Flat, with a faint bowl depression worn into it by the action of rain and weather,

    Dialine paused before it and set her lantern down. Ennelise shrank back from the shifting beams of the light. A scientist, become a creature of darkness. High irony, surely. And here was her girl, taking things from her pack. Half a loaf of bread, some dried meat, a string of decorative beads like a couple of the older people made out of river glass. And then a knife. A good knife, the steel the shuttle printers made out of that iron ore they were mining over at Dragon Hill. A quick motion, a hiss of pain and a few drops of blood scattered on the stone.

    Enough, Ennelise decided. Time to step in. A pointed cough, that made Dialine squeak with alarm. Turning, finding not some ur-god of the wilds but an angry mother, and all the worse for that.

    “Really?” Ennelise asked her. “I mean, there was some suggestion of this sort of thing among the Rangers, but you’re Science.”

    Dialine bit her lip.

    “You’re a grown woman,” Ennelise added. “What the hell is this.”

    Her daughter faced her, caught between embarrassment and defiance. “They said it worked.”

    “Who said what worked?” Jesper demanded.

    “The visit, from River Fork,” Dialine said. “I was talking. There was… someone.”

    There had been a boy. Well, a young man. Hard for Jesper not to write them all off as boys these days. He and Dialine had spent time together, and why not? Nothing had seemed to come of it, but apparently this boy had left some idiocy behind as a gift.

    “They said that some of them…” Dialine stumbled over the words. “When they were kids, they started. Leaving things, in the woods. Stealing things and taking them out there. Food, tools, anything really. Because of what was out there, they said.”

    Jesper rolled her eyes.

    “And then they got older, and they’d probably have grown out of it, except-“

    “River Fork’s crops aren’t failing like ours,” Jesper supplied acidly. “And they think that’s because of their… votive offerings? Good grief. And you believe that?”

    Dialine’s chin came up defiantly. “I didn’t say that. But I… It’s an experiment. I thought I would try. For a few tens of days. See if it had any effect, on the crops, the incursions, anything.”

    “And you’d balance out everyone else’s perfectly mundane and rational attempts to deal with the vermin how?” Jesper demanded. “This sounds like the most ass-backwards ‘science’ I ever heard.”

    Dialine said nothing.

    “So if someone in Agric gets the rabbit population under control, that means your nonsense religion here is real does it? That would be your scientific conclusion?”

    Dialine said nothing.

    “And what then? You have to keep on making the offerings or it gets worse again?” she demanded. “Bigger offerings? How much do we waste on this sort of-“

    “Mum,” Dialine said. “Shut up.”

    Not the words, that silenced her, but the tone. Not anger, not shame. Fear.

    Ennelise looked around. There was a cat there. Not a cat, obviously. Just something of that general breed, the small carnivores. The sort of slinking bastard who should be on their rabbit problem. But instead, here it was, sitting out in the open, halfway to the stone, staring at them. 

    Not alone.

    There were other bright eyes casting back the lamplight, in the dark. The not-quite-cats and the not-quite-rabbits that were their lawful prey, shoulder to shoulder. And the air flurried with motes that were moth-like or beetle-like, dancing in the radiance of the lamp.

    “Mum,” said Dialine quietly.

    “I’m here,” Ennelise confirmed, her own voice sounding incongruously steady. “Your experiment is yielding unexpected results.”

    There was a ponderous tread. A sound and impact that was somehow simultaneously heavy and soft. A thing slipped out of the trees, its quilled hide rasping the bark like serpents. High-shouldered, thorn-skinned, lumpy and unlovely with warty armour. It had tusks like scimitars, held low at the level of a human gut. 

    Jesper had a pistol. It was in her hand now and she felt she might as well have brought a screwdriver or a darning needle. The thing must be two tons of muscle, something of the boar, something of the bear.

    It reached the stone, stood across the moss-heavy table from them. Its eyes were tiny, pink, hidden beneath bone-reinforced brows. Its mobile semi-proboscis snuffled up the edibles there. Its gaze never left them. Not wary but imperious.

    Jesper was aware that she was gripping her daughter’s arm painfully tight and couldn’t stop herself.

    The creature – it was like nothing that her ancestors or the Ancients had preserved, of Earth – twisted its head sideways until one curved tusk hooked the string of beads. Then, the prize swinging and glittering about its chin, it backed away, turned and padded off into the night. The cats and other smaller critters left, eyes winking out one pair at a time. Even the flurry of flying bugs evaporated to isolated blunderers.

    Jesper sat down on the stone, the altar, breathing heavily. Trying and failing to construct a science that would contain this event. Not meeting her daughter’s gaze.

Generation 4

Three days on foot, out from Acceptance, not keeping to the roads: Nico Aramantis, Ranger. A subdivision Security in his grandfather’s day, but the old ship hierarchy was falling away, generation to generation. 

    He wasn’t Ranger Chief, but might be in time. Ambitious like that, was Aramantis. His father had been with the Rangers, grandmother too. Her parents had been Security; theirs had been cargo. The Council kept saying that nothing was hereditary, but if you grew up in a house with an engineer, or one of the Science team (still clinging to the name) or whatever, natural you picked up the skills. You had a headstart, if that was what you wanted to do. You had a hand on your shoulder, parental, prideful, guiding you that way. If it was good enough for me… The old creche systems were supposed to get in the way of that familial ambition, but the edges had rubbed off them over time. Sure, the Archivists gave all the kids of Acceptance the same basic education, but you learned things at home, too. Aramantis had been on the trail with Aramantis père from age seven, every free moment. Never any doubt what he’d grow up to be.

    He was aware, on a purely theoretical level, that there were pros and cons to that sort of system. Pros being, you got people in the jobs who came pre-trained and familiar how. Cons being, you got cliques and guilds and special interests, nepotism and having your seat saved for you just because of who your folks were. Two opposite forces, one honing a profession’s readiness, one degrading it. He’d have said that the Rangers only got sharper, given the danger they ran into on a daily basis, but he could name a few of his peers who’d been promoted beyond their ability, with families in the trade to nudge the elbows of the senior Ranger elite.

    Anyway, it wasn’t as though the Rangers had that many intrepid volunteers from outside their traditional bloodlines. Being a Ranger got you killed, because the wilds wanted to kill you. Science was still ostensibly telling everyone it wasn’t true. That dangerous didn’t equal intent. Aramantis didn’t believe that. None of the Rangers did. The way the wilds shifted, year on year, so that what was safe became deadly, trying to catch you out. The way the roads were undermined and overgrown in ways that the rest of the wood saw. The way animals looked at you, with a knowledge in their eyes no dumb beast ought to have. He knew the score; Science could pontificate all it liked. He didn’t need to show them any reason or mechanism. He just needed to walk under the shadow of the trees and trust to his gut.

    And here he was, and these weren’t even his own trees. He was way out downstream, on River Fork land. It wasn’t as though the various communities spreading out across Marduk needed to be fiercely territorial yet, after all. They were spreading out one way, picking trajectories that left the older places plenty of room to expand. There were seven separate names on the map now, from the big old hub of Acceptance where a couple of the shuttles still provided fusion power after all these years, through to the little cluster of huts and a palisade wall all the way over at Bone Spring. So plenty of space and plenty of resources, and yet here he was creeping about in the shadow of River Fork like some of the eyes in the trees might not just be animals. Like he might get caught.

    There had been disappearances. A couple of traders from Acceptance, coming this way. A few foragers. There had been rumours. There were enough human beings on Marduk now – from the last of the artificial wombs, and plenty by the regular human way – that some fell out with others. The Rangers would track human prey. Crimes of anger and passion and envy, or just bad luck and running from the consequences. The Council tried its best to make sure nobody ended up so isolated from their fellows that they fell into bad ways. There were hard years, though, when people went without. There were things that were only ever going to be more in demand than supply. The iron-hard focus of serve your ship, your people, humanity had rusted over time. Brigands, then. Some group of exiles outside any of the communities, making trouble.

    That was the official line. That was what Council had told Aramantis to look out for. But at the same time the Ranger Chief had told him, Go quiet, and don’t go say hello to your opposite numbers in River Fork. Not orders Aramantis liked, but he understood them. He’d heard the rumours only the Acceptance Rangers passed around. What people had found in the trees. What travellers had heard. 

    He was close enough to the other town to see evidence of human activity now. From a ways off, he could hear the sound of tree felling a ways off: a couple of mechanical saws and axes too. The compromises they made. River Fork would have its printers, robust and basic to churn out reliable components for repairable machines, but they had strong arms and backs too. Sometimes it was easier to devolve the small jobs to that.

    Aramantis had grown up in a world that was a constant battle between build and bury. Engineering fought entropy to keep the old tech working. Science fought ignorance to find new ways to slow the degradation of life towards brute simplicity. Farmers were at war with the wilds that attacked the crops a hundred ways. And Rangers returned the favour, hunting beasts, pillaging the woods of meat and pelts and forage. And, sometimes, bad people.

    Aramantis knew the woods as a killing ground. Everywhere there was some monstrous beast that could crunch up people in its jaws, either for food or just for fun. There were poison thorns and serpents and swarms of bugs that could stripe flesh to bone. Yet the bad people always seemed to survive it. As though the badness in the wilds recognised its own.

    Bad people, then. Rogues in the wood. If only it was that simple.

    It might have been that simple, but hew knew by gut instinct it wasn’t. Too close to River Fork for the good people of that burgh not to know about it, however much they protested ignorance.

    He found the big stones he’d heard about, sure, but big trees too. Overhanging branches where they’d hung the bodies, then cut them til they bled. Left them to drip into the basins of the stones. Left them for carrion birds and swarming flies. Things like carnivorous monkeys with hands, and sharp fangs in cat faces. And yes, the travellers had been robbed first – stripped naked, in fact, so someone could carve them up and get the blood flowing. But it wasn’t brigands. It was an offering. 

    He’d made them himself. Most kids did, at one time or another. You were dared to go to the woods, leave out something from your lunch, or some valuable swiped from your folks. His parents had caught him at it and walloped him good. Told him the wilds were the enemy. The wilds were never satisfied. Today it was a scrap of meat and a withered piece of fruit. Tomorrow…

    He was looking at that tomorrow, and it wasn’t the work of kids. Or those kids had grown up without anyone telling them No. Had started to see the hand of the wilds in every piece of luck they had, good or bad. And eventually, desperate or ambitious or just plain crazy enough, this.

    River Fork had the rot in it, sure enough. There had been a bunch like this in Acceptance, in Aramantis’ parents’ day. Not quite up to cutting the throats of visitors, but wearing animal skins and stealing from the town to give to the wilds. Council had come down hard on it. Made an example. Paraded the cultists – cultists, what other word for it? – through the town. Made every child learn how one did not give in to the world like that. They were at war, in their heads, with their hands. It was humanity against the wilderness of this terraformed world. If you wanted to blame someone, say it was the Ancients.

    Aramantis knew it was true now, seeing the gruesome scene. The Ancients had been mad, and their madness has gone into everything they’d made. They’d ruined Earth, and how could this planet they’d crafted turn out any better. 

    He padded back through the trees on the trail to Acceptance, full of bad news he needed to share, before some beast or votary could cut it out of him. Something needed to be done about River Fork.

Generation 7

Geronn Cosimir had expected the prisoners to be dead when the Acceptance forces burst in. Not as though the assault had been subtle. They’d needed engines to break the temple compound’s gates and walls, and after that the fighting had been ferocious. The congregation – brigands, murderers, lunatics – had thrown themselves into the shot and the bayonets with a mad confidence. Almost enough to have Geronn call the retreat, because plainly there was another force out there, a secret weapon, a trap… And certainly the prisoners would all be long slaughtered. This hadn’t been a rescue mission, only a reprisal. The last and most brutal measure against the River Hook Temple, to ensure they were wiped off the face of the world.

    A a relief force from River Hook itself  had come to relieve their compatriots, showing that the whole town was given over to the worship of unclean things. The soldiers from Dragon Hill had met them within the trees, where surely the enemy would be strongest. Geronn had expected the worst, hearing that: armies of ravening beasts, the very trees whipping and crushing. But it had just been a fight, confused and amorphous as any meeting of two large forces in a wood. An officer of the Dragon Hill detachment had turned up, with that scale cloak they wore over a grey uniform styled like an old shipsuit. She had scars on her face, jagged and symmetrical, and she looked at Geronn as though not entirely sure he was her ally. Yes, the River Hook force had been turned back with extreme prejudice, and the bulk of her people were hounding them all the way back to their town. Assuming the Acceptance militia could handle things here…? And a slight curl of the lip, in her voice. The fighters from Dragon Hill weren’t part-timers like Geronn’s people. The town had decided that the world called for professional killers. They made Geronn nervous. What if, once River Hook was brought in line, there was no other evident threat? What if the beasts of the wild stayed away and the world was calm? What would all those soldiers do, without a war? Dragon Hill was, Geronn reckoned, absolutely the problem that tomorrow would serve up for Acceptance to worry about. Today, however, they were on his side, ensuring nobody put a knife in his back.

    With that threat lifted, his people had broken the Temple gates. They’d brought a couple of the new cannon, that Acceptance Science had come up with. Not exactly sophisticated, but four people could carry one about, and they could be loaded with solid shot or scatter. Not explosive yet, after a few spectacular problems in testing, but they were working on it. Not just for gates and walls, but some of the big beasts out in the world would shrug off regular bullets. Two cannon, and Geronn had risked a great deal to bring one of the ancient cutters off the shuttles, that both River Hook and Dragon Hill would like to get their hands on. With the cannon making trouble at the gate, he’d led the Engineers trained in its use to the walls and carved through the stone as if it was wax. Caught the frothing defenders in the flank in their own entrance hall. Their berserk morale had broken, then, and they’d fallen further back. Geronn and his people had taken the outer Temple.

    He’d been waiting for those beasts. The thundering trample of an armoured boar the size of a house. Some dragon thing with inch-thick scales and venomous spit. A swarm of flesh-eating ants or killer bees that could only be warded off with flame and smoke. As his people pushed through the shattered gates and the smooth-edged hole in the stones, surely there would come a roaring and a trumpeting as the Life came to rescue its devotees. He believed it, and everyone under his command believed it. Plenty of eyes turned outwards to the trees; guns and bodies taken off the assault to act as advance scouts. Yet nothing came.

    Geronn was aware that some didn’t believe in the Life, or said they didn’t. It remained Science’s official position – just a hostile world with no mind behind it. No more than religious pareidolia, making faces out of the random motions of the world. Acceptance’s Council said the same, when it was making united statements. Behind that, Geronn knew, plenty of the councillors believed in the malign genius loci of the world. Plenty of scientists, too. You could only go so far ascribing everything to instinct and bad luck.

    The Life. The usage seemed to have spread like a sickness through every community at once. As though heard in the sighing of the wind and the chirr of beetles.

    The interior of the temple was a grand open space, and here was where the River Hook votaries made their stand. By then they had no choice, because Geronn’s people had them ringed. There were trees planted, in the Temple’s heart, as these places always had, and a big flat stone hauled in. Never cut – the cult wanted something natural to serve as their altar. Here they had, with ceremony, invocation and prayer, carved up any poor bastard they could get their hands on. At first with stealth, and River Hook Council denying and obfuscating everything. At last, in the open, defiantly, knowing that the world, the Life, was on their side. Daring the good people of Acceptance to do anything about it, even as raiding parties picked at the edges of their neighbours’ fields and outlying farms.

    Yet here they were, penned into their holy of holies, and the Life had not come to their aid. Not a bird, not a beast, not a bug.

    And there, to Geronn’s surprise, were the prisoners. Only now did the old men and women who were priests here decide that maybe they should start slitting throats, and Geronn shouted the advance and gave them other things to think of. He had his best shots start sniping at the priesthood. Acceptance still made good guns, having access to third generation printers that could still produce precision-machined parts, and to some skilled machine-smiths who could just about match them. Geronn himself took his pistol and sabre and led the rest in: a salvo of shot into the densest pack of them, six shots, then replace the chambers, and then in alongside the mounted bayonets. They were taking losses from enemy fire, but the cultists weren’t disciplined or uniformly armed. They milled about, or else they had some grand access of mad courage and just about skewered themselves. So that, when Geronn got to the altar with a gashed arm and a bloodied cheek, three-quarters of the sacrifices remained unsacrificed. More than he’d hoped. Far more than even his wildest expectations, honestly. Because, rational man that he was, in the cultists’ place he’d have cleared away the evidence long ago. Had these bodies cooling even as they heard the first word of Geronn’s approach. 

    After it was all done, he stood over the dead priests and looked up at the trees. The shadows under their branches looked darker and more sinister than the regular, but that, he was sure, was just his imagination. A catlike creature up there chittered at him. In rage, at its feast of blood being denied it? Or just an animal, warning him off its territory.

    “Cutter’s dead,” one of the Engineers said to him. 

    “Fix it?”

    “When we get it home we’ll open it up. Not got the tools out here.” 

    And that was one more thing from the landing days gone, maybe. Honestly, he couldn’t think of a better final use of it. He gave out his orders – untie the prisoners, get them food, shelter, kind words. Question them gently just in case any of them was hiding a sacrificial knife behind their backs. Maybe some of the priesthood were trying to sneak out under that cover. The woman from Dragon Hill watched impassively, sizing him up. Tomorrow’s problems.

    “I’ve sent runners,” she told him flatly. Meaning to her own town, its Council. Advising them of victory, and what came after. They’d send someone with authority. Geronn’s people would do the same. Probably they’d invite a speaker from River Hook. Maybe someone knew a faction within their bounds who’d bring sanity back to the town, drive out the Worship. Strike a blow for civilization, against the Life.

    “They didn’t come,” said the woman from Dragon Hill.

    He nodded. No need to ask who They were. The Life was singular, but when it acted, it became plural, composed of multitudes.

    “They’re not as strong as River Hook thought. Shadows and spook stories,” he said. “You get people scared and credulous enough, they shed blood for you.”

    She laughed, at that. “So you do believe, Acceptance man.”

    He looked at her, had a moment of holding to the Council’s line, then shrugged. “Something is out there. That hates us and loves to see our blood shed. Some mother of all beasts, some horror beneath the earth, something. You’ve heard all the ways they tell it, I’m sure.”

    Dragon Hill Council absolutely accepted that the Life was real. Right now that meant they held it as something to be fought, because that was how Dragon Hill preferred to solve its problems. Geronn could see, uneasily, how that attitude could flip to its opposite, right into the worst of Worship, so very easily.

    “You’re the one they call Cosimir, aren’t you?” she asked. “The Captain’s child?”

    He shrugged, nodded, deciding standing on the name might mitigate her general contempt for part-time soldiers. He wasn’t, really. He’d been brought in off a farm where the Life, or maybe its cultists, had taken everyone off. Found hidden beneath the floor by a parent’s last desperate action. He was creche-raised and they gave you a ship name there. No bloodline, between him and the Captain, but a bond of pride nonetheless. He was working for the woman’s legacy, no matter whose child he was.

    “Helene Balaksy,” she said. “Provost.” And he had no idea what that meant because Dragon Hill seemed to have a bewildering number of gradations of soldier. “You’ll be with us when we storm the town?”

    “I’m hoping there will be other options tried first,” he said. She snorted. Plain enough what Dragon Hill felt needed to be done. Would Acceptance caution bring them round? Seeing the way she stood, he didn’t have a good feeling about it.

    That night it rained, and he decided that the Life was broken enough that he and the luckier of his people would steal shelter from the Temple itself. Balaksy did the same, when she saw it, and he reckoned she would have scoffed about how weatherproof her scaled cloak was, if she hadn’t wanted to show that she wasn’t scared of the leftover ghosts. His choice – to take the roof rather than the rain – was what he blamed for the dream, later on.

    In his semi-sleeping state, he seemed to hear voices. Inhuman voices, like animal mouths and throats strangled and twisted until something like words came from them. A performance for his ears. There was a cat and a rabbit – things like those templates, anyway, more of the endless Earth-variations that Marduk’s wilds threw up. They were sitting, quite companionably, just the way such beasts didn’t in waking life. Sitting in the devastation, licking at the leftover blood and discussing what had happened.

    They really thought someone would come, said the cat, sounding amused even through the guttural growling of its voice.

    This is all very disorganised, complained the rabbit. Really, if we had a schedule, this would set us back.

    They take it all so seriously, with the blood and the death and the fighting, wondered the cat.

    Well Himself does like the blood. He feels it appropriate to His majesty, the rabbit said. But there’s always more blood. We can just keep moving along. The next place setting is already laid for us.

    They don’t understand that this… and the cat plainly meant the reprisals, the storming of the Temple, this final bloodshed before the altar, is just as much fun to watch. Prayers and throat-cutting get dull with repetition, just like everything else.

    Geronn sat up suddenly and had the sense of small creatures scattering into the dark. His heart was beating very swiftly. A dream. A nightmare.

    Across the chamber from him he saw Balaksy, eyes glinting, propped on her elbow. Also woken, in that moment. Did she…? A moment when he was about to confess his dream, in the hope it had been no more than that. The thought that she might admit to hearing the same impossible words was too much. Let it remain in my head. A fiction. And he huddled down and failed to go back to sleep.

Generation 11

On his last journey out of Dragon’s Hill, Giorg Balaksy looked back at his home. His community, that he had governed as Deputy for almost fifteen years. Deputy, which most people thought meant chief, headman. Maybe only the Archivists from Acceptance still understood it had been ‘Captain’s Deputy’ once. Someone put in charge by old Cosimir herself, to lead a new community.

    Small wonder people didn’t remember that sort of thing, given the history between Dragon Hill and Acceptance. Between most of the other towns and Acceptance, and among those towns, too. Life on Marduk was hard. The Life on Marduk made it hard. Nibbling away at times of plenty, at advances that should have made things easier. And you had two choices, didn’t you, when that happened?

    Dragon Hill was more than just the hill now. The buildings ran down the river, and he could see bright flashes off about a third of the solar collectors, the ones that were live and uncovered, scrubbed clean of dust and birdshit. He could see a couple of the hydrocollectors out in the river. Maybe half the fields were being tended. The rest, fallow, were being reclaimed by the forest.

    A generation ago had been the Nights of Troubles. Early enough that Giorg had grown up in their shadow. A kid in a depauperate creche where every child was jealously guarded from the world. A kid who saw doors and windows barred at night, and every adult sleeping with a gun and a blade in arm’s reach. Once, maybe seven years old, he’d unshuttered one of the windows and there had been something out there, huge, bristling, thorn-snouted, looking at him from the street.

    A generation ago, before the Nights, Dragon Hill had been the greatest polity of Marduk. This was after the big war with Acceptance, when the scale-cloaked soldiers had marched and driven out to subjugate their mother settlement.  Their own cars  powered by tree-oils; their own guns, because the earth had been generous with saltpetre and sulphur. They had slapped down Acceptance and installed a sympathetic council, and all the other towns had sent ambassadors and gifts. Dragon Hill had been the heart of the world, bowing to no-one.

    To nothing.

    They had laid down lines, then. Nothing to go to the wilds. Not the old blood sacrifices that still went on: behind closed doors, in secluded groves, at the hands of brigand-cults. Not the harvest festivals where the best of the yield was left for the gnawing teeth of rodents. Not a child putting a berry on a thorn or a scrap of meat under a stone for the insects. Marduk had been claimed for humanity. The old things of the terraformers should retire to the shadows, wither away into bad dreams and failed ideas. 

    The people of Dragon Hill had been so proud.

    The Nights of Troubles had occurred over a month. Over that period of time they’d brought from Earth, that was a month, meaning a sixteen day cycle ignored by Marduk’s moon . A human convention forced onto an alien world, that everyone then agreed was a real thing. A lesson Dragon Hill should have considered, back then.

    In that month, almost everyone who stepped into the wilds vanished, anywhere within five kilometres of Dragon Hill. From lone travellers to large parties travelling in armoured vehicles with guns and flamethrowers. At first there was no sign of anyone. Later people would find bones, bloodied scraps, broken weapons, the wrecks of cars impossibly overgrown with roots and vines. Then the Life came for the farms. Huge beasts, armoured against bullets, impossibly swift. Packs of slavering killers that hunted with a human cunning. Worse than that, the teeming swarms of vermin carpeting the fields and devouring every plant. The swarms of bugs whose grubs infested every tuber and leaf and stalk. Stores picked clean, and the land around Dragon Hill barren of fruit and seed and quarry.

    Over half the population of Dragon Hill had died: poisoned, in the jaws of beasts or the longer death of starvation. The town that had single-handedly mastered the entire human-occupied reach of Marduk became a shell inhabited by ghosts. The Life had wished to deliver a message in no uncertain terms.

    Give us our due.

    Dragon Hill was recovering slowly. A generation of fear and hunger had broken more than just its power over its neighbours. There had been… accommodations. Dragon Hill had fought for so long to keep from bowing the knee. The fact that Giorg was on this final journey showed that battle had been lost, for now.

    The Archivists – scholars from Acceptance who had people in every town these days – recorded each town’s traditions, and how the Life received them. Acceptance itself allegedly offered the woods merely produce, though Giorg suspected the Archivists sanitised their home’s dealings. Other places drew lots or had contests – the losers, or sometimes the winners, becoming tribute. Dragon Hill, faced with the horror of the Nights of Troubles, had placed responsibility where it belonged. On the old. On those who had made the decisions that brought the town to ruin. 

    Giorg had a bad back, bad knees, a mind that couldn’t quite hold onto all the interwoven strands of Council business. He had grown up surrounded by an insistence that there was one final price that came with power. One last act expected of him. He was going to give battle.

    He had a gun, and he had a hook-beaked pick that was better against tough hides than a sword. And he had an Archivist: a small woman in robes tstyled after the old shipsuits, stitching and ornament following the lines of old hoses and panels. She gave her name as Bartilio, but half the Archivists seemed to call themselves that, and they all took on ‘ship names’ when they entered the order. She’d been his advisor for the last four years of his governance, and this was her final service. To witness.

    He could see the fires ahead, picking out the clearing. The Life wanted its spectacle, after all. No glory in him just falling down a hole or getting lost and dying of exposure. And who lit the fires? Were there little monkey-cats gathering tinder out there, playing with flint and steel? Or, more likely, a whole fifth column of cultists among the people of Dragon Hill, their hearts given over to their filthy worship.

    Even though what Giorg was about was, surely, worship. An offering of his own blood and body.

    “Speak to me, privately. Words that won’t reach your chronicles,” he said. Seeing the fires, he’d paused; he was old enough it was at least partly to catch his breath.

    Bartilio made a noncommittal sound. She was young for an Archivist. She’d serve another Deputy through their term, then maybe go back to Acceptance to vie for some senior post there. What she saw this night would add to her order’s histories: the bargain Dragon Hill had made, after the Nights of Troubles. The humbling of humans who’d tried to stand straight and unfettered by the world.

    Who’d been bastards, too. Giorg understood that. They’d weighed the other towns with shackles, leant on them with a mailed fist. But it should have been those other human polities who pushed back. Acceptance unifying the others to bring the fight to the gates of Dragon Hill. Not the wilds. Not the Life. A jealous reprisal, unconnected with the town’s mundane ambitions. If the people of the Hill had taken their prisoners of war and offered them up to the wood, none of this would have happened. Dragon Hill would have retained its primacy – probably stronger than ever, with the tacit backing of the things in the trees.

    Here, now, about this foul business, Giorg found himself glad that his ancestors had been so proud they’d refused to make the Life a part of their strength. What monsters we would have been, above and beyond the merely human cruelties we dealt in.

    “Is this it, do you think?” he asked Bartilio. If his voice shook, he could say it was just age. And age didn’t mean what it once had, back in the days of the ship. Cosimir had lived well over a century, they said. But then years were different and days were different, and maybe it was all down to that. Except Giorg knew. They will not let us live long, not any of us. Just as half the factories in Dragon Hill sat empty for want of workers. Just as every town was brought low before it could start making things better. Just as, every few years, the biting flies and the fleas of the rodents brought some new infection that killed the oldest and the youngest. What could we have been, if not for the Life? What could we have built?

    “Is this it?” he asked again, and then, “Has it won? We go on like this, forever and forever, giving of ourselves into the soil, humbling and degrading ourselves before its altar until someone calls it reverence and duty and we forget even that it’s an evil thing?”

    Bartilio regarded him with her order’s professional detachment, a tradition that kept faith with generations past for the benefit of generations to come. She leant in close, though who could stop the Life hearing every breath and every word? “Deputy,” she said – a title he’d set down, but kind of her – “while we yet write the histories, the Life cannot win. There will be dark times like this, when we must throw a chunk of flesh outside the firelight, to keep it fed. But while my order lasts, we will fight. We will teach the science and the wisdom, and that the world must be fought. And that the fight is life.”

    He nodded. Heartened? He was too close to his end to know. He stepped into the clearing.

    Five stones. Dragged here by human hands, doubtless, though they were so overgrown now that they might have been here since before the ship came. They had been carved, but roughly. Cultists seldom had skill to match their fervour. Carved so that Giorg could just about picture human shapes to them. A crude division between head and body, perhaps some contours of breast and waist, or folded arms. The Life had blotched them with lichen and moss, vine and creeper, obscuring all the effort those cack-handed masons had gone to. Except… the more he stared, the more his human eye saw human features in the greenery itself. As though the very stuff of the world had been moved to refine the crude human work. Here a flower, there a spiralling tendril, bringing out eye, mouth, expression. My imagination, but Giorg wasn’t sure he’d ever had that much imagination. Five faces made of rot and growth. Arrogant, Brutal, hungry, mocking, mad. A pantheon of wicked gods.

    “I’m here!” he called, to the stones, to the shadows. Around the stones the fires leapt, because it was fitting he saw how it would end. Bartilio remained outside the bounds of the circle, but Giorg strode in, cocking his rifle. “Come on then! I am the Deputy of Dragon Hill. I am your sacrifice!”

    It walked from between two of the stones across from him. He realised he’d even glimpsed it a moment before, its flank out in the dark, as it paced about the circle. Choosing its entrance to face him, as a human would, rather than striking him from behind like a hunting beast. It was one of the things the Archivists called lions, taller than Giorg at the shoulder, maned and bearded, its skin warty and rough with bony armour and pierced by barbed spines. Its face – as great as Giorg’s entire torso, was bulked out by massive jaws still too small to contain the mass of teeth jutting from them, carving its lips in a network of ragged scars. Above that snaggling excess it looked almost human. The eyes regarded him with a measured amusement.

    A voice spoke, from the trees. Or rather, there were sounds, like yowling and mewling, as though someone was strangling a cat just exactly the right way to make it form words. Not words Giorg knew, but he heard Bartilio draw breath at his back and knew she understood. It was the old tongue the Archivists had brought from Earth. Not even the language of the ship, but that of the elder people who had remade this world. Remade it, and abandoned it, yet somehow never left.

    “It says it has heard us,” Bartilio said. “And we will always fight but we will never win. That is the price of our tenure on this world, that we fight and lose, over and over.”

    “Why?” Giorg demanded, but then the lion was padding forwards and it was time for his final act of service to Dragon Hill.

    He got a single shot off with the rifle before it had crossed the circle. He saw the blood, a good shot, right between head and shoulder past its armour. He was throwing his old bones sideways when it pounced and its foreleg bounced him halfway across the circle. The rifle was lost. He had his pick in one hand, and a pistol in the other. The lion turned, swifter than anything of that bulk should have been capable of, and went for him. A shot scarred its forehead, another punched it in the flank. It batted him back and forth contemptuously. He felt his leg break, his ribs crack. He emptied the gun, because he wouldn’t die with a full chamber. He got his pick in under its jaw. Deep into its throat. Its paw pressed on his chest, an agony of one crack after another, no breath to draw.

    The pick was still sunk in its flesh. Giorg let out a single ragged cry and hauled on it. The wash of the thing’s red blood was hot like the fires, shocking in its flood. He almost drowned before he could die any other way. The weight of the thing crushed down on him. 

    “You die,” he got out, knowing that it was a prize the beast was sharing with him. 

    That hideous-toothed maw gaped, and sounds came out. Laughter. The strangled-cat voice from the dark spoke too, high and merry at the shedding of so much blood.

    “They never die,” Bartilio translated hollowly. “It amuses them equally, when we shed their blood, as when they shed ours.”

    He wanted to tell her to go back to her order, her people. Tell them how petty and childish were the minds behind the Life. But he had no more breath, and almost no more blood. He had bought his people a few more years in the shadow of the wilds, and was that even living? 

    Giorg, former Deputy of Dragon Hill, gave out his last breath beneath the monster he had slain. Bartilio, Archivist, watched the scene for a while as the fires guttered, before turning to retread the path to Dragon Hill.

Generations onward

When strong leaders arose who built walls against the Life of the wilds, made just laws and forbade the worst of the worship; bought their people a space of security and peace of mind, safe streets, honest toil rewarded and the freedom to plan for the future:

Then walls and leaders were torn down by the depredations of nature. Sly whispers drove the powerful mad with ambition, sowing the seeds of dispute. The growth of the world tore up their stones and monsters walked their streets at night.

When they grew prosperous and numerous, their fields bountiful, well-irrigated, nature tamed to serve human need. No empty bellies or hungry children, and more children every year as they rejoiced in the joys and rewards of a simple life:

Then pests devoured their plenty in field and storehouse. Fungus bloomed on the fruit and grubs gnawed at the root. The crop ripened into corruption, spilling out worms and maggots where the goodness ought to be.

When the Archivists or some other group clawed a new age of knowledge out of the world, reopened the books, reinvented the machines. Industry and pharmacology and a remembrance of who they had once been: star-travellers, children of Earth:

Then worms ate the paper and parasites ate the brains, bringing senility and delusion. Whispers drove hungry people to take the torch to ivory towers, priming a new generation of warmongers and strong men who loved nothing more than ignorance. A new dark age to snuff out the candle each time it was lit.

When they made war on the trees, burned and cut, set bounties for pelts and killed every beast, poisoned and trapped and uprooted:

Then the wilds fought back, red in tooth and claw, an appalling unity of purpose across the entire natural world. Insects stung, predators pounced, slinking things crept into nurseries, busy teeth chewed wiring and emptied larders. After which, the earth was so barren afterwards that they starved.

Even when the cult of Life seized the reins of a town, raising temples that offered up ever more excess, the food from their mouths, the work of their hands and the blood from their veins:

Then the whispers among the people exhorted them to rise up. God-beasts devoured the priests out of boredom. A leader or hero arose who cast down the statues and burned the sacred places. 

When all these things had happened, rise and fall, wheel of fortune, more than once:

Then it happened again. For the gods of Marduk, of Hartland as was, were bored with an existence they could not end, but humans were adequate playthings. Their struggles, their pain. Everything but stability fed the gods. Everything but comfort, and calm. And Redina Kott, the whisperer, the creeper in the dark, understood the brutal cycle they had imposed, on their distant descendants from Earth. Knew the cruelty and the pettiness of it. Recognised – perhaps the only one who did – that if they were gods, they were mad ones. Wicked divinities who had once just been bad people. But what could she do? she asked herself plaintively, yowling in the night. She was just one and the others would go on with their games anyway. She had to engage with the evil, so that perhaps she could blunt its edge just a little. All the while knowing that, if she didn’t delight in suffering as much as Hartmand and the others, then it was still the only game in town where entertainment was concerned.

And then, something new entered the world.