More flat. More endless waves of grass, gorse, spiky misery generating shrubs that actively punished you for wanting to take a walk during lunch. Waves of ticks and insects, crawling over their own dead, that wanted to punish you for days for intruding in their domain. Mazelton knew that they didn’t have the nervous system to suffer from the heat that was killing them, but he liked to imagine tiny cries of horror and misery as the insects burned up against his core. It was kind of sickly, he could admit that to himself. But there were so, so, so, damn many of them! He had started to take their insistence personally.

Mazelton wondered if that was how the stone Gods felt. Not that they seemed particularly hostile to people, compared to other things. Just… terribly indifferent. About what you should expect from a statue, he supposed.

He tried to pick apart the possibilities. It was an alien. Something from outside the planet, sent here for some unknown purpose by unknown people. It was sentient. It wasn’t sentient, just acting on the same hard coded instincts that drove insects to try and feed on him. It was a dry mind, sentient but never human. It was transhuman, some ancient core of humanity in the stone, but long since changed into something unrecognizable. Changed into something that didn’t want to recognize them.

And it didn’t care about him one little bit. He frowned and stared at nothing thinking about that. His knuckles started rapping against his thigh. Mazelton could taste the smoke. He could feel his eyes watering as he stood on the burning battlefield. His last act on this dusty world is one of sheer pointless defiance and, perhaps, a final moment of art. This is what I am and who I am and I won’t let you take this one thing. You may do it anyway, but you will do it over my dead body.

He didn’t realize that he was starting to shake. Over my dead body. And in that place, at that moment, he was OK with that. It wasn’t a trade. It wasn’t anything rational. He just moved because he knew he had to, and that every scrap of his being told him it was right. One final blaze of self, a moment of pure existence, before the sun set forever.

And God didn’t care. It saw it. Saw things he couldn’t imagine, and it just. Did. Not. Care. Mazelton’s life and death were worth a fraction of God’s attention for a passing moment, and that was it. Not even worth the energy to kill. Even a near miss from God would be enough to blow him off the world, like he was blowing the dust off a shelf. And the thing was so vast, so huge physically and psychically, that Mazelton couldn’t even resent the disregard.

It was the old riddle, or joke. “Could an ant understand comedy? Or democracy? Then why do you think we could understand aliens?” Awful to think that dry minds were more intelligible to humans because they were made, originally, by humans and for human purposes. A dry mind might not “understand” comedy emotionally, but it could understand the structure and logic of it. It could make jokes.

He couldn’t imagine the Stone God making jokes, or understanding them even a little bit. Oh, that’s a question.

He hung the Ma emblem and the trifolium in the smoke. The Stone God saw them. Was he spared because of that? Was there some link between the Stone Gods and the Ma? Or at least polishers, the trifolium was the oldest continually used symbol in the world, as far as Mazelton knew.

He let his eyes half close as he desperately tried to remember anything that might hint at some sort of connection. The rituals, dances, offerings, the history of the Clan, things seen in the depths of Old Radler, his uncles and aunts trash talking and laughing over the state of the world as they sorted heaps of cores. Nothing came to mind. The Pi clan didn’t know everything the Ma knew, but they surely would have heard something about them if the Ma clan knew about them. After all, given the size and complexity of the power system in the recovered Stone Gods, they must have consulted the Ma at some point. Even if it was just informally. His fingers were beating out a fast tattoo now, and his leg was twitching in time.

Big black sun inside the statue. I want to make a black sun in me. But our lineage, and polishing heritage, predates the Nacon by epochs. Not that it hasn’t changed in all that time, but the core is still the same. If it works in one epoch, it would likely work in the next, so long as the conditions didn’t change too much.

A capsule, a sort of life support chamber for the stone statues, kept in a safe place for tens of millennia. An unimaginably long time for humans, but a mere blink to the world. Not even close to geological time. And then there was the question of sticking it under an ocean. Very unlikely to be found by humans, but also kind of a strange place to put it. The oceans were far from static, and ice ages happened. Even things buried that deep would be affected by five mile tall glaciers passing over them. If you really wanted something untouched for eternity, you stuck it in the void. Nothing up there was going to care about a random chunk of rock. So there was some reason it wanted to be where it was, and it was going to be there for a long while, but probably not geological time.

He couldn’t think of a single blasted thing. If the Clan knew anything about the Stone Gods, he was too junior in the Clan to know about it. Besides, the existence of the Stone Gods would be kind of a slap in the face to the Ma. The Ma prioritized survival of the clan, a kind of rolling immortality for the genes.

The Clan took elaborate care to ensure their dead stayed dead, and anyone pursuing immortality got it. Generally, they were immortalized by being drowned in boiling lead and their agonized remains used to decorate dormitory hallways. One aspiring deathless, their name carefully expunged from the Clan records, had their bones replaced one at a time with glass replicas. Including the skull, teeth individually extracted, and the organs were preserved with immense care. It took a year to do, and of course, anesthesia would have been counterproductive. Eventually the whole clan was invited to a feast as the still conscious and aware body was lowered into a glass tub full of acid. Mazelton always wondered how much difference eyelids would have made. By the time the final course was served, the glass skeleton was all that remained.

Still in the Spring Blossom Dining Room, now that he thought about it. It was used as a trellis for some really lovely flowers. All pink and puffed out with pride and temptation. Ælfflæd alone remember what the poor bastard did that was so awful.

Oh. Right. Them. Mazelton looked back into the wagon, and tried to remember if he had anything good to sacrifice.

Policlitus drove them twenty three miles that day. He sacrificed another brace of emigrants to do it.

Mazelton made sure he ate just to the point where he was no longer hungry, but not full either. Any kind of lengthy contact with the Ælfflæd was draining and damaging. Fatally so, often enough. Vomiting and voiding your bowels of everything you ate in the last three days was a common, mild consequence. Asking a blessing or laying down a curse? No sweat. Well, some sweat as the narcotics kicked in or the dance rituals went on. Not a problem, perhaps. Asking specific, detailed questions, likely with follow up questions, and wanting specific, intelligible answers? Well it wasn’t going to happen, but Mazelton figured he could get something usable. For a price.

“They aren’t human. At all. You have less in common with them biologically than you do with lichen. With mold. And the body forms the mind as much as the mind forms the body. But they are sentient, and they do have wants, and we can exploit those wants.”

Who was it that told him that? He vaguely remembered some adult in a clan robe, standing outside a small offering hall attached to the school. They must have been from the Hall of Rituals, but he would have been maybe six, maybe seven at the time, so he didn’t remember much about them.

“The first thing to know is that they want respect. Why, we don’t know. Our best guess is that, since we value it, they think it must be valuable to them too. So you are respectful, or they will make you pay for it.”

Mazelton had waited until the camp was asleep, tidying up the tent, clearing a spot on the dirt as best he could. The tough grass resisted his efforts to cut it away, but he persisted. He had the motivation.

“The next thing to know is that they value ruthlessness. To yourself or others. That’s what sacrifice means to them. Demonstrate the value of what you offer with your own suffering, or the suffering of others. How much does it hurt to give it up and to get it? That’s value.”

They had missed breakfast, and lunch, and there would be no dinner that night. He carried a flimsy bamboo tray with the day’s rations on it. When he was called up, he would throw it all into a ritual furnace, before joining the others in a prayer. Next week they would do it again, but they would be allowed to substitute other food if they could find it.

Of course, stealing from the Clan, or your Clan siblings, would result in heavy punishment. But there were clanless food stores and homes and pedestrians walking and eating things from stalls just outside the walls. In fact the whole city was available for predation. If they had the guts, and the skills, to go and get it. Or they could go hungry again.

Mazelton poured the beans he had carefully stolen from the Cultist couple onto the cleared patch of dirt. They had very little food. One handful less, now. But wonderfully free of rot, and rich in heat. He had stopped by again today, just to be sure. The Insect seemed to think that she was persuading him.

He sliced the back of his hand open, quickly inserting a hollow needle into the vein jutting out of his hand. The blood flowed in a steady trickle, as he drew a generous circle around the offering.

“The third thing is the form of the rituals- we don’t know why doing it one way works and not others. We have endless theories, but we don’t know. So we do the thing that we know works. The ways we know they want to be contacted. It’s why there is a Hall of Rituals. And you need to know as many different ways to contact the Ælfflæd as you can learn, because circumstances will force you to adapt.”

Just a little drizzle of blood was meaningless, of course. It barely hurt, and did him no real harm. He kept the stream running, the hollow needle stopping the wound from clotting. The blood poured over the beans, soaking and mixing with them. Turning them black in the darkness of the tent. Soaking into the dirt.

“The last thing to know, for today at least, is that the Ælfflæd are so alien, you have to get a little alien yourself to make contact. Ritual can help, along with exhaustion, starvation, dehydration, hypnosis, psychosis, and other tools. But the easiest way by far is medicine. Alcohol is a bad choice, but if you are at the very point of death from poisoning, it kind of works. Generally you want to take one of several mushrooms or chemicals, and let them form the bridge between you and the Ælfflæd. Don’t worry about where to find them or how to make them, the Hall of Rituals carries plenty. If you want more, find one of us and we will teach you how to find or make them.”

Mazelton did find them. Fascinating stuff. The Hall of Rituals had its own classrooms and teachers, and were immensely generous with their time. Like the polishing instructors- they didn’t like wasting their time, but the consequences of a fuckup meant that they weren’t wasting their time. They encouraged him to experiment with different dosages, different hallucinogens. The remedies and healers were always close to hand, the floors lined with easily cleaned cushions. Relaxing and staring up at the endless stars painted on the ceiling as the smoke from the censer kicked in.

He had burned the last of his incense a long time ago, and many miles back. Instead, he took some of the dried mushrooms (likewise stolen from the cultists) and soaked them in hot water. He watched his blood drip out, measuring the time of his life. He thought he was getting a little light headed, but that was probably his imagination. Not that much blood had leaked.

When the mushrooms were soft enough to be chewed, he drank the vile soup up. It tasted like it smelled, like fresh auroch dung. He forced himself to chew the mushrooms thoroughly. Vile tastes spurted across his tongue with every bite and grind of his molars. This too was a form of sacrifice.

He kneeled in front of his ritual circle, letting the blood pool in the same bowl that had held the mushrooms. He slowly rocked back and forth, chanting the stations that the heat flowed through to make a complete circuit of the body. As he chanted he clenched and released all the muscles in his core, from his pubococcygeus to the back of his shoulder blades. Clench and release, in time with the droning chant, as he slowly drifted on the blood loss and the mushrooms.

Mazelton’s call was strong. It didn’t take long for the Ælfflæd to appear. He never knew if there was just one Ælfflæd that followed him around, or if it was just whichever was closest and interested. He liked to think that he had his Ælfflæd. That someone, well something, was looking over him. No good reason to think so, though.

The Ælfflæd swirled around the blood soaked beans. Absorbing the sacrifice? Nobody knew, really. Its shape flickered- a snake, a bird with a giant fan tail, a beauty of no fixed gender, or perhaps all of them. An empty hole. Loneliness. The smell of autumn leaves and the taste of your first kiss. For a moment, it was the concept of the number four and a deep blue. He had thought through what he wanted to say, but as always, the mushrooms made it impossible to get the scripted words out. He didn’t try to force it.

“Honored Ælfflæd, ancient beauty, terrible dream of a terrible dreamer. I beg your favor. I beg your wisdom. What is this, does it mean me harm, and how do I kill it?” He offered the image of the Stone God, its majesty, the halo of thousands of cycles of heat surrounding it and the black sun at its heart.

Was that a spark of familiarity he felt? Like the path from the children’s dormitories to the martial practice field. Up before dawn, feet following the tracks in the frozen earth, the feet know the way.

He saw the black sun bringing in heat, expelling heat, endlessly. He saw a great aunt putting on an exhibition, killing a prole who thought that he could fight for a spot in the Clan. She struck his heart just so- breaking its rhythm. It hadn’t stopped, but over the next few minutes, the prole did. The last thing he heard was “Have a servant burn it, it’s not fit for fertilizer.”

He saw, and smelled, a room full of young people. Laughing, drinking, roasting chunks of meat on a big iron griddle. They poured sauces over the meat, let it burn on, then ate it with relish. People were making out, others pointing and laughing and going “Awww!” There was music, but he couldn’t hear it. He just knew there was music.

He watched a tornado rip through a town. Parts of the houses flew everywhere, people skewered by bits of the same beams that held the roof up. Then the tornado moved on into the fields, shredding them where it passed, then it simply fell apart and vanished. The funnel gone with no more rhyme or reason than when it arrived.

He watched a seed sprout. One of the daily meditations the Dusties encouraged. Plant a seed, and every day, meditate and watch it grow. Nothing for weeks, and then- POP. A tiny green shoot emerges.

The images were coming faster and more jumbled now. An old, ancient, man, covered in jagged black tattoos, smoking a long pipe. “Is it the only way?” He asked. “Yes.” Said a voice. “Then let it be done now.”

An elegant woman, hair immaculately coiffed and piled high, held with gorgeous pins of gold and precious wood. Naked, boasting shamelessly with the perfection of her body, save that her left arm was missing from the shoulder and both legs below the knee. “I will dance tonight. My last-” Her voice was lost in an untranslatable word. “I will offer my entire flesh to the audience, and ascend.” She smiled joyfully, pinching her cheek and pulling up the corner of her smile.

And then the Stone God was there. In the tent with him, but somehow as big and weighty as it ever was. It knew him. Not just recognized his face but knew him. Mazelton. The man. The human. Mazelton didn’t matter to it. It didn’t hate him, or fear him, and it certainly wasn’t disgusted by him. It just didn’t care about him any more than it cared about a random stalk of prairie grass. And if Mazelton got in its way, his end would be no different than that prairie grass. It knew Mazelton had asked the Ælfflæd for answers. It knew about the Ælfflæd. They can’t save you, it seemed to say. Just run. Just run. If I kill you, that was your fate all along, and if I don’t, that was too.

“Will you kill me?”

The God maintained its indifference. It probably would. The beautiful blurred face slowly transformed into Danae. Nothing you love can last. But at least the world will be peaceful when I am done.

Mazelton woke with a start. He fell over, retching, muffling a shriek as he pulled the needle from his hand too quickly. The tent reeked of his blood.