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Save Point: The Strewn Field

February 1st, 1897, Hastings, Nebraska

After the airship has exploded, taking the weapon with it, Terrowne regains consciousness after a terrifyingly infinite moment of flatline to find himself draped with flopping fragments of airship canvas, thankfully not on fire. Some of the bits he pushes aside are still smouldering a little at the edges, and there are plenty of burned patches all over his skin where his outfit is simply gone and his skin is patiently reassembling himself, but Quella's boast about the hull's layer-coating seems to have been founded in fact, the material flame-resistant and able to anneal small punctures with whatever metallic distillate she painted it.

The Dragon seems to have ditched when the weapon was consumed, perhaps out of a general consideration that the last time around things did not go so well. This time, the device having been destroyed instead of activated, the effects seem to have been much less severe and more localized, doing and undoing parts of the airship and isolated patches of the surrounding local landscape, in a random pattern of intersecting spheres. While none of them seem to have included him, he feels it was rather graceless of the Dragon to leave him merely human long enough to get knocked out and buried under the folds like a small child.

Quella herself, whom he spots over to one side after he pushes the heavy canvas away, has not been so fortunate. He crawls over closer and sits down alongside Quella's clothes, voluminous deep robes and clinging hood, now both burnt and torn to shreds enough to reveal her mostly meaningless little secret to the world, that she is in fact a female werewolf. Too late to count for anything, of course, as the razor-edged blade of a aluminium structural girder has torn her open and still tears her open, somewhere from just above the cunt-cleft to just beneath the darkened blood that trickles from her mouth-corner. The revelation of her sex has led only to an ultimate and all-too-fatal penetration.

It's remarkably hard to kill a werewolf in their changed form, with the six redundant backup circulatory organs the sethura called pneuma being located two in the upper torso, two in the lower, and even two in the upper thighs. Having backup sets of spinal vertebrae also helps. But still he is amazed when Quella stirs, even a little, because there's just nothing left.

She's practically been cut in two on the diagonal, landing back-first in total submission on the perfect scimitar curve executed by the intersection of one of the displacement spheres with the metal length of a support beam, an edge perfectly fresh and infinitely sharp.

Quella tries to say some things, there at the end, but she keeps vocalizing without making any sounds or gurgling in her own blood, and the bits he can make out are meaningless ravings. "You're yearning for me?" he thinks he hears her murmur incoherently at one point, eyes blank. "Please, no... I'm so afraid... you are so dark and beautiful!" she whimpers in confusion, quite shockingly loudly all of a sudden, and then begins to scream and arch her back.

Blood sprays all over his face, freed by her threshing. He doesn't bother to wipe it off, just wonders if maybe she saw the Dragon for the moment before it bailed and that might be what she's talking about. It is black and terrifying and beautiful, in its way.

He's about to snap her neck for her as a simple mercy, the ultimate painkiller, when suddenly she goes quite still and her eyes clear for a bit, though he can pass no judgment on her lucidity. "They say fucking... is like dying just a little... but death is nothing like..." she says quite clearly and insistently, as though presenting a profoundly rational argument in some sort of class. He almost expects her to raise one finger in solemn indication.

Whatever point she might have been trying to make is lost, however, as her last breath is gone completely. She's definitely dead now. He's just glad that werewolves tend to seize up on death, rather than loose control of all their bodily functions. There's more than enough Quella spread around the place already, without any additional help.

He wonders what to do for a while, then places a kiss on her bloodied muzzle and starts to cry for the loss of someone he never really knew, wishing that he had.

Cut Scene: The Incident

July 1st, 1947, Chavez County, New Mexico

The farmers name is subsequently redacted, but when he sees something explode and fall out of the sky one night, over his desert ranch, naturally he gets around to taking a look eventually, and then, much later, reluctantly calls the authorities.

There doesn't seem to be as much debris as there should be, though. There are scraps of cloth everywhere, strangely metallicized and tensile, that will eventually resume their shape if you crease them, and pieces of broken girders. Some of the pieces are clearly circular, like someone cut a sphere neatly out of a larger object, and then dropped it from a great height. Unfamiliar writing can be seen on some of the structural beams, written in an strange alphabet of glyphic symbols. The girders weigh like they were made of nothing, less than aluminium even, more like magnesium or something else that shouldn't be stable in free air.

The authorities, when they arrive, carefully clean up every single bit and then some, and then tell him it is a weather balloon. He is understandably somewhat skeptical of their explanation, but a man owes his great nation something and so he goes along with it, mostly. Later he hears the military have swept the entire area, have undertaken further operations at a remote location in the hills nearby, and have retrieved strange remains that barely look human, and other odd technologies and devices that shouldn't have been invented yet.

Other people take all sorts of credit for what happened that day, or might have happened. He says nothing at all.

~*~

Although he does not know it, and neither do any of the personnel who carry away the pieces in locked military storage boxes to undisclosed locations, the truth of what just happened is in fact already out there and is freely on display for anyone who cares to look, in a small museum in one of the neighboring towns. The place is not officially endorsed, it looks like a small native crafts or souvenir shop, and is run by a single elderly American Indian gentleman who was not only there, a long time ago, but has had plenty of opportunity to look into the matter to his own satisfaction in the intervening years.

In his collection are photographs of ancient rock paintings and carvings that show strange objects, some of which are depicted as in the sky and falling, or being cast, from it. There are pictures painted on leather hides, and one on a disc of peculiar fabric that would draw great attention if it wasn't for the ochre covering it, showing rather wolf-like creatures taller than a man going about doing various things. Some of the wolves have fallen and are dead, looking distinctly scorched, others are injured but okay and are involving themselves in various tribal business, causing trouble as only the children of coyote can. There is a sort of weapon cut out of a single spar of heavily oxidized aluminium, like a double spear.

Some of the objects in his collection are incredibly old, thousands of years, which only helps to convince everyone that they are fakes, a creative rewriting of history to help intrigue foolish visitors and trick dumb white guys, possibly with an eye to sale of some of the lesser artifacts that don't contribute that much to the show. The fact that he keeps prints of the photograph with the thunderbird behind the counter for sale as postcards only goes toward enhancing this conviction, although the sepia tones and colloidal process of the original clearly validate its authenticity. History turns a blind eye to the deep past in America.

His personal estimate of the situation is that the explosion of the airship somehow went both backward and forward in time, creating a strewn field of debris a couple of thousands of years wide. Most of it fell in various directions in the past, but now a largish cluster of the entrained fragments has emerged to trouble the future. Coyote will have his day.

When they finally made it to the airship wreckage, back then, there was no sign of Terrowne Kilroy, whatever he really was, or any remains of the woman Quella. There was so much less wreckage than there should be, for starters. At the time they'd assumed that the airship had merely been damaged by the explosion and had kept on flying toward an unknown destination somewhere far afield, leaving behind nothing but its fabric and some of the fallen beams, which were easy enough to push aside and bury since they weighed almost nothing and were far too bulky to be carried away from the site.

Now he wonders, though, if they merely fell a short distance forward in time, unlike the rest of the secondary debris, all of which fell backwards. The main body of the explosion has only just shown up, and he'd be willing to bet that occasional pieces will fall for a few centuries more, to confound and confuse whoever might be living here then. Which means that they might have been in exactly the right place, but early or late by just a couple of days, or years.

Either way he'll never get to ask the questions he really wanted to, but that's okay with him, now that he knows what happened, or thinks he knows. His blood brother was buried twenty years ago, in an old sleeping-bag turned shroud-cloth that he made himself from the almost indestructible material they found that had been torn from the airship hull. They'd bundled up as much of that as they could, because it seemed like a useful way to carry all the gold.

Soon he will be joining his brother for the long sleep, which is good because there's almost no gold left, now. It's amazing just how much money you can spend across fifty or so years when you do no real work whatsoever, and he would hate to spoil his streak. There'll be one hell of a surprise waiting for whoever inherits, and he just hopes that they'll have the sense to keep the collection together and not to share it with the wider public. Werewolves are very attached to their history and traditions, and he guesses that all this has become part of it by now.

End: The Age Of Black Steel