Mayor Murdoc takes the Settler's flask and, lacking tongs, ties the lanyard around an arrowhead. He carefully approaches the pool and, noticing no symptoms other than an unexpected heat coming off the stuff, quickly scoops as much as he can get into the flask and backs off. A leather-gloved Serf quickly forces a cork into the thing, then removes the glove, turns it inside out, and ties it tightly over the mouth of the flask. Another Settler produces a thick wool handkerchief to wrap it with, seeing as it's smeared with a demigod's blood and uncomfortably warm. An empty backpack is proffered to carry it in, which a steel-cuirassed Settler soldier cautiously wears.
The group continues on their way, watching the remains of the mushroom cloud dissipate into the upper layers of the sky, attenuating into the preexisting clouds until the sky goes entirely somber gray.
Another half-hour's walk through increasingly charred low brush and lichen-spattered rocks reaches the front of the mountain. The entire front-piece into and around which the fort's defenses were built has collapsed, leaving a pile of rubble at least sixty meters high where it meets the remaining rock face and smeared out through several breaches in the walls. Other small rock slides dot the hills. The surface farms are a smouldering ruin, though fortunately the livestock had been moved indoors for the night.
Closer still, and a few corpses are visible on the remains of the walls, broken and burned as the fortifications they hold.
A flare arcs up from a hollow on the far side of the valley, red light shining off the clouds for a few moments at the top of its trajectory, then a burst of sparks and brilliance. Survivors!
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Topic: If Bay 12 was a fortress Part 3: RETURN OF THE CHAOS (Read 235153 times)