© Brett Davidson   The Siege Of Humanity

 
By Sean McLachlan

A graphic novelisation of this story is under composition

The laughter comes low, rolling through the steep ravines of the eastern mountains out of the Unknown Lands beyond, to the Valley of the Hounds. As it echoes off the rocks it seems to gather strength. It quickens like an ancient tide as it rolls over the low foothills, before rushing on swift mocking tones through the Night Land to pummel the steel slopes of the Last Redoubt.

I stand calmly upon the Watch Deck at the apex of the Great Pyramid, also known as the Last Redoubt of Mankind, that massive fortress of steel that humanity built so many centuries ago. I am one of the Watchmen, the last of Mankind's numberless armies, who stand vigil over the poor remnants of a vanishing race. We guard against the creatures of the Night Land, the fell beasts that slink and howl in the Outer Darkness. They are out there, beyond the protective glowing ring of the Earth Current, which casts prohibitive rays on half-hidden, inhuman forms and pale, lunar eyes.

We watch, and listen. We watch the strange fires of the Giants' Kilns, and the stranger hulks that gambol around them. We watch for the abhumans, those dimly seen minions of the Evil Powers that now stalk our world, those creatures who also watch and listen, hoping that we will flag in our vigil.

They have been more active of late, slinking furtively between the shadows and the sickly red light from their mysterious labors. At times they rise up in full view, and gesticulate in an arcane and threatening manner towards the Great Pyramid, across the many miles of sable shadows that stand between us.

It is not they who laugh, who have laughed these past thirty thousand years and more, although mock us they surely do from their freedom in the limitless blackness. No, it is a more awesome entity, an Evil Power. Some say it is the disembodied soul of one of the four Watchers: towering beings of stone that stand sentinel like four sphinxes on each side of the Great Pyramid, far beyond the moat of protective energy that is the Earth Current. Others say it is some other power, never seen by Man, which controls and masses the forces of the dark against us. I have listened to the laughter, I have listened long, and I have my own ideas as to its origin.

I am not the commander of these men. The title of Master of the Watch honors another. For although I am the most respected, and by long and bitter experience the most qualified, I am not to be trusted. I am old, far older than the old men of the Council who decide who will lead the Watch. I am older even than the Great Pyramid. I am as old as humanity itself. I am old enough to remember the ball of flame that shone in the sky and was called the Sun. I remember when night was just a passing horror, always to be replaced with day, its nocturnal terrors melting away in the first warm light of dawn.

I am old, and my ideas are not those of men who have known only night and watching and listening. I am old, and I remember when men would rather fight than hide. I am old, though this body I currently inhabit is aged only eight years and twenty, and I am not to be trusted.

The laughter subsides, followed by a faint rumbling. I squint eastwards, and see a small avalanche tumbling down one of the ravines. The laughter has caused it, as it always does. Each time that unseen thing bursts forth in derision, the mountains that separate us grow a little thinner.

I look up, a direction to which those who are not Reawakened from an earlier time do not look, for it has been many millions of years since anything has flown in the thin chill air of this sunless world. I look up, and remember.