Halcyon's Wake: Faith
Chapter 11

Forward

The young men eventually left the campfire and headed deeper into the cave, disappearing into a well-concealed entryway in the cave floor I’d somehow overlooked during my brief wandering.

“Where they off to?” I asked Smokey.

“Down into the main quarters, probably want to play a little X-box before I head down,” he replied. “I’ll give you the fifty-cent tour in the morning - I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, to say the least. The boys will clear out one of the back rooms tomorrow for you and Beth - if you don’t mind too terribly sharing a room, that is. It’s spacious, but furnished real estate is kind of at a premium these days, I’m afraid.”

“Beth’s welcome to the space, Smokey - and I sincerely appreciate the hospitality. I’m sure I’ll be content up here.”

“Whatever floats your boat, Marine. But if you want to stay up here I recommend sleeping with one eye open and keeping the fire well-stoked. Liland has a lot of good effects, but it’s also impacted the local wildlife in ways that are a wee bit… peculiar.”

Hiro laughed out loud.

“Peculiar? I reckon that’s an understatement, Smoke. Wait’ll one of them flying, purple-eyed, squirrels comes wriggling in here looking for a snack, Zack - you’ll see ‘peculiar’ in a hell of a different light, son.”

“How so?” Beth asked.

Smokey stabbed a stick in the fire, stirring the coals before he replied.

“The Liland has had different effects on different species,” he said in a lecturing tone I knew his college students learned to crave.

“Most of the insect species - and I say ‘most’ rather conservatively, have remained the same. Some of the bees have taken on the common, purple hue, and they’ve grown exponentially in the last month. Kind of freaks you out the first time you see a softball-sized, purple bumblebee, let me tell you…” He stoked the fire to his liking then settled back comfortably into his lawn chair, as only a man comfortable in his years could.

“The bigger animals that survived the nukes and didn’t die off from the radiation have flourished in a way I didn’t think possible. I haven’t seen this many elk since I was a very young man,” he continued. “Domestic beef cattle seemed to take the biggest hit - ranches south of here that had thousands of head only have a few rangy, Angus bulls and skinny cows left. Oddly, dairy cows seem to be flourishing, constantly foraging on the Liland-covered grass and offering up vitamin-heavy, slightly-pink milk that makes the best damn butter I’ve ever had…”

“…Sure knows how to wake up a biscuit better’n any I ever had before, for sure…” Hiro added.

The light of the campfire started taking on a rather extreme, violet hue, and the flames seemed to dance much, much slower - as if the fire were somehow still raging, but under water.

“I wondered when he’d decide to show up,” Hiro gruffed.

Tendrils of flame started coalescing above the fire in the shape of a disembodied, human-like head.

Lothar.

It had to be him.

Even though I’d never set eyes on the alien, our communication on the station had left me with a definite impression of what the entity ‘looked’ like.

“It pleases me that you are both well,” the flames whispered in Lothar’s helium-tweaked bass. “Welcome home.”

“Thank you, Lothar,” Beth said. “I’d kind of thought you’d be here to meet us in person, though.”

“It is not possible. We are… held. We are… studying why, but we are held. It is… curious, and of those that are greater than us. We know not why we are held…”

“Why’d you knock my space station out of the sky, Lothar” I asked, a bit more vehemence in my voice than I’d originally intended.

“It is not of our doing. It is… interesting. It is… curious. We are… studying. We… do not yet understand.” The flames whispered in that slow-mo state of surreal, gyrating flame.

Emotion was an inflection lacking from my previous communication’s with Lothar, but there seemed to be a genuine befuddlement to his tone lending credence to his statement. Somehow I believed him, even though my sixth sense was screaming otherwise.

“You must come to us and journey to meet the others,” the flame commanded. “That has been seen and understood… it is known.”

“Where are you?” asked Beth. An uncomfortable silence lingered for almost a minute.

“It is a place known to you as Alaska,” the flame responded, and instantly I felt a compulsion and force pointing a light in my mind that dipped far off towards the northwest; faint, but a compulsion nonetheless glowing in my conscious like a closely-held memory; an internal compass showing me a destination marker almost four thousand miles distant across a landscape vastly different from what I’d known before. Piece of cake and a few hour’s time if I had a G-4 or T-38 at my disposal - but they seemed to be lacking from my cozy Sedona cave.

“Who makes the journey?,” asked Smokey.

“You are… old,” the flame replied, “but strong… we are studying. Those that have slept for eons are rising once again… we are studying. You must all journey to us… we are studying... it is… not understood yet with completeness… we are studying.”

“Keep on reading and studying your little heart out, Lothar,” Hiro quipped. “Who’s woke up that’s slept for so long? And why the hell do we have to journey all the way to Alaska?”

The flames crackled in their slow, subtle way for a long moment and the image of Lothar in flame ebbed and flowed in the rising heat, as if in contemplation or confusion.

“We are… studying. Those known to you as Nephilim are once again upon the earth… as they once were. They are… only little known to us. They are of those… greater than us. But we know them... know of them. We remember. It is… not a good thing they have awoken. It is… we are studying. It is… it is… Malathus...it is...not of good. You must come... soon...”

The slow, violet flame yielded once more to a quick, flashing dance of mesquite and pine log’s succumbing to fire; and Lothar’s visage drifted away in soft, wispy tendrils of smoke.

The silence hung over the group for a painful, long pause.

“I’m just curious…” I said, “Is there a special monthly plan I need to sign up for for unlimited campfire messages, or is that part of a stock plan I should just buy into? Don’t want to go over my monthly flame minutes...”

Hiro, Beth and Smokey all started laughing appropriately, but quickly fell into a somnolent silence.

“The sons of Gods are once again risen and walking the earth,” Hiro said into the flames, his eyes dancing in the firelight, his mind in a far away place. “I don’t reckon that’s a good thing.”

We talked of old legends, biblical lore, our encounters with Lothar and the myriad uses of Liland as the fire waned down to comfortable, soothing coals, Hiro and Smokey finally calling it a night; heading off into the depths below the grand cavern. Beth and I watched the dying flames with more than a few thousand questions on our minds, largely unspoken, but the grave visage painted across our faces spoke tomes. She ambled off into the deep recesses of the cave and returned with a huge bundle of furs and blankets, piling it up and making a nest of sorts right near my own sleeping area.

“Kiss my ass, Marine - but somehow I’m afraid of purple, flying squirrels. You get first watch.”

She was tucked beneath the furs before I had time to chuckle in response, and I sat there for the next few hours engrossed in the dying fire’s glow, wondering what tomorrow held. I reflexively played with my new blade and slid it home in it’s sheath, again and again.

Whatever it promised, I knew I’d be looking upon tomorrow with little sleep and even less comfort of confidence.

But my repeated pulls of the blade sliding home spoke faintly of confidence, purpose and finality and seemed to lull Beth away to peaceful slumber.

Fortunately, as I sat guard around the fire I slowly fed through the night, no freakin’ purple squirrels or softball-sized bee’s showed their faces. I stood vigil until the first, faint hints of morning, then crawled onto my pile of furs, giving Beth a gentle nudge, hoping Giants and figures of legend wouldn’t join the cast of my ongoing nightmares, even for what promised to be a very brief respite.

It was a vain hope, at best.

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