The woman walked along an empty beach.
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
In front of her, an eternity of greyish sand, reaching out into the distance. The unmarred expanse contained nothing bar itself.
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
To her right, the ocean, mother of all life. It lapped slowly against the sands, the irregular beats a staccato counterpoint which accompanied her crunching footsteps.
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
To her left, the sand reached out, until the bluish-grey haze of the atmosphere obscured all. Were there mountain peaks right on the horizon, obscured by the immensity of the air?
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
It didn't matter. The waters were life; that was what the Esoteric Order of Dagon taught, and so it was true. All life had come from the immensity of the nascent ocean, and one day, only it would remain.
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
Behind her, another eternity of sand. One foot, then another, her human trail insignificant against the expanse, and somehow blasphemous in its pettiness.
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
Crunch
How long had she been walking? Irrelevant. To walk beneath the sea was the greatest reward that one of the Elect could receive. Indeed, as the mother of children with the Blood, her function in life was that of a beach, a gently sloping gradient that led back to the sea.
From the sea, her ancestors had come. To the sea, her children would return.
Crunch
Crunch
Cru*
She paused, mid-step. There was a black protrusion from the sands, just in front of her; a pyramid-shaped spike from the wet sand. How she had failed to notice it before was a mystery.
No, it wasn't black, she realised, as she reached forwards, brushing the top layer, which turned out to be nothing more than a thin layer of soot, obscuring the blue-grey steel, concrete and glass below it.
Raguelle froze, instincts installed before human sapience screaming at her that something was wrong.
The light. That was it. There was that odd glow you got just before a storm, where the muted colours took on strange new undertones, neon tones insinuating themselves into your field of vision.
She scrabbled furiously at the object, covering herself in the black soot as she tried to find an entrance. This was no longer a holy place; the sky now was notable wrong. The air was thick and humid, full of static.
There was a flash of light in the distance, far out to sea, lightning in a cloudless sky, and the thunder arrived seconds later. Another one, and the thunder was closer. She was almost sobbing as her fingers felt, in this odd, soot-covered object, the sole object in this empty expanse, a hatch. The protruding edges were sharp to the touch; Raguelle quickly withdrew her hand, as blood swelled and ran from a straight red cut which ran across her fingertips.
The blood dripped down onto her palm and ran up her arm; defying all sense, it spelt out words in crimson. They were almost glowing in the noonstorm light.
And what it said was Träte der Erzengel jetzt, der gefährliche, hinter den Sternen eines Schrittes nur nieder und herwärts.
The words meant nothing to her, but the sheer amount of text, formed from her own blood, was making her feel faint just looking at it. It looked like German; a language which she knew nothing of. Indeed, the number of blasphemous histories written in it, which profaned the nature of the relationship between the Chosen and the Elect, which taught sorceries only permitted to the Chosen, and indeed had given the cold-hearted monsters who stood against the Cthulhu'puvyqera, the Spawn of the Great One, and vivisected the Chosen, the technology they used to persecute the real masters of the world, meant that knowledge of it was frowned upon.
Fangen die Engel wirklich nur Ihriges auf, ihnen Entströmtes, oder ist manchmal, wie aus Versehen, ein wenig unseres Wesens dabei? the thunder whispered to her.
They mentioned the monstrously sinful Engels; a sign of the depths of the depravity that the New Earth Government would descend to. She didn't want to know what the words meant; merely get away from this unnatural storm.
There was thumping inside the pyramid, buried in the sand, on the inside of the hatch. Raguelle froze, split between her fear of the lightning and whatever there was inside. There was now muffled shouting coming from inside the object.
“Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich,” a child's voice screamed; faint yet paradoxically loud.
That was what did it. The woman, breath coming fast as a thin layer of sweat shone on her brow, wrapped her fingers around the handles on the latch.
She had to rescue the child. That was all she knew.
The hatch gave way.
A wave of red and copper and iron and salt and warm stickiness came flooding out. It soaked the sand. It soaked the seas. It soaked her. The vital tide hit with the force of a sledge hammer, but nothing moved.
Raguelle choked, as the flood continued. She couldn't breath! It was everywhere, filling her lungs, leaving her blinded, unable to move. Through her head, frantic prayers ran; to Great Cthulhu, Lord Dagon and even the Earth Mother her parents had taught her about, before they had been truly assumed by the Elect.
And the gods smiled upon her, the tide thinning, to merely rush against her legs. The pressure was there, a pain against her shins, and it was also meaningless, for she could move freely.
Raguelle bent in half, clutching at her knees, and threw up, emptying her stomach and lungs of the blood. It was already clotting, coating her face and hair in a visceral mask of death and pain.
But the terror was put out of her mind by another set of thunder booms. While she had been immersed in the flood, the cloudless storm and its thundernoon light had come closer. The flashes were near constant, casting the landscape in a staccato light of painful brightness.
I wish I was wearing my eyesguard, she thought, as her body, on autopilot, in one sense fought against the bloody tide from the object and in another walked calmly through the fluid, as if it were no more than a texture, painted at knee height.
The pyramid had somehow grown larger, except that wasn't quite true. No, it had always been large, even when she had been touching it. It had merely been far away; close enough that she could reach out and wipe off the soot,yet far enough away that she had underestimated its height a hundred fold. The woman risked a look back, just as she entered the structure.
The blood had continued to run into the sea, an unceasing torrent. The red taint was spreading, too, the grey-blue of the waters becoming a reddish orange, which glowed in the strange light. There were things floating, too, in the corrupted waters, as the blood consumed the mother of all life. Pale, gaunt and skeletal corpses, bobbing in the waves.
No, she realised.
They may have been pale, skin like paper and their flesh hanging off their bones in greasy rancid rivulets, but they were not dead. Or, at the very least, they had not stopped moving. For these... things, death posed no impediment. If dead they were.
Almost sobbing, face caked in now-dried blood as she half-ran, half-crawled into the glass, stone and steel structure, Raguelle fled from the polluted waters, even as she waded through that which had tainted them. There were handles on the inside of the hatch, which, with a yell of exertion, she pull shut, sealing herself in the unlit structure.
She waited in the darkness with her eyes squeezed shut, breath coming in shuddering gasps. Mindlessly, the woman rubbed her hands against her face, not seeing the cascade of flakes of dried viscera which fell off with each stroke. Finally, she felt that she could move again, even though the adrenaline which had flooded her system left her shaking.
She opened her eyes, revealing that a spotlight painted a circle of brightness in the middle of the darkness. In the middle was what looked like an altar, but cast in blue-steel, cold and hard, without the customary ornamentation. There was text engraved on it, but she was unable to read it from this distance. Around the altar, the floor was a clean sterile white, with no sign of the blood-flow which had erupted.
Cold white light. Blue-steel, glass and concrete. Sterility and inhuman precision.
This is like something that the heretics of the New Earth Government would build, Raguelle realised. Something like the buildings she had seen in her childhood, before her parents had escaped the lands of the unfaithful. Warily, she approached the altar, blood-caked shoes leaving no marks on the artificial cleanliness of the floor.
She leant close to the altar, breath misting on the cold metal, trying to read the letters on the steel cuboid. Carved deeply into the steel, the font elaborated seriffed, and yet readable, the words were in English; the precise, post-Reformation English spoken away from the Demesnes of the Chosen and the Elect. And what they said was;
THE DARKNESS DROPS AGAIN;
BUT NOW I KNOW
THAT TWENTY CENTURIES OF STONY SLEEP
WERE VEXED TO NIGHTMARE BY A ROCKING CRADLE
The word “cradle” reminded Raguelle of what she was doing. She had to find the child who had been trapped in here, especially since the structure looked like something built by the New Earth Government. Raguelle had to find the screaming child; it was not possible to conceive of doing anything else. She turned around, squinting into the darkness that surrounded this pool of light.BUT NOW I KNOW
THAT TWENTY CENTURIES OF STONY SLEEP
WERE VEXED TO NIGHTMARE BY A ROCKING CRADLE
There were five dolls lying on the floor behind her, that had not been there beforehand. Four of them were old-fashioned ones, not even made of plastic, but instead of some kind of ceramic. And they were shattered, limbs splayed and broken, skulls broken open. Lying under them, the broken shapes a patch of colour against the cold white of the floor, was a larger cloth doll, crude in the extreme. The yellow wool stitched to its crudely smiling head was thick and frayed; its eyes were nothing more than buttons.
And then it screamed, falling through a void that suddenly opened in the floor. Down it fell, vanishing from sight as it dropped away, falling forever. But the wail was trapped and resonating and, in its own way, alive, growing and changing and rising and falling as it awoke from its nascent form.
And it would not stop.
~'/|\'~
4th of November, 2091
02:02
The wail continued when she opened her eyes, the infant beside her providing an alto choir to the baritone of the alert sirens. All she could do was lean forwards, clutching at her head and massaging her closed eyelids with her warm, sticky palms.
Slowly, with a feeling of growing dread, she lowered her hands, and stared at them as they glistened in the dim red glow of the emergency lights.
Just sweat. Nothing more. That was a weird nightmare.
It was then that her brain started working and she elbowed Wguh hard, in the ribcage.
He awoke, with a startled “Fhtagn!”
“Siren!” she said in an insistent tone, actual sentences beyond her current level of awareness.
“Bhuh?”
“Siren!”
Wguh groaned, swinging his legs out of the bed, hands already scrabbling blindly by his side of the bed for his gas mask. As he did that, his wife picked up the crying infant that lay between them in the bed, clutching him close to her breasts as she stumbled across to the enveloped cradle that lay on the other side of the room. Raguelle's fingers scrabbled at the lock, trying to open the clear casing that veiled the carrier.
Both the alien Migou and the monsters of the NEG made battlefield use of chemical, biological, micrological and nanological weapons, and if this wasn't just a practice drill, protection would be needed. And very young children couldn't wear even the basic masks, let alone the full suits needed to deal with some of the agents used.
The squall of the sirens woke the almost-three-year old Kair, still sleeping in a cot in their room, and Wguh's child added her cry to the noise.
There was a knock at the bedroom door, and then it opened, light streaming in from the hallway.
Ghuhalia stood there, fully dressed, with her face concealed by the filter mask. She had a firm grip on her younger sister, who stood behind her, clinging onto her arm. She stood there silently.
“Ghuh?” asked her mother, eyes puzzled even as she fastened her own, Elect-Type filter mask, before going to Kair. It was simpler in design than the ones that those with the Blood of the Chosen had to use, adapted as it was from 2020's military hardware. It did not need to cover the nascent gills, which were a favoured site for attack.
A muffled sob emerged from behind the girl's mask, which wrapped around her neck, forming a tight collar. She looked away from Raguelle, to her younger sister. “The mother's woken up,” she said, with a sniff.
“What's going on, mummy?” asked the younger one,
The elder sister pointed at Kair, “The infant's crying,” she said, her voice very muffled by the mask; so much that her mother wasn't quite sure that had been what she had said.
“Ghuh, come over here and help me get Kair into her suit. I need to then check your mask; it sounds too tight,” Raguelle commanded. “ Yhughui, everything's fine. We're just going to have to go down to the bomb shelter, and then mummy and gulifr'kre are going to have to go to their militia stations. Everything's going to be okay.”
The small girl's face screwed up. “But it doesn't sound like okay,” she said, voice quavering behind the hum of the filtration system. “It sounds like bad.”
Wguh'yului took a few steps over, and scooped up the five-year old, prying her fingers from her sister's fingers. “It's okay,” he said, in his slightly barking voice, trying as he could to be reassuring. “We're just going to get Fraenkis suited up, and then we can go.” He shot a glance at Raguelle. She nodded, frowning as she stripped the crying two year old, putting her into an sealed suit.
There was a deep thud, felt more in the gut than heard, running through the building. A fraction of a a second later, the thunderous noise arrived, the glass in the window cracking, but not breaking. Through the gaps in the blackout curtains, an orange flare of light cast the dim room into stark relief.
Raguelle froze for a moment, Kair still squirming with her sealed suit only done half-way up. “By Dagon,” she muttered softly, brain temporarily frozen by the implications, before springing into action.
There was a second thud, followed by an explosive roar of noise, even as the sirens wailed louder. There was noise above and below them in the cramped apartment; the pounding of feet and the terrified calls of small children.
This didn't look like a drill.
~'/|\'~
Orjner. Orjner. Orjner. Gur pbzov'arq g'bgnyvgl bs gur znf'frf ner gb qba gurve fnsro'ernguref. Ubfgvyr'anavgr cynthr qr'gr'pgrq.
Alert. Alert. Alert. All the faithful are to put on their filter masks. Nanological weapons detected.
Orjner. Orjner. Orjner. Gur pbzov'arq g'bgnyvgl bs gur znf'frf ner gb qba gurve fnsro'ernguref. Ubfgvyr'zvpebznp'uvar qrngu'guvat qr'gr'pgrq.
Alert. Alert. Alert. All the faithful are to put on their filter masks. Micrological weapons detected.
Orjner. Orjner. Orjner. Gur pbzov'arq g'bgnyvgl bs gur znf'frf ner gb qba gurve fnsro'ernguref. Ivehfrf naq onpgrevn sebz gur sbr qr'gr'pgrq.
Alert. Alert. Alert. All the faithful are to put on their filter masks. Biological weapons detected.
Va Dagon'anzr, fgnaq ernql! Nyy zvyvgvn'crbcyr tb gb jurer lbh zhfg or sbe evtugrbhf'arff. Hayvx'r gur pnx'r, guvf vf abg n yvr! Jr ner haqre guerng'qrngu fbheprq sebz New Earf Guddermount oy'nfcurzref. Gurl zhfg or erchyfrq, fb gung nyy zhfg or jryy. Jr'qb guvf nyy sbe gur ibqf.
In the Name of Dagon, stand ready! All members of the militia are to report to their stations. This is not a drill! The blasphemers of the New Earth Government are attacking. Stand ready to ward off the faithless. The Gods fight with us.
Va Hydra'anzr, ceb'grpg gur lbhat! Nyy gubf'r gbb byq, l'bhat, be punat'rq sbe gur zvyvgvn ner gb tb gb'n cebkvzvgl furygre'jneq. One snfg gur tngrf gb xrrc nyy fnsr j'vguva sebz z'bafgref. Gurer vf ab jnl jr pna ybfr!
In the Name of Hydra, protect the young! All individuals not in the militia are to go to their nearest security shelter. Ward fast the doors so that the blasphemers do not find you. We shall prevail!
Orjner. Orjner. Orjner. Gur pbzov'arq g'bgnyvgl bs gur znf'frf ner gb qba gurve fnsro'ernguref. Ubfgvyr'anavgr cynthr qr'gr'pgrq.
Alert. Alert. Alert. All the faithful are to put on their filter masks. Nanological weapons detected...
~'/|\'~
02:17
After the explosions had thrown everything into a sharp relief, everything had become easier. The children went down to the shelters, deep under their apartment complex, dug into the volcanic rock, with a minimum of protest, and with one last hug, Raguelle and Wguh'yului went their separate ways. He was a powered armour pilot; his eyesight had not deteriorated enough (as the vision of all the Blooded did, as the inhuman side of their ancestry won out) that he was incapable of using the longer ranged weapons which they mounted, and so served as rapid response to fill any holes which may have opened. She, by contrast, was not a full member of the military; only a member of them militia, like almost every faithful adult on the island, and an Elect member of it at that. As a consequences, her main role was to lay down her life at a static heavy weapon, keeping it firing as long as possible.
To put things simply, the fjord was designed to be a killing zone. The stubby, armoured domes of the Eyes provided a phalanx of coherent light which would require a major naval effort to break. They were protected by lesser defences; fixed turrets, and roaming squads of mecha and powered armour, ready to be deployed to anywhere there looked like there might be a break. The waterside buildings and apartments were actually uninhabited; heavily reinforced and turned into pillboxes camouflaged among the other buildings. Both the militia, which mostly consisted of the Elect, equipped with pre-Second Cold War equipment, and the regular forces, who were armed with the more modern equipment from the Order's heavily limited number of nanofactories were stationed in these bunkers, with large amounts of heavy weapons to overcome their relative deficit of vehicles. Anti-air positions bristled the rooftops, hoping through weight of fire to overcome the sophisticated NEG and Migou craft that might try to attack. The fjord itself was a veritable minefield; only the Chosen knew the safe routes through the chained munitions.
It was acknowledged that the New Earth Government could probably break these lines, as could the Migou. But the really heavy defences were in Cthulhu'ybeq Ahefrel, not here. The cost of an assault on this city would be high; the strategic balance was set up so that it would require forces which both of the other two major forces could not spare, or the other would take advantage of it.
Raguelle Goldstein huddled down in the ground floor of one of the armoured apartment complexes, her eyesguard and filter mask on under a helmet, wearing a ballistic vest. The out-vent of the filter mask, strapped to the system on her back, steamed. It was all coloured in this odd grey-white-black-blue crosshatched pattern, broken shapes made of of more broken shapes. That was meant to make it harder to see at night.
What it was wasn't, in her very certain opinion, was warm enough. The rain earlier had frozen solid; The frost glimmered in the still night air. This was all visible; the eyesguard was currently in “Enhance” mode, and so the photosensitive front plate picked up the ambient light and gave a colour-boosted image of the night. In battle, where the directed energy weapons could blind (laser weaponry could burn out a retina, merely from looking at the focal point), it would clamp down, cutting down the light to safe levels, but for now, the frozen night was somewhat beautiful.
And bloody cold. That was one of the problems when the high ranks of the Branch of Defence were entirely made out of the Chosen and the eldest among the unchanged Blooded. They didn't really feel the chill, unlike the inferior mammals who served and worshipped them. That meant that the equipment issued often failed to take into account fully the requirements of warm-blooded creatures.
“In Cthulhu's name, it's cold,” remarked Fjalar, squatting by the launcher, his voice muffled by the mask. They had been told to keep their headset radios off; it was said that the New Earth Government had sensor technologies so good that it could lob a missile right through a window of a building if it detected the use of military frequencies with invalid encryption. That didn't help one bit against the Migou, who (it was hypothesised) communicated by some kind of pseudotelepathic machinery built into their mecha, but it was feared greatly by the Esoteric Order of Dagon.
“Too true,” she replied, huddling close to the wall, trying to trap the waste heat from the filter system.
“I hope it warms up later,” he added, in a pessimistic voice. “I bet we're sticking out like hot stuff in heat-seeing gear.”
“Not likely though.”
They squatted in silence for a while, Raguelle staring out over the bay. One of the members of the true armed forces of the Order passed by, dressed in the fish scale-like modern armour, checking that everyone was in place, and that there was no unauthorised radio communication.
The silence continued. In the background, though it was not quiet. The repeated warnings in both English and R'lyehan and the sirens were interspaced with explosions, as the streaks of orange, only briefly visible when they cut down through the clouds, delivered their payloads. And it was the missiles that didn't exploded that were the worry; it was astonishing how many individuals nano-and-micromachines could fit inside a warhead, to be dispersed across the area. It certainly wasn't safe to breath the air now, and it wouldn't be safe for the civilians to emerge until the entire city had been cleared with EM zappers and cleansers.
And now shouldering could be heard from down the corridor-which-was-actually-a-trench, the clarity of the voices making it obvious that the two individuals were wearing modern armour, with a built in speaker-system. Well, that and the fact they were talking in R'lyehan, with a speed and precision that no fully-human mouth could manage. Raguelle strained her ears to listen, trying to catch what she could.
“Crbcyr ner qrprn'frq. Crbcyr'gbgny ner qrprn'frq. Va gur anzr bs oy'rffrq Cthulhu, nyy gur vafvqr bs gur Bp'phyne Tybor vf yvxr na noongb've.”
They're dead! They're all dead! By Cthulhu, it's like a slaughter-place.
Raguelle frowned under the mask. It was hard to understand, from the speed, and she was sure that she was missing things, but...that didn't sound good.
Another voice spoke, deeper, and less human; the cadences of the tongue of the Chosen more filling to its manner of speech.
“Jung! Bs jung gu'vatf qb lbh oy'noore ba nob'hg? Z'nxr l'bhe cre'fbany'vgl pnyz, naq gnyx, be lbh funy'y or chavf'urq!”
Huh! What are talking about? Calm down and explain it, or I will be angry.
“Vzz'ngrevny gu'vatf y'vxr gur qrnq, nf zheqr'eref! Rir'elbar gurl sb'haq unf prn'frq gb or. Naq gurl oebx'r gur z'npuvarf. Gur pra-geny pbageby flfg'rzf gb gur sver pn'cnovy'vgvrf bs gur Bp'phyne Tybor ner aba-sha'pgvb'any. Gurl'ir gnxra qbja bar bs bhe znva qr'sraprf. Naq jvgu gur zbgure sh'pxvat NEG wnzz'vat bhe enq'vb va-bhg, jr pna'g rira ercbeg vg. Gur onf'gneqf fubhyq tb shpx nyy gurve fvfg'ref hag'vy gurl trg cert'anag!”
They were like, Raguelle frowned, “ghosts”, maybe, or “dead things”. Maybe “shadows”. They're killers. And the... she lost the rest, as technical jargon. Something about breakages. And something about radar, or radio, perhaps.
There was a pause.
“Vf guvf-n pregn'vagl?” asked the deep-voiced one, with care evident even through the inhuman langauge.
Are you sure?, Raguelle mentally translated.
“Nssvezngvir! Z'lfrys fnj bar bs...” he paused, as if to think for the right word, “...gur no'bzvang'vbaf, nf z'lfrys neevi'rq gb purpx jul pbzzha-vpng'vbaf unq fgbc'crq.” His voice began to break then, breaths coming patchily through the external speakers. “Vg jnf nxva gb n uhzna va funcr naq f'vmr, ohg uh'znaf qb abg whzc be eha yvx'r gung. Gur rlrf bs gur guvat tybj'rq jvgu gur erq bs oy'bbq, gur fxva jnf yvxr gur av'tug'f fxl, ohg jvgu terl fp-nyrf, naq gurer jrer gjb guvatf, yvxr jv'atf ba vgf onpx. Ohg vg jnf vaivfv'oyr jvgu ur'kntb'af bs pby-bhe, f'cnexrq ry'rpgev'pvgl jura punatvat, snq'rq va naq bhg, npgv'ir pnzb z'nlor.”
The younger one hissed his certainty. I saw one of them, over a dead body, when I checked. It looked like a man, but wasn't one. It... it was getting really hard to understand now, especially since the pair seemed to be walking away, had... red eyes... which glowed? Its skin was like pitch? It had grey, was the word “scales”, or “plates”? And protrusions up from its back, like wings? Raguelle was sure that she was wrong here; they were under attack from the NEG, and that thing certainly wasn't human; maybe some kind of bound servant of the Gods. Perhaps the people... they were talking about an Eye, weren't they; “Bp'phyne Tybor” was the term for an Eye.
“It was was made out of coloured hexagons, and sparks of lightning and faded in and out of being?” muttered Fjalar, beside her.
“What?” she whispered back.
“What I caught from the end bit. He really made no sense at the end, but he was talking really quickly. I didn't catch most of it, but I paid attention when he started breathing like that.” He paused. “I'm really bad at sentence structure in R'lyehan,” he admitted.
“Someone is dead,” Raguelle replied softly, a thoughtful tone competing with the rising panic in her voice. “Many someones. And it's something to do with the Eyes.”
Fjalar shook his head. “I'm sure it's nothing that important. He sounded very young and weak in the Blood. That means that he is less divine, and more fallible, like us.”
She nodded. “You're right.” She was still worried, though, so responded in the best way possible. “We should pray though, because faith solves all problems, and so the Great Old Ones will show a way through whatever that panic was.
And so they bowed their heads, and said a brief prayer, to the glory of the Gods, and victory everlasting.
~'/|\'~
02:24
A dark shape moved up the fjord, unnaturally strong legs beating. The surface of the water, reflecting the fire-lit clouds, rippled and bulged as the hidden monster pushed its way along, walking along the bottom of the deep-water channel. Blue-green light flared around it, muffled blasts of water exploding upwards; always in front of it, never quite where it was.
A second shape followed it.
And a third.
The Eyes were silent. They had already been blinded. The technicians and soldiers stationed within, those who would have controlled the blessed implements that guarded the faithful from such abominations against all things which were right were all dead. The implements of righteousness were charnel houses, painted with blood and broken-stringed marionettes.
A head broke the surface of the waters, four eyes aflame with viridian light.
Raguelle, gripping onto the missile box, legs weak from the terrors which her mind had been inventing, ever since overhearing that conversation, fell to her knees.
“We're saved,” she breathed, barely subvocalising the words. “We're... we're actually saved.” She felt her eyes begin to water, behind the mask. She stood up then, shouting loudly, “We're saved. Lord Dagon... he has called for his... for his,” she swallowed hard, voice filled with religious awe, “for his eldest children.”
From all around the frontline fortifications, masses of concrete protruding up against the cold waters of the Atlantic, a ragged cheer arose. These were surely the Dagon'puvyqera; the spawn of Dagon. His first generation children, the most ancient and powerful among the Deep Ones, grown massive and among their kind, only inferior to their father. He had granted them some of his powers, to act as the givers of his laws, and serve as his eyes and ears where he could not be. Great and powerful, they would fight off the infidels of the New Earth Government; show them the strength of true faith.
Unless...
No, that was impossible. Could it be? Could Great Cthulhu himself have sent dreams to the Cthulhu'puvyqera, telling them to aid the servants of his highest servant; the faithful who lives and died for him? It was unlikely, true, although the R'lyeh Texts (Authorised Elect Translation) did mention that, before he woke, he would send his own eldest children, who were foretold in Norse mythology through dark whispers in the night as the Ægirsdóttir, out to reward the faithful. They would come in a time of great need, when comets bloomed in the skies overhead and the old crumbled and fell. And as explosions blossomed across the city as missiles streaked across the sky, smart submutions cutting down anyone not under cover and the invisible plague of NMB warfare making the air unsafe, it seemed to be appropriate.
If it were true, then this was a momentous occasion. The blasphemers who denied his glory would even deserve thanks, for through their sins they had unintentionally bought salvation for all.
The figure was by now half-way out of the water, water cascading off its flanks. It was not well lit; its shape was a darker patch against the sky, with only those four eyes, awesome in the traditional sense, giving off light. Even night-vision goggles worked imperfectly, somehow skipping slightly away from it. In the light of the fires than now spread across the city, from the missiles that the NEG were now lobbing against the innocent civilians of the Elect, it was barely visible. It carried something, though, but what it was could not be determined.
Another head emerged from behind it, and two harsh, actinic white eyes joined its sibling in staring over the city of Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr. They both continued their inexorable march, though, and the third sibling, one crimson Cyclopean orb atop its head, joined them.
By now, religious ecstasy had overcome many of the Elect and those with the Blood of the Chosen who manned the defences. They were in the presence of the holy of holy. What could stand and stare those so favoured by the Gods in the eye?
And that was when the lead figure; all four of its eyes now filled with a terrible emotion, illuminated the area with death.
It did not love them. It did not even hate them. No, it held them in contempt; as scum, inferior beings that had to be removed. And that was far more terrible, because at least hate would have implied emotional parity. A foe that hates you recognises your existence, if only because it lives to see you dead.
Contempt was cold and sterile.
The raw material of suns washed over the fortifications. Vomited forth from the thing it carried, it left slagged twisted remains, vaporising the buildings behind them and the inhabitants within with equal prejudice. The reaper moved back and forwards, scything through the protections and crippling their defences.
Burning, always burning.
Slowly and methodically excising what it saw as a cancer.
~'/|\'~
Raguelle! Raguelle!
She had never understood. For all she had thought she had been so wise, she had been as a child, knowing nothing, seeing only what her parents would let her, hearing only what they had said.
The Gods had seemed close. That she had borne two children to one of their Chosen had been the greatest gift in her life, the purpose for which she had been put upon this earth.
Now, nothing matters. Nothing. The Gods have rejected us and chosen instead the... the monsters of the New Earth Government.
Why? Why? Why have you forsaken us?
She opened her eyes.
Nothing. Well, not quite nothing. There were glimmers of light, but they were blurred; smeared refractions over her vision. Just these tiny twinkles pained her, tears welling up out of her squinting eyes.
She coughed twice, her body twisting up as she did it. It hurt to breath, Raguelle realised, as she returned to full consciousness; the coughs were thus agony.
“No, don't talk,” the voice said softly, trying to sound reassuring. Even in the blurred state in which she existed, it wasn't working. Beneath the placating tone, there were strong undercurrents of terror and stress. “You've got to be okay, Raguelle, you've got to!”
She tried to open her eyes wider, even though the light pained her. And it was dim light; some kind of emergency lighting, judging from the red nature of it. “Wguh?” she asked, her voice an odd rasp.
There was movement above her, a dark shape moving through the red light. “No,” it ('it' was certainly a 'he', she was pretty sure) said. “It's Fjalar. You remember me, don't you?” he asked, in what she thought was a hopeful tone of voice. “How much can you remember? Where do you know me from, for example?”
She thought for a moment. There was a blurred veil over her memories, true, just as there was a blurred veil over her eyes, but it was torn in places, and she could see through in places.
Raguelle licked her lips, and swallowed hard. “Work,” she croaked, not feeling up to the task of coherent sentences. “Militia miss... missile launcher?” she added, in a questioning tone.
The dark shape (head; it was his head, she realised) moved again. “Good,” he said, in a relived tone. “You at least remember something this time. Thank you, Lady Hydra, who watches over kin and those who are sick.” He removed his head from her field of vision, a small white light appearing briefly. “Okay,” Fjalar then said, taking a deep breath. “Right. What does it say I should do next, now that you're conscious again?”
There was a pause, where Raguelle could only focus on the pain of breathing in and out, in and out, while the white light flicked around in the periphery of her vision.
“Note down the time of awakening,” a blue-green light flashed into existence, before vanishing just as rapidly as it appeared. “Twenty-three past six in the morning. And then I need to talk to you,” he said finally. “I need to keep you conscious, keep on talking to you, to prevent you from going into shock.”
Groaning and coughing, spasms of agony running through her body, the woman tried to sit up, only to be pushed back down, firmly but gently, by a hand to the chest. She glared as best she could with this blurred vision at what she hoped was his face.
“What happened?” she rasped.
“Well...”
02:26
In that one, blinding moment of betrayal, everything changed. The burning, terrible white of the jet of high-energy plasma illuminated the area in stark brightness, and cast rigid shadows where it did not illuminate. Even the clouds above them, previously lit by the fires and the near perfect half-moon shining through, were thrown into relief; a grey veil that hid the darkness of the night's sky. The second behemoth joined in the volley of fire, though it did not chose to give the death it bore in one single jet. No, it spat out a near continuous stream of suns; burning plasma which only added to this false daylight which the leviathans which emerged from the waters had willed into being.
Fjalar only stared at the terror before him, eyes wide behind the flash-visor, which had darkened to its maximum setting.
It's horrible. Why. Why. Why.
Belatedly, he remembered why he was here. Why the sanctified forces of justice had placed him here, and blessed his gear. He was here to protect the Gods themselves, protect them from the blasphemers; protect the Chosen, the Blooded and the Elect alike. He spun the launcher towards the lead figure, and then threw himself to the ground, as the stream of suns from the maw of the device that the second figure swept around.
It passed over his head; far over his head, slamming into the dead monolith that had once been one of the Eyes. Even from that far away, the wash of heat, as so many new-born stars were born and then extinguished themselves against the metal and ceramics of the stilled Eye, licked at his back. The interior of his eyesguard pulsed into waves of colour, as the magnetic fields forced a shutdown of the systems.
The noise was horrific. It had ceased to be noise long ago, and was now some physical pain in the ears. Fjalar was wearing ear protection; the equipment issued to the militia came with it, despite the age of the designs, dating back to before even the Second Cold War. It still hurt; the roaring hiss of gas flame, magnified uncounted times.
He pulled himself to his feet. There was dust everywhere, both the fine grains of shredded concrete and ceramics, and glowing white-hot globules of metal, splashed all over the place. To the left and right there were people face-down in the fortifications. The metal drops had burned their way through the armoured roof of the building, designed to ward off missile strikes. The helmet radios were filled with nothing but static. They'd probably been fried by the plasma weapons, the sensitive Old American equipment not designed for a battlefield where directed energy weapons, and their attendant magnetic and electric fields, were thrown around in this way.
They're cooling even now, he thought, idly, though the blur that filled his head, staring at the white hot globules as they faded to orange. Shock, betrayal, terror (gut clenching terror, which had already had its effect); these were the aerosol which made up the fog that clouded his every thought.
Fjalar fell back to one knee, as he realised what he should be doing. Squinting even behind the nearly opaque eyesguard, as the stream of suns swept away, he sighted back down the targeting computer for the launcher.
Someone yelled something. He looked to his right, then left. It looked like it was Katrin under the armour, but she was almost unrecognisable with the opacity of the eyesguard.
“What!” he yelled back.
She yelled something again, then the air itself screamed. From behind her, there was a massive explosion, which tore through another one of the dead Eyes. Just for a moment, in painful flares against the back of his eyeballs, eve through the eyesguard and his reflexively closed eyelids, there was the blue-green afterglow of the trail of a relativistic charged particle weapon; a charge beam.
He pulled off his filter mask, and sucked in a breath reflexively. It hurt like hell. The air was hot, like an oven, so rapidly changed from before, and filled with dust. Fjalar realised belatedly that the filter mask was far more than a simple filtration system; it held the air and cooled it, as well as removing hostile agents, like nan... nanites...
Fuck, he thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck. There'd been that NMB warning, hadn't there? I know there was. I heard it. Everyone knew the NEG used gratuitous amounts of that kind of thing in their major assaults.
I've done it now. I'm a dead man walking. I'll be back into the Cycle of Reincarnation soon.
All that could be done was to sell his life as dearly as possible.
~'/|\'~
Raguelle stared up at the face of the man.
“You're dying?” she asked, in little more than a whisper.
“Probably,” he replied. “I took my mask off in an area without a zapper. We both know what that means.”
She felt a fresh rush of tears run from her blurry eyes. “Dagon. I'm so sorry, Fjalar.”
“You don't need to apologise for anything,” he said, voice tightly controlled. He wasn't about to tell her that the same had happened to her, that this area under the slagged mess of the Eye wasn't NMB safed. “It's not your fault.”
They were silent for a few moments.
“What happened later means that I'm a dead man walking, anyway.”
“Keep on talking, please,” Raguelle said, with a shuddering intake of breath. “By the Gods! It hurts!”
~'/|\'~
“What. Are. You. Saying?” he mouthed as an exaggerated fashion at the figure, who he thought was almost certainly Katrin.
He saw her pause, obviously split over what to do. There were a few moments of stillness in this hell. Then she pulled off their filter mask.
It was Katrin, her night-dark face shining with sweat. She mouthed back at him, similarly exaggerated.
The electronics on the launchers are jammed, she was telling him. Probably won't guide. Fire them dumb.
“What. About. The. Missiles?” he yelled back, choking on a fresh wave of dust.
The woman's mouth opened, and then closed again. Good point, she mouthed. Might have fried the electronics. Load a fresh one.
He nodded, an exaggerated jerk up and down of the head, and belatedly refastened his filter mask. At least it gave him cooler, dust-free air, even if he was probably infected with something by now
Fjalar removed his hands from the launcher, and hugged them tight to his chest, shaking. He took several rapid breaths of the cooler air, whimpering, until he felt that he could actually move without shaking. He poked his head up above the ceramic defences, out of the darkness and into the harsh light cast by the things that those... that those abominations were doing. There were flights of missiles filling the air now, from both sides. High above, punching through the veil of clouds, were the streaks of a long-range bombardment; yellow-orange streaks which passed through the field of vision almost too rapid to see, before adding to the thuds and booms of the explosions which were marching their way through the city of Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr. The three figures that it almost hurt to look at, so bright were they, were wading out of the waters, the lead two methodically harvesting everything they saw that was larger than an infantryman. The third one, which gave off the green-blue after-glow of relativistic particle beams when it bought annihilation, was precisely wrecking the Eyes, removing any possibility that the anti-ship defences could be put back online. And they were spewing out even more death and destruction, from the smaller armaments (still equivalent to anything that a mech which the faithful could use carried), which covered their surfaces.
There was still only static on the helmet radio, pulsing as the monstrosities violated the atmosphere. With this amount of energy being thrown around in the air, metallic surfaces were building up a charge, earthing themselves with a static spark when they were touched. There were winds blowing, fanning and fanned by the fires that now devoured the city, and the four-eyed figure was in the middle of a gale, as it consumed the atmosphere only to send it back out from its weapon, torn apart to a stellar plasma. There was even lightning earthing itself around the figures, never quite touching them, as if it were afraid of them.
Dagon knew, Fjalar was.
The forces of the faithful were firing back, of course. But instead of the synchronised barrages of 120mm missiles that they had drilled to do, they were disparate and scatted, the electronics in the launchers fried, and forcing the weapons into dumb mode. And the leviathans of death that strode ashore, destroying and killing, were fast, moving somewhat erratically specifically to avoid the rain of what should have been their doom, blurred shapes dancing through the rain of exploding missiles that filled the air.
Wait a moment.
These were contact-detonated anti-armour warheads. They shouldn't be...
Son of a bitch!
“Pass me a new missile, Rag!” he yelled, as he tried to strip off the main viewfinder to get to the iron sights underneath. The LCD screen was fried; half of it was just black, and the rest gave a blurred mess of pixels and blobs of colour. “I said, new missile!” he repeated again, when he didn't feel the nudge.
He turned to face his loader (and he loved her, he knew that really, but she was married), already half expecting what he'd see.
He was wrong. She hadn't been hit by one of the globules of molten metal which had fallen through the metal shield above them. Instead, she was just sitting there, in the harsh shadows cast by the plasma fire, huddled up on the floor in a foetal position. Her flash goggles were off, although the filter mask remained on. The bloodshot eyes, wide open despite the dust, were contracted to pin pricks.
Fjalar's heart fell. “By Dagon, Rag!” he yelled. “You had to be an idiot and take them off, didn't you. You wanted to get a look at the Dagon'puvyqera... whatever those things are. They're not Lord Dagon's children; he wouldn't do this to us!” His voice, already yelling over the noise, cracked. “Dagon, Lord! Why?” Gently, he pushed the flash-goggles back on her face.
He unscrewed the back of the launcher, carefully easing out the possibly ruined missile, which he (very carefully) placed in the grenade trench, outside the fortifications. If you could call them fortifications. If the things in the fjord called them anything, they would probably have called them stuff to stand on. Taking her key, he opened the missile box. The case was insulated, a Faraday cage built into the structure, exactly to prevent stray currents setting off or damaging the contents.
~'/|\'~
“I... I looked at the things?” Raguelle asked.
The man made an annoyed noise. “Yes! Yes you did! And you took off your flash goggles to do it. Those things also protect your eyes from NMB stuff,” he shouted. There was a silence. “Sorry, sorry. I'm not one to talk.”
“So... the blurred vision,” she said, hesitantly. “It's not just flash-blindness.”
The silhouette against the red light that was Fjalar's head moved. “No. Well, probably not only. But I looked at your eyes last time you were awake. It's in the handbook, in the,” he broke into a fit of coughing, “in the first aid. You've got the blood in your eyes... you know, in that jelly stuff inside the eye; that means they're... um... attacking the thingies at the back of your eye that allow you to see. And the whites are almost completely red now.”
The woman began to hyperventilate, painfully. “Oh Hydra. Hydra.”
“At least you don't have it tearing apart your lungs, as well as whatever else it does when it's breathed in,” he responded, a slightly wry note in the midst of the fatalism.
It would be better to not tell her. She doesn't need to know any more.
“I think I do,” she said, faintly. “It hurts to breathe. It hurts to talk.” She drew in a shuddering gasp. “How can a person do that to another person?” she asked, tears running down her face, leaving tracks in the dust. “They might be unfaithful monsters, but who can sit down and just decide to do that!?”
“It gets worse,” Fjalar replied.
~'/|\'~
He carefully loaded the missile into the tube, after rotating the dials on the surface which told it that it was being fired from a launcher with a non-functional guidance system. It was another problem with the ancient gear; the warhead relied on guidance information from the launcher. He should probably be thankful to Great Cthulhu that the ignorant fools who had designed this equipment had given him such a dumb-fire option.
Squinting down the iron sights, he spun the launcher towards the lead figure. It was really difficult. Not only did it hurt to look at the terrible brightness of the jet of plasma it was using to slaughter the faithful (there, a squad of powered armour evaporated, nothing left after the jet had moved on but the glassed area where they had stood; there, a brief sweep tore through an apartment building, the slagged wreckage crumbling like wet sand as the bottom floors vaporised), but he was having problems even staring at the monstrosity. His eyes couldn't focus on the blurred shape properly; his vision sliding off it. There were incredible winds blowing out in the fjord, which had come from seemingly nowhere, and flashes of light and booms which may have been the discharge of lightning cannons, but might have been genuine thunder and lightning. Almost weeping, he judged the best he could through this apocalyptic landscape, and pushed the ignition trigger. There was the pop of the initial charge kicking the missile out of the tube, then the main booster igniting, and a new comet joined the solar system of the warzone around the bay.
It missed.
Fjalar slumped to the ground, hyperventilating. It should have hit; it was right that it would have hit. A world where that desperate attempt failed was a cruel and uncaring one. Slowly, the urge to flee almost unbearable, he crawled over to the box, to grab another launch. He would have fled, actually, fallen back to a place where he could fight properly against human blasphemers, not these monstrous leviathans that he could do nothing against, but one thing kept him here.
Rag. I can't leave her like this.
By now, too much of his home city lay in ruins. The offshore missile bombardment was raking its way through the tightly packed buildings, choking the streets with rubble and demolishing power plants and the desalination buildings. And the things were just killing as they saw fit. The Eyes were the only things that could have hurt them, but they had all be blinded before the attack. And to prevent them from being put back online, they had been systematically eradicated by the things that they would have been needed to kill.
I see. Everything. They just plan to kill us all. They have their own Gods, but they aren't like ours. They're just... things. Idols.
Suddenly, Fjalar had no energy left to even crawl to the box. He lay in the harsh shadows cast by the stellar fire being thrown around around the water, ears filled with the cataclysmic noise outside, and prayed. He closed his eyes and tried to calm his mind, but all he could see, burned into the inside of his eyelids, were the figures, burning their way through everything he knew. He began to whimper.
From above, he heard the flapping of wings, massive, powerful beats which forced air aside through brute force. The noise of battle dimmed for a second, as they passed overhead, before returning in full.
And then the wave of burning heat hit him. Even under the armour and the cooled air of the filter mask, it burned. The rad-counters screamed, the elevated background of the modern battlefield, where, after all, plasma weaponry saw use, running to lethal levels. Fjalar didn't see this, of course; he was facedown, eyes screwed shut, but he could hear, somehow, the fact that the Geiger counters were telling him that he was doomed.
He stayed face down for a very long time.
~'/|\'~
“What were the wings?” Raguelle asked, her almost useless-eyes now perpetually wide open from the tale of horrors which was being recounted.
“I didn't see,” he replied. “It...” he began to cough, “it's beyond people. Everything. It's just not people. No people, never.”
“What happened next?” she asked. From what she could hear of his voice, tear-filled and shaky, Fjalar was about to fall apart. And not just mentally (which he was justified to do, given what he'd seen), but biologically as well. The best he could hope for was that the lethal dose of radiation had fried the nanites infecting his lungs.
All in all, that wasn't a particularly good hope. She'd been exposed to the same, after all.
And in a hollow voice, he told her. The words were vague, incoherent, compared to his previous story; a patchwork tatter of something which had torn while living through the events. He could hold the pieces together when distracted by other things, but exposure to the same forces shredded them again.
He spoke of the blinding, fractured white light, that sparkled and shifted like a cut diamond made out of everything that it touched. How it had reached out and the wings had stopped. How it had illuminated the world for him, and shown him that nothing cared for anything, that everything was a purposeless mess, with no rules or goals behind it. That the Gods had Gods of their own, and that those Gods cared nothing for them. That the universe didn't even have the decency to hate them. Of how he had broken and run, leaving the faithful to save himself and her, dragging her rigid body behind him.
He spoke of the things that had emerged from the water, from metal boxes which had been invisible, and had used the attack of those three great leviathans to land themselves, without the faithful noticing. How they were not the Chosen, yet they had come from the water, not to pillage and claim the land in their name of their Gods, but merely to kill everything. How he had seen Katrin nailed to the back wall of the fortifications with a single rod-like projectile that protruded out from her forehead, her body dangling limply. Of the flash of blue which had taken out one of the towers, where the non-militia troops were, fired by a man-sized thing with four glowing yellow eyes on its face. Of the way that the enemy were completely silent, entire squads, seen from the cover of the wreckage of the Eye when he dragged Raguelle to relative safety, moving in perfect unison.
He spoke, and Raguelle listened, the world slowly growing dimmer as tailored nanomachines and micromachines tore apart the rods and cones on her retina, only attacking that particular cell type, filling the world with darkness and the vitreous humour with blood, just as the micromachines in her lungs activated an autoimmune response, slowly filling them with mucus and her body slowly fell apart at the cellular level from the lethal dose of radiation.
And there was silence, as he stopped speaking.
Raguelle began to laugh, a panting, hysterical giggle which hurt with each hurried gasp of breath.
“What... what can we do?” she wheezed, through the bloody tears that ran down her face. “We can sit here, and wait for the end.”
She coughed, a splash of blood smearing itself across the faceplate of the man, trapped down here beneath the melted slag of what had once been a defence laser. All things had come to nothing. The crawling darkness that filled her eyes was waiting, and she could do nothing to hold it off.
“We... we,” she gasped, as a fresh jolt of pain ran through her body, “we wait until they find us. And kill us. That's all we can do. Nothing more. We're only men. And they're monsters.”
~'/|\'~
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
