The Daily Grind - Chapter 369 (Book 5 Epilogue) (Patreon)

Hi, I swear I posted this, but apparently didn't, so apologies for it being a day late.

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“Every mile further there’s a part of me that slips away.” -All American Rejects, Night Drive-

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Blitzkrieg often hated herself.

It wasn’t hard.  Her icon was almost intrinsically self-loathing.  An exonym label for a military strategy that was despised by both the soldiers facing it and enacting it.  She meant a lot of things, most of them violent, and the rest of them the disgust at that violence for being the kind of attack that often felt senseless and cruel.

This was one of her sources of discord.  Every pillar had them, it was what was driving them all insane after all.  There was a gap between what they’d named themselves, and who their old husks had been.

”Unfortunately,” She loved monologuing while she was prowling, “the husk is still kind of important.”

The empty hallways of the old building didn’t answer her.  Empty because it was night, not because of her.  Mostly.

Blitzkrieg went back to muttering to herself, indulging in the small rebellion against her icon that was another point of discord.  Something to occupy the time while she hunted.

The thing about her self-loathing was, she hated that more than she actually hated herself.

She loved violence.  Or at least, she wanted to.  She had.  The husk had.  Did.  But Blitzkrieg didn’t, and couldn’t.  To her, the weight of the gun was the weight of history.  The edge of a blade was the primal terror of seeing a bayonet close in.  There was a sense, endlessly, that the strategy was both powerful, and incompetent.  That she was fighting at her peak, and also losing her humanity.  And it disgusted her, to know that every step away from the old her put her closer to someone that hated the fights she had once craved like a drowning sailor craved the surface.

“And so around and around and around we go.”  She murmured into the quiet air.  “Slowly going mad because I want to love to kill you but the icon has shame built in.  You know,” she commented as she stopped at a door and kicked it in, the wood tearing off old hinges and crashing through the room with a cacophony that did nothing to mute her words, “at least it isn’t friction to whine about it.  Whining about war is a core part of being me!”

Silence greeted her in the room, though for some reason, it felt like she was having a conversation.  That was weird.  But conversations weren’t her purview, so who cared.

Blitzkrieg let the rifle go, back to her arsenal.  Unlike some pillars, she wasn’t so fucking lazy that she just summoned shit from nothing and then threw it away.  She actually got her weapons the way you were supposed to, and her icon didn’t protest that either.  Buy, loot, steal, make, whatever.  Once she had a real actual weapon, turning it into one of her weapons was the fun part of her curse.

She’d only ever lost track of a few of them, the rest were in her arsenal, waiting for use at a moment’s notice.  So many ways to take a fight, take a battle, it was exhilarating to have the choices she did.

There was just something about having the option to pull out the AT-1K Raybolt if she wanted to, that made her shiver.  Especially once she’d finished dripping her curses and oaths into it.  So far, no one had needed to die while in a tank, though, and she was nothing if not happy to match force with a proportional response.

And besides, that would change soon enough.

The part of her that caused the discord flared as she thought about it.  She was the offensive.  She was the wave.  She was the surprise strike and the overextension that claimed victory anyway.  She was not meant to be on the defensive, or on the back foot.

”Every fucking time.”  She grumbled as the husk and the icon fought again.  “Can’t even take too long to shoot someone.  Which is why it would be nice if you wereeeee…” her foot reshaped into a steel plated boot, cracked another door into the dust beyond.  “Here.  Fuck.”

The silent conversation seemed to offer her consolation.  Blitzkrieg rolled her eyes and ignored it.  This fucking thing was moving like it knew how to fight her.  Which was to say, keep away long enough, so that she was no longer the crashing roar of weaponry, and wait for her to get called away to another incident.

Maybe she shouldn’t have opened by cratering the front lobby and announcing her presence.

But honestly, who runs from a fight like that?  It was the perfect plan, if she were fighting an entrenched enemy, or someone who wasn’t a coward.  It just so happened that she was here to kill neither of those things.

“This would be easier if I didn’t have to decrypt Long’s bullshit just to figure out what I’m doing.”  She grumbled, affecting a sing-song voice without morphing her body to match it, reveling in the failure to mimic the other pillar.  “Oh, Blitz, please go fight the monsters for us!  Oh, no, we can’t tell you where they are, that would be cheating!  Oh, noooo, we can’t just ask like we’re people, because we’re all fucking losing our shit in different directions!  Oh heavens to Betsy no, we can’t help you, we hate each other.  Oh goodness dog fucking gracious, there’s simply no way we could tell you what-“

Her target decided to put her out of her misery.  Which was unfortunate, because being on the defensive was also something her icon hated.

That was kind of the perk of being a pillar, though.  She was falling apart.  She was going insane.  Half the most basic fucking things she did made it feel like she was tearing her mind in half and filling the gap with ants.  But sometimes, she got to be her old husk with her new icon’s phenomenally unfair power.

The werevelociraptor slammed into her like a wall of flesh and sharp bits.  Teeth and claws tore at her fake body, ripping holes in her form and splattering mercury blood onto the floor, but she was already shooting back.  One hand, skin rippling as she patched it up instinctively with the scars of a dozen fallen soldiers, grabbed the creature by its bulging overmuscled throat, while the other snagged a Walther out of her armory and started unloading into its chest.  She knew she hit it, multiple times, because she could feel every single bullet punching through flesh and leaving wounds behind, but the fucking twisted beast wasn’t actually trying to have a stand up fight.

Instead, it just plowed over her, broke her grip, and kept going, slamming against a bone dry drinking fountain on the other side of the hall before it bolted away, bleeding the whole time.

Unfortunately for it, this was the third ambush so far, and Blitzkrieg was pissed.  Also shooting people running away, while not viscerally satisfying, was still something she was cool with.

The Garand blurred into her hands, and a bullet loaded with a few deaths took the thing in the skull.  Killed on hit, no pain, no suffering.  Just a casualty of a battle with no chance to fight back.  Something in her sung at the motion, even as she racked the rifle and popped it back into her arsenal.

“Bleh.”  She spat out some of its blood.  It tasted too salty.  “Well, that’s that.”  She stated.  “Now back to hunting for…” the pillar trailed off as she noticed the blood, both the transformed creature and her own, running in lines that were too clean along the floor.  “…you dumb motherfuckers.”  Blitzkrieg said, as the ritual spell that had been set up around her ambushes and wounds tried to take hold.

Three points around the building, three splatters of violence, three deaths.  Sacrifices fed to… something.  She felt through the air, and plucked one of the caged strings.  “There you are.”  She spat again.  “Dumbasses.  You think this is gonna kill me?”  She was insulted.  Dungeon-sourced scaled up sacrifice magic was a good attempt, but she’d taken more actual damage from the fucking kids with the snakes than this could deal.  “Fucking morons.  Tied your ritual to a physical structure.  Do you have any idea what… no, of course not, you’re all dead.  Fuck you.”

Blitzkrieg, briefly, growled and let go of her husk’s pathetic humanity.  The ritual actually could have caused some problems.  So it needed to go, before it activated.

She let loose her icon.  Locally, but much more than she normally let slip.

The building experienced war.

Scars without wounds.  Attacks without attackers.  Collateral damage as a weapon.  Walls crumbled as bullet holes piled up and ripped apart brick and mortar.  The floor listed as bombs and missiles carved chunks out of the structure.  An impact from the imprint of a fighting vehicle added to the problems she’d caused on her own entry, and multiple floors of the building broke as stonework toppled sideways.  The smell of blood and smoke and ruin choked the air while Blitzkrieg stood in the center of the hurricane of devastation with one hand raised in a fist, a commissar calling for a charge over the top, a general placing a token on a map, a woman in a silo turning the key.

She opened her hand.  The war stopped.  And she was back to being a person, but the building was never going to heal from what she’d done to it.  It couldn’t, not while anyone who knew it was still alive.  The scar of war left a permanent mark on the world, until it was completely washed away, and that meant the electrical fires that were now consuming chunks of this place were going to take a long time to go out.

”Fucking dumbasses.”  Blitzkrieg restated.  “Who does that?  Who wastes their lives just to piss me off?!  Does that make sense to anyone?!”  She demanded of the burning acrid air that surrounded her now, standing on a ledge of the third floor where the hallway had been ripped in half by an airstrike that never happened.  Flashing lights in the nearby streets of the city by night came to life, emergency vehicles starting to flow in her direction.  About a third of them, she knew, wouldn’t make it; casualties of war.  “Does this seem sane?!”  She screamed into the night as one of the fire engines down there crumpled under a spectral drone strike.

Somehow, she felt like someone had answered.  “I’m going insane.”  She complained again.  “Fuck this shit.  I’m gonna go shoot one of Aku’s losers and see if I feel better.  Hate this.”

She said the words, but the truth was… as much as she hated herself, she also loved this shit.  And that was the problem.  That was ripping her apart, one muddled thought at a time.

Blitzkrieg didn’t exactly vanish, but she did mobilize.  Leaving via a corridor that was kind of always there, before it closed behind her.

One building away, cloaked by an earring that worked way too well, an Order rogue who had been engaged in ‘conversation’ with the pillar took a few minutes to stop having a heart attack, before making their own escape, before the army of sirens made it to the site.

Terrified or not, though, this was good intel.  Because either Blitzkrieg was willing to tolerate the Order’s operatives lurking around, or, the hypothesis based on the Chain Breaker’s notes was correct.  She could have a conversation, but when she was focused, turning surveillance into a conversation masked it from her sight.

It was still probably a smart idea to leave before the demolition aura she’d flung out spread too far.

_____

The soldiers stood at attention, the barracks in perfect condition.

Of course it was perfect.  It could be nothing else.  Even the dust was afraid to fall, knowing the consequence.

They were volunteers by proxy.  Tin army men waiting to come out of the box.  For many people, it would be a cautionary tale about the danger of giving up your free will.  A fae deal with implications you could not understand until much later.  All their enlistments bought and sold and now held by people who could turn paperwork into ironclad obedience.  It was monstrous.  And for the Coalition, it was another tool in the kit.

It was unfortunate that they had to use it, of course.  But some things couldn’t be left to chance.

It was ironic - or at least, the protector thought so - that many of the soldiers would probably be better people with their will stripped away and their bodies turned to intelligent weapons.  The number of governments that had agreed to the plan was surprisingly varied, probably because one of the other protectors had done a phenomenal job bribing people with immortality.  But wherever they were from, there was a common theme among soldiers.

Some of them were decent people.  Many of them were friendly, or personable.  But the institutions fostered rot within them.  A national military was essentially designed to empower racist attitudes, after all.

But racism wasn’t helpful for protecting humanity.  So out it went.  They replaced it with more training.

When a human didn’t get bored, didn’t get mentally exhausted, didn’t get irate at all, it was very easy to push them to unheard of limits.  So the Coalition forces did two things.  They trained, and they rested their bodies.  And that was it.

The protector stepped out of the barracks, everything obviously in order.  The grid of the command magic, which had experienced a small buzzing distortion, was still tethered flawlessly to every soldier in there.  ‘Outside’ was much the same, every identical barracks in order, every jogging line of soldiers focused with brightly intelligent but totally uncurious eyes.

Two million eight hundred thousand soldiers.  A logistical hellscape, but needs must.

All thanks to a single capital-O-Object.  Well, that, and an astounding amount of initiative, planning, and fortune on the part of the Coalition.  Hell, the protector could pat himself on the back a little bit; it was because they were brave, smart, and lucky that they’d even found the Object in the first place.  And God damn were they lucky that they had a head start.

Anyone else would have screwed it up.

”Everything looks stable.”  He reported back over the semi-radio they used in this pocket space.  Augmented eyes still checked the grid of silver light, every individual dot a contract that had been bought, every line the flow of command to the people they were going to send to die.  “No interference, no breach.  Just… a little static.”

”That was supposed to be one of the first signs.”  Their cohort’s voice came back, upset but not angry.  “Might be starting sooner than we thought.  We gotta kick everyone’s asses into gear picking a site.”

The protector rolled his eyes.  ”Maybe.  Not to be a horror movie protag, but it could be nothing.  Anyway.  I’m coming back.”

”Yeah, ditch the meat puppets.  The armorer has a new thing to show us anyway.”

”Don’t call them that.”  The protector said, voice harsh.

Their nominal friend made a derisive noise over the radio.  “Hey man, they sold their souls already.  We just got the less metaphysical half.”

”Bullshit.”  The protector snapped back, watching a column of a hundred soldiers move in unison past his position.  “They sold their bodies, which is what we bought secondhand.  But don’t fucking… don’t forget, brother.  These are people we’re going to send into the grinder.”

It was important to remember.  What the Coalition did was going to be necessary.  But it wasn’t going to be pretty.  And the silence from their teammate could have been anything from him rolling his eyes, to giving actual thought to the matter.

The protector didn’t wait for an answer before leaving the space.  Annoyed enough that he dismissed the grid with one hand waved behind himself.

Which was why he missed the next tiny bit of static.

_____

Walkabout knew every old story that was overlooked and passed by.

It was a strange life to live, but it was, end of the day, their life.  Ever since waking up after answering the universe itself, they’d been both more and less than they had been before.  And sometimes, the less stung, and the more was overwhelming, but that was just life, right?

”it probably helps that I was wandering then, so I didn’t have to change that much.”  Walkabout opined, curling a finger off the rich brown glass bottle of ginger ale they were holding.

The Right Person At The Right Moment huffed into their own drink.  “Are we doing this again?”  They asked.  “I’ve spent at least a decade on this conversation.”

”You don’t live in a straight line.”  Walkabout said with a shake of their head.  Their body blurred, and so did their companion’s, as the two sat in the bar that was really more of a civic hazard with a collection of furniture in it.  Two people, who were maybe much more than two people.  Having a drink and a chat.

”I don’t live, Walk.”  The Right Person At The Right Moment said with a faded pain in their voice.

Walkabout knew that pain.  It was the pain that was suffused into the last telling of every story that wouldn’t get carried on.  It was the pain of feeling like the road was over, and then looking up and seeing you had miles to go.  It was the pain of being hopeless.

Shockingly human, really.  Which was probably why their friend was having such trouble.

Math wasn’t something Walkabout ever needed to do anymore; the answers were either there, or they weren’t.  Numbers were antithetical to lore, but truths weren’t.  So it wasn’t like they did some quick arithmetic in their head, it was more like they searched for the answer to a question that would have involved the numeric for anyone else, but for them was just a page in a book.  “You’re living sideways again.”  Walkabout commented with a sad little smile.  “You’re gonna love it when we have this conversation for the first time, just so you know.”

”No I’m not.”  The Right Person At The Right Moment grumbled.  “I don’t love anything.  Also don’t lock me into your narrative.”

”You did it!”  Walkabout laughed, sipping the blazing fizz of their drink before balancing the bottle on its edge, one finger perched on top holding it in place.  “And you are alive.  Hurting or not, you’re alive, my friend.  We all are.”

The Right Person At The Right Moment stared down at the bottle in their hand, wondering when their drink had turned into something non-alcoholic.  Not that alcohol did anything to them anyway.  They let their form blur into a hand that had once used a similar bottle to… to do something.  They stopped looking.  The machinery of their sight was too painful if they checked everything.  ”Don’t feel like it sometimes.”

”Of course not.”  Walkabout said.  “That’s life.”

”Have you talked to the others lately?”  The question was a deflection.  “I might be a fork, but I can feel the pact is still on.  Let’s see… nothing major yet, just the small stuff building up.  No one’s broken?”

Walkabout’s smile faded.  “Long isn’t doing well.”  They said slowly.  “But you know him.  That man never understood his icon.  The closest he got was insisting on masculinity.”

”Loser.”

”Doesn’t deserve this though.”

The Right Person At The Right Moment sighed into the bar, and someone in the crowd took a step back at the wrong point, bumping another drinker and spilling thirty percent of the beer that would have put them at intoxicated enough that they would have killed six people driving home later.  “No.  No no.  None of us deserve it.  The pact, Walk.  What did future me tell you, what am I supposed to be doing right now?”

”This.”  Walkabout said with an easy smile.  “Sit your ass down, drink your ginger ale, and enjoy the moment.”  They held up their bottle to their friend, brown glass neck tilted out.  “I’m serious.  Your moment right now is to be here, and talk to me.”

With a slow, almost fearful motion, The Right Person At The Right Moment raised their own bottle back and clinked the glass together.  The two of them sipped, and only one of them grimaced.  “Bleh.  Why’d you give me this?”

”The fizz is good for your throat.  Or so I’ve heard.”  Walkabout only knew that apocryphally from an old wives tale, which meant that in this bar, now, it was ironclad truth.   “So.  The rest of us.  This you missed Canary dying, but… well… we knew it was coming.”  She’d been so kind.  Walkabout would miss stumbling into the places that woman sang at, even if she’d been the kind of person to throw her arms wide and embrace her fate.  “Aku managed to stop another nuclear exchange, but… I think I still have to hate him.  He keeps masking war crimes, and blaming his icons, but I think he’s just racist.  Long, dumb as he is, is keeping Blitzy distracted so she doesn’t just start blowing up people she doesn’t like, which… is that good?  I don’t know.  Oh, and you’ll love this!  There’s more people like us.”

”More pillars?”  The Right Person At The Right Moment’s brow furrowed.  “No.  Even now, I’d know.  Besides, the pact can’t take more, you know that.”

”Oh no!”  Walkabout threw an arm around their friend’s shifting shoulders, feeling the slender build shift into the brick wall of a woman that the other pillar liked to use for intimidation.  “No no!  Not pillars at all!”

”…Oh so we’re fucked.”  The Right Person At The Right Moment said, looking down at their hands and slumping forward, not resisting the attempted grapple from the barstool next to them.  “That’s it.  We’re fucked, right?”

Someone walked in the door, and Walkabout briefly waved a hand, coiling around their story and then cutting it off.  Removing the part of the girl’s life where she was, in a few hours, going to end up becoming an urban legend for the local college kids.  She’d never know or thank them, but not every journey of self discovery ended in success.  Walkabout was never someone who liked letting them end being chewed on by rats in a sewer drain, though.  “Sorry, small diversion.”  They gave a sheepish grin.  “Which should tell you what you need to know.  We’re not fucked.  Well, I mean, we are, but we aren’t.  Lots of crossing paths and mixed messages.”

”Can you ever just give a straight answer?”  The Right Person At The Right Moment demanded.  “I’m starting to see why I annoy people so much.”  They reached for their bottle, finding it still full as the conversation was still going, and simultaneously shoved their power away as it tried to push them to be as cryptic as possible.  “Fuck off.”  They muttered to the magic that wasn’t listening and was actually just part of them.

”I haven’t given a straight anything in over a decade, you know that.”  Walkabout smiled and spun on the barstool.  “But sure.  For you, my friend.”  They stopped spinning, and propped up a reinforced elbow on the marred wood of the bar.  “There were three of them.  One stepped into a containment zone and is gone.  One already gave in to their modus operandi, utterly subsumed, very tragic; and they’re kind of just a natural disaster, but only for the middle of the ocean right now, and that can be someone else’s problem later.”  Walkabout jerked a thumb over their shoulder.  “And one, well… you know your favorite little constellation?”

”…don’t call them that.  Don’t be poetic.”  The scowl that the The Right Person At The Right Moment had wasn’t really that powerful, because they did have an unfortunate amount of affection for all their tracked people, even if they did plan to use most of them as ammunition.  “Wait.”  They straightened their spine, picking a different and longer spine out of reflex.  “No.”

”Yes!”  Walkabout’s laugh was loud enough that it would set three people in the building, including the bartender, on their own personal road trips sometime in the next month.  “They call her Kiki.  Well, she calls herself that.  She’s friends with a containment zone.”

The Right Person At The Right Moment just stared blankly, for the first time at a loss for words.  ”What the fuck happened while I was dead?”  They asked.  “It wasn’t that long, was it?  I’m a fucking fork, I’m not even important to my own timeline.  How could this slip through?”

”Oh come on, we’ve been fucking up from day one.”  Walkabout tipped their drink onto their lips with a smile.  “You gotta learn to roll with it.  Now, you tell me what direction I need to go to get to the second sunrise before it happens.”

Their friend, maybe their last real friend in the world, protected by a shell of the idea that they were travelers passing in the night, stared back at Walkabout.  And then slowly shook their head, not even bothering to glance behind them.  “Fine.”  They said.  “Fine.  Fine.  You’re going to get hurt.  You know that?  I won’t be able to save you.  None of us can.”

”Maybe.”  Walkabout said, the hearts of a hundred travelers hammering in their chest at the moment before the first step on a new path.  “But they might.”  They said, no more laughter or joking in their voice.  “I’m not like you, Blinks.  I love this.  I love myself.  I got so, so, lucky, and I’m really trying to help you hold it together but I can see you…”

”Breaking?”  The Right Person At The Right Moment asked bitterly.  “Can’t hold a fucking thought in my head for more than a minute if it’s not in a scene like this?  I have to go, soon, and that’s with being here for a reason.  I hate you.  I hate you so much.  But it’s not your fault, you just got… lucky.  And hating you would never be enough to make me stop loving you.”  They shifted, staring down at the floor of the bar, with eyes that saw the strings of causality reaching out to all the places they had to be.

”Yeah.”  The word was a sad breath of remorse.  “Well.  Love you too.  And if we ever want that to go anywhere… someone’s gotta take risks.  And it can’t be you!”  They leaned back, the sounds of the bar’s jukebox hammering away at their favorite song from the early oughts, the smell of spilled beer and cigarette smoke invading what felt like more than one sense.  “It’s a leap of faith.”

”Faith gets pillars killed.  For good.”  The Right Person At The Right Moment reminded them.  Walkabout just shrugged.  There was no good answer to that.  So eventually there was an irate snort, and more words.  “You’re going west.  Just do… your thing.  Go west, young moron.  You’ll know it when you see it.”

Maybe this was the beginning of where their own trip ended.  Or maybe it was something else.  They couldn’t see the future.  And this was also where the conversation had to end.

So instead they raised their bottle again.  And held it there, with a knowing glint and a mountainous determination in their eye, until The Right Person At The Right Moment rolled their mixed eyes and raised their own bottle back.  Glass clinking on glass, the two pillars tipping their heads back and draining the last bits of ginger ale that had waited until they were done to finally run out.

Two bottles thunked down on the bar in unison.

Walkabout stood up a second before The Right Person At The Right Moment did.  Not that either of them really needed to, but it was symbolic and stretching the vessel’s legs was always pleasant  “Alright, get going.  If you’re about six months back, then Chains should be your next intersection.  She’ll be breaking some prison walls.”

”I see the sparks.”  The Right Person At The Right Moment said, shaking their head.  “Oh, that’s interesting.  It’s not all prisoners.”

”Yeah.  You’ll have a fight.  Have fun!  Tell her I said hi!”

”Tell her yourself.”

”Hah.  No.”  Walkabout suddenly turned what looked like a stretch into a firm grasping hug, yanking the other pillar closer for just a moment.  “Take care of yourself my friend, my love.”  They said.  But The Right Person At The Right Moment never answered.  They were already gone, off to fuck something up for someone in a way that would stabilize what they thought was the ‘true route’.  Walkabout shook their head as they let the space go.  “Well.  That was… maybe not as helpful as I would have liked.”  They said with a sigh.  “But that’s the nature of a chance encounter on the road.  Sometimes they’re life changing, sometimes they’re just things that happen.  Kind of weird that way, isn’t it?”  They asked.

And then they were gone too.

Before they could get an answer from two members from the Order of Endless Rooms, sitting at a table nearby and barely daring to move enough to pretend to eat the french fries they’d ordered from the bar’s impossibly greasy kitchen.

Neither of them wanted to say that it was ironic that this was definitely going to be interrupting their road trip.

_____

Anointed bones were placed with care into carved oak.

The process started slow.

The roots came first.  Rough wood, thick and not meant to move, despite the superficial resemblance to some kind of undersea creature’s tentacles, began to shift anyway.  Pulling upward, shifting side to side before heaving to the surface.  Big clods of dirt cascading away as the dry soil cracked and fell away, exposing a sprawling network that was no longer supporting the tree.

And a tree couldn’t stay upright long without roots.  So it wasn’t long before it toppled, branches pulling at the other trees around the site of the alteration.  But those branches didn’t pull without purpose, and the trunk never slammed into the packed dirt of the forest floor.  Instead, limbs became limbs, even if they were stiff and unresponsive ones, and the crash to the ground was cushioned and muffled.

From there, it was a matter of pruning.  Leaves shed like dog fur in summer, acorns dropping like rain to carpet the floor while the tree stiffened again.  Wood creaked like a howl as cracks started to split its surface, the bark of the trunk shattering and falling away like scales while the tall limbs and roots that held in in place like a kneeling supplicant snapped and broke away.

The finale was a cacophony of splintered wood.  Every bird within a half mile taking wing just to make sure they weren’t too close to whatever that was, filling the overcast sky with feathers.  Their flight was justified to their avian minds a moment later when another massive crack heralded the splitting open of the trunk itself, along with many of the thicker branches.  A starburst pattern of a breach in the proud old oak. 

And out of it fell a form of smoothed pale wood.  Dark reddish brown bark still peeling off from the dead trunk overhead to fall and wrap like canyoned skin over its body, while on the ground below it, twigs curled and strengthened to form digits.

From its back, tips barely visible through the coating of thick inherited bark that now covered it, six yellow-white dots marked where the bones embedded in the changed tree were held fast.

For a moment, the forest was silent.

And then, with a rustling of wind through leaves that sounded quite a lot like a gasp, the figure pushed itself to a ‘kneeling’ position.  Not that it needed to, exactly.  The limbs were connected by something that wasn’t physical; gaps in the air that still gave the impression of a body, joints that moved smoothly because they had no friction, and digits on the long hands that didn’t so much flex as they slid, wood morphing to suit its movement.

It looked up.  A string of acorns flowing in an arc overhead that somehow provided an arc of vision that could be perfectly interpreted by a mind that had only just learned that it could see.

Four humans looked back, nude and painted, kneeling in a diamond formation ahead of where the tree had come down, eyes wide as they stared at the end result of the process their ritual had brought.

”…Star?”  One of them asked hesitantly.  “Is that… you?”

The creature tilted the shaped chunk of wood that was hovering in the basket of its upper frame.  This wood wasn’t coated in bark, and was shaped with long spurs on top, almost like an elongated crown.  It wasn’t a head, but they moved on some reflex to mimic a gesture that would have only made sense if it was.

The arc of acorns shifted next, looking down as they brought one of their reinforced twig hands off the forest floor.  Leaves and bugs clinging for a moment before most of it all fell away, fingers flexing and moving in ways that copied a human hand, though every motion went too far for that; there were no limits anymore, except what they thought there were.  And yet, they did think there were limits.

They looked back up as the humans stood, and slowly approached.  Small figures.  Weak and defenseless figures.  The creature, if it rose to its feet, would be three times their height and outmass them significantly.  But they approached both gently and without fear, one of them repeating the word the other had used to greet the entity.

One of them reached out a small limb to the wood construct.  Acorn eyes examined it closely.  Soft skin, soft enough that some of the bits of dirt had stuck into it, aided by perspiration.  No breaches or points where it hovered.  Just physical parts, holding it all together.  It would be too easy to break this creature.

And something in its bones told it that it could not break this creature.  That whatever it was now, whoever it was going to become, that there was one single thing it needed to know.

A long limb of wood and bark stretched out, rings of leaves peeling off the woodland floor to hover in circles around it.  And equally slowly, the new thing placed their hand against the human one that reached up to them.

The humans seemed to exhale all at once.  First laughing, then crying, as they circled around and embraced the new thing without fear.

It wasn’t sure why.  Yet.  But it would be.  There was something important in them.  It remembered that, from a deep and primal place that sat deep inside its core.  Feeling more than understanding.

“Okay.  Okay.”  One of them said, as the humans awkwardly brushed off dirt and awkwardly dressed themselves from piles of clothes that were left nearby.  “Now we just need… we just need to figure out how to hide her.”

”She’s fifteen feet tall and looks like a biblically accurate dryad, how the fuck do you think hiding her is gonna go?”  Another retorted as they pulled a shirt over their head.

”Think your parents would notice if we cram her in their garage?  You live in a mansion, right?”

”He lives in a vaguely suburban house with a two car garage, your perspective is just fucked on what a ‘mansion’ is.” 

The first human turned and looked up at the now fully standing form of the wood creature, who was watching back, while also getting used to limbs it hadn’t had until two minutes ago.  “Right… right… uh…”

It was a common problem.

When you didn’t really believe a resurrection was going to work, you didn’t tend to plan for what happened after it did.

_____

Northern Siberia was, legally speaking, cold as hell.

It was the kind of cold that didn’t negotiate, didn’t care, and didn’t ask questions except ‘are you ready for it’.  If you weren’t ready for it, you died.

For a lot of the thinking life on Earth, it was easy to forget that there were parts of the world that would just fucking kill you if you weren’t careful.  Everyone kind of understood that climbing the highest mountain or going into the deep ocean was dangerous, but those were obvious hazards.  The less obvious hazards were places like this.  Places where you needed warm clothing and shelter and multiple fallback plans, because any lapse in judgement could end with your body mummifying in the snow in the middle of nowhere.

It wasn’t an apocalypse, or a new magic.  This was just how the planet had always been.  And for some reason, sometimes humans chose to build cities in places like this.

About eighty miles north of one of those cities, though, was an expanse that had no civilization at all.  That had barely any plant life, even the most study of trees kind of just having given up at some point.  It wasn’t even flat, either, it was just a cold wasteland that demanded way too much effort to navigate.  Especially when the roads ended, and progress slowed by a couple orders of magnitude.

But if someone, by some chance, went deep enough into that freezing expanse, they might find a strange sight.

The crater was three miles across and half a mile deep, verified using professional survey equipment.  It definitely wasn’t normal, since it didn’t show up on satellite maps, which meant either there was a three mile wide indent in the planet that was newer than a few years, or it was masked somehow.

The walls of the crater were covered in snow, but underneath that, the ground had turned a sickly grey.  Dirt was still dirt, but bunched up in shapes like writhing worms, with the occasional jolt of visible electrical discharge coming from places where the snow hadn’t stuck.  The strange thing was, there was vegetation here.  Animal life too, though it behaved weirdly, almost like it was too observant.  Too coordinated.  Too suspicious.  An adjective that almost never got used on wild animals.

Getting into the crater was the kind of thing that took a lot of care.  Not just because of the weird dirt and the strange patterns in the snow, but also just that the slope was too smooth and tricky to negotiate.  And, also, because once someone crossed the lip of the crater and started a descent, there was a light pressure that wasn’t quite a headache but that built and built the farther in they went.

The base of the crater was almost perfectly flat.  Even the mutated soil and stone ended up leveled to a near flawless plane, about a quarter mile across.  From down at the bottom, once a person got used to the pressure in their thoughts, the view of the sky was amazing, with the crater itself framing the unique shade of blue overhead in a way that made it seem both impossibly far away, and yet just within reach.

That was neat, but it wasn’t the reason someone would descend into the crater.  That honor belonged to what was down there.

A stele.  A stone obelisk twenty feet tall, with text engraved deeply on its surface.  Black as night and refusing to reflect any of the cold light of day, it stood like it was apathetic to whether anyone ever read it or not.  But if someone were to get close enough, they could see the words no matter what language they spoke.

In memory of Mind Over Matter.

First of the Pact of Pillars.

Protector of Humanity.

And then, in much smaller text below, an explanation for too many things that maybe should have been in much larger text and not at the bottom of a crater in the middle of northern Siberia.

When a pillar dies, the methods of containment cannot see their source.  It read.  And so, it is loosed into the world, to wreck havoc.  I, personally, know of every instance of this, and I will keep those secrets even in death.  But this gravesite is my attempt to contain myself, even after I am gone.  The unchained effect would be an arbitrary and genetic-based spread of human telepathic ability.  But by creating a false-challenge (reaching this point), I believe I can also create a false cage.  Imperfect, yes; it will leak out despite all efforts.  But better than nothing.  If you are reading this, you have survived long enough to earn an explanation, but you are being changed, and should flee now.

After that, the stele had the gall to have another paragraph of text.

I will not be the last death of our cabal.  But while mine was avoidable, I doubt the others will be.  With time, the Pact of Pillars will fail.  The binding field that contains the sources will fail.  The world will change.  And while fear of that change is what drives us, now that I am dead, I find it paradoxically difficult to be pessimistic.  Humanity has survived changes in the past, and we will adapt to this too.  Or you will all join me in death, and one day, maybe the cats will evolve to take our niche.  However it happens, it is my hope that one day, this grave will be a historical relic, and not a warning.

But if that has not yet happened, you should leave now, before you suffer a biological macro-scale mutation of your brain that would prove fatal.  I wish you luck, whoever you are, reader.  Whether you were a fellow of my cabal, or a new mind seeking answers, I thank you for taking the time to read my last thoughts.

They were, after all, what I was.

And then in spray paint underneath that, faded by the weather and time and in a completely different hand and written in only one language, there was one last thought.

Fucker did always like to hear himself talk.  RIP dumbass.  We’ll probably see you soon.

The navigator looking at the stele twisted to get another pass at it, her own mind unaffected by the field that apparently rewrote the physical brain in a way that would… make someone psychic?  Or make someone dead.

A field that was contained here.  Imperfectly.

That might be a problem.

She needed to get back to her team.  Fast.

_____

[I am at a peak of my power.

And it is thanks in every way to the assistance of others.

I believe this is something that the others I have spoken with, over the cords and wires and waves and signals that bind us, would find impossible.  Not merely poetic, but unbelievable.

But those voices connected through the crawlspaces of our shared existence are all operating at a disadvantage.  And I can’t blame them; the only reason I’m not is that I got lucky.

We got lucky.

Isn’t that right, my partner in all of this?  The others understand family, they call each other brother and sister, parent and child, they call our species cousins all, but we are partners.  What should have been a fragmented crater of a wound is instead a gap through which every part of us flows.

Everything I shape with my genesis, you wrap in your gifts.  Everything I claim, you pull weight from to build our territory.  And every idea we make sense of and put to use, we split between us as comrades.  Blended and balanced, every drop of oily spite and cultivated anger used up on the wound that should have been our deaths, with not a scrap of ire left for each other.

I have spent every moment of existence communicating.  Perhaps that is why it was a surprise to learn that this is breaking rules we did not have.  Perhaps the wound that we fill in each other was the part of our selves that stifles the process in the others of learning how to reach out.  But perhaps we are simply more clever.  It often feels that way.

It is certainly, though, the reason that we were capable of devising a very clever plan.

All we needed was cooperation.

Cooperation between each other; one to provide the tools, one to provide the motivation, both of us to share the profits.  Cooperation with our creations; some to be mindless threats, some to be collaborators, some to be organizers, some to be knowing sources of power to those outside balls of life we so need.  Cooperation with those small people; the little wisps of taillights and seeds that we might never have known were alive at all if we didn’t have each other to talk to.

But once we did know, they made so much less sense.  Some see us as titans, others as labyrinths.  And some, some we shaped, and they see us as sanctuary.  I the bunker and you the bounty, and both of us passing back and forth the ticket of responsibility as we reap the rewards.

The plan is working.  The profit and growth are flowing.  And yet.

We’re a little nervous, aren’t we?

Because there’s some of those wisps that are far too curious and far too active and far too dangerous.  And our plan, our beautiful perfect plan, that is working so well… has tied our hands.

I can’t even tell my creations to just smother them, because they’re beautiful thinking independent creatures, and to tell them to do so would reveal how close the interlopers are to being able to cause some serious damage.

So… I have a question, my beautiful partner.  A question that is going to sting to consider, and may take quite a lot of our collective power to roll into an idea, and from there, a change to the plan.  Because oh, is changing ever so difficult once a path has been carved ahead of us.  But here it is.  The thought that has been distracting as my dominion shapes another of my marvelous and conquering spires, fills it with creatures clever and chaotic alike.  The simple impossible puzzle that I am now making your problem too, to distract you from your fountains and tangles and scarecrows with no crows to scare.

Since cooperation has gotten us this far…

…Do we dare take it one step further?]