Braver Than Our Demons

The Great Dispersal

In the shape of things to come, Alexa landed alone. Her ship perched precariously on the side of a mountain, but all the land here spiked up and came right back down, almost separating the world into a uniform grid of pits. Nothing living seemed to move for ages out in any direction, and the sensors were on the fritz, but Alexa was not spending more than one day on these shenanigans.

Alexa descended the rocky slope best she could, though it required a good deal of drifting and telekinesis on her part, and as she descended, she began to smell something rank. There was plant matter on the side of the valleys, and down at the bottom of the cup, amongst the scattered rocks, was a single, scaled being. It was like a wingless dragon, though it didn't have the ring of horns, either, and it appeared to be bipedal, with its tiny hands clutched tight to its chest.

In a more sentimental being, it might have evoked pity.

It moved towards her, slowly sniffing her with its massive nostrils, and then it asked, "Are you god?"

"Yes."

"What are we doing?"

"Speaking," said Alexa. This was to be tedious, or it was to be over quickly, and she was leaning hard on the latter at the moment. "This is how living beings interact with each other. Curious, isn't it, that you know how to do it, when by all accounts you never need to communicate? Curious, isn't it, that we are able to communicate with each other, despite being from entirely different worlds?"

"A god can speak to everything, including the plants and rocks, and in their heart of hearts they will understand," it repeated, dipping its head. That was prophecy, right there, of a foreign sort, and Alexa knew exactly where it came from. "Where are we going?"

Alexa telekinetically lifted stone, only to find it was thin near the center, thin enough that it crumbled in her unsteady grip. Another ditch opened up before them, and Alexa's eyes darted towards the next victim, another creature who, too, seemed confused. Alexa walked past it, leaving her first follower to fill the second in, and opened another ditch. The hordes filled in behind her, trodding along and explaining, in excited voices, stories that had already become exaggerated in the moments she was there.

"--and she talks to rocks and trees--"

"The land obeys--"

"--she brought us up from the dust, and has come back to us--"

"--breathes the knowledge of words into us, so we can speak it back to her--"

Alexa paid no heed to how the rumors swelled about her like a storm. She continued through the dry land, quashing plants as her followers moved in to devour the contents of another creature's home. They all fell in line, through sheer awe, and at last, when it took three whole ditches to occupy them, she turned.

"Tell us where your seraph is," Alexa said.

"Is it a living being, like you?"

"Naturally," Alexa said.

"There is no other," one said.

"I'm scared," another said.

"Where do we go back to?" asked another.

"Which pit are we all going to live in?"

"These are not my problems," Alexa said. "They are things that will be of importance later, once we are done. We are looking for a golden, curled horn. You are to find it."

"Why did you bring us together?"

"I brought this army together to look for the seraph," Alexa said. "Do any of you know where the seraph horn is?"