The Domain of Demons

Many months went by, and the alarm over the growing threat posed by the ice bridge spread fast, far, and wide across the waters. Messengers, mainly daydreamers for they had unparalleled speed and mobility, were pivotal in coordinating action between often widely-spaced, highly autonomous districts. Local leaders then met and organized. Through such wide-ranging nomads as Pebble and the other southern hunters, and intrepid travelers like Seeker, word quickly reached the coastians. They were the northernmost of the thalassic gravediggers, known for being reclusive and independent. Their culture had never adopted a life floating on the open sea but instead relied on earthen and stone homes constructed upon offshore islands. The news worried even the central islanders of the Meridians, those who were culturally closely connected with the settled meadow districts where the four friends hailed from, but who were the most terrestrial of all the thalassic gravediggers as a result of their more productive land. Their lives were less strictly dependent on the water than any others, but they too were well aware that if ice reached their refuge it would be rendered as inhospitable as the far south.

If there was anything the sea stewards excelled at, it was cooperation towards a common goal. Their histories, both evolutionary and cultural, were based upon the principle. Though most of their cultures were not widely different to begin with, as they all interacted to some degree over the relatively small territory they all shared along the seaway, the plot to clear the ice brought them closer together. A massive engineering project of an unforeseen scale, it would take the help of everyone to accomplish. The ice bridge was growing by the day, and it already stretched for tens of miles. The coastians affirmed that, given enough of it, the resources they utilized from the earth would be able to melt sea ice. They were willing to share them in return for other resources scarce to them, and trade deals were negotiated for access into their mining camps on land in exchange for foreign meats, fuel oil, and bloat products. Bloat bone boats, covered with waterproof bloat hides, were in especially high demand for their size and durability, as the species rarely occurred near the northern coasts due to its size leaving it highly vulnerable to stranding, and the coastians’ primary local prey - small sealumps - provided inferior building materials.

The issue with acquiring enough fuel from the earth was scale, for the coastians only needed relatively small quantities of fuel for day to day life. Near-surface deposits of dried out peat were widespread across the continent where many ancient bogs had once existed, and these beds ran deep and seemed inexhaustible. It was a reliable source to feed flame, and so the one which was most often excavated. Burning stronger but less accessible, coal was known from only a few exposed seams exposed by erosion of the bedrock by rivers that the coastians had excavated slowly over time, forming shallow, winding trenches but rarely tunnels, for without an open roof it became too dark to see and to use flame torches in the mines would be a fatal mistake if they were to be set alight. Coal was harder to get out, but in turn burned longer for a lesser quantity, as it was simply peat condensed over millions of years into a more compact fuel source.

The logistics of transport of either of the useful “earthfats”, as the coastians referred to them, from the northern lands to the south was challenging. It required the formation of the first mass-transport system utilized by the sea stewards - fleets of wide boats manned by gravediggers, which would be towed by thousands of daydreamers toward the north. This was a project primarily overseen by these two species by necessity, with only a small number of greenskeepers taking part, for they were not a nomadic people by nature and their ability to aid the efforts limited by their small size and vulnerability to predators outside the settled meadows to which they were endemic. The coastians aided the newcomers, teaching the methods they had used for thousands of years to cut and dig peat into blocks with specialized bone shovels used just for this purpose. Most of this material was already dried and easily accessible, for the bogs that formed it had gone away long ago as the climate cooled and the vegetation was stripped away by grazing animals. Mining camps were always situated along rivers that emptied into the ocean, both for the convenience of easy access to ship out the mined materials and because it was here that coal seams were most often left exposed by erosion. Cut into blocks, peat was stacked and then loaded onto the vessels by the ton to be taken south across the seaway. The coastians regarded the land as being filled with danger, but many generations had worked these camps and harvested the fuel to be found there and so they were reasonably well-protected with fencing and often bordered with deep pits to keep out predatory wildlife.

~~~

Already working along the frozen southern islands were others, pulling and layering mud from the seafloor on the bridge to encourage melting of the ice with dark sediment that would heat in the sun, and having some success receding the depth of the ice flow, though the consistent overcast weather worked against their progress. When the first shipments of peat arrived, protected under tarps, they had to be laid out and then burned immediately before they could become waterlogged with precipitation. When these fires burnt out they left the ice covered with a layer of red peat ash that persisted, for it became frozen in the lower layers that had thawed beneath the flames and so colored the ice, leaving it more liable to absorb heat from the sun and continue to thaw during the day.

Weeks of daily peat-burning on the ice bridge had a visible effect, forming pits and fissures in its surface, but the process was slow going. Coal was more useful, for it stained the ice all around black with ash and caused even more rapid melting in the sun. It was also heavy and solid, and unlike peat would not become saturated and unusable with rain. These factors were conveniences that soon proved the extra effort needed to acquire it. As many more gravediggers from the settled meadows and outlying districts joined the coastians on the northern shores, they made lighter work of picking it free of the bedrock, and the trenches were significantly expanded. Unknown to them, they were chiseling through the remains of ancient tropical swamps from many millions of years ago, once buried deeper but brought closer to the surface by widespread erosion. Here and there throughout the seam they came across intriguing shapes in the rock. Outlines of fish and leaves, and occasionally the small, neatly articulated bones of unfamiliar creatures appeared above and beneath the dark seams that they sought out. Incredibly delicate, they most often crumbled when removed, and so remained a mysterious phenomena. Yet occasionally a far bigger example would be revealed as they expanded the channels through the coal seams, and all would gather around in awe. Long, long before them, huge and terrifying animals had lived and died in the very place they now stood. Buried by countless millennia of dirt and debris until they lie deep underground, the miners inadvertently exposed them to the sun again for the first time in hundreds of millions of years.

It wasn’t only the bones of bygone beasts that the thalassic gravediggers discovered as they found their land-legs, however. The land was a world still full of living monsters. In the night frightful things lurked the outskirts of the small mining towns. Wildwalkers were real, and they were worse than all the stories. Uncanny and wrong, like huge, frightening caricatures of their people, they haunted the darkness beyond the pits, peering in with cold eyes without a soul behind them. Its presence was not betrayed by snarls or growls - it came silent in the night - but only the quiet prying of its claws against the fencing. Not smart enough to communicate, but enough to think and plot and remember to test every inch of the barrier for weak points night after night, it was a creature from a nightmare made real.

The wildwalkers were nocturnal, and they left their haunting vigil when the sun rose, yet danger was no stranger even when the sun shone high and the snow melted off the ground. It was in the dawn that the horn-beasts came. The coastians called them ever-eaters, for they constantly chewed the barriers, eating through both thorny timbers and solid skewers of bloat bone, requiring continuous repairs to be made before nightfall. It was not the wildwalkers, but rather these creatures that complicated the miners’ lives more than anything else, and which drove the coastians to make their permanent dwellings offshore, for they were indiscriminate eaters of everything in their path. Flesh and leaf, bone and dirt, all was taken into their jaws and destroyed. They were slow but powerful, low-slung and scraping their way across the landscape like glaciers. Nothing remained in their wake except stripped earth, and their herds appeared unstoppable. All through the day guards stood at the outer barriers armed with long hooked tools and lit torches. The ever-eaters feared the flames and kept their distance most of the time. Occasionally however the hoard approached too quickly for those in the back to realize those in front had stopped walking. Pile-ups knocked through the barriers, and the pits intended to keep out predators filled with their tumbling bodies. Luckless, pitiful beasts wailed and cried, lying injured and abandoned by their herds as night fell. The miners retreated to barricaded shelters beneath the ground, but got little sleep as all manner of monsters whose true appearance the gravediggers could only imagine came from the dark to feed upon the trapped ever-eaters. They filled the night with squeals of terror as they were eaten alive by unseen horrors. By dawn, only the scattered tooth-like horns and a few flesh-stripped bones remained in the pits. The land demonstrated every night that it was no place for a sea steward, and the miners knew it. This was the domain of demons. Their project could not be completed quickly enough.

~~~

Unbeknownst to the miners gathering their resources to fight their own war for survival, and fighting off hungry predators, they were being watched by somebody else, too. Unlike the wildwalkers and the ever-eaters, this scout went unnoticed. It posed no threat, and didn’t stand out from any of the others like it, so they ignored it even in plain sight. It observed them closely, analytically. Watching what they did, and how they did it, and trying to learn why they did it.

After a few hours, it left, having attracted no attention. It flew home, a distance of about five miles down the river. There it met its family. As the sun set, Brighteye picked up a stick and began to etch into the fresh-falling snow.

A much larger creature came and stood next to a tiny black and white bird, peering down to read as he wrote.

“We are not alone.”

Blaze picked up her own stick, and she too began to write.

“I know. I saw the smoke too.”

She appeared worried, and looked around before finishing her statement.

“The demons are here again.”