Thirty Three

After negotiating a stubborn bit of vertical forest that brought them out of the Gulf, Bird and Fyndraxis ended up on the valley’s eastern plateau. Like the land to the south of them, the valley floor was girded by two high plains. These plains in turn were enshrouded by peaks high enough to not have trees on the very tops. One mountain in the western range dominated them all. While the other mountains seemed to have a bit of ruggedness to them, this one exuded an attitude that said something along the lines of “Fuck you, try me.” It even had a few tattoos just to drive the point home.
Where the other mountains were covered completely in unbroken forest, this one had great swaths of trees removed. Where the trees had been taken away, the grasses had taken over. These rivers of grass criss crossed its broad face and added to the overall mystery that the mountain had cloaked itself in.
“It’s just up here,” Bird said, as they summited a small hill. Below them, the forest floor was decorated with enormous boulders. These boulders showed all the typical symptoms of not having arrived there naturally. Each one of them was roughly cubic in shape. On most of the faces that could be seen, parallel channels had been carved into them. This was quarried stone, marble in fact. And Green marble at that.
As they picked their way through this boulder garden, they came across the remnants of an ancient chain link fence. Once past the skeleton of this fence, the forest floor disappeared and was replaced by a void of vertical rock. A cylinder roughly two hundred meters across had been bored into the earth here, and the forest came up to the very edge of it. It revealed the nature of the bedrock below their feet. Aeons of tectonic fender benders, subductions, and metamorphic events piled one atop the other.
Bird brought them to the very precipice of this vast gaping maw. A bitter wind issued forth from this chasm, like the last breath of a dying world. Hundreds of meters below, the booms of ancient cranes lay strewn about like forgotten toys. Ice covered the waters awaited at the bottom, hiding untold depths beneath their frozen veil.
Bird kicked a rock into the quarry. On its journey to the center of the earth, it told its story in a series of vibrating echoes that continued for minutes after its long descent. If Fyndraxis had blood in his veins, it would have been frozen solid. This was the last place on earth that he wanted to be. Below him lay an eternity in darkness and isolation. He could pass the time beneath the icy waters while insanity took him by trying to guess what century it was.
“Let’s have a chat, Fyn,” Bird finally said after the rock she kicked had finished echoing into infinity, “I’m sick of gettin’ fucked with. I want you to tell me what the fuck you are and what the fuck is going on here. Right now’s the time for honesty. I’ve taken you to a place that frankly I’m scared shitless of, and I have a pretty good feeling that you are too. So, tell me everything and we can both walk out of here. If you don’t, I’m gonna have a pleasant walk by myself up to the mountain and you’re gonna get very familiar with the bottom of this hole.”
“Whoa, Bird. Let’s not get too hasty here,” he wasn’t exactly pleading, but it was certainly pleading adjacent, “the last thing I want is to end up in this hole.”
“Well, start talkin’ then,” she said encouragingly.
“Okay, I’ve been rather honest with you about everything that I know, but the problem is, I don’t know what I don’t know,” Fyndraxis began to cover his ass, “from what I can tell, I am a soul that is trapped in this sword, how that happened, or why is unclear to me.”
“Tell me about Terra, how did you talk to her and why did you make friends with her so fast?” She asked.
“Terra is something called an artificial Intelligence,” he explained, “she is something that was created to be a thinking machine. Her soul, if you want to call it that, is bound to something that’s called a satellite. It exists in the sky and looks down on the Earth. I wouldn’t call her my friend, but she did help you out quite a bit.”
“Why’d she do that? She doesn’t know me,” she threw her crown into the gaping maw of infinity below them.
“I think it was possibly done so that I would be more apt to help her,” he was really starting to get unbelievably uncomfortable about this whole situation, “you’re right, she doesn’t know you, but she knows that you are functionally my legs for the time being. So, I guess it was a bit self-serving.”
“Why’d I get sick?” She asked icily.
“That’s a complicated one, and might take a while to explain,” he waffled.
“I’ve got nothin’ but time,” she said, looking around her at the empty forest and the quarry before them.
“Alright, so matter, what you and I are made of, doesn’t just exist. It is made of small parts, like building blocks,” he had actually been thinking about a good way to explain this to her, so he wasn’t going in completely blind.
“Atoms?” She asked.
“Yeah,” Fyndraxis said, kind of taken aback, “How would you know that?”
“That’s not important now, go ahead,” She said evasively.
“Anyway,” he continued, “my edge is extremely sharp, like, the sharpest that something can be. When I cut through something, I end up cutting through some of the atoms that it is made from. Generally, that is not supposed to happen to atoms. When they are split, the energy that holds them together is released. That energy is very harmful to humans and nature in general. I did not know about this before I asked you to wield me. If I had known, I wouldn’t have talked you into it.”
“How does Terra stay up in the air?” She asked.
“She doesn’t, she is above the air,” he clarified.
“Like in space?” She asked, in further need of clarification.
“Yeah,” Fyndraxis was again taken aback by her general knowledge, “again, why would you know that?”
“I’ve studied some physics,” she mentioned, briefly.
“What? Where?” He asked.
“You’re doing the talking here,” she said in dismissal, “you can assume I know stuff, if I fall behind or don’t understand something I’ll let you know,”
“Ok, I will,” he continued, only missing half a beat, “she is in a state called orbit, and she is traveling so fast that she doesn’t hit the ground, but it is still bound gravitationally to the earth. She has been up there since the world ended.”
“Do you know anything about that?” She continued her interrogation.
“A little bit, but it all comes from her. There was a war happening pretty much everywhere, and somebody released the Wendigo. The Wendigo destroyed everything. I don’t know if it was on purpose or a huge accident. People used to rely on this material called plastic for pretty much everything that they made. It was everywhere and held society together. This caused some environmental issues and the Wendigo were possibly made to clean the whole thing up. I’m really not sure about the motivation behind the whole thing, but it didn’t go well for humans. The Wendigo ate all of the plastic and turned it into copies of themselves, and in turn knocked the bottom out of our civilization,” this was a pretty wild understatement on his part, but it actually summed up his knowledge pretty well, so he was relatively satisfied with the answer.
“We have a legend about this, but I doubt that it’s anything close to the truth,” she leveled with him, “So it was a big fuck up?”
“Probably, but it could have been on purpose,” he said, “there were something like twelve billion people on earth so the chances of somebody being both dumb enough and capable enough of pulling it off were pretty high.”
“Yeah,” she remarked noncommittally, “I’ve seen some people pull some pretty dumb shit over the years, so that doesn’t really surprise me. How do you exist in there?”
“I think I am something called a computer. This is another of those thinking machines, but different from Terra. She and I both live on computers, but I am pretty sure I used to be a person. She never was,” he surmised.
“Alright, I think we are starting to get some stuff straight,” she said as she leaned the sword against a tree, opting not to dangle it over the edge of the quarry, ”what about this Mycellus thing?”
“Woof, I really have no Idea there,” he had hardly had time to think about it himself, let alone explain it to somebody else, “that’s kind of outside my wheelhouse, but they seem to be a global intelligence that kind of runs things here on Earth. Probably the closest thing to a god that I am ever going to meet. They give me the creeps. Also, I wouldn’t take that pill if I were you. I have a bad feeling about it. It would probably turn you into their puppet, and I don’t think either of us want that.”
“They dosed me,” she said evenly, not a question, but of a statement of fact.
“Yeah, I think that was a deliberate thing, so that you would be in a state of mind that would be more flexible to understanding a concept like them,” he reasoned, trying to get in the head of a global consciousness.
“That makes a strange kind of sense,” her tone was almost respectful.
“The general vibe I’m getting from all these strange beings I am talking with, is that I am not only fully equipped to fight the Wendigo, but doing so would be in my best interest,” he brought her in on his current state of thought about what was going on, “neither of these beings have threatened me directly, but I get the feeling that if I don’t cooperate, things might get sticky.”
“Well, I know that I’d like to see the Wendigo gone,” she seemed to go along with this general vibe that Fyndraxis was talking about, “they’re really bumming everybody out.”
“So, what do we do here?” Fyndraxis asked.
“Well, I’m usually not one to let people tell me what to do,” she went on, “but if these guys want the Wendigo gone, then I’m all for it.”
“I mean you and me,” at the edge of a very deep hole, clarification is key.
“Oh, that,” she took a second to think, perhaps basking in how uncomfortable this made the Daemon Sword, but one can never be sure, “yeah, I think we should be partners. This might be the mushrooms talkin’, but I’m kinda gettin’ to like you. I’ll be your legs until we figure something else out, but I will only do that if you are completely honest with me about everything from here on out.”
“I can do that.” Fyndraxis stated.
Normally, this would be the point where they shook hands and made a deal of some sort, but Fyndraxis, being a sword, lacked the required equipment. Bird remedied this by awkwardly shaking his hilt, in lieu of a hand. She was still definitely on mushrooms.
With midday approaching and clear sky available, Fyndraxis suggested that they get in touch with Terra as soon as possible for introductions and briefings.