Seventy Six

Before Bird had lent Mycellus the use of her body, he had insisted that they should come up with a solid course of action. The next time that Terra was overhead, looking down on them from space, she would notice that something was amiss. She wouldn’t be able to communicate with the piece of her that was inhabiting the sword and acting as a beachhead for her consciousness.
Once he had pulled off what he wanted to do, he wanted Bird and the G to abandon the village and head to the west. This was much easier said than done. She would have to convince them to pack up and leave everything that they had built in the valley. The semi comfortable life that they had crafted would have to be abandoned. This thing had to be done because Terra had unknown resources in orbit. There was a very good chance that she would notice that she had been thwarted and start raining down orbital munitions from on high.
Mycellus had given this about a fifty fifty chance. Either she would look at the disruption of her plans to leave orbit as an existential threat or she would see it as an opportunity to pursue a different strategy..
All that being said, it was time to get moving. Convincing the G to abandon their village for no reason would be close to impossible. Solomon was stubborn and his affliction did him no favors when it came to leaving his safe little bubble that he had blown for himself on the mountain. A different tack was in order. She and Mycellus had chosen terror.
Terror was a great motivator. There was nothing quite like it if you needed to motivate a large group of people. Luckily, it was the middle of the night and pretty much everybody was sleeping in or around the lodge. The air gap project had eaten up the majority of the day, and they were looking at the small hours of the morning. This was perfect, all she needed to do was wake everybody up spectacularly and convince them to run out into the waste. Easy.
Here was where Mycellus came in. He would use his available resources to put the fear of god into them. Bird no doubt would be hearing about the vast expense that Mycellus was paying for the next few months, but it would be worth it eventually. He had originally hated the idea, but Bird had talked him into it by pitching it as an investment opportunity in the future dividends of the magic system. It takes money to make money, she had said.
Things started to happen on the eastern ridge across the valley. It was the middle of the night, so Mycellus did everyone the courtesy of lighting up his network. The mountains in the distance began to give off a pale green light. While Bird had never seen a city, Fyndraxis had told her about them, and she imagined that they would look something like what she was seeing. She needed to start doing things now, so she started making a lot of noise. She was in the throne room at the top floor of the lodge and almost everyone in the village was sleeping below her. She began yelling and generally raising hell to try to wake everybody up.
This was an emergency, and she made that fact clear through her actions. She began by trying to wake Solomon up. She chucked empty bottles of whiskey and frankly whatever she could find at his throne. He awoke reluctantly and a bit too slowly for her taste.
“Bird, what the fuck are you doing?” He asked, rubbing his eyes.
“We need to get the fuck out of here,” she let some panic ease into her voice to inform Solomon that she wasn’t just throwing a hissyfit in the middle of the night, “something is happening and I’m not sure what it is. What I am sure of, is the fact that we need to get the fuck out of the valley.”
“What are you talking about?” He managed blearily.
“Look,” she said and pointed at the valley bathed in pale green light.
“What the fuck is that?” Solomon asked, astonished and confused by what he saw.
“I’m not sure, but I don’t like the looks of it,” she lied.
He made his way out to the balcony to get a better look at what was going on. What he saw didn’t make much sense.
Looking at the eastern ridge, they saw what appeared to be the moon rising. As it rose, it became clear that it was certainly not the moon, because the moon was already up and casting its pale light for everyone to see. Also, the moon didn’t have fingers. An enormous hand had crested the ridge, this was followed glacially by a forearm and eventually a bicep and shoulder. When the hand made contact with the ridge, Bird and Solomon could see a couple thousand trees get mowed down and snap like kindling under its enormous weight. This all happened in an eerie silence. As the giant form levered itself to its feet the sound finally hit them. It was as if the sound of a couple of seasons worth of wood harvesting was compressed into a single jarring blast.
Bird was having a problem wrapping her head around the scale of the situation. In her head she knew what was going to happen. She knew this on an intellectual level. On a spiritual level, this was another story. The eastern range was enormous. It existed on the geological scale. This was a scale that measured mountains and lakes and valleys, you know, the big stuff. Things you could reliably build a house or a village on. Things that it would take you a couple of days to walk across. What was being witnessed now threw that all out of whack.
Seeing Mycellus raise tectonically to his feet in this way made the mountains in the distance appear to be no more than a pile of leaves. Her sense of perspective was torn asunder and she had to fight off a spell of dizziness. As the beast that Mycellus had become took his first silent step over the ridge the G had begun to stir in the lodge below them. They had heard the deafening crash of a couple of hectares of trees being mowed down and that had done more work for her than yelling and throwing a couple of whiskey bottles.
The first enormous step made landfall and it seemed like nothing happened. A full five seconds later she not only felt it in her chest and noticed it rattle her teeth, but saw its passing in the ancient timbers that surrounded her. The throne room was suddenly filled with dust and the lodge itself transformed in her mind from something huge into something miniscule and claustrophobic. She understood the panic that she and Mycellus had created, because she was in fact feeling it. They needed to get the fuck out of there.
If she had grown up at the peak of humanity, Bird was the kind of girl that would have read H.P. Lovecraft when she was about thirteen. She would have had a framework on which to hang the distinct flavor of horror that she was witnessing. She would have been familiar with the concept of things like Cthulhu and would have held such grotesque things in her imagination. This was utterly new territory for her. What she was witnessing was so utterly alien and mind bending that her urge to flee was overwhelming. So that’s what she did.
The writings of H.P. Lovecraft did a decent job of tapping into a kind of genetic fear of the unknown. Things that move silently in the darkness, things that exist on a timescale that is utterly alien to us, things that have unclear and alien motivations. This was a fear that was crafted and expressed through the genome during the processes of evolution. Creatures afraid of things that go bump in the night tend to be a bit better at survival than their braver counterparts and pass on their genes.
This fear of the unknown didn’t spring fully formed from our lower brains unwarranted. This was burned into our DNA through practical examples; Things actually going bump in the night. Looking upon Mycellus, one could see the headwaters of this genetic fear. This wasn’t his first time pulling this sort of stunt and it certainly wouldn’t be his last. He was fear and death and the universe coming apart at the seams.
Bird slid rather easily into a controlled panic and not an unhinged unproductive kind. She grabbed Solomon by the scruff of his neck and screamed “Let’s go!” into his face. He was almost unresponsive. His tenuous grip on reality was beginning to fail him and he was going non verbal. He did follow her though. Which was a good thing. They ran toward the shouts and screams coming from the floors below.
On each floor that they visited, Bird relayed the messages that everyone should both, “grab your shit,” and, “follow Me.” There was mass confusion and abject chaos of course, but when a giant glowing representation of death was strolling through the valley at you, that was to be expected.
Everyone eventually gathered in front of the lodge and a haphazard census was taken. All heads were accounted for and it was decided that they should head southwest. This would take them out of the path of the titanic thing that was getting nearer and nearer to them by the second. From the southwest, it was decided, they could also eventually double back and lose the giant in the forest. They could observe from a safe distance and have time to make a little more of a coherent plan.
Normally, finding their way in the dark would be a bit of a chore. Not an impossible thing, but a right pain in the ass. Fortunately for them the forest was lit up like it was Christmas. The G were wary to enter the forest in such a strange condition, but with a little chiding from Bird, they got underway. She chided them by yelling, “let’s fucking go you idiots,” around half a dozen times or so.
Progress through the forest was pretty easy going all things considered. The G had gotten the majority of screaming for their life out of their system in front of the lodge in the first couple of minutes, so everything in the forest was conducted in rather hushed tones. They made their way toward the western ridge.
This was part of Mycellus’ plan. He had said to move out of the valley and get over the ridge as quickly as possible. Nominally, this was to protect them from whatever vindictive actions Terra was going to take. Bird wasn’t one hundred percent sure what that sort of thing would be, but Mycellus seemed worried about stuff coming from the sky. From what she knew, stuff from the sky was Pavel’s territory, but she trusted Mycellus in his paranoia.
As they made their journey, Mycellus could be seen making his way across the valley in slow and steady strides. These strides were of a length that Bird could sprint in about half an hour if she was really pushing herself. Every once in a while he would stop and crouch down. From this crouched position he would point his head skyward and in the same motion stand back up and let out a bone shattering call. This call couldn’t be heard, but only felt. It was of a frequency that was far below human hearing. It passed through the bodies of everybody that was inhabiting this slice of hell that Mycellus was manufacturing and made their bones thrum in sympathetic vibration.
The ribcage was especially susceptible to this. Whenever this call happened, the five hundred odd rib cages in the valley would expand and contract in a cadence with the beast and generate an involuntary response that sounded like a chorus of bereaved widows. Everyone, with the exception of Bird, ended up bleeding from the ears, nose, and eyes from constant changes in ambient pressure. Eardrums tried their best to keep up with the illusion that they were gaining and losing a couple hundred feet in elevation by popping incessantly.
With the nature of the atmospheric conditions, namely, barely above the freezing point of water and relatively humid for this time of year, clouds could be seen forming around Mycellus when he moved his great form. When an arm or leg or tentacle moved through the atmosphere, the resulting air in its wake would dip below the freezing point and briefly condense into mist to decorate his passing.
All the while on their journey up the hill, they found themselves level with different parts of his body. At first it was about crotch height. Luckily for everyone, Mycellus was not in the habit of wearing genitals. Because it was fall, there was no forest canopy to shield them from the sight of him. The skeletal branches broke up the sky into little asymmetrical patches, so Mycellus’ form was viewed as though through a stained glass window.
By the time they had made it to the ridge and were level with the giant’s shoulders, he had made it to their now abandoned village. This was where her knowledge of the plan stopped. Mycellus had said that he would make his way across the valley to the G village, but he hadn’t said what he was going to do after that. She hadn’t really asked him either. She had assumed that he would just kind of hang out there for a while and then turn to dust or something. He was crouching down at the lodge though. In fact he reached down and took the roof right off the thing, which was unfortunately its walls as well. He did this delicately, like he was working with tweezers.
She realized that in the commotion that she had forgotten the sword. He must have known that and was looking for it. He must have found it after a while because he stood back up slowly and took a few steps back from the now decapitated lodge. She heard a message from him then in her head. He told her to have everyone cover their ears. She did this of course, what he had been doing for the last couple of hours had been extremely loud, if he was planning on doing something extra loud she would heed his warning.
With everybody covering their ears, they all watched this leviathan grow its right arm into a long snakelike tentacle. Mycellus started counting down in her head from ten. By the time the number three came around, this tentacle was in motion. He was using it like a giant whip, maybe the biggest whip the earth had ever seen.
From the motion of his gargantuan body it was pretty clear that he was transferring all its weight and momentum into this legendary whip crack. By the time the number two was intoned, the very end of this whip was moving so fast that it was starting to glow from atmospheric heating. When the number one was spoken, a great explosion could be seen, but not heard. A single glowing line made it out of this conflagration and streaked into the northern sky. Mycellus had likely put the Daemon blade and whoever was imprisoned in it into orbit. From this explosion, a spherical blast wave propagated like a growing soap bubble. Everything that it touched was set aflame and torn asunder in the same millisecond.
Mycellus’ body did not survive this treatment. It, like the surrounding village and forest, became part of a propagating blast wave. Bird was able to watch this wavefront travel not only out across the valley, but follow the path that they had just taken through the forest. She summoned her Daemon armor and told everyone else who had it to do the same. They were covering their ears but they got the idea once she was fully geared up. The wave front hit her and she blacked out.