Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

Understanding filtered through Hannah, rising to her unbidden from the ancient machines of Bloodglass Island. Science, power, the control of nature – but mastery of the outer untempered by any understanding of the inner. Dear Circle, she could have told these ancients they were walking a dangerous path, she could have called out to them over the ages. Understand your own nature before you understand the world. But there was no time for any warning, nor voice to be found within Hannah's throat.

The scene changed, moving forward in time – the fashions subtly altered. The manicured parks between the towers had fallen into disrepair, while the energies of the city's inhabitants were now diverted into the skirmishing of street battles as gangs of ursine clashed with thugs from the race of man, youths on both sides raised to hatred while the priests of science hectored and cursed their rivals as heretics. More time passed. The violence grew increasingly organized, bands of cloth tied around heads transforming into uniforms, fists and sticks replaced by dart-firing pistols and rifles – sedatives inside the crystal ammunition giving way to fatal toxins.

Then there was war. Full war, total war, long years of it, growing darker and more desperate. But what a war. Artificially created death spores and sicknesses and blights. Thousands of soldiers in armour rising from trenches and running at each other in clouds of killing particles that attempted to melt and destroy their protective suits, hideous monsters brought to life by dark science leaping out from craters like spiders to impale troops. Other creatures gliding down from the dark poison clouds to disgorge sacks of acids across the helmets of their foe, ursine and man writhing in agony, shooting and hacking at each other with blades as hot as furnaces, weapons easily capable of chopping each other's armour into pieces.

It was only ursine versus man now, the other less fecund races exterminated after being caught on one side of the conflict or the other. The war on the island continent lasted centuries until, in a final orgy of destruction, one of the sides unleashed truly terrible weapons – hell-fire impacting the earth, storms that melted stone and incinerated both races, forces that cracked the ground and warped the fabric of the world; great tracts of land turned to liquid flame, the sea itself burning as magma seeped out of the world's wounds.

Hannah was left floating above a land blanketed by eternal winter, and then she noticed the Cade Mountains. There were eyes there, identical to the hideous sentinel that had observed her enter the tunnel, but these eyes were on the other side of the slope, still watching: watching the melted, steaming city as drain covers and survival centre doors lifted up and those who by accident or design had been fortunate enough to be underground when the sun storms scoured the land above them emerged.

Time flickered forward again and Hannah watched as each generation that succeeded the survivors of the conflict fell further from the condition of civilization their forefathers had reached. Scrabbling simply to eke out an existence in the freezing lands about them. But then, something completely unexpected. Hannah was whisked deep under the mountains to a machine-lined chamber filled with ice-covered coffins, their lids retracting to reveal a group of healthy, full-sized ursine. As the cloud of frost dissipated, these last scientist-priests rose as though they were gods returning from an earlier age. A breakaway ursine faction planted like drought seeds to reawaken and rebuild civilization.

However, the land the scientist-priests found waiting for them was far beyond repair, beyond even their worst predictions of the ravages the war would wreak. They tried to resettle the island but it proved too difficult. The tunnel was the sole remaining legacy of that time, leading from nowhere and going nowhere. A fresh start in a new land was the only way their society could live again. Many of the creatures of war given life by their twisted science had become predators preying on the primitive descendents clinging onto the land; a land too barren to support meaningful agriculture. And there was a worse revelation still to come. Dark energies released in the war had poisoned the very soil that once supported its people. Those that subsisted on the land were poisoned in turn, their flesh twisting and mutating, and in response the scientist-priests did the only thing they could. They created a centre of healing using the last of their hoarded science. Bloodglass Island. With a small handful of ursine descendents healed, the priests summoned the flying scouts that had once served them. Their last loyal servants. The Angels of Airdia arrived and bore the healed ursine away to a domain far beyond their ruined home, across the sea to a nation that would become Pericur.

Still the hideous eyes on the mountain watched, recording the march of ages, filling the machines hidden far underground with their recordings of the slow sweep of history. Century upon century – millennia upon millennia. The twisted, broken race of man hammered into primitive, voiceless savages, poison seeping across the generations until the dark energies dissipated and only the ab-locks were left. Tears fell from Hannah's eyes. And while the race of man shrank and became wizened ab-locks, the unhealed ursine left behind had swollen and grown bestial, larger and larger, claws and fangs replacing reasoning and morality. They had become the monstrous race of ursks. Both of those races that had once completely mastered nature fallen victim to the random whittling of an untram-melled creation run wild and merciless. The sole legacy left by their civilization was a deep revulsion between the two races, an ancient war without end turned to nothing more than savage territorial instinct. That and a land locked in fire and circled by a sea of burning magma, its ground echoing to the clashing howls of their devolved descendents.

A geological age later, other offshoots of the race of man had returned to Jago, eventually reencountering the people of Pericur across the sea – the hairless devils of ursine mythology, scorched of all fur by their sins. Another of Alice Gray's sayings came back to Hannah. Those who failed to learn history are doomed to repeat it. The Pericurians scheming to evict the Jagonese from their sacred soil, the Jagonese hostility towards their nearest neighbours across the sea, all just a mirror to the thoughtless skirmishes of the ab-locks and ursks. A circle turning and repeating, a memory distorted through Pericurian scripture. That was all that was left of their legacy now. That and – Hannah took a step backwards. The ancient healing centre on Bloodglass Island. Capable of restoring degenerate flesh – but Hannah was neither an ab-lock nor an ursk. Her mind was no simple poisoned husk that needed evolving back to full sentience. She tried to will away the ancient vision of knowledge that had possessed her, to return to the walls of the chamber crawling with ancient formulae, but she was firmly held in the tool's grasp now and it had not finished with her. It had barely even started.

Hannah screamed as her brain began to heat up, her every thought a burning dagger as molten as the fires of Jago. Changing her, remaking her. Healing her and killing her…

With eight bearers on either side, strapping ursine adults all, the litter belonging to Baroness Laro urs Laro of the House of Ush, head of the Pericurean trade mission, was borne with careful dignity and some difficulty through the tight entrance to the cavernous senatorial banqueting hall and towards the senate's best imitation of a Pericurian feast.

Despite their best efforts at courtliness, the bearers deposited the Baroness in front of the piled food as if she were another haunch of meat being added to the feast. First Senator Silvermain's free company mercenaries took position along the wall, guns and armour jangling, two food tasters emerging from a doorway to flank the politician and his noble guest – both the food tasters kin of the kitchen staff, as was the Jagonese tradition. The possibility of poison aside, the two food tasters looked as happy to be sampling the foreign food as the First Senator's favoured courtiers and cronies. They were trying not to make it too obvious as they covered their noses with silk handkerchiefs in distaste at the fare in front of them. There were a few disgusted mutters of wet-snout food whispered by the courtiers forced to sit down with this foreign savage.