As the violators fell on the inside, a demonstration made to the Outside.

Meyr the Grey Mother was the sympathetic fallacy made real. About the Eye of the Winds, the air thrummed. Her action took hours to achieve its full flowering, but it began simply and quietly. Valves opened around the perimeter of the cold reservoir and dumped cold air into the descending shafts while discharges of the Earth Current caused some reservoirs to flash boil. Immobile but not static, the Redoubt contained within itself immense energies that flowed through its arteries in order to sustain its life, and these were now being turned to a new task.

Down below, weather systems coalesced in dozens of levels of the Underground Fields. Fronts combined across the thousands of square miles of farmland and brought sudden rain, gales and hail that trampled crops and shattered the windows of hundreds of villages. People ducked through the rain and pelting fragments of ice to find shelter, while above, in the metal Pyramid, a sudden chill drove fog through the halls and the folk into their family domiciles. At the core of the vast underground complex, warm air was being herded by the cold fronts, and its pressure was concentrated under the centre of the metal Pyramid, up against its sealed inlet valves. Under forces they were never designed to withstand, the valves began to flex, sending alarm signals to the control halls of the Wind Masters.  They tried to open the blocked channels without success.  Unease spread among the engineers and diversions were opened, again without result.  Plans were pulled from files many ages and dynasties out of date in their drafting and so overwritten with amendments as to be almost completely obscured, but still every solution tried was stalled.  The pressure continued to build and the alarms became one continual deafening toll.

It was when they were preparing for evacuation that the valves opened at last, catastrophically, and the hot, moist air was forced up, propagating a shock wave before it that caused the air to condense and shed rain in the very halls and corridors of the Pyramid. Not one citizen remained standing. About the Eye of the Winds, black thunderheads erupted, enveloping it and climbing ever higher. Inside the arteries, which rose through a hundred miles of locks and intermediary stages in the Underground Fields pressure waves were reinforced rather than damped and jetstreams were produced that climbed at almost supersonic velocities through the eight vertical miles of the Pyramid’s gaping ducts and their branching tributaries. These channels at their extremities opened to the Outside, and through them, like an enormous living beast, the Great Redoubt screamed.

The sound of its voice was not great within the volume where people lived, at least it was not great in the frequencies that human beings could hear. Much of its energy was infrasonic, provoking other effects than deafness. Bowels loosened, glass broke, people curled upon themselves in reflexive fear. However, as the sound propagated through the smaller channels the aerial tsunami took on an audible voice: a deep, all pervading rumble that climbed the scale as it spread through the fractal branches of the network towards the outer perimeter until the million mouths that opened in its flanks shrieked with one coherent earth-shaking note. In a near-perfect circle, the shockwave spread from the spire and swept across the Land, bursting the eardrums of every creature abhuman and alien that possessed ears for scores of miles around. Organs ruptured and many beasts of just the right size and shape were boiled from within as the waves were focused by their bodily geometry and expended their energy as heat.

Moisture carried within the vented air condensed as it impacted on the cold atmosphere of Outside, creating a solid wall of sleet that split rocks and shredded flesh and turned foliage to splinters. It tore across the desert dunes, piling up abrasive dust that polished bones as it stripped them bare. The ice covering the Giants’ Sea cracked, the House of Silence shook in its deepest recesses and the grey-shrouded Silent Ones trembled with a fear they had never known before.

Only the five Great Watchers were unmoved as the sound broke over the cliffs of their faces.

The echoes of the Scream spread and reflected back and forth between the towering Walls of the World that delineated the Great Valley for hours afterwards, and in that time, it was the only thing heard save for the actions of the earth itself as lava erupted from newly pressured underground chambers. As it fell at last to silence, blind creeping things began to feed upon the living and unliving carcasses of the Night Hounds and other corporeal beasts while dark Eaters began to colonise the nearby Grey Dunes that had themselves been newly sculpted into strange labyrinthine patterns. About the Land, everything was changed, species advanced and ebbed in strange ecological tides in the years and centuries that followed until a new contingent order was established.

The Redoubt, seemingly stunned by its own exertions, darkened and withdrew in upon itself, but the Electric Circle was still lethal and no living thing dared to approach it. Internally, it recovered slowly. Its floods drained, its crops were replanted, and an emergency spring was declared. Eventually the lights of the Pyramid began to glow once more and a few wandering beasts were vaporised, for the instruction of others, by newly renovated energy cannons.

The army of the grey hominids that had surrounded the Redoubt had vanished – dispersed or dead. The survivors, if there were any, or their masters would perhaps bide their time for another more subtle attempt to seize the Pyramid, but they had lost the element of surprise and Mother Meyr had further resources yet, half a billion possibilities in fact, and more to come with every age. She was sure that they would not so insult her again. With a sigh, she let the mantle of divinity withdraw itself into the matrix of the arcology to leave her shivering and lean in her cradle. Carefully, the attendant Masquers came and wrapped her in soft velvet quilts and took her away to recover to her humanity.

Her respite was only temporary, as Galen told her, for more than one reason, and this she knew herself. Her fingers spread spider-like across the mound of her belly, all the more odd and prominent in her newly leeched frame. She carried the child of Onn, a mixed blessing for sure, but properly handled a useful resource in the long eugenic programmes directed by the various intersecting orders. She conferred with him for a while, making plans. Her voice still carried echoes of greater powers and Galen wondered if she would ever be entirely disengaged from her immortal role, of if she could be so removed without withering and dying. 

One year after the Scream, the Watchers had not shifted - but neither had they advanced. The Electric Circle still crackled its warning to any Outland being that dared to transgress. The child of Onn had been delivered to the quiet care of the Masquers, from where he would be adopted to a chosen clan. Sentimentally, Meyr decided that clan Asphodelos would receive this boon.

There was still a vaster wanting in the Redoubt however. The aborted betrothal and the Scream had been an object lesson, but it was a chastisement that raised no hearts. More was to be done.

The impetus for the ritual emerged in the Dead Cities under the subtle guidance of jesting Masquers who set up stalls and gave apparently impromptu performances of mystery plays to maintain morale as the community of the Redoubt staggered to its feet again. The motleyed dancers who emerged from the darkness with their clouds of parti-coloured fireflies might not have been able to bring food or medicine, but they brought smiles to children and confidence to adults. They were tolerated, welcomed, and then expected, and they fed this expectation. Through their networks they suggested absurdities: a Festival of Misrule and even an Exhalation of Butterflies, which had not been seen for millennia.

The allocation of resources was almost unthinkable at such a time, but even the new Master Monstruwacan found himself bowing to popular sentiment. In the Underground Fields, then, food came first, wine second, and the breeding of butterflies always, while other luxuries were put in abeyance. Families learned to live with darkness a little better and children discovered what faces they could pull with the aid of chiaroscuro when stories were told in the rationed light of their Hearth-Lamps.

The Exhalation had required the careful accounting of resources and this task fell to the Censors. Croft for one was anxious to see responsibility for major decisions shared, with the result that Galen was able to tilt the debate towards approval for the exercise with relatively little opposition. He was likewise able to force the opening of a commission on the processes of examination of returning adventurers. There were unlikely to be any more expeditions in the near future unless a close survey was to be made of the devastated Land, and Croft no doubt thought that this would be a convenient time-waster that would keep an ambitious rival occupied, but Galen found it entirely to his liking. It was in fact, a power base of his own, and one that gave the cover of discretion for his dealings with the Masquers. He also took the opportunity to inform the Masquers of the existence of such seers as Madimi, who might be useful to them. The revival owed not a little to his own mediation and he was proud in his way to be wearing a robe of amphiglaukos, the colour that appears both black and white.

Many children would be born and speak their first words before the internal power and ecological systems were ready for the great celebrations, but finally the diphaos came when the new Master Monstruwacan could preside over the ceremonies in the garlanded fields of the County of Silence where sorrow was symbolically folded into joy. “We are Heroes all,” he proclaimed, initiating the project. Galen stood only a few paces behind him in the forward ranks of the Censors.

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On the diphae the great Festival of Misrule, bright and glittering lines of painted and ornamented men and women wound their way through the halls of the cities, climbing the stairs in flaming spirals. Masquers proceeded behind a rank of saffron-garbed celebrants who swept a path for them, scattering flowers and surrounded by a flight of butterflies that were but a foretaste of the flight to come.

Girls from a million clans linked arms along the way and encircled their darling-trees, giggling, to protect them from the crush and the boy-followers. A few more mature girls did not laugh, but looked at certain boys with a slyness, at once protecting and offering with a tease the central blooms of their most intimate branching. Those in the first bloom of potent adulthood gathered in parties that swirled like eddies in the wake of the main processions, knotting and wending themselves into side halls where their collisions were more explicitly carnal. That too was all part of the ritual.

Again and in earnest, Meyr was the centrepiece. Ostensibly an actress playing a role, she was the truth concealed by the pretense of its proclamation. The preparations were extensive, so that Meyr might appear to deceive as she must: they dusted her skin with alabaster and mica so that she gleamed like polished marble; they dyed and gilded he parts of generation; lines of glowing jale climbed her legs like ivy and spread their foliated structures across her skin; they tied her hair and wove it with ribbons; on her face they placed a porcelain mask, and over this all, the cloak of covert that parted to reveal just a little of her glory. On the back of this cloak, as she had embroidered it herself, there was worked an elaborate pattern that integrated the themes of the marks on her body with the visage of Face.

The final touch of course was the placement of an emerald in her navel. A perfect, entirely flawless and unblemished emerald.

When the anointing and the robing was completed, she was presented as a confection to the populace in every city of the Pyramid. There were a hundred levels of the Underground Fields and thirteen hundred and twenty inhabited cities to the peak of the Pyramid, and over the next three years, Meyr proceeded through each of them, sleeping for one night in each surrounded by her retinue of Masquers and Mostruwacans, the latter thinking that they had contrived the exercise. Each diphaos she rose, was painted, proceeded through the halls where she was showered with the affirmations of the populace, ceremonially rekindled the Hearth-Lamp of the central square - and each evening she was elevated to the next city to begin the cycle of the previous diphaos once again.

Finally, she was admitted to galleries of the Tower of Observation, the most prized sanctum atop the Pyramid, where the Monstruwacans conducted their readings of the omens of the Land. There the Redoubt made its own demonstration, not of its sheer power, but of its fecundity. It was to be the ultimate campaign of what was being called the War of the Omens.

The Master Monstruwacan believed that this anonymous woman in her actor’s costume was a symbol, that the event unfolding was a matter of abstraction. Meyr let her smile match her mask and said nothing, performing her duties and gestures as she welcomed the other performers who were analogues of the various heroes of the counter-revolution. She stood on an open balcony eight miles above the Land, breathing through an air-bell concealed within her mask of serenity, held a chalice of red wine aloft to represent the blood of her brood, then flung it into the air to watch the droplets scattering like ephemeral stars in the light that shone from the myriad opened embrasures. Her robe of covert she opened to reveal its bright red and gold lining and at that moment the Exhalation began.

Far below, as before, valves in the arterial system of the Redoubt were opened and the currents of the wind shifted. This time the change was far more gentle, and as Meyr had tasted the air, so too did simpler creatures. For three years now the farms of the Underground Fields had been devoting their energies to the breeding of butterflies. The population boom engendered would have been catastrophic had it been allowed to continue, but it was expended in a few short hours. The perpetual storms of the arteries were calmed to mere breezes laced with pheromones which led the teeming insects from their breeding grounds under the Land and mixed them together as one vast, dense congregation over the interior sea, for once still, beneath the glass palace that was the Eye of the Winds. There they turned about in a spiral cloud, a glittering recollection of the galaxy as it had once been before the Eaters came. The manifold opened and they were led once again upwards and into the fractal vents of the Pyramid, through its ventilation system, through the sealed halls of the aviation stages at the perimeter, and finally released into the still, cold air of the Night Land.

The Scream had brought black destruction to the Land and the golden Exhalation was no less antithetical in its own way. Every available light source within the Pyramid was turned to illuminate the mist of fluttering life and to keep it warm as it spread. For a few moments, the shimmering cloud recalled the days of the Earth’s life when the Sun had shone across green and growing fields. The lesson was sharp, and the Watchers saw and understood better than any other creature. They alone apart from humanity recalled the days of light and they were reminded again of that previously forgotten reality and of its place in the hearts of humanity.

Finally, in the cold, every last one of the butterflies died, but they when they were gone their light remained. Shed scales as fine as dust coated the scoured rocks with iridescent gold for miles around. Over the years, even that sheen faded, but the Pyramid persisted, and would for ages yet to come. This, everyone knew