The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic (16 page)

“Oh thank you Grandfather, that would be so neat!”
Helemia cried, and the two ran over to hug him as he crouched for them.

With their tiny bodies held in his embrace, it was easier for him to remember that they were just babies, and how much he loved them.

“Thanks Father, that’s very kind of you.  If perhaps a little paranoid.” Talia giggled as she hugged him in turn.

“Ah, you noticed that, did you?” he chuckled, a bit abashed.

“Yup.  We love you Father.”

“Give our love to Nemia too!” Mark called as Yazadril left.  “Better yet, bring her with you tomorrow!”

They returned to what they were doing before he’d come; Mark reading a treatise on the War of The Segregation, Talia and Alilia re-charging Flight and Translocation medallions, the twins trying to Move the pebble.

After another twenty minutes Reggie picked up the pebble and pocketed it as he and his sister stood.

“Not feeling anything yet?” Alilia asked.

“No.  It’s frustrating.”
Reggie reported. 
“We
know
how to do it, we know exactly how it will
feel
to do it from Mother’s memory of
her
first Movement, which is quite clear.  And we know from Father that we have the
power
to do it.  But it seems like the part of our brains that actually
does
it isn’t working yet!”

“I don’t think it’s worth spending so much time on it.”
Helemia stated.
  “I think that when we can do it, we’ll do it, and until then all this staring and concentrating isn’t going to help.  We should just check it for a minute once a day and that’s it.

“We’re going to play darts.”

A half hour later Mark realized that he hadn’t heard anything from the living room for a few minutes, and went to check on his children.  They’d thrown darts until they were tired, then simply laid down on the sheepskin throw rug right where they stood and fell asleep together.  Helemia still had a dart in her hand.

They looked so adorable that he simply stood there smiling and looking at them.

A few minutes later Talia came in and chuckled at the scene, then they picked up their babies and took them to bed.

Over the next week; the twins finished their education on general knowledge, then began reviewing it again from the beginning.  They announced that they could detect Alilia’s unborn baby’s mind psionicly, though no others could yet, and independently confirmed Yzell’s judgment that it would be a girl.  And, throwing darts became their favorite pastime.

They’d started out playing the game conventionally according to Finitran rules; throwing from a standstill, from behind a line at the standard distance from the standard dartboard, throwing five darts each per turn, and counting points to 100.  On the first day, most of their darts failed to reach the board, though they played with the lightest darts available.

Their first modification was to run up to the line and throw while running, with a motion like throwing a light javelin.  Then they replaced the board with a target of their own design; a wide plank with a crude picture of a humanoid on it.  They only counted points if they hit it in the throat, groin, or eyes, and by the fourth day they were doing so consistently.  Then they drew a face on a dried pumpkin, tied it on a rope, and set it to swinging before they threw at it.  By the end of the week they had designed an obstacle course through the small trees at the edge of the little valley behind the house, with faces painted on the trees for targets, and they ran through the trees while throwing 15 darts each of various sizes at 30 targets.  Then they stopped competing with each other, and ran the course together, practicing providing covering fire for each other.  They played in silence, without a word or a laugh or a yell until they were finished.  To those watching the activity seemed very little like playing a game, and very much like dedicated military training. 

At dinner on Eighthday of the following week, Mark voiced some concerns.  “Listen kids, over the last few days there’s been a change in you.  You seem a little grim much of the time, and you don’t smile as much.  Would you care to tell us what’s bothering you?”

The twins exchanged a glance and a burst of thought before Reggie answered. 
“We realized a while ago that everything in life has to do with the demons that are coming here.  We’re here so you and the other adults would have the time to have more children before they get here.  No one needs to work much to get their necessities here, and all the real work that gets done is all getting ready for the demons.  Researching spells to fight the demons, building defenses to fight the demons, everyone training together to fight the demons.

“And I realized that I used to have a memory about the demons, but I forgot it.  I just remembered that I used to have it.  It took me a while to remember where I got it, then I got it again.  And of course Helemia knows everything I know.”

He went back to eating like the matter was settled.

“So you’ve been upset because of this memory of the demons?” Mark pressed.

“Upset isn’t really the right word.”
Helemia told him.
  “It’s just that now we know what we’re truly facing.  I think most people here don’t really understand what it’ll be like.”

Like her brother, she went back to eating, and seemed to assume the subject was dealt with.

“Maybe you’d better give me the memory.” Mark told them.

“I’m sure you don’t want it.”
Reggie replied. 
“It’s not very nice.  I wish I hadn’t remembered about it.”

Mark considered them both for a moment, then firmly instructed; “Son, give me the memory.”

Reggie looked at him, and shrugged.

Mark slapped his hands onto his forehead and screamed, which sounded strange in his exceptionally deep voice.

“Love!” Talia called in worried surprise as she sprang from her chair to go to him.

“It’s okay, I’m all right.” he told her through clenched teeth as she hugged him, and she found to her surprise that he was blocking her from his mind.

He forced himself to relax and took a deep breath.  “I just have to walk this off for a minute.  I need some fresh air.” He stood a bit unsteadily, walked to the door, and left.

Talia watched him go in concerned confusion, then forced calm on herself, and turned to her children.  “What exactly did you give him?”

“Well I got that from Kragorram, who got it from Povon, who got it from Quewanak, who got it from Somonik, who remembers it from almost seven and a half million years ago.  So it might be a little fuzzy, which is just as well.  It would be worse if it was fresh.  It’s Somonik’s memory of the last demon war.”

The conversation paused for a moment.

“Go to him.” Alilia told Talia.  “I’ll talk to these to rapscallions for a while.”

Talia found Mark sitting beneath a tree, leaning back against the trunk at the edge of the yard.

She curled up in his lap, and he wrapped his arms around her.  She waited for him to speak.  After a few moments, he did.

“A few minutes ago, we thought that Reggie and Helemia were acting a little strange, even for them.  Now I’m amazed that they’re still acting as normal as they are.”

He paused again for a deep breath.

“You know, I always thought Somonik was pretty incredible, but I really had no idea.  He was maimed by demon-Fire in the third year of the war.  One wing and one arm almost completely burned off, half his face and half the rest of his body burned very badly.  Wounds from demon-Fire don’t heal more than halfway at best, and the pain never diminishes at all.  No one expected him to live through the night, and if he did, they fully expected that he’d ask to be put out of his misery.  And they’d have done it as a matter of course.

“He had the Healers cut off all the burned flesh, right down to what was still healthy, and Heal him as best they could.  The pain didn’t diminish any; the pain of demon-Fire is a magical property of it’s own, probably a sub-spell of the Fire spell.

“He went back to war
the next morning!
  He was thought to be the Eldest Draconian, he was their mightiest warrior, and he refused to let them down.  Everyone else was just amazed that he was alive.  They were amazed again when he chose to continue being active in the war.  No one would have blamed him if he’d have chosen to command from the rear at that point, they’d have considered it a miracle to have him there.  But he was back in the
front line
of the battle, and
the next morning! 
And it was a huge and crucial boost to everyone’s morale that he did.

“He fought the rest of that war; fifty-three more years of fighting the demons, and he’s led his people for almost ten million years through many more wars and crises since then, and always, he was the voice of justice, of peace, of reason.  And in all that time, he never let it show that he was in constant agony, feeling like half his skin and limbs had just been burned off.”

He paused again, and leaned down to kiss her before he continued.

“The kids are right.  Except the dragons, no one here has any idea what they’ll be facing.  Quewanak’s been going easy on us in the training exercises.  The demons he’s been simulating for us aren’t a tenth as dangerous and horrible as real demons are.  I mean, war is always hell, but war against real demons is another whole category of hellishness beyond war against anything else.  They make unsworn Sylvan seem noble and nice by comparison.  The demons’ favorite game was to see how much of a prisoner’s body they could eat before the prisoner died.  They’d take a little bite, then cauterize the wound with demon-Fire to stop the bleeding, then keep going.  The most skillful among them could regularly eat over seven-tenths of a prisoner’s body before it died.

“And it’s hard to fight effectively against an enemy when every part of them poisons you.  If you cut them and their blood gets on you, it poisons you.  If you step in a pile of their shit or a puddle of their piss, it poisons you.  If they spit on you or blow snot on you, it poisons you.  Hell, if you even get too close and they breathe on you, it poisons you.

“And they’re damned hard to kill.  If you cut off one of their limbs, or even two or three, it won’t kill them, and they’ll probably be back in the battle in two or three days.  Assuming that one of their own doesn’t take advantage of their weakness to kill them and eat them.  You pretty much have to destroy their heads, or more than half of their torsos, in order to kill them.  They breed like flies, and they give birth by vomiting up a few hundred tiny demons about five centimeters tall, all of whom are battle-ready a moment after birth.  They double in size every three months when well fed, and they can change the shape and configuration of their bodies as they’re growing.  They can add extra limbs, tails, wings, spikes, horns, whatever they want.

“I mean, I
knew
a lot of this already, from what Somonik said at the beginning of the War of The Founding.  And we just read about it a couple of months ago.  But knowing it is a lot different from seeing it, hearing it,
feeling
it like you were there.  I don’t know how our babies haven’t been completely traumatized by this.  It just amazes me.  Fifty-four years of the demon war, every experience of it, taken in a blink.

“I’m so worried about them now, but I don’t know what to do about it, or even if we
should
do anything about it.

“And beyond that, I’m worried for us all.  I think we’re not taking the threat of the demons seriously enough.  But I’m not sure if there’s anything we can do about it.  I don’t know that it’ll really help things if everyone knows in advance how horrible the demons really are.  Many are having a hard enough time dealing with their fear as it is.”

“No doubt that was Quewanak’s thinking.” Talia mused.  “And Povon and Kragorram’s as well, since they have the memory too.  Quewanak’s training pushes us pretty hard.  He could make it harder, and we could improve faster, but then it would start to detract from people’s ability to enjoy their lives between training.  That in turn might slow our progress.

“We have the time to train in the healthiest manner possible.  It would be different if we had less time.  If we had to fight the demons in six months it would be worth it to hurry and intensify the training.  But we can’t sustain that level of intensity for twenty four-years.

“On the other hand, the simulations of demons that we face in the training should be just as dangerous as real demons.  If we have to face less of them in the exercises in order for any of us to survive the battle, then we’ll just have to do that.  They just don’t have to be as
horrible
as real demons, not yet anyway.

“Tell me; when we faced the demons in Quewanak’s training dream, do you think they were the same as in Somonik’s memory of them?”

He cocked an eyebrow.  “Huh.  I haven’t thought about that training since before you got pregnant.  It’s like a dream that keeps fading with time.  We didn’t face demons until the last part of the training, and by then I was pretty emotionally numb from it all, and they were just distractions from the task of beating Zarkog anyway.  But yah, now that I think about it, they were pretty much the same, they were just as poisonous and tough and horrible in the training dream as they are in Somonik’s memory.”

“Good.  I remember Quewanak’s training well enough to know that those demons were bad enough.  I haven’t thought about it enough recently to compare it to the training exercises we’re doing now though.  I spend most of the exercises thinking about how well the others are doing.

“And they’re doing well, considering how inexperienced most of them are.  Quewanak allows us enough victories that the exercises are…  Well not fun, as I was going to say.  But with the joy and triumph and celebration that comes from the occasional victory, I think it’s an enjoyable experience overall.

“I’m still worried that we may be forming bad habits that will lead us to underestimate the enemy.