Chapter 5: Chapter 5: The great equalizer

It is dark. Night has come.

 

The man stands at the top of the lighthouse, staring out at the encampments all around the cliff-side. They’re nested in like rats in an old brickhouse. There’s no getting them out now and it’s only a matter of time until they nibble their way forward towards him, towards his home.

 

There’s nowhere left to go, not that he has anywhere else in the world where he would rather be.

 

The noble-houses coming here to hide was a mistake on their part that he had pointed out from the first day of their arrival, at the risk of his own head. They should have known better, but at the same time, there was something nostalgic about the idea of coming here for them.

 

The lighthouse is where his uncle, the once-king, had grown up. It’s where his father’s father had grown up. It’s where he grew up, together with his older brother who holds the throne through a line of succession so twisted that it comes around in the shape of a circle. For as long as the tower has existed, even before they had risen to nobility, his family line had held it as theirs, serving their key duty in keeping the lives of the sailors at sea safe, so that they might provide the city, the place where his heart truly resides, prosperity.

 

He had never wanted anything to do with the whole ‘nobility’ and ‘bloodlines’ thing. He just wanted to keep the lighthouse burning, safe and bright, so that the world might keep moving without him. That’s one reason, but the truth is that he’s just a romantic who loves the glow of the stars out here, so far away from the city.

 

It sounds dumb. It sounds stupid. But in a weird, half-desire that he could never explain, he hoped that the lighthouse would appear to be a star as bright as any in the sky above the ocean, for any travelers out at sea.

 

But now, despite all of that, the world has come to his doorstep.

 

The nobles, fleeing the city, had come here in some desperate bid of a last attempt at survival, indifferent to his wishes to be left out of it all. Kingly blood will only serve you so far, until a desperate bodyguard kicks in your door and holds a pike to you. Honestly, Meridian is sure that he would have been killed, if they didn’t need him to keep the lighthouse running, in hopes that reinforcements might arrive from over the ocean after all, even at the last minute.

 

But he knows that nobody is coming. The rest of the world has its own problems and the force of reputation that a few petty nobles have to offer are sparsely bright enough to mobilize a local militia, let alone international troops.

 

“They’re getting ready to move,” says a woman to his right. An elf, clad in light riding armor. She’s with the noble-guard. Probably the last of their troop, actually.

 

Meridian looks at her, stroking his old, sea-washed beard. “And?” he asks, almost sarcastically. “What are you going to do about it?”

 

“My job,” she says. “As for you, I suggest jumping,” states the elf dryly, turning away to go back downstairs. “Otherwise, I’ll be back in a minute.”

 

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He can’t help but laugh. She could just kill him now, but it’s perhaps a hint of kindness in her eyes that she’s giving him a chance to do it himself.

 

What a nice young lady.

 

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Now, on one hand, the existence of the station itself was a problem on the international scale. After its reveal through the first initial blast, alliances shifted, falling as quickly as the dust around the impact crater. Long standing treaties and under-table deals were thrown away in the blink of an eye, after the deciding power of the weapon was first witnessed.

 

As such, after the war mostly ended immediately, its use was regulated and controlled to an almost insane extent. Usually, every practice firing in the desert would have to be approved and rubber-stamped ten times over in order to allow him to undertake his favorite task in the world.

 

It is a construct with world-changing potential and was, responsibly enough, treated as such. Gottlieb isn’t exactly sure how fate had decided for him to be the man who gets to pull the trigger, he’s hardly a model citizen. But he got the job and that’s been that ever since.

 

Wielding this thing, just holding onto this single control stick is like grasping the ruling scepter of god. The fate of nations, the lives of leagues of men and women and children, the literal future of the world and its peoples are in his hands in a way that no mortal has ever controlled before.

 

For many, this would be a mind-numbing sense of pressure and obligation. Gottlieb however, wiggles the stick left and right, zooming in between the man on top of the lighthouse and the man riding on the big bird, which is clearly not a chicken.

 

Gene manipulation has come far, but not this far. It’s a magic world, so it’s obviously a magical bird. Fair enough, right?

 

“Kai,” asks Gottlieb. “Is it immoral for us to get involved in stuff like this?” he asks. “I mean, it’s not our business, right?” he ponders, perhaps too late, considering the ‘chicken lady’ incident.

 

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