Fiction:Tenet/History/23

=scenes from the war, ii= -- it is a contraption made of wood and iron and glass. it is stabbed into the earth, and its wheels are set spinning into motion, and suddenly all around it tenet magic flickers, falters, fails.

-- it is a medallion made mainly of copper, but incorporating many strange sigils and arbitrary materials. the soldiers who wear them swear they become luckier in battle, that fatal blows fail to connect, that their weapons are guided to weak spots and chinks in armor.

-- it is an arrow made of volcanic glass. there is an eye-watering rune scratched into the tip. tenet warriors struck with it howl and spasm, becoming clumsy and weak, as if their uncanny vigor is draining away with their blood.

-- /taboo himself fights us now/ whispers the wise man. /he has given them weapons made of stolen secrets./

-- /in the name of balance/ hisses the cunning man, /we have weapons of our own to give you./

-- they call them /demons/. they are not the shambling misshapen puppets the fleshcrafters are known to make but tall, thin things with osseous armor and skull-shaped faces. every night they emerge from the shadows to stalk silently into the cities of klavkin, and every night another helpless family is found gruesomely, nauseatingly dead.

-- they call them /effigies/, because they are strange disarticulate things made of porcelain and light, and they enrapture all who look at them with their beauty. they walk with impunity into the throne room of the haliyae king and with a touch of their staves set him alight, and all the royal court does nothing but watch, enthralled, as he burns alive.

-- they call it the shaping sickness, and the only cure is fire, even and especially while its victims still live. because even as they grow sicker and sicker, even as new flesh bursts in cancerous life from their bodies, they do not die. the omiyan learned this lesson from what happened at geisjar, which is no longer a city, but a hive.

-- they call it the thought plague, and it is not discovered until it is too late. by then, a hundred thousand are dead and dying with a word on their tongues. the word is a virus. it kills the mind. to hear it is to be infected.