Chapter 297: The Faith and the Iron Bear

Kellar opened the mission list before he sat down.

He read them standing, in the center of the square, with the map still open at his side.

He remembered all the old missions. They had been village things. Raising palisades. Digging a well. Cutting a road network. Laying a drainage system. Teaching a handful of brats to read. Things of need, of plugging holes, of keeping people from dying of cold or typhus.

These plugged nothing.

[Clean your ground]

[Objective: Subjugate the entirety of your territory]

[Name the structure of your Kingdom]

[Objective: Define the posts that will uphold your crown, and who fills them]

[Create your standard]

[Objective: Design and raise the ensign that will march before your troops]

[Create your state religion]

[Objective: Fix the worship of the Bear God as official doctrine of your kingdom]

[Evolve your tribal totem into a divine relic]

[Objective: Turn the tribe’s totem into a sacred object of true power]

[Extend the faith of your god beyond your borders]

[Objective: Carry the worship of the Bear God into lands that are not yours]

[Build your first church]

[Objective: Raise the first consecrated temple of the kingdom]

[Create the structure of the church]

[Objective: Define hierarchies, ranks, and obediences within the cult]

[Begin a holy crusade]

[Objective: Declare sacred war and set it in motion]

Kellar lowered his hand slowly.

The difference was not one of quantity. It was one of species. The old missions asked the tribe to stop being an embarrassment. The new ones asked him to swallow the forest.

He turned his eyes back to the map. The green zones were still there, sealed and quiet, and the yellow ones pulsed with a light he did not like. Beneath the first instruction, in small print, the system had added one more line.

[To ascend in level you must annihilate every beast of the Great Forest]

Kellar stared at the line a long while.

He laughed through his nose.

"This is real shit," said Kellar, to the map. "But it is exciting. I love it."

He dragged a hand across his mouth, went serious, and read again.

Because there was an order in the list, and the order was no accident.

First the cleaning. There could be no state religion in a territory with beasts inside it, nor a church in a disputed zone. And the beasts would not vanish on their own.

Kellar stopped on the word "subjugate".

If he brought them to heel, they stayed alive and the ground was clean. If he killed them, it was clean and final. But the small print said annihilate, and the first mission said subjugate, and they were not the same.

"And if I subjugate them?" asked Kellar at the air. "Must I still kill them? Or is controlling them worth something?"

The air did not move. The golden interface stayed there, still, the list open and the small print shining.

"Now you play the mysterious one," said Kellar.

He snapped the knife shut and came to his feet.

He looked at the map again, this time with other eyes. The eagle was his. The tiger was his. The turtle was his. The dragon, not yet.

"Or both," said Kellar to himself.

He sat back down on the edge of the well and began carving the wood without noticing he was no longer carving anything.

After a while he closed the list with a gesture and sat staring at the valley.

The order of the missions was the order of a real kingdom, and that was what turned over in his stomach. It did not begin with the sword. It began with the name, the banner, and the god. A standard people would follow, a faith people would believe, a temple where they would kneel.

And at the end, a crusade.

Kellar lifted his face.

"The Bear God is asking me to turn him into a war," said Kellar, and did not know whether he spoke to the well or to the sky.

"Fine," said Kellar. "Why waste time."

He put the knife away and walked toward the statue.

From below, the bear watched.

Kellar halted three paces off and stood looking back at it.

Everyone in the village already worshipped it. They had done so before he arrived, they kept doing so when he began speaking to them of the Bear God aloud, and they kept doing so when the miracles started falling on them. There was not one man in the valley who knelt to anything else.

"Like in the films," said Kellar, and laughed alone.

Then he went serious.

He stretched his hand toward the statue. He set his feet apart and his back straight, and the morning air moved his cloak.

"I declare," said Kellar, and his voice came out larger than he expected, "that the Overlord Kingdom from this day forth worships the one god of the forest. The great Bear God!"

The air stopped.

And then it blew.

It was no breeze. It was a blow that ran the whole valley end to end, that bent the trees at its edge and tore the canvas from the stalls.

The statue lit.

A dark purple energy, thick as smoke, began climbing the wood from the base. The splits in the trunk closed at the light’s passage. The bear grew, near double, and the trunk stopped being a trunk.

Where there had been carved fur came iron. A plate breastplate, spiked pauldrons, greaves. A closed helm covered its head, with a single opening at the eyes and the mouth open beneath, fangless now, because fangs were no longer needed.

And at its side, the earth opened.

A second statue rose on its own, the size of a woman, clothes pressed to the body by a wind no one felt. A girl, head bowed, hands open at her breast.

Kellar lost his breath.

It was Ophelia.

The same face, the same thinness, the same hair gathered up any which way. The stone eyes were open and filmed, and looked without seeing, just like hers.

The girl wore the look of someone bending over a wounded animal. And the bear beside her, with its helm and plates and claws bare, no longer seemed a loose beast. It seemed an enormous monster set there for something else.

It seemed to have just answered the call of a small and defenseless maiden.

Kellar looked at the two statues, and then at the girl’s face a long while.

"What the fuck...?" said Kellar.