ivory towers - E

     The roar of battle around me is like the tortured scream of a single, dying giant as it bellows its last breath to the dark heavens above. For an instant, everything is still and silent and frozen before my eyes. I imagine this is what nirvana could be like, that what I'm touching with my mind right now could be the one true state of zen. But everything starts to move again, and one of the mindless black things is gurgling acid to me, and all I can think is that I won't die here, not now, not while the white pillars at my back yet stand. They are not smart, these inky, caustic creatures, and are not difficult to out-maneuver or kill  in single combat. So I run this one through and cleave it sideways, slinging its filthy excuse for blood into the red earth. My muscles ache, my armor is heavy and spattered with their sludge, and still they come. They always come, and they never stop.
  
     Void help us all.

     We fight them. We, the white knighthood.  Our duty since the Great Emergence has been to fight, and to protect the Ivory Towers that rose one by one in a great arcing wall from the soft pink sands of our homeland. We volunteered, trained. We were happy to put our lives on the line, thinking  that in a few years we would be free, and the first few years were very successful. Our numbers thinned, but the towers remained untainted. Our enthusiasm proved naive, of course, and two decades have gone by-- twenty years of war and terrible mottled black rot, punctuated only by sunrise and sunset.
  
     Still, we count ourselves fortunate, for we are not alone in this war. The sun's coming and going heralds a great miracle, and shows us that God Himself is on our side. In the early morning, when the battle looks its bleakest and the towers are beset at their roots by the black evil, the sun rises and the long white fingers of God sweep over us. We see from the parapets, we watch as the evil is washed back and away and gives us a moment's respite to catch our breath. The battlefield is swept clean and the monsters abate for a few hours, while they replenish their numbers and we nurse our wounded.

     This is our daily routine. We fight, we recover, and we fight again, and we pray with each changing of the daylight that it will be the last we see of the shambling rot. For all our experience, we do not know much of these things we fight, only that they will stop at nothing to eat away at the towers. That without us, the towers that remain would crumble into their fold and be lost forever. Our families, too, would join their inky conglomeration. All that would be left of our country, the decayed foundations of these towers, the pale red earth, and perhaps God.
  
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alt title: dens custodia

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