#tsv 16

Not in like, a "I want him removed from the story" way. In a "This little shit deserves every bad thing Katabasian Mason is going to put him through and I will gleefully watch him suffer" way.

Fuckin Anakin-ass whiny "But I wanna be a Katabasian and sit on the high council after doing a single mission!" bitch. "Wait you actually expect me to go convert people?!" You conceited, overambitious power-hungry little motherfucker.

The movements come easy by now.

We hack down the maypole. Splinter the carvings into fragments. We torch the texts. Smash the stained-glass windows inside the church.

Where there are prayer-marks carved into stone, we extinguish their meanings, scraping our own meandering lines and shapes to obscure the original pattern.

Nobody who comes this way will be able to make sense of this. The homes and the bodies, we burn until there’s nothing left but trophies and carrion.

And then, once all memory of the Mire-Hag has been removed from existence, we make our own marks.

Mercer and I daub the quarry-blood across each other’s faces. Our teeth bright and our eyes laughing as we praise our god and claim his prizes.

After that, we move on.

But a moment later, it’s our own soldiers in the village square who begin to shout, in panic and in anger, because the old priest has somehow scampered back into the safety of his church in all the confusion - locking himself in from the inside.

They begin hammering on the doors with their boot-heels and the butts of their rifles, because whatever he’s gone in there to do, it’d be in all of our interests to stop him before it’s too late.

They’re too late.

When the mire-priest comes out, he comes out changed. Bursting out through the church doors, shattering the wood to smithereens. Stooping through the threshold, a vast and cumbersome shape: his skin darkening and rippling like ancient peat bursting forth beneath a cutter’s turskill, veins of rancid sphagnum moss pulsing about his bulging arms. A human face still visible, wide-eyed and no longer in control, from deep within his chest.

As the Peat-Saint walks, its footsteps shed dirt. It picks up one soldier in a colossal hand - Timps, his name was. He struggles, briefly - a few gasps, a couple of feeble kicks - as the molten peat flows outwards, oozing over his skin, searing and burning as it goes. He dies quickly.

But when the body falls, it’s as wrinkled and tanned and haggard as any corpse that’s lain beneath a bog for a thousand years. The Peat-Saint marches on.

Mercer and I reach for our satchels. We find the bottle-grenades, slopping with thick liquid.  Another man is already screaming and writhing beneath the beast’s embrace.

Our anniversary lighters come alive with flame. We light the stuffed rags. And we charge.

The Peat-Saint flails, and stampedes, and burns. Our soldiers scurry back and forth to places of safety in the village square, avoiding its increasingly clumsy and desperate movements.

We circle it, and light our bottles, and we torch it again. Eventually it falls, still blazing. Its vast form crumbles, losing its shape, collapsing into earth.

After that, there’s nobody left to stop us - and we can begin the work at our leisure.

This...incredible, drifting white snow set against the polluted violet sky. And my sibling Gage and me, we’re riding into this peat-cutters’ town…What was it called? I suppose it doesn’t matter any more.

Low hillock-houses of grey brick, stooped into the bog flats to protect against the strong winds. A town hall. A kind of hunched church, crouching amongst the grand and twisted roots of a crimson lantern-tree. A place that’s survived and grown hardy here for a very long time, without ever once beginning to thrive.

The soldiers lead the approach, three armoured jeeps packed full. Our platoon were polished - once. Our bad habits have worn off on them, during our time together.

But despite their shabbiness, despite the hunting-trophies hung about their throats and shoulders and the black mark of the Beast That Stalks In The Long Grass upon their helmets, these soldiers, they still give off a certain grand impression. Like a parade coming in.

They must think that the war has started, or maybe they assume we’re simply marching through this inconsequential place to get to somewhere that matters.

There’s a maypole in the centre of the village, a stout carved thing topped with the icon of a thick, waddling mass, its peat-skin carving off into ribbons, and as the jeeps pull in and Sergeant Kipuros shouts for the men to assemble, an old priest comes running out in thick robes cowled with sheets of turf, bidding us welcome in the name of the Mire Hag.

Kipuros will pretend that he’s conducting some kind of official census. He takes notes from the priest - how many farmers are there on the village’s outskirts? Are there any worshippers who’ve left home?

Gage and I, we don’t bother trying to talk to these people.

What would we even have to say to them? 

That a senior member of the local courts, a key ally of Adjudicator Shrue, intends to use these lands for grouse-shooting - and to cultivate grouse you need to burn the peat, and to burn the peat you need a god of fire to work its will unimpeded and without contest?

How would they be able to understand that position?

Besides, it isn’t really about what they believe. It’s about what they remember.