Chapter 5: There Be Giants
"This world is like a bad lover to me. Every day I wake up and I get stabbed. I go to my kitchen, I get stabbed. I eat some cheese, I get stabbed. If you wanna go out you can. I'll show you the nearest town, but honestly just stay here." Windfrom says. What a sad man. Not a single ounce of ambition or hope. Nothing human about him.
I couldn't stand this. Men like these are why the revolution fails, the working people have been so beaten down that they feel they might as well not try. I get up. I look down at him. His eyes, sunken deep into his face, look up at me.
"You've had a tough life. I know the way you look at me. Someone has beaten you down, someone has taken everything from you. I, well I'm here to help you. I've seen God himself." The appeal to God always works with these folks. Religion is a commonality among the poor since God is in everyone, it gives them hope. However, when I say God, he frowns and starts to inch away from me. He's afraid.
"I-i-i don't want anything to do with God's." He says nothing more. It's odd for a man to go one minute speaking confidently about not trying to cower before me once again. I sit down on the ground with a sigh. My beard is itchy these days, too itchy to deal with fools.
"I mean no harm, old soul, the whole God thing is," I pause for effect.
"Metaphorical" He looks at me confused. We are two men sitting in a room in a desert, after almost killing each other, and yet we can't find any common ground. Where's the old love between killers.
"I mean to say, that I'll help you find revenge if that's what you want. If not I can still help you in many other ways. I have seen too much suffering to ignore yours." He's staring at me while I talk. It's odd seeing a man who's obviously never had to read someone, try to read you. His eyes fixate on the bridge of my nose.
"Friend, friend, friend you won't find my secrets on the bridge of my nose. Tell me what ails you. Who has stolen what." The words come to his lips. He's about to talk. He's about to spill his story.
"Us poor folk must stick together, Windfrom, may I call you that? Oh nevermind, who's going to stop me. Anyway, only us together can stop these oppressors, these horrible people from wronging you." His eyes stare up at the ceiling now. He twiddles his thumbs. Sweat goes down his cheek, the room is not hot.
"I've never seen a raid before you know. Well, I 'had' never seen a raid before that moment. I don't know if there's much else to say. Everyone is gone, everything is gone, and now old Windform is all alone. Do ye pity me?" I did not. The story was about what I thought. Something out there is evil. Windfrom stares out onto the sandy wall. His mind is turning, the cobwebs of sadness are being undusted from their frames.
"What should we do?" I say and Windfrom turns to me. He starts to laugh, at first a tinkle of a chuckle, and then an uproarious laugh. I see a tear however in the midst of it.
"We die. That's how this ends for me at least. I'm going to die. Whether it's you that kills me or someone else. Just leave me. If I had killed you at least I would've had something to eat for the week. Being friends? Honestly, what's the point." Hope lost. He lays down on his back and stares at the ceiling. I shift in my seat. I've lost a man.
"I might as well just end it now. I feel my blood begin to depower, soon I'll be a husk. I hear heaven doesn't reject sufferers anymore." At those words, I hear a mighty click. Like a key being shifted into place, however that key came right from Windfrom's chest.
Two seconds pass and his mouth grins at me. He mouths a word that my mother would say was not allowed in the newspaper. The air smells metallic for a second. And then…
BOOM
Windfrom's entire chest explodes in bloody glory. A small intestine is on my face as I recoil back. Blood coats the ash floor, and guts coat the walls. I retch at the sight of it, it is not the worst sight I've seen, but it is the closest I've been.
All that's left of him is his smiling face, his dangling arms, and in the center of where his chest would be a still-beating heart. I sit for a minute and stare, all that talk of friendship and now he's just dead.
I leave the room and go out into the hot desert sun. At least there I don't have to look at his corpse. I breathe in deep, it's dry out, and his blood and specks of guts still hold on to me. A man is dead, it's not my fault, but I was the catalyst.
I walk away and to the other rooms. Most of them have nothing in them. One of the rooms, most likely a now decayed storage shack, has what seems like food. Little bits of some kind of grain and bags of and bags of blue cubes that shine in the light that's streaming in.
In another room, I find a coat and two books. The cot is half destroyed from years and years of old men sleeping on it. The books are serviceable, however. I look inside them to find that they are both in some foreign script. It looks like a cross between English, Spanish, and what seems like Chinese. As I stare out onto the page, the words fall into nothingness.
Only to be replaced by, Spanish words? Words that didn't seem to be possible by the standards of anyone yet somehow. Spanish. The book was much-like an annotated atlas. Filled with places that Che had never heard the names of.
His eyes rested on the description of a giant walking metal city. He noticed an annotation not like the rest, in big bold, charcoal, it read 'pendejos.' The city walked around a place called the Stormfather's Respite. It said that this place was free from the Livingstorms of the Stormfather's Wastes.
I knew where I had to go. The book's final pages composed a map. On it is a compass, inscribed on the side of the compass it says, 'point to where you want to go'. Does that mean I should? Maybe there? I point to Stormfather's Respite. The ink on the compass swirls and points towards a different wall.
Onward into the abyss it was for me. No use staying for longer in a place like this. Survival is simply survival and I must thrive.
I pack up the bags of grain and a couple of the blue cubes. If anything they'll be useful for later to trade-in for something.
These things inside my head, they control me. Does that mean they are somehow real? Are these not just some sort of literal manifestation of Freud. I focus on my core. I focus on myself. I reach deep inside of myself and look and peer inside my mind.
The red has become a scarlet. Like the deep color of blood and The Monster itself has grown. He, and now I know it's a he, is alive and throbbing with millions and millions of little beings. He's clashing against The Man.
I knot my brows and focus. Ideas, thoughts, all sorts of things enter my mind. Take over the world? Unite the people of Northern Ireland? I take these ideas and hold them in my souls' arms. And mold them and mold them. They will become the mold that sticks together my two parts.
The soul space as I call it is somewhere inside of me but also not. As if my body had been superimposed on a copy of my body yet in this copy nothing physical happens, as far as I can tell.
However, something inside of me, deep in those nooks and crevices of my mind tells me it's important. That somehow this new thing is the key to understand all of this.
The ball of ideas is still forming in my mind. They try and poke out of the core yet I know they cannot get out. It forms at a snail's pace, I watch as little specks of ideas go onto and attach to it.
I start to get up when I hear something. I pause, I'm reminded of the horrible sound of jungle insects, and yet louder. Where is this sound coming from? Is it from the dune over there? I look. No. Is it from that one? I look. No.
I look up. Dotting the skies are hundreds of insects, each adorned with plates and plates of metal that form a thick skin-like armor. The insects have hundreds of eyes and a storm of bladed legs each. Their wings are large and scaley. And on top of each of the insects is a man.
"Master Uramesh, the Wonder-Artificer, the Twelve-Time Bloodline Saint, father of the Current Warrior God, we have come in your time of need. Where are these opponents who have come." A voice from the sky says. It's too loud to be from any one of these men. Until I realized who said it, in the middle of their formation. On an insect bigger than a building, one really, really, really, big man.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone