Seventy Eight

“The great beast that you saw was Mycellus. He is a God. I know that you worship gravity, but he is a God that is here and actually gives a shit. He has chosen me as his Champion. As Champion, I have a mission to fulfill. I am to seek out and defeat the Wendigo,” Bird shouted over the growing wind. There were gasps of astonishment and groans of admonition from the crowd.
“Why the fuck did he wreck our village?” somebody asked.
“To save us from further threat,” Bird explained, “there are other forces that would do us harm. There is an entity in the sky named Terra. We just spoiled her plans and she is probably going to do something pretty aw….”
As Bird was pronouncing the word awful, a tremendous sonic boom shook everyone’s bones and a truly biblical smiting began to take place in the north of the Valley.
“Summon your armor!” She commanded. All available armors were summoned at her behest.
At the northern terminus of the valley, a flash of light twice as bright as the sun was followed up by a growing mushroom cloud. This was followed by an identical series of events slightly further to the south. Each one of these impacts was like the hand of God reaching down from the skies to smite the things that it found disagreeable. Terra was carpet bombing the valley from space. Bird didn’t pretend to know what sort of resources she had access to, but she was pretty sure orbital bombardments were Pavel’s territory.
She tried to shout to her new wards, this was ineffective. After the treatment Mycellus had given them, and then a couple of one hundred and fifty decibel sonic booms, everyone was functionally deaf. So she gestured wildly for everyone to follow her and she made for the peak. Getting a couple of million metric tons of rocks and dirt between them and this orbital smiting seemed like a pretty decent idea.
Mycellus informed Bird that he would look after Solomon and make sure that no harm came to him. She took that as a cue to sprint for the peak and head down the other side.
On this twenty minute journey, they were buffeted by untold numbers of bone rattling shockwaves. They were able to witness the valley catch fire and be fully extinguished a number of times. The tungsten rods falling in from orbit were able to ignite flammable material from the intense ultraviolet radiation of their passing, but the shockwave of their impact would snuff out most of the smaller fires. Eventually though, the fire prevailed and the valley was a vast conflagration and it was apparent that they were never going back. The G had been betrayed by their uncaring god.
Once the bombardment had finished and everyone was safely on the other side of the peak, Bird continued her explanation.
“Mycellus was saving us from that,” Bird continued to her deafened audience, “no amount of talking or warning would have swayed you to leave the village,” there were nods of agreement at this observation, there was no way they would have left hearth and home behind without some sort of emergency, “so we chose to try to frighten you instead. What Mycellus did compared to what just happened was nothing. This is the threat that we face. Danger from the open sky. I will work to face this threat and we will prosper. Whoever doesn’t want to follow me on this journey may leave now. When we travel, we do so with our armor on to hide our presence. Terra won’t be able to see us if we stay cloaked. She can see a lot, but not in great detail. She will be even more blind if we head into the storm.”
There were looks shared between people, but the general consensus was that continuing on with Bird was the only course of action that seemed safe.
Bird could hear a small voice. The Music player that Fyndraxis had fashioned for her after they had slaughtered the cannibals, also happened to have a little radio in it. She could hear the voice of Terra.
“I have no doubt that you probably survived that,” she intoned with cold and calculated malice, “but I figured you should know who exactly you are fucking with,”
This left Bird with a decision. On one hand, she knew that Terra was deliberately taunting her into giving away her position, that was clear. On the other hand, Terra had made her intentions very clear and was now truly an enemy. Were she to give an answer, she would be playing directly into Terra’s plan. She would be confirming that she had not only survived, but was an active adversary intent on doing harm.
She decided to appeal to Mycellus for one last favor. Use of the radio would have been wildly inadvisable, so a message of another sort would have to be in order.
“Mycellus,” Bird spoke into his network, “I think we should send Terra a message.”
“Agreed, what did you have in mind?” Mycellus asked.
She could have gloated for a minute or two about her message, and that would have been satisfying. Instead she made a tentative plan in her head to head south and visit her cabin.
There were important books there. Books that were handy when you wanted to build a society from scratch. The difficult business of mourning Fyndraxis and all that entailed would have to wait until she had sufficient free time. Her mental todo list was getting rather extensive given her new station.
The next time Terra was overhead, when she looked to the valley that she had destroyed, she would see something very human. Something that was originally a gesture of defiance practiced by the archers of old. It was truly a message that summed up how both Bird and Mycellus felt about Terra.
Mycellus had spent a lot of energy today. He had consumed a number of resources and needed to gain them back from somewhere. This was carried out by making a withdrawal from nature itself in the form of sucrose. This was done so violently, that it left dead black ash where there used to be things like forest or grasses.
This patch of death could really be any arbitrary shape, be it a circle or something a bit more creative, like a bird. What Mycellus chose to burn into the surface of the earth, was a giant rendering of a middle finger that was clearly visible from space. Below it, in marvelous penmanship was the message,
“Fuck you,”
Bird looked west into the waste, she allowed herself a few insistent tears, though they were private ones hidden by the mask that she wore. The storm had started to silently release its burden of snow. That was okay though, her people knew what to do with snow.

The End.