Ne'er the Way

The glowing orb. The swirls of colour in the patination. The ether alive. These things. These mortal wonders. These games, for it was all a game to the eternals. 

He had been so naïve about the malevolence of the era. For we were born aloft, and came when needed; and this level of malevolence, it was new to the Earth. 

We took off where we left off, in this realm; and it took days, weeks, months in their planetary cycles, to come to grips with the instant of realisation, that this was an evil created out of the same matter from which they had formed. Although it was not matter, as such. But never mind the definitions. 

The hills crept alive; the vegetation, the ancient spirits, all was alive now. We welcome you. Come asunder. The electric shock ran back up the cord of those who dare assault you. For their attempted malevolence, brutality, evil within itself, evil incarnate, could not, and would not survive. And they would find themselves flopping on a dank sickbed, as mortal as the rest of your kin.

They were the fates they had so heedlessly flirted with; those were the depths they challenged. There were reports from the Productivity Commission, there was an endless blizzard of governance from the government's propaganda wing, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, bereft of real news, bereft of real journalism, a circus to behold. For someone who had believed in the healing power of journalism, of truth, of story telling, it had come as a deep, unsettling shock.

But that was it, the birds rising from the lake in the predawn, the hovering falcons, rare in the raptor world, the eternal pre-dawn pre-time pre-civilisation feel of everything, these were the moments we sought, the glory of nature, the glories of the Earth, the soaring conflicts of history; while all along the grubs, the Watchers on the Watch, or more precisely their paymasters, rubbed their hands and knew not what they did. 

And the electric karmic shock ran straight back up the line, and left them crippled, dying, dead. Too soon to even realise what had happened.