War

The fishers and the pastoralists took refuge into the thickets near the shore until it became too shallow to safely navigate, and there rallied up with the gravediggers. This was now their war too, for whether or not they wanted to be a part of it, it had come for them now. But they lacked the size and strength to engage in it directly - the warmongers could toss their boats like feathers. Their enemies were unfamiliar with gravediggers and their tools, but could navigate the underwater realm so freely that it would be difficult to do substantial damage to them from above the water. So the fishers and the pastoralists would have to be its soldiers. The gravediggers, however, would aid them from the land.

The enemy was bigger and stronger, but the gravediggers had an idea to render these advantages less powerful. To render their deadly bites tolerable to their new allies they dexterously fit the whale-birds with armor. Bones and shells, collected and saved from countless successful hunts, were threaded and tied around their huge bodies to form protective plates and so would protect soft hide from the savage teeth of the enemies. A plus - without hands of their own or of an ally from above, the warmongers would have almost no capacity to take it and fit it onto themselves.

And this was just the beginning of what the land-dwellers could offer the sea people to win their newly shared war. They would not win a war by defense alone. The daydreamers needed weaponry. Things their enemy would lack the capacity to create in response, extensions of their bodies to put distance between attacker and target. Coming together from all around, the gravediggers amassed their stone knives and spears of bone and wood, tipped with sharpened flint heads. Tools that the daydreamers could manipulate in their mouths, even if they could not build them from scratch. And a secret weapon the enemy would never expect.

The ethics of war can be as grey as they come, and the morality of exterminating a species was an uncomfortable one that went against the philanthropic beliefs of the sea-gravediggers. But the gravediggers were still a pragmatic lot - it was their new allies that were the philosophers. With the times clearly changing things, their behavior would need to adapt along with the circumstances. The warmonger’s calculated attempt to destroy other species was different from the natural predator and prey balance; it was a corruption, and therefore something they were obliged to oppose for the sake of everyone’s survival, including their own.

~~~

Though this was true, in a world of grey morality it was also an oversimplification, as the warmongers were an entire cultural and ethnic group of the most diverse and widespread sapient species ever to live on Serina. They, too, were people, and forged from generations of struggles, a great many of them were only seeking to survive in the only way they felt was open to them. Desperation for long enough can lead the most civilized to depravity, especially when one is only trying to protect and raise their young. Living beneath the watch of a modern dictator with her own goals, isolated from outside influence, and collectively forged from a parent culture that forced their ancestors to kill their own children, the warmongers themselves had a tough lot in life to contend with. Trapped and knowing only a single way of life, beneath their homogeneous exterior there were people among their ranks and held under their rule who would do anything for a way out, if only one were to exist.

During the first battle, those who sought a better life were given a glimpse of an alternative path before their very eyes. Though their perspective was limited, they saw different daydreamers (including big-toothed ones) and strange talking walkers working as one, helping one another, something that they didn’t believe possible because it had never been demonstrated. They saw the personhood and humaneness of their enemy even as they fought them, viewing them as more than a faceless threat or something distant and detached that would stop the ever-aching pains of hunger that plagued them day after day. They cared for their own too. Behind the battle lines, and even in the midst of it, some warmongers grappled with the reality of their situations, of their behavior, of what was being expected of them by the matriarch… and for what? To perpetuate an alternative reality in the face of damning evidence? Could there be any stronger evidence that your path is the wayward one than for the gods themselves to come down and guide your enemies and not you?

To keep their own young alive, they were killing the young of others. They had accepted this as a necessary fact of life since ages long ago. But clearly it needn’t be like this any longer, for somehow they had found another way, one that didn’t involve killing other people to make ends meet for their own. They were many and they were healthy, their children growing safe and free of worry… until we came. Fighting and killing tooth and nail is what animals must do every day… but did it have to be this way for people, too?

~~~

The matriarch didn’t share her worries with anyone else, for she was smart and knew that if she did, she knew would be done. So she pushed her concerns and self-doubts deep down inside herself, to a place where she hoped she would forget them, and she initiated the second charge. She still commanded more than a thousand of the sea’s most formidable apex predators, and she hoped they would remain loyal to her and their doctrine. If they followed her, she assured them they would find prey, prosperity, and power. Her most loyal followers surged forward, willing to die for the cause, but their allied motley crew of enemies were waiting for them with evil things they couldn’t comprehend. Like skeletons woken from their resting places, the armored fishers and pastoralists appeared from the shadows, their forms hidden beneath stark white plates and bones that blocked the killing force of the warmonger’s jaws.

Tiny and nimble ghosts swam laps around hulking ogres. They worked against the enemy in teams, one keeping the gnashing jaws’ attention while the other got behind, swung their head sideways and impaled their foes with their god-given weapons. Huge forms wailed, and the sea seemed to boil as they thrashed in vain to dislodge the stick that poked out of their necks. But even if they broke it away and freed themselves, the warmongers so stricken were already out of luck. They struggled only for a few moments before it set in. Their body movements reduced to frantic twitching and then all but ceased as they slowly sank helpless to the sea bed. But they weren’t dead - not yet, as their eyes still saw what went on above them. The soldiers that were hit remained cognizant as the mysterious weapons of their foes rendered them paralytic, even as they were left helpless to fight, to flee… to reach the surface… to breath. They could do nothing but lie there, floating like a carcass in the water, as their fellows met the same fates, until their lungs ached with desperation for oxygen. As their bodies shut down they still comprehended every moment of their lingering deaths.

They had been poisoned. Earlier that day, gravediggers had dipped the spear-heads now stuck in their hides into a mixture of a fine white powder contained within earthen vessels they brought from their homes. The powder was made from the fire-dried skins of a locally abundant land animal - the fireslime lumpus - a tribbet whose defensive skin secretions burned like fire if only touched and caused rapid paralysis of nerves if internalized, causing suffocation and death. The gravediggers had learned centuries beforehand to use this land creature’s deadly defenses to quickly subdue large aquatic prey, as though the sea had its fair share of poisonous organisms and so many animals there had some innate immunity to aquatic toxins, nothing found at sea would have ever come across this toxic chemical weapon. The toxic mixture was water soluble, but when the tip of the dipped spear was then covered lightly in clay it formed a protective surface that had prevented the poison from dissolving as the allied daydreamers waited for the time to strike. And when that time came the weapon worked as intended, though the warmongers were unfortunately so large and so adapted to survive without breathing for long periods that a single dose was insufficient to kill them immediately. It took as long as half an hour for them to asphyxiate after their lungs became paralyzed.

For the allies however this worked in their favor, as the following soldiers' will to fight was markedly reduced as they watched all of those leading the front collapse in seizures and slowly drown, and the army began to balk as the bodies ahead piled up in the water and began to draw the attention of the swarms of scavenging sharkbirds and other creatures that picked flesh from their helpless comrades that could no longer even cry out for aid. The gravediggers, normally so empathetic, now felt curiously little sympathy even as word spread back to them that the warmongers lay slowly dying in droves. For they had never before been in the position of war. They were now merely defending their lives and their livelihoods against a proven threat. Everything was justified, and so to them contributing to the effort was simply another of life’s unglamorous necessary actions. They found it worryingly easy to disassociate the enemy as some outside force, being outside the battle lines, and so to disregard their welfare. They cheered at the news. Yet to the daydreamers on the front lines of the battle the sight, even of their enemies, choking and dying all around was difficult to endure. Left defenseless and utterly helpless, the eyes of their enemies met their own as the light slowly left them, and they saw the fear and pain and terror in them. They saw themselves in them. As the adrenaline cleared, and the water turned red, the fishers and pastoralists alike found themselves abhorred. How would they be any better than those whose lives they were destroying if they took pleasure in this atrocity? For there was no glory in this.

The warmongers too were horrified at what they had been faced with, as they made their retreat and the second battle drew to a close that evening with one side clearly prevailing. All of those most strongly devoted to the cause were now the first to die… except for the matriarch, who had waited far behind and out of danger as her people were pushed ahead as cannon fodder to further her agenda. She found herself now surrounded by a dispirited army, with her most rabid defenders left catatonic and choking on their own blood, an act of divine retribution that made an example for all to see of what awaited those who went against the will of the Creator. She was old but far from stupid, and she knew that all of her prior-laid plans were now done. It was time to switch gears, quickly, to maintain order with what remained of her people. They would come up with a new plan. They would survive, as they always had. And she would still find a way to lead them to the prosperous life they all sought.

But by now her people had heard it all before and most were tired of listening. For the matriarch could talk circles around them all, but what else had she accomplished? Hundreds of them had died to fulfill her dreams, and were survived by angry, bereaved family members. A unified army became an angry mob, and neither the fishers or the pastoralists on the other side were the enemy at that moment. Jaws gnashed and a coordinated pack closed in around her. Liar. Bastard. Traitor. Murderer, they called her. The old leader knew well that she had already fallen from power. All of her allies dead, she would be the next if she stuck around. So she fled, the jaws of her former people snapping at her flippers. She would become a wanderer like those she so despised. Isolation and hunger for the rest of her days would be a more just end than they could give her right now with their jaws.

For one though the pain was too strong to let go so easily. A widow who had just watched her mate forced to the front lines against his will by a power-hungry liar, only to die before her eyes and leave their child behind. She picked up a broken stick from the seabed, a spear whose point was still embedded in a nearby body, and she followed the exiled matriarch for a long distance in the darkening waters sticking to her left side so as to hide in the shadow of her blind eye. And when the leader rose to take a breath, she charged. Using the stick as an extension of her own jaws, she channeled all of her rage, and jammed it like a fang deep into the socket of her former leader's right eye with all of the force she could muster.

As her victim’s furious bellows filled the sea along with her blood, the fallen soldier’s mate retreated back to what remained of her family. Their future was now as uncertain as ever, but there would always be hope for light at the end of this tunnel. The matriarch though would never see light again.