A Fortress of Pebbles

Cassandra felt like paper, ripped in half and ragged. She drifted on the wind, following the Master of Language down the stairs and out into the courtyard. He was probably saying stuff the whole time, but she couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her own soul flapping in the wind.

The Master of Mind met them at the bottom, beautiful face stony, “like a Greek goddess with resting bitch face,” Orion might have said—

He was gone. Orion was gone.

The green grass of the courtyard was exactly as it had been when they’d run across it together, hand in hand. Even the storm clouds overhead were the same. Only now, she was here without him.

Scribes stood around with clipboards, tablets, and pebbles listening intently to whatever the two Masters were talking about. A moment later, a conglomeration of boulders and a severed head joined them, bringing an entourage of his own scribes in brown robes. This was followed by the arrival of a tangle of tentacles, bringing her own entourage in green.

A light rain began to fall on the meeting to which Cassandra couldn’t seem to pay attention. The Master of Maps waved a hand, and the brown stone in his forehead flashed. Raindrops curved away from the majority of those gathered there, as if an invisible pavilion had been erected.

The Masters of Maps and Life began to create makeshift furniture – stone chairs covered in soft leaves. Cassandra found herself sitting in one of several chairs arranged around a council table made from a slab of marble. Somehow, a steaming cup of cider found its way into her hand, along with words of encouragement from several mouths at the end of tentacles.

Although nothing being said made its way into her ears, she did notice a steady supply of scribes running into and out of the Fortress gates, bringing pebbles with them both ways. It was like a line of ants – but instead of returning with food, they returned with information, presented hastily to the Masters at the table.

She also noticed a new color – in addition to the robes of brown, green, gray, blue, and white, there were now a few scribes wearing black. They mixed in, milled about, and meandered, seeming to have no particular purpose. But they watched and listened intently. Whatever they saw or thought, however, never made it onto a pebble or clipboard. Everything just went into their eyes and stayed there.

One of them stood near the council table, listening to the Masters better than Cassandra presently was. The words “stability and order” popped into her mind. The man noticed her looking at him and gave a curt nod before turning his attention back to whatever the Master of Language was saying. On his belt was a sword.

The Master of Language was gesticulating at a large replica of Earth that rotated slowly in the middle of the council table. Whatever mind magic was creating the globe was also annotating parts of it with arrows and statistics. Whenever America rotated past, Cassandra couldn’t help but notice that most points of interest were at or near the state of Montana.

***

Orion could never find words for his feelings. They always came and went like strangers, not bothering to introduce themselves. When Dad came back without Cassandra, Orion felt one of those nameless ghosts enter through his stomach, making him want to puke. It didn’t help that the noise outside and the flashes of light through the attic windows were turning his skin into electric sludge.

“Don’t puke while you’re electric,” said Dad. “Whole house’ll ignite.”

“If your puke kills us, you’re grounded,” added Mom. “No Sega. No food. No Cassandra.”

Dad opened one of the windows, and Orion wished he hadn’t. So much stuff was exploding out of the dirt that the land surrounding the house had become an ocean. And it was boiling. From here to the treeline, chunks of grass churned like green foam, geysers of icy dirt shot skyward. Dark plumes against a red sky.

At first, Orion couldn’t see what was causing the turmoil. But as he crept closer to Dad and his sniper rifle, he saw that it was a mixture of things. Small objects were exploding out of the Earth’s crust and entering the atmosphere, unfurling their wings at the last moment and catching fire as they flew in all directions, covering the world in torchlight.

Others were larger, lurching from the Earth like slumbering giants climbing to their feet. Several were already standing. To Orion, they looked like dinosaur bones coming back from the dead to get revenge. Within their rib cages, hundreds of pebbles glowed, engines of magic casting a horrible light through their skeletons.

The ground at their feet crawled with smaller versions of themselves. Each was lit, at minimum, by a single point of brown light. The roiling earth was covered in the glow of a million pebbles, like an angry sea, reflecting too many stars to count.

There was one noise – a furious buzzing that drowned out everything else – even the monstrosity of bones pulling itself to three times the height of the house just beyond where the Humvee was parked. It did this without noise because the whole world was a beehive. Thick clouds of insects filled the air, plinked against the window, and dimmed the view outside like smoke.

They moved quickly, but whenever one happened to land on the foggy glass in front of Orion’s nose, he could see a tiny green pebble embedded in its abdomen, surrounded by wriggling legs. Multiple pairs of wings glinted from the light of the fire in the sky.

Orion turned to tell Cassandra, but the space beside him was empty. He puked electricity onto the feet of the mannequin, causing its plastic toes to wriggle.

“Grounded,” said Dad. “And no more stomach for you.”

“Stomachs are a privilege, not a right, sweetheart,” said Mom, joining them in the nook, and pushing aside the useless sniper rifle. She used a towel to wipe aside Orion’s puke.

Orion fixated his eyes on the rifle and rocked back and forth in his mother’s arms. For some reason, it seemed appropriate – to gaze intently at the only thing here more useless than he was. A stupid device that could puke bullet after bullet into the burning chaos out there, changing nothing.