Earthbound Spirit
Every person lives bound to the earth.
Beings born of the soil who will one day return to it.
From eating and sleeping and shitting, to the birth of new life and the final end that follows, a man spends his whole existence leaning on the land, leaving his mark upon it with a body that will eventually crumble to dust.
And this law is so simple, so absolute, that even the strutting noble lords who swagger about as if they own the air itself cannot escape it.
Hell, even His Majesty the King over there in Orléans would drop dead the moment his belly stuck to his backbone, wouldn't he?
Sure, with that precious royal blood of his, he probably never has to worry about starving like a serf. But in the end, the king and a man like him are the same—one wrong step and you're dead.
So then, what's the point?
If even the most exalted king on earth is no different from a lowly serf like him, what reason is there to keep those nobles alive—the ones who suck the lifeblood out of peasants just so they can live in luxury?
George, an odd serf who worked the lands of the Count of Avignon, found himself entertaining such blasphemous thoughts every time he cleaned out the dung from the stables.
George was no budding radical revolutionary, nor some modern man from the twenty-first century. But the reek that stabbed at his nose in those stables kept stoking a murderous impulse he couldn't quite shake.
Of course, George had a family to provide for, so he never did anything so foolish as to speak those impious thoughts aloud.
Then one day, the lord went mad.
The Count of Avignon had never been a particularly good master to begin with, but he became obsessed with some rootless cult and started pouring seawater over the fields.
It was an act both monstrous and stupid.
Even then, George didn't take the matter too seriously.
He had no idea how powerful this so-called Sea God might be, but a man bound to the earth who dared offend the Earth Mother would surely be struck down by divine punishment before long. He laughed at the thought.
It did not take long to learn how dangerously complacent that assumption had been.
The lazy Earth Mother showed no reaction whatsoever while the mad Count of Avignon ruined most of his demesne, and the wheat fields George and his family had tended were, quite naturally, completely destroyed.
Ah, fuck. The crops are screwed.
Guess we go take the lord's head, then.
Peasant uprisings broke out all across the count's territory for reasons that simple-minded, but George did not join those idiots.
How could mere farmers dare raise weapons against those high and mighty lords?
A thousand plowmen could gather, and the moment the knights in their gleaming armor mounted up and charged, they would be swept away without a chance to resist.
Instead of grabbing a pitchfork and standing against a cavalry charge like the other fools, clever serf George quietly climbed into the mountains to forage for food.
Abandoning the useless faith of the Earth Mother and offering prayers to the mountain spirits was just a bonus.
"How dare a serf like you—!"
"Look at me in this ridiculously expensive armor. Handsome, right?"
"A rebel serf? Trash, aren't you? Take my sword—the one that killed your family!"
His foresight proved exactly right. The first uprising in the count's lands was thoroughly crushed, and for a moment it seemed everything would return to normal.
The cult-obsessed lord was driven out, and his second son inherited the title, so there was no reason to expect further trouble.
Things started going strange only after the new lord began his rule.
The second son who had ousted the Count of Avignon and taken his place was an absolute bastard.
Like father, like son—but there were limits. He declared he would raise taxes on the very serfs whose farms his father had ruined.
Even clever serf George's brain could not make sense of such lunacy, but the taxes went up all the same, and a second wave of uprisings erupted everywhere.
Birds of a feather flock together: the knights and lesser lords under the Count of Avignon all announced tax hikes of their own, and the entire sphere of the count's influence dissolved into the chaos of peasant revolt.
The mountain that was supposed to be the George family's lifeline filled with bandits instead.
"Ah, fuck. My life's screwed."
Do I have to go take the lord's head after all?
By the time things reached this point, even stupid serf George felt the urge to join the peasant uprising—but he could not crawl into a death trap and leave his wife and children to starve.
So he tried to forage in a nearby field. That very field was reduced to ash in a clash between knights and bandits.
The Earth Mother and the mountain spirits had both abandoned him.
While the whole world spun mad in the flames of war, the lowly serfs bound to the land could not even find a way to ease their hunger, and died wretchedly.
His family was no exception.
With no one left to be responsible for, George finally joined the uprising for real.
By then it was not only the Count of Avignon's vassals putting down the rebellion—neighboring lords who coveted the land had joined the suppression as well. But what did that matter to a mob that had nothing left to lose?
Forsaken by gods and kings alike, they plundered carriages and raided manors without hesitation, doing everything in their power to ruin the lives of the noble lords.
Human decency and any line they ought to have drawn had been buried in the earth along with their kin.
To drag even one of those pig bastards who had sucked their blood and lived in luxury down with them as company for the grave, they half-abandoned their own survival, becoming the leaders of a bandit pack that drifted across barren mountains and fields.
That was how it should have been—
"...What the hell. Am I seeing things?"
George, the man with nothing left to lose, had followed a sudden plume of smoke and now stood speechless before the jackpot spread out before his eyes.
Spears, swords, and arrowheads scattered carelessly across the road. Chain mail and helmets. Here and there a knight's full plate and warhorses still wearing their saddles. And off to one side, military provisions stacked neatly in piles.
Enough matériel to arm a hundred men with ease, just sitting there abandoned. George's gang could not collect their wits; they fell into pure confusion.
"B-Boss. What in the world is all this?"
"Whoa. Look at the shine on that beast's coat."
"I-If we just had that, we could—"
It was treasure never meant for a mere peasant rabble.
Costly weapons, sturdy-looking armor, solid warhorses, and abundant food.
The exclusive property of knights and armies—things they had never dared dream of possessing—lay strewn along the roadside like so much trash.
"Uh..."
What is this.
What the hell is this, really.
Clever gang boss George spun his stiff brain as hard as he could, but no amount of thinking was going to explain this unidentifiable miracle.
In the end he was about to give up on understanding and just order them to grab the supplies and pull back—when a small heap of ash piled among the gear caught his eye.
"...Huh?"
In that instant his mind began to whirl at furious speed.
There was no real evidence, nothing solid, yet the abandoned matériel and the ash snapped together in his head and summoned the name of a certain goddess.
Vesta.
The Flame of Benevolence who protects humanity. The judge who burns away evil and saves the weak.
The goddess of love and justice who left the earth in disappointment at the corrupt and fallen clergy, yet still watches over them.
It had to be.
This unidentifiable matériel that had appeared before them was surely a gift from Goddess Vesta herself.
She had reduced the wicked lord's dogs who once owned it to a handful of ash, then raised smoke to guide them here.
Otherwise, who would abandon such precious supplies by the roadside?
How else could a mere band of rioters discover them and take them whole into their hands?
This was all the Goddess's will.
Pitying their lot under the nobles' tyranny, the Goddess had punished the wicked and bestowed blessed arms upon them!
George felt faith in Vesta surge up inside him like a flood.
Earth Mother this, mountain spirit that—none of them had the power to stop the world from going to hell. Yet merciful Goddess Vesta still looked after even the humans who had disappointed her so carefully.
George had been born after the Order's fall and had never once set foot in a church, but suddenly he felt an urge to fold his hands and offer a proper prayer.
He was the leader of a band now, however, so instead of wasting time on private sentiment he considered how to raise his men's spirits.
And after hard thought, the answer that emerged was, of course, to share the revelation he had received.
"The Goddess is watching over us! Let's shove her sacred flame right into those pig bastards' guts and build a paradise on earth according to her will!"
It was a complete misunderstanding.
The one who had burned the knights and soldiers to ash was not the striking Goddess Vesta, but Rebecca—and she had left the expensive gear behind simply because there had been far too much of it.
She had incinerated the knights and soldiers armed with that equipment because they had dared try to collect a toll, not because she meant to punish the wicked and save the serfs.
Of course, from the perspective of serfs who had just gotten free weapons, that was information they neither knew nor cared to know.
Armed with costly gear, George's band grew in power at a terrifying pace.
The dying embers of war began to blaze once more.