Pontifex Ursa – Part 9

Not going to lie.  It’s been a tumultuous week.  I’ve had a lot on my plate since this weekend, and I’m only now starting to come to grips with my new reality.  I’m beginning to make new inroads on what I do and how I do it, and most of all I think I’ll come through this better than I was before it happened.

I don’t know where I’ll end up when all is said and done.  I don’t know if the vast net I’m trying to cast will catch any fish at all.  I have no choice though: I want those fish, and that’s what I have to do to get them. I just have to keep my nets strong and maintain them, then it’s all about the effort.

Writing is one of the most unique activities I’ve ever had to describe.  It has an almost endless list of things which can be used as metaphor or allegory.  For example: Writing a book is like running a marathon, and I’ve every intention of doing both.  I intend to write a book about doing both.  It’s on my mental list, which I cultivate with care.

 It is my opinion, and one I am becoming more secure in as time passes, that writing is something that each of us compare to a different activity.  We find strength in relating the task to things we actually have accomplished or feel is accomplishable.  Grinding out a book, grinding through the edits, and then grinding through the query process is horrible.  It requires a nearly endless amount of personal fortitude, and a willingness to see things through which defies the imagination.  Doing something, anything, to ease those mental burdens just makes sense.

Going back to Wednesday’s post, I like having a lot of things I can throw at my writing career.  I need to have a lot of things I can throw at my writing career.  I’m going full steam with no prior experience, no innate ability, and no real connections or influence to leverage.  I’m starting the race in the locker room.  So I need a lot of things to keep myself from throwing my hands in the air and giving this up as a bad job.  Because it is one, right up until the instant where it won’t be.

Now, it’s time for talk about bears and popes and mechs.

Pontifex Ursa – Part 9

My face itched.  I had grown a scraggly beard for a few months when I was younger, and that was a child’s toy compared to how I felt now.  I went to scratch it, but the bandages along the tips of my fingers didn’t do a satisfying job, and to add injury to insult they sprouted fresh red flowers of blood.

Human hands weren’t really designed to accommodate claws.  Or to expand to nearly twice their original size, while growing an additional joint to maintain manual dexterity.  So they bled, and they hurt.  All in all, I was a pretty miserable sight, wrapped in bandages and itching myself constantly.  In any other place, in any other time, I would’ve been a pariah.

In the Holy Chapel of the Awakened God, I was treated with veneration, respect, and no small amount of awe.  

I had arrived at the College of Cardinals as a Kindred.  I would soon learn that not only was that the highest echelon among the priesthood, I was the youngest Kindred ever.  By a rather embarrassing margin.  To be a Kindred usually took a decade, at best.  And not all of the Priesthood could climb that high, as it had no connection to either seniority or ability.  You were either born with the ability to become a Kindred, and then spent most of a lifetime refining it, or you didn’t rise above the gneeral Clergy.

The class I was joining was nearly sixty people large, and alone among all of them I arrived on the arm of a highly attractive Priestess.  That, coupled with the private cottage granted to all the Kindred while at the Holy Chapel and the surrounding city, meant that I had been singled out for things I was both proud of and still slightly shell-shocked over.

Finding out that you’re one of a handful of people who can communicate with the Pontifex telepathically, in a population of nearly two million people is rather difficult to process. 

It made sense though, because the entire time the Pontifex had spoken to me on that fiery moonlight night, it hadn’t opened its mouth to do so.

I had been too shocked and confused to notice it, but had there not been so much happening to and about me, I would’ve found it far more alarming.  Many things about that night still seem unusual, even with understanding. 

The Pontifex, the other Kindred, and the mid-tier Priests and Priestesses had all taken turns explaining what Lilith had fought, and why she had to fight them.  I’d been given the full history books reserved for members of the clergy, and my courses at the College were significantly different from your standard students. 

Humanity, it seemed, was not as close to extinction as I had thought.  The cities and towns connected to the Holy City were not all that was left of us.  Those who had led us to the brink of extinction, those whose desire to enslave and subjugate those less fortunate or talented than they were still at large.  Not only were they at large; they were growing again.  It was alarming what the last remnants of human pre-war culture were doing, and how they were doing it. 

I stared at page after page of men and women in collars, lashed to machinery that they were forced to drag by brute strength across the irradiated wasteland.  Their food doubled as their sedative, and although it was capable of maintaining their frames against the hard labor, it also robbed them of any greater understanding.  They were human cattle, bred rapidly and used hard until they were discarded for a new generation.  It was beyond barbaric.  Even before their other atrocities were laid bare, I reviled them.  The Pontifex would not have to ask me to be a soldier defending against their expanse.  I would fight them willingly for no other reason than to set those poor slaves free.

I also learned that the enormous metal creatures were actually suits of armor, designed to allow a human being unrivaled prowess in combat, and the ability to traverse the entire globe through the air.  They were scouts, shock troops, and heavy infantry all in one neat package.  The size of their ‘mech’ was a symbol of their status as well as a mark of their training.  Even the least of the pilots was capable of laying waste to an entire city, if they were left unchallenged. 

The Pontfiex, however, had other plans for its people.  And it did not include being torched like so much kindling.

To be continued….

Mechfully,
Justin