Unsleeping Patron - Foundations at Brierhold

Gideon spat a mouthful of black grit onto the grey gravel and immediately regretted it. The air had no moisture in it, only the sharp, sulfurous stink of cooling slag that coated his tongue like grease.Around him, the eleven survivors were sprawled across a flat, windswept terrace of shattered stone. The phantom basilica was gone, vanished as if it had never solidified in the first place, leaving behind only the flat imprint where its foundations had rested. Beyond the edge of the stone terrace, the grey fog hovered thick, heavy, and motionless, like curdled milk poured into a trench.”Get up,” Gideon barked, his voice gravelly as he pushed himself up onto one knee. His trousers were torn at the right thigh, revealing a purple bruise spreading beneath the skin. “Wu, get your feet under you. Don’t lie in the dirt.”Samuel Wu didn’t move for several seconds, his chest hitching in silent, shuddering gasps before he rolled onto his side and dragged his chin out of the dust.A sudden, sharp resonance echoed from the pocket of Gideon’s trench coat.Before he could reach inside, the jade-green slate the Relic of Humanity pulled itself free of the wool lining. It floated three feet into the air, its surface glowing with the burnt-gold light of the eleven English names engraved upon its face.The light didn’t flare; it expanded outward in a smooth, quiet ripple, like oil spreading across still water. Where the amber aura touched the heavy grey Miasma, the fog didn’t dissolve it recoiled. The choking soot was shoved backward, rolling away across the gravel plains in a ten-kilometer circle until it formed a massive, swirling wall of grey dust that sealed the horizon.Inside the golden dome, the air thinned. The sulfurous stink faded, replaced by the sterile, cold stillness of high mountain stone.”It stopped,” Hester whispered. She was sitting on a low rock, her hands wrapped around her torn knees. Her broken glasses dangled uselessly from her shirt collar by a thread of cotton. “The mist… it isn’t coming back.””It won’t, so long as that stone stays lit,” Gideon said, stepping toward the floating slate. He didn’t touch it. He could feel the faint warmth radiating off the green stone, a steady, low hum that vibrated through the soles of his boots. “This is where we stay. For now.”He turned to survey the eleven of them. They looked like refugees from an iron foundry explosion. Clothing ripped, faces smeared with charcoal-colored earth, eyes wide and bloodshot from lack of sleep and sheer terror.”We have no water, no food, and no tools,” Gideon said, his voice dropping into the clipped, rhythmic cadence he used when briefing his supply drivers before a night run through the border posts. “If we sit here waiting for a rescue party, we’ll be dead before the sun shifts. Gold, you were a civil engineer, right?”A stocky, thick-necked man in his late thirties raised his head from where he was scraping mud from his palms. Gold looked down at the rough, sharp slabs of slate littering the terrace. “Structural. Mostly concrete and steel framing.””Concrete’s out,” Gideon said bluntly. “We need shelter before whatever lives in that fog realizes there’s a hole in its wall. Find three men. Gather flat stones heavy ones. We build three-sided windbreaks against the rock face over there. No mortar, just dry-stacking. Make the walls waist-high first.”Gold nodded once, wiping his brow with a filthy sleeve. “I can do that. Need something to dig with, though. The soil under the slate is packed tight.””Use the flat shards. Knap the edges if you have to.” Gideon turned to Hester. “Miss Brierly, gather the women. Clear the loose gravel inside the perimeter. Check every bush or root that isn’t grey. If it glows, don’t touch it. If it smells like lilies, stay five paces back.”Hester pushed herself up, her knees wobbling slightly before she caught her balance. “And Silas?”Gideon glanced toward the far edge of the stone terrace.Silas Blackwood was sitting alone near the base of a jagged shale outcropping, forty feet from the rest of the group. He had his back turned to them, his knees pulled tight against his chest, his head buried in his arms. He hadn’t spoken a word since they landed in the wastes. From this distance, his shoulders were shivering in short, jerky twitches that looked less like shivering from the cold and more like a man trying to suppress an involuntary spasm.”Leave him be for a minute,” Gideon muttered, though his brow furrowed. He had seen shell-shocked soldiers in the barracks after mortar barrages men who stared at their own boots for eighteen hours without blinking. But Silas didn’t look shell-shocked. He looked like a man holding his breath to keep from spilling his own guts onto the stones.Gideon walked over, his heavy boots crunching on the loose gravel. He stopped three paces behind the younger man.”Blackwood.”Silas didn’t jump. He slowly lifted his head.In the pale, amber glare of the distant Relic, Silas’s skin looked like damp parchment stretched over a skull. The skin around his nostrils was stained with dry, dark crust, and his lips were so pale they were nearly blue. But it was his eyes that made Gideon’s hand drop instinctively toward his belt buckle.For a fraction of a second, Silas’s pupils looked entirely too large, swallowing the amber light and reflecting nothing back two ink-black pits set into a dead face. Then he blinked, hard, wiping his face with the cuff of his jacket, and the blackness vanished, leaving only bloodshot, exhausted brown eyes.”We’re stacking stone,” Gideon said quietly, keeping his tone level. “Gold needs hands.”Silas let out a dry, raspy breath that smelled faintly of old iron. “I can stack.”He pushed himself up, leaning heavily against the shale rock behind him until his legs stabilized. His movement was rigid, his right side hitched as if his ribs weren’t sitting quite right in their sockets.”You’re bleeding again,” Gideon noted, eyeing the dark stain soaking through the pocket of Silas’s flannel shirt.”Scraped it on the stairs in the basilica,” Silas lied without hesitation. His voice was cold, flat, completely devoid of the panic that had infected the others. “It’s nothing. Give me a pile to move.”Gideon stared at him for a long moment, then turned back toward the center of the terrace. He didn’t trust the boy there was something rotten underneath that calm exterior, something that had started the moment Silas went up those spiral stairs alone but right now, a man who didn’t panic was worth three who did.By mid-afternoon, the camp had taken a crude, desperate shape.Three low stone horseshoe walls stood against the shale cliff, built from flat slabs of slate wedged together with smaller river pebbles. They offered no roof, but they broke the biting draft that swept across the plain.The real problem arrived with the silence of their stomachs.Samuel Wu dropped a heavy rock onto the wall and wiped his sweating forehead, his eyes darting toward the distant horizon where the grey Miasma wall rolled incessantly. “Captain… we haven’t had a crumb since yesterday morning. My throat feels like it’s bleeding.””I know,” Gideon said, adjusting the placement of a capstone.”There’s nothing here,” Wu whispered, his voice cracking with a rising edge of hysteria. “It’s just rocks and grey dirt. What are we supposed to eat? The stones?””Look up there,” Silas’s raspy voice came from the ledge twenty yards above them.Gideon scrambled up the scree, his knee clicking painfully.Silas was crouching behind a boulder, pointing a long, sharp shard of slate toward a shallow gully three hundred yards away, right near the inner edge of the golden barrier.In the gully, three creatures were picking through the grey gravel.They looked like oversized, featherless ostriches, standing nearly five feet tall on thick, scaly legs. Their skin was a mottled, bruised purple, completely hairless, and through their thin hide, pale blue veins of light twitched and pulsed like subterranean rivers. They had no eyes only two flat, leathery mounds above a wide, serrated beak that crushed small slate stones with loud, wet crunching sounds.”Pseudo-abominations,” Silas murmured, his knuckles white around the stone shard. “Not full monsters. Just things the mist got to.”Gideon stared at the creatures, his mouth watering despite the sickening appearance of the beasts. Meat was meat.”They’re huge,” Gideon said softly. “And we don’t have a single spear.””They’re blind,” Silas replied, his dark eyes fixing on the lead bird as its glowing blue veins pulsed in the twilight. “And they’re hungry.”