Chapter 27: Decatur

27

At the end of America's Civil War, with the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the largest and swiftest mass migrations in human history was to begin. Former slaves, newly freed from the dark despair of the South, began to move across the continent in droves, seeding all areas of the North in pursuit of their own particular, uniquely American dream.

The routes established by these migrants lead them through many small towns known to offer safe harbor in passage, strung all along the way to the promised lands of Chicago respectability, a Detroit factory's job stability or New York gold.

Many, though, would fall by the wayside, stranded by limited resources, broken axles, dreams and hearts. They would go on to quietly integrate into these small Northern towns, these Cairo's, Decatur's, Danville's and Kankakee's, creating ethnic enclaves in formerly pristine, all-white areas along the pipelines through which they traveled.

All around them, as they walked the streets, Monique and Jo-Mel could see evidence of this Great Migration in the faces of the people. Much of Decatur's black population could trace their family heritage, which for the descendants of former slaves, both ended and began anew in the heart of captivity, to just a few areas in the South.

It was common for someone who had successfully migrated North and had found employment, to quickly send for family members to join them. As they arrived, they settled along the levees and rivers, along the outskirts and out of sight of the gentry. They developed thriving businesses and bustling neighborhoods. They laid down roots. Ingratiated themselves into the local histories, customs and cultures. They married and raised families.

Many of them stayed for generations, their blood still apparent all around Monique and Jo-Mel as they made their way through an old neighborhood riddled with abandoned houses.

Monique remained silent, not answering any of Jo-Mel's questions. She follows along an unseen pathway leading on from her heart, strung along a golden thread. She feels a sense of urgency as she traces it.

Several locals stare at them curiously as they go by, wondering at the weaponry and the strange attire. Peeking out of windows or peering intently from shaded porch fronts, their passage is noted and forwarded on ahead by the onlookers. Someone calls the cops.

Jo-Mel recognizes the underlying, telltale signs, the masked scent of suspicion and fear that seemed to hang low across the ground of this place. It was like wading through a low lying fog. She knew that they would have to find shelter away from prying eyes soon enough or they would have to deal with the local's constabulary.

These people had been bred towards suspicion. It was a tool, a well-crafted curse designed by the new age magicians of this world's notorious Merchant Kings. A curse in no need of magic to enact.

Instead, a one of the new sciences had been introduced; mass psychology. And it worked, most insidiously and with increasing effectiveness.

Such vile tactics took root on Earth, helping to consolidate the power of the Merchant Kings. They were soon enough able to supplant the world's magical hierarchies, seizing control of the Earth and altering its histories.

But Jo-Mel knew of the true chronicles, knew that they were preserved and taught by some still on both worlds. She knew that there were believers and zealots and Eternals, still, here on Earth, who had been cast into the dark underbellies of slave ships.

Their faiths and practices were mocked and shunned. Branded as forever primitive and painfully inferior, they were scattered and broken. Despite this, some still managed to bring along the remnants and dregs of their splintered and reassembled beliefs and mythologies.

This America, though, was a hard place for such unyielding faith to grow. The blood of the Divine, the sacred essence that resonated with the energies of the Source, had dried up across North America as men drove down upon, hunted, shackled and slaughtered the Elementals for profit.

This caused the magics of the indigenous peoples to begin to falter and fail. When the slave ships began to proliferate, they could offer no assistance to acknowledged fellow members of the Tribes of the Last People.

All of the Anasazi were gone, the land had lost its most powerful defenders, and those who were left were under assault themselves.

Unchecked, then, the influence of The Merchant Kings spread, fueled by a toxic stew of racial animosities and quickened by callous greed. This disharmony grew into its own conscious state, infecting and shaping the hearts and desires of this newly established nation.

From here, these divisions were to be honed and perfected and deployed across the globe as weapons of war. It was a war that very few of the inhabitants of Earth could ever possibly know of or even begin to understand. A war waged within the hearts and minds of the men and women.

There were vast and ancient schemes at play here, some even at odds as paths cross and diverge.

Jo-Mel had been to Earth many times. She knew of its histories. The ones they kept hidden from themselves. For her, like most of the inhabitants of the Incata, the travails and foibles of the Peoples of Earth were a mystery, particularly for those more closely bound to the Source.

The Earth was an overpopulated stew of human vice and animosity that was beholden to amorphous forms of currency, the type which only accrued spiritual value at a cost.

Because of this, its peoples were kept in thrall to these hidden powers. Its course was guided by hidden hands that had been at the controls for countless centuries. Evidence of their manipulations, however, can be traced back even further, to this realm's inevitable loss of magic.

Across both the Earth and the Incata, the Merchant Kings were the secret ruler's of the worlds. It was they who dictated the pace and progression of society, assigned value to that which they chose.

In the Incata, these families traded in magical currencies, their stores of power, collections of magical artifacts and carefully curated bloodlines imbuing within them a naturally inherited status.

On Earth, the families ruled through finance. Money had been transformed. It was now offered up as a form of prayer, a petition for absolution. It had the cumulative effect of a distorted material reality. Because of this, the world was a negatively divided place, its magics were stifled and corrupted.

Jo-Mel felt sluggish and was unable to fine tune her senses to the environment. She never understood Earth's allure amongst her comrades. She had only ever followed Askauri, her Unit Commander, here in order to pursue his carnal interests in the name of establishing relations with this world's piteous magical families, those led for centuries by the Great Men of Earth.

Long ago, these men had grown unsettled by the shared authority of, whom they saw to be, lesser women and men and looked to other means to exert their will upon the form and function of the world.

They sought to steal the fires of the gods, looked to wrench free and seize control of their own evolutionary development. In so doing, in their perversion, the Source began to retract, to recoil from this unnatural assault.

The indigenous peoples could only watch and mourn the loss as their powers, their own sacred connections to the Source was diminished. They were overrun by the onslaught of technological curiosities. Their faiths and beliefs were ripped asunder, chained to the steel will of man.

The forests were razed, the mountains were mined, their life's blood and substance extracted. The skies were occluded, cut off from the radiant cosmic energies shifting throughout the universe.

Its Last Peoples, the Earth's final defenders, such as the Kush and the Anasazi, those clinging to the illusions of the old ways, were outmaneuvered. The most vocal, the most vociferous of them and their families and their descendants were silenced, killed or parceled off into captivity in foreign lands. Their tales and legends, the empowering connections of ancestral histories, wisdom and knowledge, were severed.

Jo-Mel knew of these tragedies, as did most all school children in the Incata. She saw it and comprehended it with a begrudging, but a passing concern. These were the tragic travails of other lands. The trials and tribulations of the people of Earth, it was well-understood, were of their own creation.

It was also firmly believed that if they were to find salvation, find a means of reconnecting their hearts, souls and minds to the Source, to discover the means to reverse the damage, it would take the works of the same men responsible for it in the first place.

If they couldn't figure it out, well, the universe waited for none. A divergence was coming regardless. The Earth and the Incata were due to drift apart, their elliptical orbits soon to take separate paths.

Jo-Mel knew what this meant. It was, again, well-documented in the histories of the worlds. The Merchant Kings and their kin knew quite well what this portended, as well. It was a part of their own teachings and beliefs.

They were certain, though, that their unique knowledge, their control and their technologies, could shield them from the worst of the effects of the divergence.

And perhaps it could shield and protect just them, but Jo-Mel, like most in the Incata, had very little faith in their plastics and circuits and switches. It seemed a fool's folly to place one's belief in such things.

Jo-Mel has other concerns at the moment, however. Monique had gone through several different iterations since she and Bealz first materialized atop the hill just outside of the Great Forest back in the Incata. Simultaneously, it seemed, she had been a blinding flame, a shrunken, shuffling thing and, all at once, a towering electrical storm.

Jo-Mel wasn't sure which of these were the woman's true face. But she was certain that Monique was no less a split and divided thing, just as confused, it seems, as she was conflicted.

Askauri had tasked her with overseeing and protecting Monique and Bealz until he could manage to arrive to do so himself. Jo-Mel had long served as his envoy, utilizing her skill at stealth, concealment and infiltration in order to communicate with him through the thick concrete walls within the prison's secure compound.

She was, herself, a warrior. More so, she was a soldier, having pledged her sword, The TruthSeeker, and her shield, The Breaker, to the House of the Askai, to the Lands and Peoples of the Long Plains Kingdom. To Askauri, who was, though frivolous, worthy of her loyalties. He led his unit, treated each member, as if it were a family.

For an orphan of the Wilds, a solitary, lonely soul left to her own devices as a child, Jo-Mel cherished this, sought comfort and security within such a structure. As a result, there was nothing she'd readily refuse her commander. Lest of all a request to babysit what appeared to be one of the last of the Earth's Eternals struggling through an identity crisis.

Jo-Mel, peering leerily at Monique as she walks on in a near trance, can only hope that Askauri would hurry and relieve her of her duties before she was caught up in a conflagration. Having seen into the heart of this woman, Jo-Mel knew very well that once stoked in earnest, Monique's fury, when fully unleashed, was fierce enough to destroy worlds.

Jo-Mel didn't want to be anywhere near her when that happened.