Chapter 218: Chapter 218: Green Sky (2)
Chapter 218: Green Sky (2)
It hopped once on the barrel.
Sella did not move.
The rigger beside her, the two apprentices on the ladder behind her did not move.
Each and every one of the 206 people did not move. They breathed quietly
Natalie took her hand off her bowstring. Nyx had come out of the shade and was standing at the edge of the crowd with her hood down.
The bird looked around at two hundred motionless human beings.
Then it dropped off the barrel, took three steps in the ash. It was looking for something. It found something and ate it.
Sella put the ladle down and sat on her stool. She put the apron over her face and cried into it. She cried without making any sound. And who wouldn’t cry looking at this sight?
It was unimaginable for people who had spent their eternity inside the walls. They had finally found Hope. Hope that they could live for. Hope for the future generations.
Unlike Sella, Odran did not care about appearances. He was weeping his heart out. He did not care about little things. He lived in the moment.
"My grandmother used to talk about grass," he said, to nobody, to whoever was nearest.
"She said it used come up everywhere. She said it came up in the roads and you had to pull it out of the roads or it would break them, and I thought she was lying. Not lying, I thought she was..."
He stopped.
"I thought she was making it nicer than it was. Because old people do that."
Two meters away, the rigger’s boy, nine years old, stood with his water bucket looking down at the moss with a small frown.
"What is it for?" he asked.
Odran looked at him.
"What?"
"The green stuff." The boy prodded it with his boot. He had literally never touched grass before. The mix of magic and scientific civilization had kept them alive. So, they were taught more about surviving in the Wildlands than the Environmental Studies.
"Is it food? Is it for the machines?"
"It is not for anything, lad."
"Then why does everyone want it?"
Odran opened his mouth to answer. But he did not have an answer for the child.
He looked at the boy, and then at the fifty miles of open land. He let himself be engrossed in the scenery.
He then looked back at the boy, and he put his hand on the back of the boy’s head and said nothing.
Bram Stonehelm stood behind them with his arms folded.
’My father bakes with imported grain,’ he thought.
’Every sack. Every day of his life. He has never once put his hands in flour that was grown on this side of the world.’
He looked out at the hills.
’There is dirt out there now.’
DING.
---
[Directive 09 Complete: Reclaim the Green.]
[Miasma Clearing Tower is operational. Purification radius confirmed: 50 miles.]
[Reward: 25,000 System Points.]
[Current Balance: 88,000 SP.]
[Standing Bounty active: 10,000 System Points per additional tower brought online and held operational for thirty consecutive days.]
---
Draven read it standing at the edge of the site with the noise of two hundred celebrating people behind him.
’Eighty eight thousand,’ he thought.
Then he put the number away. The number of system points did not matter today. Today, the whole of Humanity had taken their first step towards the true Freedom.
’It is just the beginning. Fifty miles of air and soil. Water that needed no purification. The increased agriculture, which will lead to self-sufficiency, will fund the future Wars against the King-level Beasts and will also help in curbing the Civil War.’
In a year or two, the Bastion will be totally self-sufficient. Dependency on any other Bastion was the main weakness of Bastion 7. It was a well-fortified Bastion with Lord Commander Helion Goldmane leading it’s people.
The reason he was posted there by the Capital Elders was due to the dependency of the Bastion on Capital for it’s food. The elders used this as leverage to keep him as a pawn for their plans. If he rebelled, they would simply stop the food supply. Simple as that.
Now that the Bastion had acquired new lands, the agriculture on large scale would be possible.
Every treaty on the continent rested on one lever, and Helion had said it out loud on the road three days ago.
We eat what they permit us to eat.
’This is the thing they will kill us for,’ Draven thought.
Behind him somebody had got a drum out of a supply crate, which meant somebody had packed a drum, which meant one of Halvers’s people had walked out of the wall three days ago believing this would work.
Halvers himself was sitting on an upturned crate at the base of his tower with his head in his hands.
"He should be here."
Draven turned.
Cole had come down off the scaffold. He was looking south, at the gray line of the Great Wall on the horizon, ten kilometers back.
"The Lord Commander," Cole said. "He read those blueprints. Halvers said so."
He wiped his hands on his shirt.
"He is sitting in that city right now getting a report about it."
"Yes," Draven said.
"That is not right."
"No," Draven said. "It is not."
Natalie Tokks had not come down off the transport roof.
Everybody else was in the middle of the site.
She sat with her bow across her knees and looked out at fifty miles of open ground.
Then she said, quietly enough that only Draven heard her when he came up the ladder:
"Captain."
"I see it."
"Do you?" She did not turn around.
"Because everybody down there is looking at the grass, and I have been sitting up here for twenty minutes doing the other half of it."
She lifted her chin at the horizon.
"Thirty hours ago I could see four hundred meters. That was it. Four hundred meters of gray in every direction, and anything past that could have been anything."
She let her hand rest on the bow.
"I can see the hills now. I can see the riverbed. I can see the road going over the rise, and if there were a man standing on that rise I could count his fingers."
Draven stood beside her on the roof of the transport and looked out at the same fifty miles.
At a three hundred foot Star-Iron lattice standing alone on a plain, humming, throwing off the only clean air on the continent, lit up by arc lamps and visible from every ridge and rise and hilltop within a day’s ride.
"Yes," Draven said.
’We spent thirty hours pulling a curtain down,’ he thought.
’And we were standing behind it.’
"They can see us now," Natalie said.
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