The Dusties had been getting ready for the renaissance for a long time. Once the Beacon was positioned and lit, things would happen very quickly, but until then, the whole thing was very vulnerable. Just knocking over the reflectors could wreck the renaissance. Not to mention an absolute fortune in cores. It must have been the life savings of the Bissetts, along with money from their coven and the Shale Snake Ridge Canton. The life savings of dozens of families. Bandits were the least of their worries. For that kind of money, blood would turn on blood.

So the Dusties had dug in and fortified the area around the renaissance. They couldn’t wall in the whole thing- just too much land. But they could cover it with guns and bows, so they built strong points around the area and bunkered up. People with spears and axes covered the roads. Open fields were broken up with spikes of wood and stretches of rope. Nobody was getting through at speed. They had two years to get ready. If they did everything right, none of this would be necessary but it was good community building. If word leaked, it wouldn’t be wasted effort.

Mazelton planted his flag and surveyed the waste to be reclaimed. It wasn’t a huge one, as these things went, a few dozen square miles. Hard to say if it was created by a weapon strike or something else. He could feel two intense plumes of radiation aways out from the canton. Pretty normal.

The location of the hot waste was interesting. Clearly the river that ran west from Ghost Lake used to pass right through here. The slope of the land all but screamed it, and the current course of the river was shallow, wide, messy and muddy. Not much time to dig in a channel, and rivers work pretty fast. So this was a relatively new waste, a few millennia old or less. Someone probably dug out an old doomsday weapon and set it off accidentally. There was nothing around here, so it was hard to imagine such a weapon being used here on purpose.

Old, old story. Happened all the time. It was a bit lucky, actually. Well, not lucky, they wouldn’t be doing this if the waste wasn’t there, but for a renaissance, you actually wanted more heat. Lots and lots of heat. Heat was just a sort of energy, and you could coax energy into all kinds of forms. With the right tools.

Mazelton checked over his weapons. He hadn’t even started the build on his new heat weapon. That would take time, but at least he had all the materials and had finalized his plans. He had opted for his stick sling, which might finally see some use, a machete and a spear. For armor, he had a padded jacket which was pretty brutal in the heat, and an ancient helmet of some composite ceramic that seemed impressively durable. It would do.

The hours ticked past. Mazelton was offered a light lunch and plenty of water, which he gratefully accepted. Shortly after lunch, the Nimu caravan rolled in.

Policlitus had no intention of stopping even for one minute- the Canton was just too small to justify his time. If they wanted something carried on his wagons, they could go to Cold Garden to book it. As his wagons rolled on down the road, the emigrants settling in Shale Snake Ridge pulled out of line and drove into the Canton. They were directed here and there by the villagers, seemingly at random, until the last few slotted into place and formed a neat little bulwark between the Canton and the caravan. Loranne calmly walked their big wagon through the gap in the barricade, then the wagons tightened up, sealing the gap. The Collective gave the set up a healthy dose of stink eye, which got worse when they saw all the bunkers and defensive positions. Once some of them got up on a ridge, they could see Mazelton standing on the edge of the waste, banners flying. He couldn’t hear them yelling, but the body language was shouting loud enough on its own.

The Collective didn’t stop, exactly, but a number of them pulled arms from their wagons and hung back. They weren’t rushing in, just… watching. In case some opportunity developed. Mazelton frowned. He had never been on the receiving end of rifle fire. The Nacon slave machine was using smooth bore weapons, so it didn’t count, probably. Using the machine as a benchmark, standing out in the middle of an empty patch of desert next to a flag was not a strong tactical position. But that was his job, right now, so he would just have to hope the Collective wasn’t so desperate that they would try anything.

The Bissetts rolled in, pulling up next to Mazelton. The aurochs were quickly unhitched and led away.

“The biomass. The dead plant stuff. Where is it?” Humble Bissette was wheezing, struggling to move. Her husband helped her stand. Walking would be near impossible.

“We buried it around the waste two months ago. No sense in waiting until the last minute.” The man who formerly had a hoe and now had a bow replied.

“Good. Good.”

A team of youngsters, supervised by the man with the bow, hauled the parts of the Holy Beacon out into the edges of the waste, and started setting it up. The reflectors went around the edges of the waste, shiny side aimed in. The parts were connected, and the connections checked. Everything looked fine. The crates of cores came out, still in their wooden boxes. It was easy to spot them- a small crate took two strong men to shift, very slowly. And there were three crates.

The attack came suddenly and silently. Mazelton went blind, hearing the shouts and screams of everyone near him. A light, sun bright and dazzling with colors seemed to be shining everywhere. He crouched down, shielding his eyes and desperately trying to sense where the attack had come from. He could feel the cores burning like a bonfire behind him. He could point directly at the heat plumes in the waste. Everything else was a ghostly presence at best. He clutched the sling staff, trying to load a bullet with his eyes clenched shut.

He got a sense of two faint clouds of heat rushing towards him, and thought he heard feet pounding on dirt. He launched a bullet in their direction, and apparently missed. The two clouds swerved, still approaching.

One of them shrieked “The Light of the Enlightened Blinds the Unclean!” The other replied “Glory!” Mazelton recognized the voices. He recognized the heat. It was the cultist and her partner. The Insect and its wife. Mazelton’s thin face contorted into a death’s head grin. Thank you for talking during a fight. I appreciate you.

He dropped his sling and pulled his spear from the dirt. The Insect and her partner kept running towards him, as he was between them and the cores. They thought he was blind. And they were right. What a pity that they had been dyed in his heat for the last few months. He could feel the tumors from yards away.

“Power and light for the Enlightened! None shall stop us!”

“Glory! Glory!”

Mazelton brought his spear into line. He lunged at the closest cloud of heat, practically an outline of a body this close. His strength gathered in his toes, then the arch of his back foot, then upward until his waist snapped around and his body exploded forward. The narrow, flat head of the spear hit something soft, there was a fraction of a second’s resistance, then it punched through. He tried to draw the spear back, but the thing he stabbed collapsed onto it, fouling it and making it so that he couldn’t clear it easily.

He dropped the spear and drew his machete. He moved around the mewling cloud on the ground and rushed the second cloud of heat. The light was even brighter, stabbing through his eyelids. The world was a blaze of red, the blood in his eyelids lit up from behind. He wondered if he would be permanently blind after this. Apparently the cultists were relying on everyone being blind to accomplish their theft. It wasn’t going to be enough. He chopped at what looked like an arm, brought up to block his attack.

Once again, it was textbook. The edge was perfectly aligned with the force of his cut, the heavy, brutal blade hacking through thin bone like dry wood. They screamed. It was the Insect, clutching the stump of its arm. He was so close now, he could see the radioactive food in its gut, see the traces of radiation swirling through its blood as the contaminated water flowed through it. The grin never left his face. It was dying. The Insect was being ravaged from within, its strength almost gone. It must be in pain. Good.

Mazelton rushed her, knocking it to the ground. He swung the Machete in short, brutal arcs, hacking at whatever he could reach safely. Once he got a shot, he dropped on her, mounted, and in a display of supreme disrespect, reversed his blade and smashed its face in. He kept smashing until it stopped moving. Until he saw its heart stop, the heat no longer circulating in its body. He was still being blinded by the light, it’s force panful on his skin.

He ran his hands over the corpse, trying to let the heat and pressure of the light guide him. Oh. Now that’s interesting… It was the Insect’s skull. He couldn’t quite figure out how it worked, but somehow the light was shining directly from the skull. How the hell had the two of them seen through all that? Also, skulls, in his expert opinion, do not shine out brightly enough to blind people. He shook his head. He had a job to do, and this wasn’t it. He took off his padded jacket, almost gasping at the sudden relief from the heat, and wrapped up the head. The sudden relief from the light made him collapse on his ass. Once he gathered his breath, he yelled.

“They’re dead. The cores are safe, the site is safe. I need someone to clear the bodies. Use long hooks, they’ve done something to themselves. Their bodies might be dangerous.”

Nobody was moving for a couple of minutes, Mazelton included. That was fine. The fight only took a minute or two, but damned if it didn’t feel like it took a lot longer.

He heard a feeble moan. The other cultist wasn’t quite dead. Mazelton groaned, picked up his machete and fixed that. He would be damned if it was going to make a liar out of him.

“Here. For your eyes.” The cloth Loranne handed him was damp and cool. They must have a deep well, or that river runs colder than he would have imagined.

“Thank you.” He draped it over his burning eyes. Most people’s vision had returned by this point, but he was still pretty blinded. The colors seemed to explode and shimmer in front of his eyes, with gray and black voids swimming through the fireworks. It hurt, and the cloth was very welcome. “How is the setup going?”

“No problems, thanks to you. We thought the Collective might rush in, as they weren’t as affected as everyone else, but the bunkers protected a lot of people’s vision. A few warning shots and they kept back.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. I’ve got to ask, Mazelton. How the hell did you manage that?”

“Fighting them blind?”

“I mean, even finding them, let alone fighting them. How is that even possible?”

“Well, the fighting bit was easy enough. You get thrown into some lightless catacombs with twenty kids your age and told that only the first three to the exit get fruit today, well, you quickly realize that you have a lot more senses than just sight, you know?”

“Your family trained you to fight in the dark.”

“The Clan,” he gently corrected her, “trains their kids to survive. And attacking at night is a beyond ancient tactic. The scum were very noisy, yelling all the time. I knew where they were headed, too. It wasn’t hard to find them. I got a bit lucky with the one I speared, but I could feel the light pressure coming off the other. That one was easy.”

“Not doing much to persuade people you aren’t an evil wizard, though.”

“Ah.” Mazelton considered that. Then shrugged. “I’ll live. They might not.”

Loranne chuckled awkwardly. “Always a little ray of sunshine.”

“Only if pressed. Only if pressed.”

“I thought you would want to keep their skulls.”

Mazelton drew himself up, and for the first time, Loranne really saw him. Not the polite, fussy Polisher Mazelton, or the sad, lonely young man Mazelton, or even the funny, kind, duck appreciating Mazelton. She saw Ton, of the Zel generation of the main line of the Ma Clan of Old Radler in all his bloody strength and fury and arrogance. The Ma clan that was so hated and feared, the mobs only dared come at them hundreds to one. The bone deep savagery that saw the Ma survive multiple apocalypses and come out strong every time.

“I cherish the skulls of people, not things.”

It took a couple of hours to get everything set up. Mazelton’s eyes still hurt, and he was still mostly seeing bursts of color, but he could distinguish vague shapes now. So hopefully this wasn’t permanent. He kept his eyes closed most of the time, on the advice of the healers. The fact that he could look directly at people approaching him even with a bandage around his eyes encouraged a healthy degree of respect. And fear. He could hear people muttering that the Bissettes had found a good Ancient.

The barriers were raised and the boundaries set. Sage was burned to purify the space, and a bundle of fine reeds were dipped in clean water, then used to flick water around the Holy Beacon, sanctifying the place. Honoring The Boundless Earth and its gift of life giving water. The Humble called out, invoking the protection of Mother Moon, and the strength of Father Sun. They were ready.

The Bissettes walked out. The Humble was too weak to walk by herself, so her husband carried her. She looked terribly small and light in his arms. She seemed serine. He was smiling, but tears were trailing down his face.

“I’m glad it ends with you. You were a good husband and a better friend.”

“I loved you from the moment we met, picking blueberries down by the stream. I loved growing up with you, growing old with you. If this is my last life, then I am blessed to spend it with you.”

“Soppy old thing. Seems we won’t ever be parted.”

“Never parted.”

They reached the beacon, and two children, a boy and a girl, placed the Martyrs' Crowns on their head, the triggers in their hands.

“Thank you.” They chorused. “We will remember your names.”

The Bissettes smiled at them and nodded. They looked over at Mazelton, and just to be safe, said, “We are ready.”

“HEAR ME! BROTHER AND SISTER BISSETTE STAND READY TO LIGHT THE BEACON. ALL STAND CLEAR AND GIVE HONOR!”

Everyone cleared back. The burst of radiation would be fatal, even with the protection of the reflectors, for any too close.

“Joyful are we. Thankful are we.” The canton shouted back. Even the Collective, up on the hill muttered the words.

The Bissettes touched foreheads, whispered something to each other. Then the world went white. A long roar rolled out as they burnt their souls, returning the energy they had been gifted by the World. The land shifted, as the cores ignited and the Beacon bounced the energy off the reflectors. The buried biological material started to break down, as did the poisoned dirt that made up the waste. The heat rippled outward, and it triggered a chain reaction. The more heat it encountered, the faster it spread and the faster the soil broke down. Hills formed, as gullies were cleaned out and firmed up. Wood and waste turned into hummus. The poisoned, radioactive dirt became primed for plants and other life. The river bed was restored. A little digging, and the course of the river would be returned to where it ought to be. Bringing life to the Ridge, and connecting it to the west. It took an hour for everything to transform. An hour, two lives, and the accumulated efforts of two villages, to heal a piece of the world.

Mazelton let his senses roll over the waste. The heat plumes had gone. The cores were just puddles of lead, now. Still in their crates, thankfully. It would be wrong to contaminate the soil again, so soon after it was restored. The land would be too hot to cultivate for a few decades, but that was fine. Nature would take it from here, slowly restoring the land to what it always should have been. The Dusties were in no rush. Their kids or grandkids could enjoy the benefits, and if they didn’t? Well it was still worth it to heal the world.

He raised his voice once more, projecting outward to the watching crowds.

“Hear me! HEAR ME! I AM MAZELTON, ANCIENT FOR BROTHER AND SISTER BISSETTE! I TESTIFY THAT THEY HAVE HONORED THE GREAT DUSTY WORLD WITH THEIR SACRIFICE, AND HEALED IT IN THIS PLACE. ALL BEAR WITNESS, DO HONOR, AND LET THEIR NAMES ECHO IN ETERNITY!”

His last duty to them was fulfilled.

“Joyful are we. Thankful are we. Honored is the name of Bissette.” The crowd chanted back. Mazelton wanted to crawl back to his wagon and sleep for a week. It had been a good day.