The Great Yukon Serpent

    They held for three days with a simple discipline- fire, reload, repeat. Speaking only to pass ammunition down the trench, the foxholes turned into little museums of desperation. Frozen piles of spent brass, bloodied dressings, and a stink that the cold couldn’t quite bury. Men were so scared to move once they were posted, most never did.     By the third morning the valley felt picked clean of quiet. There was no wind, only a gale force howl, screaming and gunfire as much a constant as insects buzzing on a summer day. The Armistice told themselves the Yukon were almost spent. They rehearsed that lie between clenched teeth, refusing to see the line of reinforcements that stretched into the horizon.     The breach came like an answer to that lie.     The siege broke as suddenly as it had began. An abomination, some kind of cross between man and beast, tore a hole in the fortifications. It hit the west wall where the concrete had cracked in a star pattern since the first barrage. There was no ladder, no bomb-sled, no elegant machine of war - just something heavy and deliberate, shouldering the seam again and again until the star finally ran out of lines and became a hole.     The first group through the tear didn’t last the length of a breath. The defensive batteries opened up, too close for comfort but close enough for certainty. The blasts didn’t so much break bodies as erase them into air and grit. The certainty came at a cost.     A second hole fell in, then a third, and now the neat geometry of defense broke like old plaster. The cannibal army was here, and there was no place to retreat.     The Yukon soldiers were rumored to be starved during a siege, and the rumors seemed true. Some came over the wall only to drag screaming soldiers back with them, some didn't even wait that long. Eating parts of their victims raw in the midst of the intense fighting. A few broke just from witnessing the brutality. With the last remnant of morale gone, the fort had truly fallen.     The night became a theater for desperate last stands and heroic sacrifices. Some tried to flee into the tree line, some hid in the base. As more and more of the cannibal horde moved in all hope of escape vanished. Some smaller fortifications held, creating whole new meat grinders as survivors tried to make these last bastions of cover before being run down.     A long night of horrors lay ahead. If they could survive until dawn they had one last chance to get out of this madness. Air support from their allies was coming at first light, the kind that would turn the fate of this war once and for all.  

  She stood calm in the racket of men. Snow hissed under her bare feet and warmed, the melt finding wilted stems and sleeping moss. The touch completed the circuit. The mycorrhiza murmured - root to root, ruin to ruin - bringing her the valley’s memory as if it were breath on the skin.     Information moved through her without effort. She did not command so much as allow it to permeate her. At a silent lift of her hand the Guardians collected: the Hollowed drifting in from tunnels and culverts, the changed ones gathering like vultures to a fresh corpse. Lost Dreamers, abominations, the obedient and the empty; aligned by their connection to the natural universe. They called her kind savage. The Dream would show them the power of unity.     The ground told her about the planes before lookouts ever could. A tremor traveled up from far ridges, Appalachian airfields drumming with the promise of retaliation. But their precious bombs would not be wasted if there was no one left to save. She raised her arm and the onslaught began anew.     Her Hollowed children erupted into the base, scouring every crevice for survivors and holdouts. She walked after with her personal guard, Somnic-bonded grizzlies padding at her flanks. Muscles thickened to support claws that could find seams in steel the way fingers separates threads from the weave. They worked on scent, instinct, and the will of the Yukon.     A thin smile she couldn’t stifle moved with her as she went; through the roots she felt a collective relief from her brethren. The main fighting was over, and it was time to feast on the spoils of their efforts. Their foes were almost vanquished, and before long, a new war would begin. The Yukon Valley, Alaska, and all of Canada were now conquered. But there was more. There was always more.     Reinforcements would come at dawn and discover there was nothing left to rescue.     And after dawn, another war. North America awaited.