The Smog • South of the Bud • Solovan's Plaza

Daedalus was the given name of the man who spent most of his time upon the little plaza, south of the Bud, amongst the Smog lands, in that drowsy space with the mist and the dark skies overhead. He was the man, the preacher, and the unofficial speaker of that bubbling group, the sungazers. No one knew who he was or where he came from, though there were some theories as to his origin. Originally part of a group of five Vicars, having come back the lone survivor of a terrible mission in Panama. Supposedly it had driven him insane. Another rumor, myth amongst the Vicars in the little taverns and inns was that he had fathered a child to a human woman in Mexico, and that birth had killed both child and mother. That's the type of tragedy that leads you to melancholic hysteria. It's what turns you to God.

Whichever theory, whatever guilt. Daedalus was here. In the Smog.

Daedalus. Who roamed the roofs and spoke to the hearts of that unspoken majority. Daedalus whom they mocked. Daedalus, the man of the people of the Smog.

Daedalus who hated the Vatican, who hated the Bud, who hated Vicars. Who probably, by the sheer depth of his contempt, hated himself.

“God is disappointed in us,” He said from the rooftop. The thin man Daedalus with his thin and scraggly hair, who crawled and spidered around the roof of a tavern. He hung by the cornices, moving hostile and angular and patient like a stalking animal.

Daedalus.

He stood in this plaza with the small group of perhaps twenty spectators, Apollo saw. Apollo was coming back from his trip to Elijah, who had decided to stop here in this providence to regain composure and had hung by a low roofed tavern, loitering by the side with shade. He had heard the footsteps above, thought it rain. When he backed away to get a better view, he saw the man. His little act, his little dance.

“What’d he call them?” Apollo mumbled. “Sungazers?”

Apollo looked around the building, to the Vicars gathering with their weapons strapped to their backs and their tall necks bent upwards, staring straight at Daedalus and into the downcast sky.

“Narcissist,” Apollo mumbled. He settled by a patch of shriveled ferns, away from the small crowd. Vicars of all shapes, some still green in the eyes (which meant they were novices to the craft) he didn’t mind those. They were just stupid, impressionable kids. It was the Vicars, the experienced red-eyed ones who had begun to nod their heads to Daedalus’s speech, that had him worried. Apollo looked up. Daedalus came around to his side, he stared down at him.

They locked eyes. Apollo’s bulging forehead and his bruised lids closing slowly as he stared at Daedalus. He felt warm in his chest, dry too.

They broke off. A quick spar of glares. The madman turned again to the crowd.

“They send us to foreign lands, to work together with governments who despise, to die for people who do not believe in us. And all of you take it! You take the stones, you burn yourself alive in the annals of Hell, willingly! And they call me mad?”

He felt the words expand and grow and multiply like a parasite in his skull and he turned himself away from the speaker, hoping not to hear the words for in some corner of his heart, perhaps he was right.

He was thinking of Havenbrook. Of Purgatory too. Of his silent victory.

“Why do we persist as phantoms in this world? To hide ourselves and our war? They tell us - those white-gloved people - that we persist in silence for silence. To keep the peace amongst the normal mortals. To keep us in order, to make sure we do not stir the warmachines and industries of the modern world. To keep us in check! The aristocrats and the scientists and the Holy See himself, want of us that docile slave race.”

His voice became scratchy, his prowl upon the wood and old hay roof lending to itself that low drone beating animalistic quality. His hands gestured out, making figures in the air like an insane symphony.

"Those filthy aristocrats lie to us. Those who sleep in the golden towers of the Bud, the chosen few Vicars. Scions of God, who claim themselves right hand to heaven itself! Blasphemy. Who claimed it? It certainly wasn't God. Were any of you there when the holy finger was pointed, when He came down to touch and prod and pick these supposed few? Was anyone?!"

Apollo could see the golden towers from a distance, no fog could hold their shining figure. The few buildings for the even fewer Vicars who had, by lineage or by Pope, had risen to become the self-imposed ‘greatest of Soloman's Keep'. The chosen few.

No, no, best not agree. Apollo shook his head.

More Vicars came in different shades and waves of worship. Some, for example, came to mock Daedalus and slurred profanities at the man with rotten produce aimed at the spidermonkey. Daedalus took them, in stride. He was hit on the face with an egg. He licked the yolk off him. And, by empathy, pity, it seemed to only empower his stance.

"What's your problem?"

“My problem? My problem!” He screamed at a particular heckler. “My problem is the order, the institution we have all chosen to confine ourselves too. My problem is with the immoral and inferior men we die for. Why wouldn't it be my problem? To find no comfort, no answers, no hope in this lawless land. To slave away, to fight, to die and be eaten by demons? What life is that? No life, that's what. No, no, no. Don't ask what the problem is, don't ask why the Knights of the Rose deserve to die. Ask why they even deserved to live in the first place!”

The hecklers went silent. He really wanted to be elected, just to break it all down. A democratic anarchy. It almost made Apollo laugh. But he laughed alone.

A confliction, an audible groan of the crowd began to surface like scum. Apollo could see across their faces, quite literally in real time, the change of heart of some of the skeptics. Their cold, dry eyes, their frowns, their rigid shoulders all morphing, easing up. Some of them clapped, some of them nodded up and down in agreement. They all listened.

Contagious. Apollo had to shake, had to focus on the pain on his face and on his arm and most of all had to remind himself, what type of revolution did this madman really want?

"Oh, I’ve spoken of the elite. But what of the men who empower them? Who bolster their death grip? The men of science and arcana. What of these blasphemous heathens? Those who abandon God, those who covet His secrets at any cost. Have you seen them? The way they speak of demons and of magic and of their dark arithmetic? They’re seduced, seduced by the devil and his fruit of knowledge. I’ve seen them! I’ve seen the experiments. The unnaturalness of their relationship with Hellspawn." He screamed, jumped“And we’re supposed to work with them? To fund them with bodies and with blood? To reduce ourselves to numbers for men more interested in becoming God than loving God?”

He was talking about the Hospitallers, the Canaries as some called them.

“The Hospitallers of Elezear are godless. The Order of Holy See is godless. The world is godless.” Daedalus tiptoed to the end of the roof, his large body casting a wide shadow on the land. The mist, out of fear perhaps, going around and past him, given him that glowing ephemeral quality. Something of an angel, or perhaps a devil in disguise. “Why protect a world that despises us? Why work hand in hand with aristocrats and cold mystics?”

Apollo felt his neck hairs rise. The speech, the words were sweet nothings before, small utterances of a romantic fool. But now, Apollo could see upon the weighty figure of Daedalus, and more importantly, what the people were beginning to clap to. An excitement grew, a circle of sixty men around of which all clapped and screamed and hurrayed. A group that had squeezed out the skeptics like himself. The skeptics, Apollo, and few others, who now walked around the circle in worried pace, who watched the march of rebellion taking its first step.

There was a pulse here, the rush of blood amongst the hungry people. A floodgate, breaking open. He heard a shot in the crowd, straight into the sky. People screamed in joy at it.

"They invite the devil here, let me tell ye. Make no mistake my friends, the end times will cometh. And the Canaries are too preoccupied with the material universe to care. And the aristocrats of the Holy See are too far off with their debasement. Fucking each other senselessly! Indulging with ruthless abandon!”

The crowd cheered, laughed even.

"So what are we to do? Should we allow these blights of God to persist, should we allow them to shame His image? Should we allow the people of the world to fall to ruin?” He came down from the roof. Down to a statue of Cid, the first Knight of the Rose, the man who started this whole mess. “I ask of you to remind yourself of those times when we could still stand before the holy light of God with a bit of pride. Oh not too much, just a bit." He breathed. "When we still had the people to our backs, championing us. Guiding us. Helping us. When there was glory! Glory for God. But now?”

Apollo wanted to walk away. His legs couldn't move though. His mind couldn't stray.

“Now? We’re just janitors to a nihilist world, here to clean up the mess, and to be mocked and spat upon as we do it. To be forgotten, to be hated.” He said. “I ask of you to join me, brothers, to rid ourselves of this religion of cynicism. To prop ourselves back into the modern world, to remind everyone what the war really is about.”

Insanity, Apollo thought. That'd cause too much chaos, he reaffirmed.

But they screamed and shook the air, in sporadic repetitions like a tremor. Yes, yes, yes.

Apollo walked backward slowly, with his eyes to the madman now spinning in open arms upon the statue, he had to keep watch of him, of everyone. Apollo’s eyes skid across the horizon, from one direction of hysterical screaming to the other. He could not see an end.

Weren't there only sixty before? He thought.

There was an energy, a pressure like you’d find in the deepest ends of the sea, a suffocating thing that compelled him to stay or run. Maybe it didn't even matter which he did.

"Elect me for the First Order."

Don't ever let him near, Apollo thought.

"Elect me to take it back, to reclaim those old and lost ideals. To enforce those standards of nobility the degenerates have forgotten. To kill the logicians, to reclaim the throne for God himself. Elect me not because I want it, but because our people need it. Elect me for the First Order.”

It was a strange type of fear that took hold him. One of dismissal, one of arrogant wave-away. Apollo walked away from the crowd, nodding his head, not wanting to admit that his hand was shaking, that the ice had fallen out of his little pouch. Not wanting to admit the length and strength and energy of the crowd, the excitement.

“I don’t have time for this shit,” Apollo said.

He combed his neck hairs and scratched his head. He walked through a narrow street. Faces poked from outside, their eyes a scarlet red and vibrant green. He lowered his head and counted his steps to try and distract himself, it only made the voice behind him worse. As if in a tunnel. An infinite spiral stairway leading down.

“Freedom for Vicars, revolution for all.” The voice said. “One state, under one ideal, under one God."

And he had to shake his head and focus on the small shivers and the pangs of his injuries.

And Daedalus kept screaming, on and on, with the stiff timbre of his voice booming and looming over this little island like the cold white mist.