Another little story.
I hope that you enjoy.
There is a power in the human spirit, and the human mind, and the human will. We shape the world around us, strengthening and even creating the things that we love, hate, fear, live for and die for. Our faith created Gods and heroes, powered miracles and magics, and now... now it, like every other thing that we have, is another weapon against the Enemy.
The first indications were unmissed absences, and unheard silences. Outlying farmsteads that weren't heard from for months at a time weren't heard from for a few more. Merchants from distant places simply never arrived, and never brought word that there had been travelers that should have arrived before. Departing merchants vanished down the road, as they always had. A few of the outer villages mentioned disturbing signs, but when they didn't follow up on those reports, we assumed that everything was fine. It's a wonder anyone survived at all.
The first idea we had that there was something truly wrong was from the village of Danford. They had a phone line, a rarity for those outlying towns, and an old lady at the other end to take messages. Every Sunday at three, Mrs. Zithner's son, the carpenter, would call to speak briefly with his mother. He'd done so every Sunday at three, and three exactly, for the past ten years. When he hadn't called by three thirty, Mrs Zithner became worried, and put in a call herself. When the phone line wouldn't connect, she became more worried, and went to talk to the mayor. The mayor sent a technician to check the lines, and the technician didn't come back. The next day, he called out the Guard, and a hundred men marched to Danford. That hundred men met an overwhelming force.
Of that first hundred men, ninety dug in and fought and died, pausing that segment of the advancing tide for a handful of precious hours. Ten returned with orders to report all they knew, pushing their exhausted bodies as fast as they could over hilly terrain, firing shots wildly back at the shadowy forms that pursued them in desperate attempts to buy mere minutes. Only three of them made it. The reports they brought were horrifying, and the four hideous creatures who chased them across that last stretch of open ground to the gates were nightmares made flesh. The enemy were not men, or beasts, or any other thing of this world, but demons. They were giant, misshapen, and stinking of sulfur. no two were quite the same, and all had claws or horns or stingers. They carried whips and tridents and ugly hooked and bladed things, and they spat acid and fire and some of them flew.
There's not a day that goes by, these days, that I don't give a bit of silent thanks to those misunderstood freaks in applied theology. They figured it out somehow, a leap of intuition or lucky guess. If demons existed in the world in a real and tangible way, then the other Powers had to as well. They grabbed a lab deep in the bowels of the Seeley building with the impossible goal of turning that guess into something practical and useful over the course of a scant few weeks. Frankly, it was a foolish and desperate attempt with no real chance of success - except that there is a power in the human spirit, and the human mind, and the human will, and they were surrounded by an entire city of people praying desperately for someone to come up with an answer. They discovered that power, and why no one had been using it before. We can't do it on our own. One person's will isn't enough to do anything with. To actually get significant effects, you have to have one person who channels well, and a team of others to back them up, just believing and hoping and willing at them, to provide the threshold power to cut through the laws of reality as they are, and impose the laws of reality as you would have them be. They found that old icons had power in themselves, that long belief wore grooves in reality, and made things easier, and they found that alongside the cold and ancient myths there was a fresh godform, born from the dying age, in exploration, science, liberty, capitalism, and computers. It was tenuous, and unshaped, but it was very much there, and with circuit boards and black candles and electricity and goat's blood and stacks of dollar bills at the cardinal points they forged and channeled it into something useful. They slaved and they sweated and they built an arcane supercomputer, to route the power one to another, each to his brother, to collect it together and share it out and turn a city full of individual desperately praying souls into a giant engine of belief by which miracles might be generated, and they named that construct FREEDOM.
Three days before the demons arrived at our hastily improvised walls, we were desperate and afraid. Two days before, there was a strange electricity in the air, as if something was coming. We didn't have any idea what, and we didn't have any proof, but we started, just a little, to have some hope. One day before they arrived, the geeks in the basement flipped the switch, and turned on the speakers, and played for us the siren song of FREEDOM. The power rushed through us, and we could feel it as it ebbed and flowed. We felt the flexible shape of reality, and from moment to moment, the hold on it shifted, as each of us took up the power and thrilled in its use and laid it down again for the next to try.
In the glorious chaos of that day, we found a simple truth. The ones who channel it best - who get the most out of the least - are the people who believe the hardest. The best count among them the truly religious and the violently atheistic alike, and their souls burn with certainty in the face of the Darkness. Overnight, our priests and pastors and bedrock skeptics, what few we had, became holy warriors against the encroaching hordes. They developed powers grown from their own desires and ideals. A pacifist imam who could not bear to do battle instead gained the healing touch. A holy exorcist gained the power to banish with the Cross, the Book, and the Word - or if, as he claimed, he'd had that already, to do it from half a mile away, and in job lots up close. A follower of True Reason became a bastion of the Laws he had held so dear, standing upon the walls and demanding that the demons bow to Physics. He stood and demanded, and flying leviathans fell like stones while pyrodemons exploded in their own flame. Finally, a holy woman who'd lost her entire order in the chaos, but kept the vows out of habit smiled, and raised her face to the heavens that she knew held her Savior, and stepped into the sky. I saw her, that first day, when the Power poured from person to person, seeking for someone to wield it right. I saw her, and a little more belief opened up in my own heart, and the Holy Mainframe caught the moment, and shunted a few minor shunts. I do not believe in God. At the very least, I don't believe that he's still alive. I certainly don't believe that he or any of his angels are going to save us. There is something I do believe in, though. I believe in her, and my belief helps give her the power that carries her aloft, and calls the storm to her bidding. FREEDOM puts my faith in Nun of the above.
So...what do you think?
There is a power in the human spirit, and the human mind, and the human will. We shape the world around us, strengthening and even creating the things that we love, hate, fear, live for and die for. Our faith created Gods and heroes, powered miracles and magics, and now... now it, like every other thing that we have, is another weapon against the Enemy.
The first indications were unmissed absences, and unheard silences. Outlying farmsteads that weren't heard from for months at a time weren't heard from for a few more. Merchants from distant places simply never arrived, and never brought word that there had been travelers that should have arrived before. Departing merchants vanished down the road, as they always had. A few of the outer villages mentioned disturbing signs, but when they didn't follow up on those reports, we assumed that everything was fine. It's a wonder anyone survived at all.
The first idea we had that there was something truly wrong was from the village of Danford. They had a phone line, a rarity for those outlying towns, and an old lady at the other end to take messages. Every Sunday at three, Mrs. Zithner's son, the carpenter, would call to speak briefly with his mother. He'd done so every Sunday at three, and three exactly, for the past ten years. When he hadn't called by three thirty, Mrs Zithner became worried, and put in a call herself. When the phone line wouldn't connect, she became more worried, and went to talk to the mayor. The mayor sent a technician to check the lines, and the technician didn't come back. The next day, he called out the Guard, and a hundred men marched to Danford. That hundred men met an overwhelming force.
Of that first hundred men, ninety dug in and fought and died, pausing that segment of the advancing tide for a handful of precious hours. Ten returned with orders to report all they knew, pushing their exhausted bodies as fast as they could over hilly terrain, firing shots wildly back at the shadowy forms that pursued them in desperate attempts to buy mere minutes. Only three of them made it. The reports they brought were horrifying, and the four hideous creatures who chased them across that last stretch of open ground to the gates were nightmares made flesh. The enemy were not men, or beasts, or any other thing of this world, but demons. They were giant, misshapen, and stinking of sulfur. no two were quite the same, and all had claws or horns or stingers. They carried whips and tridents and ugly hooked and bladed things, and they spat acid and fire and some of them flew.
There's not a day that goes by, these days, that I don't give a bit of silent thanks to those misunderstood freaks in applied theology. They figured it out somehow, a leap of intuition or lucky guess. If demons existed in the world in a real and tangible way, then the other Powers had to as well. They grabbed a lab deep in the bowels of the Seeley building with the impossible goal of turning that guess into something practical and useful over the course of a scant few weeks. Frankly, it was a foolish and desperate attempt with no real chance of success - except that there is a power in the human spirit, and the human mind, and the human will, and they were surrounded by an entire city of people praying desperately for someone to come up with an answer. They discovered that power, and why no one had been using it before. We can't do it on our own. One person's will isn't enough to do anything with. To actually get significant effects, you have to have one person who channels well, and a team of others to back them up, just believing and hoping and willing at them, to provide the threshold power to cut through the laws of reality as they are, and impose the laws of reality as you would have them be. They found that old icons had power in themselves, that long belief wore grooves in reality, and made things easier, and they found that alongside the cold and ancient myths there was a fresh godform, born from the dying age, in exploration, science, liberty, capitalism, and computers. It was tenuous, and unshaped, but it was very much there, and with circuit boards and black candles and electricity and goat's blood and stacks of dollar bills at the cardinal points they forged and channeled it into something useful. They slaved and they sweated and they built an arcane supercomputer, to route the power one to another, each to his brother, to collect it together and share it out and turn a city full of individual desperately praying souls into a giant engine of belief by which miracles might be generated, and they named that construct FREEDOM.
Three days before the demons arrived at our hastily improvised walls, we were desperate and afraid. Two days before, there was a strange electricity in the air, as if something was coming. We didn't have any idea what, and we didn't have any proof, but we started, just a little, to have some hope. One day before they arrived, the geeks in the basement flipped the switch, and turned on the speakers, and played for us the siren song of FREEDOM. The power rushed through us, and we could feel it as it ebbed and flowed. We felt the flexible shape of reality, and from moment to moment, the hold on it shifted, as each of us took up the power and thrilled in its use and laid it down again for the next to try.
In the glorious chaos of that day, we found a simple truth. The ones who channel it best - who get the most out of the least - are the people who believe the hardest. The best count among them the truly religious and the violently atheistic alike, and their souls burn with certainty in the face of the Darkness. Overnight, our priests and pastors and bedrock skeptics, what few we had, became holy warriors against the encroaching hordes. They developed powers grown from their own desires and ideals. A pacifist imam who could not bear to do battle instead gained the healing touch. A holy exorcist gained the power to banish with the Cross, the Book, and the Word - or if, as he claimed, he'd had that already, to do it from half a mile away, and in job lots up close. A follower of True Reason became a bastion of the Laws he had held so dear, standing upon the walls and demanding that the demons bow to Physics. He stood and demanded, and flying leviathans fell like stones while pyrodemons exploded in their own flame. Finally, a holy woman who'd lost her entire order in the chaos, but kept the vows out of habit smiled, and raised her face to the heavens that she knew held her Savior, and stepped into the sky. I saw her, that first day, when the Power poured from person to person, seeking for someone to wield it right. I saw her, and a little more belief opened up in my own heart, and the Holy Mainframe caught the moment, and shunted a few minor shunts. I do not believe in God. At the very least, I don't believe that he's still alive. I certainly don't believe that he or any of his angels are going to save us. There is something I do believe in, though. I believe in her, and my belief helps give her the power that carries her aloft, and calls the storm to her bidding. FREEDOM puts my faith in Nun of the above.
So...what do you think?