Great and terrible was the wroth of the caravan, and hatred of the “Pink Gulleted Shitboxes” ran deep. Many mighty and terrible oaths of vengeance were sworn. Slings were limbered in preparation for the mighty crusade to come. Everyone believed the winged enemy would return, and they would be met with holy fury.

Mazelton had way too much fun watching the show. He was nice and clean, thank you very much! Duane was having so much of a good time, he nearly chuckled.

The wagons kept winding down the mountains (up, too, on occasion.). Every now and then they lured you into thinking that you were out, that you were in the deep river valleys that made this corner of the world so rich and green. And then you turned a corner and a stony grey peak was glaring down at you. It was beautiful, but a little numbing at this point. Mazelton could taste something in the cool breezes he didn’t like. A hint of winter. Not fall. Winter. Snow wasn’t in the immediate offing, but… Polyclitus had been right. A few more weeks, or even a month- snow seemed very likely. At a lower elevation, they would probably have a few more weeks of summer, even a nice bit of fall. But up here?

They stretched their legs a bit, as much of the going was on the flatter side of things, without the tiring pressure on the aurochs who had to act as both tractor and brake for the wagons on the slopes. That night, the wagons formed up into neat circles. It had worked well for the Collective, after all. They knitted the wagons together, hung tarps where they could, and quickly scrounged up stones. Then watched the sky.

With the setting sun, the great winged bastards came swirling down. First in their tens, then their hundreds, they drifted down. They were met with flung words of defiance- and a wall of stone. They fell fast, the sheer quantity of fire telling. Not all of them though- one bird figured out that they were under attack, and retaliated.

This bird, and quite a number like it, inflated their gullets. The terrible wobbly pink balloons spoke of outrage and contempt for those literally beneath them. Then they looked down, opened their beak, and screamed back.

The noise swept out like a physical thing, shatteringly high pitched and warbling, not letting your ear adujst to the terrible onslaught. No two birds cried exactly alike, so the din was hideous. It panicked the auroch, who tried to run off despite their hobbles. It panicked the people, who desperately tried to cover their ears.

People collapsed, their eyes shaking and their sense of balance so corroded, so jumbled that walking was impossible. Moving seemed impossible, beyond curling up and trying to cover your ears. Some couldn’t hold on, and threw up. A very few hardy souls tried to throw more stones, but they missed by a mile. If anything, it only made the birds yell louder.

Mazelton was curled up under the wagon, for all the good it did. He couldn’t even roll to his knees. The sound had almost shattered his ear drums. Duane was down here too, he thought. He wasn’t sure of much right now. He just wanted the hurting to stop. No time to be discreet. He reached out to all the cores around him on the ground, and flailed for the cores above him. He could only try to haphazardly connect to whatever was floating in the sky. He struck to kill.

Well. He tried to kill. He was a mite fucked at the moment, with all the offensive power of a narcoleptic kitten freaking out in a patch of catnip.

The terrible invisible flames, driven by the ancient mysteries of the black sun lashed out across the sky. The lazy, lethal curves swept out and, upon reaching his avian oppressors, gave them heartburn. Or something. The mind breaking noise tapered off with grousing squawks and eventually- silence.

Mazelton stayed put for quite a while. Every time he tried to uncurl, he felt his head spin. He slowly stretched out one hand and grabbed the grass under him. When he felt that he had a firm grip, he tried it with the other hand. Then he carefully, slowly, uncurled his legs. He tried to dig in his toes, but it didn’t go very well. He just hung on, hoping that the world wouldn’t fling him off.

A few times, he thought it almost did.

He lay quietly for a time, then slowly crawled out from under the wagon. Duane had left already, off doing who knows what. Mazelton looked around. In a final insult, he couldn’t see a single dead bird.

Toko, Polyclitus’ general handyman, book keeper and all around useful person, had been sent to investigate the auroch situation. The good news was that they hadn’t run off too far. The bad news was that quite a few were injured. It was a busy night. Mazelton gingerly ate a bowl of noodles in vegetable sauce, and that was it. He lacked even the strength to set up his tent. He just rolled out his groundsheet, a pad, and his blankets, and slept on the ground like everyone else. It wasn’t a good night’s sleep, but it would do.