Kaia the Argent Wing

I got barely any sleep, thanks to my own dumbass brain. So little sleep, in fact, that I dozed my way through the watch period while Chloe actually kept an eye out for problems. She appeared not to mind, other than giving me several looks that ranged from bemused to concerned.

One by one, the others began to wake up, and soon we were sharing a tough, stringy meal in the quiet morning.

“Hey guys,” Chloe said, after taking a swig of water. “I wanted to try something while we walk… it sounds stupid, though.”

“What is it?” I asked, while everyone else stilled, curious.

“So… you know Silver? Well, she helped me translate some weird books, and in those books, we found examples of a sort of chanted group magic. The book was all about a pretty niche use for it, but I found one that we could use,” she explained quickly, like we were going to start laughing and hollering.

Except, of course, none of us did. We listened and nodded, then thought about it.

“What's the chant you found?” Asked Camillo. “What's it do?”

“So… we can actually sing pretty much anything that's vaguely related to the concept we want to invoke… but roughly, it makes us walk faster.” She said. “So long as I get the mana sigils right, and we're all in agreement that it's supposed to make us walk faster without getting sore or tired…”

I knew, as soon as she said it, that Ollie would take the lyrical loop hole and run with it. “These boots are made for walking!”

Scotty leapt to his feet. “And that's just what they'll do!”

“If you two go through the whole song together, I'm taking my chances with the fucking death horses from yesterday,” Immie said, massaging her temples.

“How about we keep it simple?” Chloe offered diplomatically. “Anyone know a sea shanty about walking?”

I arched an eyebrow. “A sea shanty about walking?”

She scowled at me. “Shut up.”

“I got really into viking style music for a while, but…” Scotty began, wincing. “Then I found out a bunch of their fans are fash and I got weirded out.”

Chloe gave him a sympathetic smile. “I did the same. I had some songs like that in my playlists, but I didn't feel comfortable putting them there without a lot of research.”

I nodded quietly along with her. I'd heard some of the creepier older kids talking about that kind of music, and it sounded cool. The idea of music inspired by cultures from before our ancestors had gone all imperialist sounded fun, until you found out who else thought that way. Then it seemed… distasteful, even if there were explicitly anti-fascist bands out there. Unlike Chloe, I did not have the energy to navigate that minefield then or now.

“We're in the apocalypse and we're building a new community… why don't we make new songs?” Immie suggested quietly, glancing briefly in my direction. “Get some inspiration from Cynath's past, maybe?”

Camillo began to shake his head and shake his hand in a negative, slashing gesture. “Let's not. Cynath has been good to us, but the people who worshipped her back in the day were…”

The first empires in Eurasia. The Assyrians were especially… violent. Their worship twisted me for centuries. You yourself pointed that out earlier, Kaia, when you chastised me for my choice of insult.

“They were brutal, vicious, and imperialist,” I finished for Camillo. “I think I like the idea of starting fresh, though.”

We all nodded, but looking around, there were a lot of glum faces. Songwriting was hard, and—

A loud clap caused me to jump where I sat on the ground. Huh? What?

Alec had stood up, and he was grinning. “Time for me to earn my bardly keep! How about this…”

~“Walking through the shadow, of a world gone to dark. With my buddies united, we'll build the forge, spark! Our weapons will glow, April-hammered and quenched. Our hearts beat, ignited, our resolve entrenched.”~

The song or whatever it was, wasn't the best, at least with our reedy voices chanting it, but Chloe's ritual was undeniably working.

Alec had started out singing by himself while we walked, and for almost five minutes he failed to get something inspiring enough to function. Then he began to really get into his groove, and our sketchy witch cast her spell.

It was like we were sailing without a wind, and then suddenly a gale came to fill our sails. Our strides got longer, our legs slowly drained of fatigue, and the miles were devoured.

I was really curious how the spell worked, to be honest, but Storm sense didn't tell me much. There was some sort of magical construct around us, spun out of mana that she'd somehow extracted from an ability, but that's all I knew.

This is incredible! If we'd had rituals like this back in Assyria, we'd have conquered the whole world. The range it would've given our foraging parties… we could have supplied our army for three, four times as long!

Doing my best not to falter, I thought back, What do you mean? Why wouldn't you just throw a bunch of food on some wagons? Foraging to feed a whole army seems… difficult.

Oh, yes. I've been eternally impressed by how the armies of your recent past have done things. I have a lot of learning to do if I wish to shake off the cobwebs. I wonder if there's any modern gods of war around that I can talk to…

I pursed my lips, trying to contain my amusement. Cynath was really old. Mentally clearing my throat, I offered, Maybe try Uncle Sam. If he somehow became an actual god instead of a nickname for the government, I'm sure he could teach you all about stomping your enemies with pure factory-to-chamber bullet throughput.

My eyes widened as the reality of my little joke set in. If the Bandoners could manifest one of their ancestors into a goddess, it was highly probable that somewhere there really was a personification of Uncle Sam. That was a very horrifying thought.

I believe we just had the same realisation. I will keep an eye out.

We crossed the interstate near midday, and it was a sombre experience. The road was raised up on an earthen berm that curved off out of sight. Cars were strewn down its length, smashed and discarded where they'd rolled to their final resting place. Many had their windows shattered, or doors torn from their hinges. The remains of the passengers were scattered around in a few cases, but too many deaths were marked only by torn cloth snagged on twisted metal.

In a few places on the road, cracks had formed from years of baking sun and neglect of the state government. Now, a small weed, barely sprouted, was worming its way up out of one such crack. The scattered strip of forest that lined the interstate on either side would follow the example of those weeds, given time.

A short ways following the interstate and we found a sign at an off ramp, advertising the quarry we were after. Sidestepping a flipped semi, we descend the ramp to the side road.

Everything was quiet… for about fifty yards down the road. A loud, crashing boom shot that silence through the head, and our singing petered out. Someone began to comment, but another boom shook the air, and it was quickly followed by the god-awful sound of rending steel.

Dead silence followed, except on the extreme low end of the spectrum. I could feel it through my feet—A shuddering cacophony of hammer blows against the ground.

“No wonder the pastures and woods around here look empty,” Scotty said dryly. “Rent prices must be in the dirt with all that noise.”

He wasn't wrong, either. This side of the interstate had more spots of woodland than the side we'd come from, but the fields that were here were entirely empty of critters.

Immie laughed at Scott's joke. “Yeah. I gotta say, though, I feel like ignoring the wisdom of the local fauna is a little scary. When even the birds have fucked off, you know things are going to be dangerous.”

“No cap,” Alec grunted, and we all flinched as another booming exchange was heard.

“What is that noise, though?” Ollie asked, looking almost grumpy. “It sounds like a bunch of transformers having an orgy.”

“But instead of beds they're using giant gongs,” Scotty added.

“Shush,” I groaned. “Let's sneak up and see what's happening.”

It took us ten whole minutes to reach the quarry, approaching as cautiously as we could. The place was massive, almost two thirds of a mile wide at its widest point, and shaped vaguely like a jelly bean.

The stone here was either a light grey colour or a sort of dirty dull orange, almost brown. The two types of stone seemed to merge in some areas, or be layered together in others. The lighter coloured stone was, generally, in the upper tiers of the mine, while the lower tiers had more of the orange.

I don't think any of us were particularly interested in the colour of the stone, however, because down at the bottom of the reverse-wedding-cake pit, there was a titanic brawl in progress. Massive ten to fifteen foot golems made of cut stone were going toe to toe with anthropomorphic industrial mining equipment in a no-holds-barred fight to the death.

As we watched, one machine golem with an excavator bucket for a hand managed to wedge the teeth into the neck of a stone golem. With a wordless screeching howl and a colossal shove, it beheaded the stone golem like a suburban mother levering a cork out of a wine bottle. As soon as the large faceless stone block of a head was separated from the body, there was a concussive blast strong enough to lift dust from the ground, and all the various stone blocks of the golem lost whatever spark had been animating them. Each block dropped to the ground with a series of thunderous thumps that shook the ground even up at the edge of the quarry.

The excavator golem didn't even have time to bask in its victory before a new stone golem used the opening to crush its head in with a ponderous, inexorable overhead blow. The head, which had been the cabin of the excavator, exploded with shattering glass, which was lifted and thrown in all directions as another concussive blast tore through the melee.

“Fucking hell,” Scotty stated dryly. “At least we won't have to cut the stone ourselves.”

“And it'll be storm-infused,” Chloe added, eyes wide as the boom of another dying golem tugged gently at her dark curls.

Camillo coughed out a laugh as dust billowed up around us. “I think I'd prefer chiselling for months to whatever insanity it'll take to eventually get some of that stone.”

“This is only a scouting mission, anyway. We'll be fine so long as we get a few samples of the normal rock, along with the golem stones.” I said, giving him a conciliatory smile. “In the long term, I'm more excited about those machine golems. There's some excellent metal in there, of several different types, too. Oh, and look! More golems are spawning!”

Sure enough, at one end of the jelly bean were a couple of holes whose interiors seemed to rapidly fade into shadow, and from those holes came more stone golems. They hauled themselves out like wrestlers taking to the stage, then lifted heavy feet as they thumped almost mindlessly into the fray. On the opposite end of the jelly bean, machine golems were doing the same.

“Wait… is this an eternal battle?” Ollie asked, awe in her voice. “Why isn't the whole quarry full of golem corpses already?”

“I guess we'll have to stake the place out and see what happens,” I said with a shrug. “Let's head back into the woods on the side of the road and make camp. I'm hungry, and I think this will need to be done on a full stomach.”

“Amen to that,” said Immie, patting her small belly.