Commander E. Marvin, a young but ferocious man, stands upon the podium. His soldiers, divided into six divisions of sixty troops, surround him in a crimson halo. Their uniforms, softly aflame in the evening sun, incarnadine the golden world around them. With roseate zeal the soldiers heed their commander as he prophesies of the fall of the enemy crown:
“Tonight we open the sixth seal! Tonight the apocalypse is our guide! The golden crown which boasts with the pride of the sun will fall–once and for all!”
The men cheered in boisterous antiphony.
“The eclipse has come. The bloodied moon will obnubilate that dread and false light, as the gods have decreed! Prepare!” The soldiers continue their coiled praise in violent ecstasy, throwing themselves together into their somewhat unorthodox, but historically effective, military formation along the face of the eastern treeline. Each division of sixty troops is armed with their assortment of personal weaponry and a fortified siege engine–the type composed of three walls and a reinforced roof–imperfect but valuable beneath the barrage of enemy machicolations. The castellations which shall soon be under siege stand about seven furlongs eastwards across the field which lies separated from Marvin and his troops by a wall of dense forestry. Marvin’s camp will be left by the troops tonight for the first time since it was set up three months prior. The maintained secrecy of their occupation of the small glade over the course of these past three months is notable but not quite miraculous.
Aside from tents–housing for the weary soldiers–Marvin’s hideaway is decorated with three impermanent, but nonetheless immobile, ballistae; their stance being just far enough from the treeline to be a threat to any incoming opposition. The centremost of the three stands slightly larger than its parenthetical companions and is armed with a shooting force greater than the other two combined. For the past couple of days all three remained at all times armed in their east facing intimidation. This practice was inspired by the common paranoia which seems to infect the moments immediately preceding ambush–or revolutionary change of any manner, for that matter. It’s not as if the battlements were built for any cause besides a fear of potential discovery from the east, anyways. Anterior to both the dwarfish towers and the sleeping quarters rest a couple of pigpens (with pigs therein). The pigs’ purpose in the camp is multifaceted. Pigs are both a good source of meat–which has proven necessary for a three month encampment–as well as a brilliantly combustible kindling; but, most of all, the pigs ensured, with their incessant groans and snorts that everyone in the camp was always slightly irritated due to a lack of deep, uninterrupted sleep. Besides the pig pens were buckets of resin and a shed of prepared, but unlit, torches. With the potential of both a defense mechanism and an engine of siege–whatever urgency deemed necessary first–the pigs were to be drenched in resin and the torches lit at the always burning campfires amidst the tents and thrown upon the resin-soaked, explosive swine creating an army of enflamed pork to trample and engulf opposing forces.
As his troops arrange themselves in an anxious excitement to finally break beyond the confines of their cramped, cacophonic and pungent outpost, Marvin momentarily turns and looks apposite the carmine sea before him in a westward gaze. Looming above his battalion a predatorily inquisitive gaze meets his eyes. An owl stands before him, the descending evening sun bedizening his mantic body in a saturnine glimmer. Its grey body is firmly stationed upon a crooked oaken tentacle, wise and unforgiving. Its feathers shine with a silver alchemy in the fading light; cold incantations humect the air with apocalyptic bale. Out from the ochreous rust of the ancient bird's sagacious face, a pair of eyes–jaundiced and sacred–stare past Commander Marvin into his soul with a piercing scrutiny surpassing the collective attention with which his underlings admire him. An oracular primordiality infuses the owl’s face. Hypnotic songs of antiquity bleed out from his clever eyes. Commander Marvin stands paralysed; entranced. The burnt sienna of the owl’s plumage cracks through its stony grey feathers in a volcanic glow. It burns with the same fire which consumed Korah’s two-hundred-and-fifty heresiarchs; the same fire which razed the vain stubble of the workers commissioned by Julian the Apostate to build the third temple; the very flame upon which lambs of old were immolated and goats were holocausted. The world about Commander Marvin dissolves into a velvet silence and the gentle whisper of the owl’s coo lingers in an odorous cloud of bittersweetness. This dissonant pause is sustained until, in a violent urgency, commander Marvin is shaken from his trance by an unknown hand.
“Sir!” a frail voice squeezes out of its breathless lungs “I…” the voice breaks and chokes on its own airlessness. Commander Marvin likewise takes a moment to catch his breath. Startled more by the existential imprint left by the owl upon his mind than by having been suddenly awoken from his dreamlike bewitchment and attempting to regain his composure Marvin glanced towards the unidentified fellow, crouched in a fatigued frenzy of short, straining breaths whose hand now rests upon the commander’s shoulder. In a struggle to push the strigine apparition into the recesses of his unconscious–convincing himself it was simply a trick played upon him by his sleep-deprived, swine-enriched mind–he takes a step back, removing the unnamed hand from off his shoulder. As Marvin steps back he sees the uniform of the man, his back still heaving in breathlessness, and identifies its congruence with the dress of his countrymen’s martial messengers. “What now?! Can’t you see we are busy? Three months I have waited for this day! Why delay!?”
“Sir… a message… the king” the messenger squeaked out, as if in a vile mimicry of that famous Pheidippides who ran till the brink of death, whimpering a final Nike before his soul escaped his body, following after his breath. The passing thought of victory fills Commander Marvin with a guttural rage. Victory was to be his, not the king’s. Has the king camped among swine for three months? The hand which once rested upon Marvin’s shoulder now stretches out towards him with a parchment, gripped loosely and weakly. The roll of smooth parchment, bound by a lazuline cloth ribbon breaks in the imperious hand of commander Marvin, crinkling into a series of paper mountains and valleys. Marvin tears the ribbon from off the roll and scans its contents with a trembling grimace. As his eyes zigzag across the parchment in a frenzied truculence, his wince degenerates and metamorphoses into an ugly, terrible lividity–a creatively grotesque theatre mask. The king’s messenger glances up towards the commander and falls slightly backwards in horror, until a sudden calm comes over the commander’s face–Marvin’s world enters into a silent serenitude. Commander Marvin turns his head towards his troops, all still arranging themselves and their siege engines for the imminent eastbound procession. He smiles softly. He then looks towards the messenger, sustaining his eerily sympathetic expression. He helps the messenger from up off the ground and returns the parchment.
Marvin’s eyes close and he retreats westward letting out a wearied sigh. He retracts his hand from the messenger and tosses aside the dagger which was seconds ago hidden beneath the parchment and lodged between the ribs of the king’s messenger who now writhes in a pool of wine-dark blood; the remaining air in his chest escapes from the hole carved in his lungs by the blade's gentle butchery. At the edge of the camp, Marvin gazes at the camp, fantasizing of the potential destruction his strategic devices could have come to. “I’m sorry,” he whispers to himself in a soft, cracking falsetto as he collects two of the unlit torches from the sheds adjacent to the pigpens. A campfire with its soft theatre of flame dancing across a stage of bloodred embers lends itself to the torches and commander Marvin returns to the pigpens. A moment later Marvin ascends the foremost of the trinity of his engineered ballistae. He adjusts the trajectory by two notches downwards. In an inverted solar trajectory, commander Marvin's rage burns eastward; a kindled bolt screams across the sky; a flaming porcine legion of incendiary swine flies across the ground.
Dusk falls and a pair of wings spread; a susurration whispers across the twilight.
