City

Lightly, gently, waves of air pass around her head. Just a light breeze. She directs a little more and more, just a little. Just enough for the girl to sense it. And to stir the dust in front of her. Meantime, she gets agitated by everybody on the site.

- This is not right! Well, these kids have no idea what they're doing. Wait, what are you doing? No, don't dig, don't hold it like that, man! Oh, he's going to ruin everything! Oh, good, their supervisor came. They are volunteers, not graduate archaeologists, so they don’t know how to dig a site. Well, if they haven't finished yet, so what's going on here? Why are they letting them poke around on my surface! I’ve been here for thousands of years, and can wait a bit longer for them not to butcher me! -

Again, she feels a breeze on her neck, but all day there has not been a breath of wind anywhere. Marija has been sitting on the boulder for an hour, watching others working, pretending that she has strained her joint and cooling it down. It doesn't even cross her mind to work actively for eight hours in this heat. She watches how patterns are being created in the dust in front of her. She occasionally wipes them with her foot, but they reappear. The patterns reappeared even though she wiped them twice. She says to herself - Jerk, stand up, fake a light hobble and join the others, you'll be stuck here alone. In her opinion, she has been a champion of faking it and making it look like she is actually doing something while lazing around. Champion amongst her friends, a teacher to those idiot masses of them that worshipped her youth and laziness. Alas, doing it if no one is paying attention to you is futile, not very satisfying at all. -So, up and at them, like her gramma would say!- she thought and got up. Slowly, mind you, she is no faking champion for nothing, you know.

- This kid is really a jerk.- City sighs to herself,- I've been writing to her for an hour and she STILL thinks she's tripping. - The city has no more patience today. Other parts of her require attention as the day progresses. Once a small prehistoric settlement with a couple of sheds, to be honest, not houses, now it's a small town. Nothing special really, considering how long she's been around.

- Why are they digging here? These kids are going at it like crazy. If they go a little deeper, they will find the horror that the fat, bearded thief buried. And then everything will go to hell! - The city thinks.- It has been such a long time, maybe the thing won't work now? The idiotic marauder got it from the east, the far east that is, they make their juju powerful and dangerous, better not to take chances. -She thinks to herself.

How can a city even shape its thoughts into something so specific? She is old, very old. First started to gather as a minuscule fragment of consciousness a few millennia ago when beings that lived in that area began to stay in one place for a prolonged period of time. A feeling of being, a spark of something accumulated and grew. With time, that spark became flame, a shining star, permanent and capable of forming thoughts. The organisms in that area grew and multiplied, becoming more and more complex. From centipedes, birds, small rodents, to bigger game, to finally humans. So with them she grew, built herself from their feelings, thoughts and actions. Learned the patterns and behaviour, language...

She focuses her attention on schools. Indeed, there are still a few days left until the holidays, so all those lads are mostly yelling rather than doing anything, but the city knows that it should be that way. Various sorcerers, priests, magicians, and madmen addressed her. And children, always children. She used to be their imaginary friend, a benevolent spark that follows and watches over them. She turns the forest paths for them to get home, slows down the battles and traffic so that the cuties can get away in time. But no one heard her and understood when she addressed them. Even when she was warning them about the jerks from the neighbouring island state.

So, action! Schools are still full of students and professors, from her experience, a disastrous and a winning combination. The kids who dig her outskirts are still technically going to one. The professors who supervise them technically still teach at one such institution. Thus, she must use what is at hand. Not very promising delt hand, but it's what it is. Since previous experience shows that the rearrangement of flowers and sounds isn’t something the human species really knows how to interpret promptly, let's see what they know. She knows that some words are written on some parts of the old fortification. Old bastard wrote some of them she remembers, guided by that shaman but with his own hand. She always knew that the writing had some connection with the buried monstrosity. At that time, they took such length in preparing the hole, so, so deep. They poured something foul from the couldrons first, almost as if to isolate her soil. Then came the rites, and chanting, drums, day and night, haunting, they echoed through the bones, earth and surrounding trees. The drums were made from human skin, ranging from the largest, taken from adults, to the smallest, from children and babies. They resonated, shaking, trembling, everything around them. And suddenly they stopped. The silence was even worse. It was like all living things forgot how to breathe from the terror. Now that the drumming stopped, they couldn't remember how to take breathe in their lungs. The bastard didn't give them time. He called for the cage, which was rolled to the hole with the shaman chanting again, grinning as if it were the greatest pleasure all the while. They put down the foul aura thing in the hole, buried it with more dirt, ashes, living humans, the drums, then dirt and ashes again. Bastard then took the chisel and, guided by the shaman, wrote something on the walls. The hole was made in the yard of the fortification, not in the centre either, on the sides where the stable boys dumped the manure, and the kitchen and chamber maids dumped their garbage. Writhing on the wall isn't visible now, and it was never much, just a few lines in some odd chiped language the shaman spoke. Honestly, she was never overly interested in what they wrote. Now that her ass is in the line, so to speak, she will pay attention. She will definitely pay attention. She must worn the kids.