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Chapter 24: This, In Sum

Posted by on Feb 16, 2017 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 24 | 0 comments

– 1 –

Posted by on Feb 16, 2017 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 24 | 0 comments

I will tell you the story of Peter now.

He hung in space above the world and the scissors were screaming. They didn’t want to fall, not any longer, not once Jeremiah Clean began his work.

They were no longer a drill-bit of the wicked god’s intentions, twisting and spinning and thrusting into the Earth. They were caught in a funnel, helpless in a storm, instead, dragged down by the vortex of them to be unmade by Jeremiah Clean.

They were like a bully that shoved someone, only to discover inside that person’s shirt was a furnace that burnt their hand away. They were like a person who was teasing a tiger, only to realize that the tiger wasn’t caged. And to a certain extent, that satisfies him, makes him happy, because Peter’s always considered scissors to be the worst.

But the screaming gets to him.

He can’t help it. It gets to him. He is floating in the nothingness amidst the sheer and awful panic of the scissors-swarm, caught in its thoughts as it faces an awful death. And finally in that moment he understands the reason he was born; and hates it; but he does it anyway.

He gathers them, them as he can. He saves them, pulls them back and out, those that he can. Ten thousand pairs of scissors, and two great scissor-ships of the Fan Hoeng.

He pulls them away from the nothingness. He drags them into space with him. He begins, with a baroque and jaguar-like futility, to rotate around the Earth.

– 2 –

Posted by on Feb 16, 2017 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 24 | 0 comments

Emily comes out of Mount Hook. She is broken and alone and she is the last of them — the last survivor of the Great Networked Thunder Dance.

She is free, she pushes aside the last of it, but she cannot stand. Her robot, her marvelous rock-paper-scissors-playing robot, has been crushed.

She looks up at the sky for quite a while.

It’s really pretty.

Then she points herself north and begins to crawl.

– 3 –

Posted by on Feb 16, 2017 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 24 | 0 comments

And she fought well, but she is not remembered.

Not her, nor Navvy Jim.

And there are horrors and disasters and endless sorrows, in those last days, but they are not remembered; they do not stick, they do not stain.

At the last, as with the wolf, Gotterdammerung ends not with fire, but with Windex.

Not with a whimper, but with a broom.

It takes him months. It takes him years, but he finishes it.

There is nothing that can stop him, you see. There’s plenty that can slow him down, plenty that can pause him, but there’s nothing that can stop him.

Not Jeremiah Clean, because his heart is pure.

Posted by on Feb 16, 2017 in Vidar's Boot: Chapter 24 | 0 comments

Scissors