[Original Novel] Pariah of the Little People, Part 21

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It grew more intense and sophisticated as I drew near, and I could now see flickering red light up ahead. Casting intermittent shadows over the forest floor, bathing one side of nearby trees in light of a color I’ve never before seen emitted by a fire.

When I finally discovered the source, I was wholly unprepared for the scene before me. A lone, ethereal red flame flickered on a pyre in the center of their encampment. Around it danced multiple concentric rings of naked little fellows, smeared in something wet and grimy, dancing hand in hand.

Presiding over all of it was the unmistakeable figure of a Tyrant...nailed to a crucifix. Not moving, and, upon more careful inspection, still inanimate clay. I spectated breathlessly from behind the bushes as what remained of the attacking party returned. Battered, wounded and weary, but having secured their prize.

They towed behind them a wheeled cage filled to the brim with captured brown robes. I was so caught up in the firefight I didn’t even notice that’s what they were after. The wheeled cage was brought before a tiny stone altar at the foot of the crucified clay Tyrant. One at a time, prisoners were dragged from the cage, restrained to the altar and sacrificed.

The blood collected in a basin below the altar. When full, it was carefully lifted by a team of red robes and poured into the slightly open mouth of the clay Tyrant. I thought I was imagining it at first, but before my eyes the clay slowly changed texture to resemble pale, sickly skin. Until at last its eyes opened.

My breath caught in my throat. The two golf ball sized glossy black orbs studied the ceremony before it. Then weakly smiled. Its restraints were undone, then the wretched creature was helped down from the cross and supported until it could stand on its own. I dry heaved. Of all the possible survival strategies, entering the service of the Tyrants never occurred to me.

How could they reduce themselves to this? After everything I’ve done to protect them. To deliver them to victory over the cruel, toxic little monsters. I never figured them for boot lickers! Evidently a quality found even in some percentage of Homunculi.

Yet, while gazing into its eyes made me feel queasy and brought on a headache, it did not produce the paralysis it once did. As if something recently changed inside, to make me somewhat immune. Or compatible. Just then I noticed countless pairs of big, shiny black eyes in the woods around us, red light from the enchanted flame reflecting off them.

One by one at first, then several at a time, they emerged within reach of the light. Surrounding me in all directions for as far as the light could reveal. I felt no hostility from them. It was more of a welcoming party, or initiation. I felt their energy resonate with something inside me. Conceived the moment I learned of Tyler’s death, rapidly gestating since.

My suspicions were confirmed in the worst way when they brought me the sword. A twisted, convoluted handle wrought from the same sculpted obsidian as the violin Katerinka had shown me in the field. With the same thorns, though as my hand drew near, they retracted. Sensing that I was the sort of person it wanted to be used by.

Tears returned as it dawned on me what all of it meant. How very, very far I’d fallen. What, despite my futile struggles, I allowed them to transform me into. Yet this was the logical path forward, surely?

Like Dan before me, I’d take control of the Tyrants. Use them to pick off the other students one by one. Relishing in the mourning of their families following their disappearance. Or perhaps I’d just leave the bodies for them to find.

Part of me fought it. But where before it was just slightly larger than the part of me which embraced, which craved this outcome, a tipping point was reached. The vile black goo bubbling up within me finally seized control. No reversing it now. No going back to who I was. Everything I most desperately wanted was now within reach.

My hand drew closer and closer to the sword’s handle. It resonated as if some strange magnetism was growing more intense. The countless pairs of round, shiny black eyes blinked sporadically around me as they watched me step into the role they’d so carefully prepared. The only direction left for me to go. The final step in my transformation. Monster world? What a joke. I’ll show them a real monster.

Just before I could take hold of the handle, an ear piercing shriek filled the air. The Tyrants all writhed in pain, as did I. Then a striking figure wearing a shimmering dress of obsidian fragments and a reflective full face mask leapt into the middle of the ceremony. Seizing the sword before I could, then using it to skewer the freshly animated Tyrant.

The red robes and their Tyrant masters scattered in a panic. All I could do was to stare, enraptured by the spectacle. The figured twisted the blade, relishing the little monster’s agony. Steam began to rise from the wound. Then the blood started boiling as it gushed out. A foul scent issued forth, scouring my nostrils.

The masked figure whispered to it in a deep, guttural voice. “Sleep, you black eyed pig. Fall into a deep pit of ghosts.” The impaled Tyrant writhed, deflated, then finally turned back into clay once all the blood finished boiling out of its body. Then it burst into flame.

I gasped for air, still hardly able to believe what was happening. The figure strode up to me, put one foot on my chest, then spoke. “This is how little you resist? To be so easily consumed by your sadness that you would give yourself over to them in a moment of weakness, undoing all of my hard work until now?”

The figure slid back the shiny, curved, mirror-like covering. Like a mask but featureless. No holes for the eyes, nose or mouth and nothing like the shape of a face. Of course it was Katerinka. Still, a remarkable sight to behold. I sputtered, searching for words with which to defend my actions but finding none that sounded convincing in my head.

“I tell you in the field, the Tyrants did not vanish. All this time, gathering blood. From the little ones, with their own help. I am sure you know what they use it for.” I shuddered, remembering the last time I laid eyes on the crone. I somberly nodded, wiping away residual tears. “Then, no more dawdlings” she said. “From now on, I teach, you learn.”

So she sat me down amidst the trees, and with a wave of her hand, little people hiding among their branches produced lanterns by the hundreds until there was enough light to see by. “Do you feel that?” I waited for a bit, then inquired what she meant. “Do not play game with me. The energy, when you enter forest.”

I recalled the feeling from earlier, and told her about it. “Is alive. Not surprising, right? Of course is alive you say to me, is trees. But that is not full extent of it. Trees communicate with one another by releasing chemical signals. Awareness of danger, such as fire on one side of forest, propagates tree by tree to the other side until all of them feel stress. Plants, they are simple. But even they feel stress and communicate.

I say they are simple individually, but when many of them network, it forms something like a brain. Where each tree is but a neuron which can receive and send signals, either originating them or just passing on others. Very alien sort of mind. Slow thinking, hard to understand. When think so slow, you perceive time differently. Years go by in a blink. Decades, centuries, eons. To the forests, we were hairy creatures swinging through their trees not so long ago.”

I found the idea interesting, but asked why she was telling me any of this. “Is a God, don’t you think? Of a sort. A small one, anyway. A mind grander and older, to which our lives pass more quickly than this sentence. An emergent intelligence in nature, but just one of many. For you see, any network of processes which act on each other in a cascading, causal manner behaves this way.

Communicating with these minds is the basis of magic. To curry their favor, to connect ever more intimately with them. Many forest witches in the world, is the easiest and most comprehensible Boltzmann brain on Earth.” I asked her to repeat the term, never having heard it before. “Boltzmann brain. Emergent thought-like activity in seeming chaos.” I then asked if the crone had been a forest witch.

“Tch! Babulya? You think so little of her? She was no amatuer. No hemp wearing, granola crunching servant of the forest goddess. Did she never tell you that she was the Witch of Storms? Only one left in the world, a dying art.

To conform your mind to the one which consists of synchronous storm activity around the planet is by far a more difficult feat than to do so with the forest mind, which is by comparison not so different from us.”

Living storms? It beggars belief. Nonetheless, I continued to listen. “Babulya mastered storm magic. So completely that she was split, at all times, between her own body and the storms. So intimate was the link that, when her body ceased to live, she simply withdrew into the storm consciousness entirely. I tell you in truth, she lives on wherever there is thunder and rain, violent winds and the flash of lightning.”

I thought back to her intervention in the field, and began to piece together how she’d done it. Great waves of relief washed over me as I came to believe she still persisted in some form. But also shame, as I now realized she really had been watching me all this time. Witnessing what I’ve become since she left.

“But, remember that such great, distributed minds can also be made of people. You know a cult when you see one. Now, anyway. But they are not such simple tricks as you imagine. They would not work unless those ensnared in them truly believed. And because they believe, because they all believe the same things and push in the same direction, a larger being is born.

A magnified image of man. Of his strengths, his weaknesses. His compassion, but also his wrath. As the concern of the ancient Hebrews was above all else to become powerful in war, to dominate their enemies, so Yahweh was chosen from the pantheon of Canaanite gods by Abraham for exclusive worship. For he was the Canaanite God of war.

Other gods were shaped in the same way by the psychology of their followers. Whatever drives they all shared in common were also the drives of their God. So it is that there have been Gods of wine and partying, gods of the harvest, gods of the ocean, of love, and every other facet of existence.

Wherever humans have been unified in a feeling, for however long it lasted, a larger being embodying that feeling was given life. An egregore. And just as one whose mind is in perfect alignment with the storms or the forest can persist within that network even after the death of their body, so too is possible to copy yourself onto a network of human minds.

If they all synchronously embody your teachings, your behavioral qualities, striving to be as much like you as they can, something like magnified version of yourself is brought to life. One which, should they pass on their beliefs to next generation and so on, need never die.”

I dwelled on that for a while. I once read about the idea in science fiction that we might capture as digital information everything about ourselves that makes us who we are and put it into computers in order to persist in some form after our bodies die. What she suggested was not so different, just accomplished by more primitive, organic means.

While I pondered, she produced the violin case she brought with her the other day. When she opened it, the Secret of Storms was impossible to hold. The thorns were all extended, protruding threateningly such that I dare not pick it up. “Do you see now how far you’ve set me back? Much work to do, healing your heart, before you can again so much as hold this.”

I vowed to do whatever it takes. She studied me closely. “Good. Good. First step is to understand difference between justice and revenge. I sense the crippling weight of a grudge within you. If left alone it will slowly twist up your insides. It will distort your heart, until it is so closely in alignment with the Tyrants that you may as well be one.”

I thought back to how I looked upon them without ill effect, aside from some dizziness. They’d really almost gotten me. How long, I wondered, had they been subtly pushing me in that direction from the shadows?

“That is the essence of a Tyrant, you see. To make record of every little transgression. To never, ever let it go. To obsess over punishment of wrongdoing to the exclusion of any other thoughts until it turns you into a monster.”

If it hurt to listen to, it was only because of the accuracy. I asked her if I couldn’t just slay the Tyrants with the sword they offered me. “The Poison of Sorrow. Is a powerful weapon. In some ways, the equal and opposite twin of the Secret of Storms. Both forged on the same day from the same materials, both powered by storm magic. But I tell you, every Tyrant you kill with it would also kill part of you.

Is cursed. Babulya made it during a fit of sadness and fury, dwelling on what became of her parents. On the way she was beaten and teased by the other girls. A weapon to destroy the world, which she so regretted creating as to curse it such that whomever should pick it up with the intent of harming anyone would be slowly corroded by it, from inside out.

On that day, she also creates the Secret of Storms. A failsafe. After the Tyrant tried to kill her in her sleep, she realize what could happen if it escape her control. If it learns to make more of itself. So, to balance out the sword to destroy the world, she creates the musical instrument to save it. Powerfully effective at the only thing which has ever defused man’s lust for blood. Understanding.

The one who holds the Secret of Storms, whatever that person feels, it is realized as writing and song. Synchronously, as is the way of all magic. However difficult it may be for that person to communicate normally, such a wide and efficient conduit is created that all who hear the song, or read what is written, will become that person in every way that matters for as long as the song endures. For as long as they read what is written, they will know his heart as intimately as their own.

It is the only way to, at once, everywhere, untangle the twisted up heart of every Tyrant. To reverse completely the distortion which makes them what they are. In that moment, I tell you, they will be undone!

Drained of the energy which animates them, returned to being lifeless clay figures. No matter how numerous, no matter how powerful, if one with a heart in the right condition should play the Secret of Storms, every Tyrant on Earth will be forever destroyed.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 22!}