---Act I. ---
Stage 00
The Great North
Inue Proudfoot – December 1922, somewhere in the Yukon:
- “Tears like water flow through me,
-Sunken Eyes, they shelter me,
-Return what’s lost and banish he….”
The wind roared softly over the great plane of ice before me. Our journey was only half completed and already we had lost so many to both the cold and feral beasts. After my mother’s death to the freezing water my father made sure I took over her duties as priestess. In three sunrises I had been told many lifetimes worth of anguish, each voice full of sorrow and lost hope. I could do nothing to quench their sorrow aside from recite the first one of the great stores that came to mind as best I cold remember. Then it would be onto the next lost soul.
My mind was exhausted and I missed my mother dearly. I questioned how she could have listened to the sins and sorrows of all of our people and yet always carry herself with dignity and recite to them a cheerful parable vividly retold. I questioned how she could come home to us exhausted from her duties and still treat my brothers’ hunting wounds and also warm my heart with tales of her youth. I had been steward of this role for less than a month and already I dreaded my future. I clutched the mask of Kugan Jaad, praying she would see our journey to a safe and swift end. The roaring wind cut like daggers, I wrapped myself tighter and the elder called for us to make camp under the icy cliffs. After the winds died down, I wandered outside the camp, the nightless sky glowed orange and I felt like I could wander straight into the sun. I heard a crow cawing in the distance, it must have been calling its young to return home. A wide plane of ice stretched out before me, I could see neither crow nor any other signs of life, and yet it must have been out here. Brown grasses live under the permafrost; What struggles must it endure to poke its head through the inhospitable ice? As my mind wandered and my body grew colder from the slicing winds, I heard the ground crack below me. The large sheet of ice had begun to split! I looked around desperately for any safe footing within reach. Fear warped my vision and I witnessed a crushing void of white ensnare me; I was falling. Ice was floating in my periphery and the world was spinning. I wondered, would my father and brothers ever find me? Would I be remembered as anything but the daughter of a chieftain? My head struck a rock as I reached the bottom of the pit and darkness took me.
When I awoke, I could feel sticky warmth coating the hair at the back of my head. The pit had nearly killed me, but here underground the cutting winds at least couldn’t not find me. My step was shaky as I rose to my feet. My head felt an immense pressure and the vision I my left eye was becoming blurry. The light of the orange sun could be seen above me, I had fallen twenty or thirty feet, but as I surveyed my surroundings, I noticed something peculiar. Initially, the dark walls appeared to me to be craggy black stone of some fissure in the earth. As my spinning head began to yield, I noticed glowing inscriptions carved into the walls, and I slowly made my way over to study the strange glyphs. They swirled with bright green light, not unlike the norther lights that oft colored the sky. In my disarray, the lights seemed to be dancing and flowing along the black stone walls. Small critters danced and scampered along the walls and felt I must follow them to wherever the took me. The shapes danced in a circle along a tall and smooth wall, which I lay my hand in the center of their parade and the circled under my palm. As I touched the stone I felt as if I was flipped upside down and I fell into the stone. In utter darkness, I wept in despair as the stone swallowed me. I closed my eyes in the darkness desperately prayed for abatement.
Once hours had passed and utter despair gripped me in its indemnible embrace. I opened my eyes to a darkened abyss and was beholden to five wispy figures. The figures existence should have marked an immediate danger to my life, and yet there was nothing left for me to fear. One of the whisps reached out a hand towards me. The presence was intimidating, yet in a word: comforting. I pleaded with the shade to aid me, to free me, to protect me from this world of infinite darkness in which I found myself a victim to. The shade reached its hand into my chest and pierced my body. There was neither blood nor warmth, and as the shade retracted its hand it gestured high into the sky, standing strong as a mighty oak. The four shades beside it silently did the same. I could not feel my hands or legs, but I willed my soul to reach for the heavens. At once the whisps disappeared and I could now feel myself lying on a cold rocky ground.
I lay there a moment and I thought I heard a fox howling in melancholy. My ears perked up and I could hear voices shouting high above me. The orange sun could not be seen anymore, and yet a faint light began shining high above me. A muffled voice cried out something, again and again they cried: “Inue!”. First one voice and then many. I lifted myself up and knelt on the cold ground. Something heavy was in my hands and I looked down to see a half-circle made of glassy obsidian with a conical divot in the center. There was no light to illuminate this thing clutched in my hands and yet I could see it clearly. In the darkness I beheld a vision…. --A strong back, a distant land wreathed in storm, a terrifying war waged in defiance of gods.
I could not fulfil my role, and I wept.
The shouting high above grew louder and I could hear my dear fathers voice shouting for me over the howling wind. I called back, my voice strained and weak. In my foggy thoughts I imagined the whisps being my brothers and father coming to save me…. As I was raised up by ropes into the night sky, I did not let go of my father’s neck as he carried me back to the camp. ---
When we retuned to the village that night, my grandmother the village elder brough me before her in her tent to explain what had happened inside the cave. My voice did not carry the weight she expected of me and all the while she chided my feebleness as a poor replacement for my mother who was the former priestess… After her tirade, she calmed down and asked me to present her with the artifact. I solemnly nodded and shuffled on my knees over towards her; The fire was warm but her gaze was as cold as ever. As I removed the cloth wrapped around the stone, I heard an animal’s cry from directly behind me. I panicked and nearly dropped the stone, but as I looked around me there was no one in the tent besides the two of us. “Return!” a squeaky voice cried in out in the tongues of our ancestors. The Elders eyes widened. “KUGAN JAAD SPEAKS!” She pointed a wrinkly finger at my waist to the wooden spirit masks tied to my waist. The Raven and Fox were there as they always were, but to my surprise, a strange light bathed the Mouse-Woman mask in an ominous Indigo glow. The eyes seemed to stare at us, piercing our very souls.
I quickly retrieved the mask and stared into the eyes… My mother helped me make this mask when I was a young child, it was a crude fetish of wood and simple plaints. When performing my duties as priestess, I would wear the mask and dance for the children and recite our people’s stories from the best of my memories. As I stared at it now however, the masks eyes were aglow, piercing and full of an immense kindness and sorrow. “Return the Grain” the mask squeaked softly. Grandmother’s aghast visage convinced me that this was not my mind playing tricks on me. “The stone is cursed! You must be rid of such a thing! Take it far from here!” My grandmother cried loudly and began clutching around the room for any and every talisman and powder she could get her hands on, hurling them at my in a barrage. I dropped both the mask and stone from my hands and shielded myself from her assault; I pleaded her to calm down and to stop hurling things at me!
I recoiled and crawled back into the corner of the tent far from her, the fireplace and the accursed stone. Even now it spoke to me; though I couldn’t tell what it was asking of me. The Elder picked up the stone to throw it away, and in that instant the world went white…. The world was hazy and much like a dream I could see only the silhouette of my grandmother, the cursed stone, and the mask of Kugan-Jaad. As she held the stone aloft, white spots like snowflakes began to fall from her, rising like a could of dust into the air. Her eyes widened with horror as she screamed a horrible wail. Her mouth was agape and began muttering words that were not entirely her own:
“Grains fall like sand, plucked by mortal hand.”
“The mending of things, begins in that land.”
“Travel far across the sea, break the synchronicity….”
My grandmother’s eyes glowed and her death-wail would etch itself into my very soul. A moment later, the light was gone, and so was the elder… Her body collapsed to the floor, her spirit now far away from here….
Both my father and the other villagers mourned her loss… Though for me they held nothing but scorn. They decried me for bringing trouble to our tribe and their voices called for my exile. With tears in his eyes, my father told me I would not be able to return until I had rid myself of the cursed stone; My burden. With no choice and no hope… I began the long journey all alone….
Lance Cartridge, -December 1922, somewhere in Canada:
The cold winter winds breezed through the valley in which we made camp. I cursed the roadblock we had come up against.
I had known this road would not be easy. Fighting to change things was like walking up a waterfall. Every inch of ground you reclaim is overwhelmed by synchronous forces pushing back at you. My men had stopped counting the days since our grand campaign had begun, as there was no point in doing so. It seemed no matter what we tried, we could not stop the war that had forged us. For every suit we assassinated, and every enemy leader we brought to our side, there would be no end of other problems to stand in our way, the most ethereal of which was the population back home. Those sick bastards craved spectacle. After hundreds of attempts and hundreds of years walked backwards, we simply couldn’t not break the deadlock in Vietnam. My most trusted advisors concluded that in order to break the lock forward, we must change the landscape backward.
And so, we walked back further and further.
The details of our wars and journeys could be chronicled in a hundred novels. The more we pushed the more we discovered, and the further we got, the more we were able to change. In our own time, I had never even heard of half the wards we ended up participating in. The Giant wars, the gruesome blood-feud between British North American and the US, the Runjaw incursion. Those were easy scuffles to settle. But what was brewing in Europe during the Great war proved to be a far greater task than any we had seen before. I had gained many allies in my crusade to stop the culling, but I had lost many of the brothers I had originally fought through South-Asia with… I could walk them back, but that would undo all they had died to accomplish… I would be no different than the damned suits, smearing our progress and discarding the sacrifice… My boys deserved the rest….
We must push onward, there was still much to be done…. But now, we were the damned, cursed to this place in time… There would be no more time-walking: As it turns out, when you push against fate, fate pushes back. Action and Rection… Entropy’s a bitch...
The last grain was gone, vanished to time and it was all that damned leaf’s fault. Whatever it takes, I will make him give it back. He has to know something, there’s no damn way he could have knocked it out of my hands by some accident. The only was forward was to find that bastard and pry the info out of his head. We have enough gear, weapons and men to wage war on a mid-sized country. Those of us who were gifted with power by the Grain still maintained most of it, however diminished that power was now. Without the stone, I can’t walk back further than a few minutes, and my pool of instances was rapidly decaying. This would require careful planning and allocation of resources if we were to survive and forge the future we soldiers would die for.
Our scouts had discovered an energy source similar to that of the Last Grain. It would take a while to mobilize the whole army so me and the scouting regiment went on ahead to try to secure the artifact before any other powers got involved… It wouldn’t end like this: as soon as we kill that Canuck bastard and take the Grain back, we would do whatever it took to finish our crusade.
I lamented this to myself and the radio crackled beside me, the operator on the other end confirmed that the grain was on the move heading south towards us. I chuckled at our good fortune and make the call: “Scorched earth boys! We’ll do whatever it takes to get us back on track!” The cries of thirty thousand men echoed across the snowy valley as we prepared for war.