The mountains were no less beautiful on this side of the skree. It was like some grand cosmic being felt like painting serenity and the vitality of life. The white caps of the mountains shifting into bare pale brown stone, then into shocking green of shrubs and the austere rich green of the pines and firs. The piercing blue sky reflected off the nearly transparent turquoise lakes, shading into a dark, royal blue as you looked further out across them. Then, for a pop of color and texture, the edges of the lakes were lined with tall, golden reeds, waiving proud purple fronds at their tips, like the tassels of spears.

Mazelton thought it was a good place to die. The Great Dusty World probably didn’t need your help at this place, but it was still excellent to be part of something so spectacular. He could see the Dusty families comforting each other, telling each other that very thing. That we were never truly parted from the dead, nor were they truly dead. Just going through some changes. The little raindrop that evaporated up into the clouds finally made its way back to the ground, and the cycle would continue. World without end. Amen.

Cold comfort to the father who had to slit his son’s wrists, so he could go easy. Cold comfort, wondering if he had been just a little stronger, if he could have held back the wagon just a touch more, if his feet stood a little firmer, would his child still live?

If the slope hadn’t been so torn up by everyone who went before you, would they still live?

The Collective formed their wagons into tight circles, yelling for everyone to piss off and stay away. The bodies were collected and cleaned as best they could, not that the Collective had lost many people compared to the Dusties and Independents. But they took each loss hard. Particularly the old man. They buried five people that night, four “regular” members of the Collective, buried deep in a shared grave. The last, the old man, was buried with them, but he got his own separate funeral service. That was Mazelton’s inference anyway, they were speaking, singing and praying exclusively in that unknown language of theirs.

Mendiluze got up and spoke. Then a few middle aged people, relatives? Spoke. Another senior, a bit younger than the one who died, stood. He picked up the stringed instrument, long necked and fat bottomed, and began to play. His voice was stronger than the old man’s had been. He too seemed to sing of the pains and tragedies of life. When he was done, he balanced the instrument in his hands and, holding it towards the old man’s corpse, he bowed. The body was lowered into the ground, and the survivors all began flinging handfuls of dirt over the bodies. When everyone had thrown at least one handful, they picked up shovels and began burying in earnest. A simple wooden stake was pounded in, the names of the deceased carved on it.

Food was starting to get short. Nobody was feasting. The division was done in a half hearted sort of way- the bodies often left intact and simply buried where it looked like they might do some good. Mazelton watched a little girl carefully transplant a sapling over a grave, lovingly patting it down and watering it from a tin cup. She didn’t burst into tears, or make a big fuss. Mazelton wished she could. But she just tamped it down, and went to cook dinner.

Policlitus was tense. The Nimu Caravan had enough food for themselves, but the rations were starting to run low for the other groups. It was expected, of course. It was a sign that they had rationed their supplies correctly. It would help getting over the mountains. But it still meant people were nervous. And nervous people didn’t always act rationally. Nimu had plenty of food. Nimu had big, strong ropes to lower their wagons. Nimu… didn’t bury anyone today. And while Nimu had a lot of wagons, it didn’t have a lot of people.

Mazelton retreated to his tent early. He figured nobody wanted to hear from him tonight, and it was a bad time to be the focus of attention. He started in on his new weapon again. This time he had proper, professionally machined components to work with, which was good, but he still had to do all the carving and polishing, which was not so good. He only had one chance to get it right, and as he kept reminding people, when heat weapons go wrong, they go really wrong. He had ordered a thin wax coated dowel from the Xia, which he used to practice his carvings. Sketching in two dimensions was one thing. Making sure you could really do it, and that it would work in three dimensions was another thing entirely.

It was easy to slip into that meditative space, letting the tools glide through the wax. You never forced it. That was one of the keys to polishing, you never forced a cut. You gently pulled along the path you wanted, and then you went back and did it again. Polishing. You really couldn’t think about other things, it demanded the whole of your attention, lest you carve too lightly or too deep. Finding the flow was something Ma children were taught long before touching a core. Finding the flow that lets work pass with timeless focus.

Mazelton carved, seeing the storm of heat that cycled through the Stone God, seeing how it left the black sun at its heart and projected outwards, bouncing off the carvings to find the best resonance, the best frequency at which to destroy its enemies. There was simply no way he could match that output, or the effortless understanding of what the most efficient ways to kill were. But he could make the output a hell of a lot higher. He could make the beam far more focused. And with some luck and a lot of care, he might even be able to adjust the heat coming out of it. Dialing in the most effective attack, rather than trying to overwhelm with raw force. And if he was very lucky, and skilled, and sneaky, he might even be able to replicate a hint of that black sun within himself.

It came down to density. It wasn't gravity pulling in the heat, it was the imbalance of pressure. The core was constantly pushing out, creating a void and the void pulling in. That was his best guess, at least. It was creating the vacuum that flummoxed him. Simply put, that wasn’t how heat worked. As heat left a core, the core just turned into inert metal. Far from a void that needed filling, the lump was much more stable than an active core.

At some point the core itself had to undergo some kind of transformation, changing from the cores he had known his whole life into… whatever that was. That black sun. Clan lore said that it was something a Ma at the apogee of skill could produce in themselves. Mazelton reckoned he was pretty good, but he surely wasn’t that good. So how to get a flicker of that art, that power in his weapon?

Obviously, he had to cheat. Nothing quite said Ma like taking someone’s power for your own, however imperfectly.

The two major problems… well the two major problems that he was prepared to address with the last weapon were the slow reload rate and the fact that he had to focus on controlling his heat at the same time as he tried to shoot. A bit like trying to juggle knives and throw them at the same time, except the knives were inside of you.

So he decided to “cheat” a bit. Instead of using core dust, he used an actual polished core, one carved and polished with a pattern of his own design. It worked together with the interior of the device, the “chamber” to borrow a term, to reflect its own energy back into itself. It energized and broke itself down. To encourage this process, the chamber had tiny ducts carved into it, gently harvesting the atmospheric heat and whatever heat Mazelton chose to feed into it. The amount collected was utterly miniscule, but, like a heat sponge, it was working all the time, completely passively. The charge just built and built until the core broke down entirely.

Every trigger pull (and wasn’t that an expensive set of parts to have milled) opened the aperture and released a storm of heat into the “barrel,” but this time the barrel wasn’t just a reflective tube. It was attached with screw threads to the chamber and trigger assembly. The idea was, if he could get the carvings just right, Mazelton could carefully adjust the fit of the barrel to control the way the beam of heat bounced down it. It couldn’t turn radio waves into gamma radiation, of course. But Mazelton had faint hopes of controlling the intensity of the ionizing radiation. Some things do a better job on flesh, but lack penetrative power. Others punch right through, but in a very narrow channel. Sometimes you want things to be a little messy.

He was very proud of his design. His father would slap the teeth out of him and send him off to the discipline halls for correction if he saw it, but… it was the skull situation all over again. There was just no pleasing them, and he would have to take pride in his accomplishments without their praise.

Well. It would be nice if Father said something positive about it. He had really tried hard. Mazelton sighed and got back to practicing the carve on the wax covered dowel. No use looking for affirmation where it certainly would not be coming from. His eyes slid over to the stock of the rifle shaped weapon. Mountain ash. Durable but bland. Was that a snub from Xiatoktok, or was he just being a cheap Xia bastard?

He spent the evening quietly polishing in his tent, practicing the cuts on the dowel, smoothing them out, then carving again. When he was sure he had a line down, he picked up the necessary tool from his roll and carved. He had come to treasure the time his hands spent on the tools. They were literally made from his ancestors. They were proof of his legacy. He knew, in an intellectual sort of way, that he could make his own tools. That a polisher’s core had a lot of virtue for making polisher’s tools, but they weren't the only medium possible. He was already faintly feeling the patterns on his own core that showed how the tools were made, and the subtle channeling of heat needed to transform them into the instruments of a master. But these were his family. The previous generations of the Ma, making one last, enduring gift to future generations, that the Ma would go on. That there would always be the Ma to restart the fires of civilization.

The noise from the camp was getting loud and angry. He put the lights out in his tent. No need to make himself an easy to find target. He carefully put away the pieces he was working on, and safely hid his tools in their padded roll. He drew his machete, still in its sheath, from under his pillow, and quietly slid out the back of his tent, trying to disturb the fabric as little as possible. He slept in the wagon, unnoticed by anyone.

No one attacked his tent during the night. When morning broke, the Collective turned up at the Nimu wagons- armed.