The First Human-Monster War

A war nobody wanted, between two species that had shared a world for centuries, manufactured by something that eats fear.

The cause

Akumu, which condensed out of three hundred years of essence-users' nightmares and then cultivated the terror it lived on until it tipped a civilisation over.

It did not attack. It managed a supply: nudging researchers toward dangerous work, feeding artists anxieties to spread, editing kings mid-sentence in their own war rooms. Communities split along lines drawn by invisible fear, alliances failed under manufactured distrust, and the balance between humans and monsters tipped into hostility.

How it was sold

Whispers. Monsters walking among us. Creatures of shadow and fang threatening extinction. Politicians called for preemptive strikes, preachers called it divine mandate, and mothers demanded protection.

Nobody asked why the monsters had lived peacefully beside us for centuries. Nobody wondered why the fear came so suddenly, so completely, so uniformly across every human settlement on Earth. (ch. 24)

The truth of it

The propaganda had the predator backwards.

An average monster could take ten average humans. An awakened human could kill dozens of awakened monsters without effort. The monsters in the deserter camps were refugees, not aggressors.

The cost

• Twenty years from the fear taking root to open war. Ch. 24 and ch. 26 agree on the figure.
• Five years since humans and monsters were still living together. Ch. 26 gives it from inside the war room, as the thing General Trent cannot stop wondering about: "just five years ago, humans and monsters had coexisted peacefully."
• Forty-five percent of Earth's population dead within three months of the war beginning (ch. 24).

So the shape is twenty years of quiet seeding, then five years of a peace coming apart, then three months that kill nearly half the world.

Executive Order Seven-Seven-Three

The camps have a number. Ch. 26 has Aldric issue it in the war room, one line after Akumu tells him where to aim.

AKU: Their families. Their children. Their beloved. Make them choose between their cause and their hearts. ALD: Their families. Of course. ... ALD: Executive Order Seven-Seven-Three. Immediate relocation of all deserter families to protective custody.

The general objects, and is answered:

GNR: Your Majesty, with respect... won't this be seen as taking hostages? AKU: Hostages? No. Leverage. ALD: Not hostages, General. Refugees.

The narration does not let it pass: "Protective custody. The oldest lie in the book. Cage people for their own good, and half of them will thank you for it."

The order is what produces the seven compounds and therefore the seven simultaneous raids that are the spine of the volume.

The ultimatum, and why either answer suits Akumu

Ch. 26 gives the letter's terms. Thirty days to present themselves at any military outpost for "debriefing and reintegration into human society", after which "your families will be treated accordingly".

The narration does not let the word pass: "Such a clean word for breaking people until they forget why they ever disagreed with you."

Akumu's method in that room is worth recording precisely, because it is not mind control:

Not control. Not domination. Just... influence. A gentle pressure on the fear centers of their brains. A whispered reminder that everything different was dangerous.

It touches every mind at the table, the king, the general, the scribes, the guards. General Trent's doubts evaporate mid-sentence.

And the trap is built so that it cannot fail:

Soon, the deserters would have to choose between their cause and their hearts. And either choice would serve the shadow's purposes perfectly.

Aldric's hands tremble as he signs, and the chapter allows that it might be "some deep part of his soul trying to resist".

The deserters dissolve themselves

Ch. 27 has Icarus refuse both options the letter offers. His force is fifty awakened humans and about thirty monsters, against fortified compounds and professional soldiers.

His plan is seven simultaneous rescues with no coordination and no backup:

ICR: We don't need to coordinate. We need to trust each other.

And the price, which is the part the archive did not have: after the raids the deserters stop existing as a single body, on purpose.

ICR: After this, the old camp is compromised. Everyone scatters. [...] The age of big deserter settlements is over.

ICR: We become the war they can't fight - the resistance they can't root out because we're everywhere and nowhere at once.

He takes Sanctuary Hills himself, because his mother and brother are there. Nilah refuses to let him go alone.

The seven compounds

Ch. 27 gives the count and the total. A courier, seventeen years old and pressed into service, hands over the guard schedules and locations he copied before he left.

ICR: Fifteen hundred people. Maybe more. Spread across seven compounds.

Only three of the seven are ever named, all in the same paragraph of ch. 27, and none of the three appears again anywhere in the saga.

That is 950 of the fifteen hundred. The other four compounds hold the rest and go unnamed.

Icarus notes what the third one is called: "the name was a cruel joke".

What the seven raids cost

Ch. 40 has Magistrate Korren read the tally aloud in the throne room, off a scroll, and it is the only hard accounting in the volume.

KOR: Seven simultaneous attacks on our detention facilities. Fourteen guards killed. Six facilities compromised. Nearly a thousand prisoners freed. The largest coordinated assault since the war began.

Six of seven, and roughly a thousand of the fifteen hundred. Aldric calls it "an act of war. Against your own species, no less."

The throne room is warded. Nilah's flames go out and Icarus loses his connection to his own soul the moment they arrive, to magic the narration calls "not the raw elemental force that awakened humans wielded, but something older, more refined."

Then the families are shown to them, alive, inside the palace. The rescue succeeded and delivered everybody into the same building as the king.

Who is inside them

Not soldiers. The relatives of people who refused to fight.

Icarus's mother and younger brother are in one of them, which is what makes ch. 24's question to his father, "How is mother and little brother?", a thing he asked while she was already a hostage.

The courier's own parents are dead, "killed in the first monster raids when this all started". His last word before leaving is a request, and it is the seed of ch. 39:

COR: some of the guards are just kids like me. Pressed into service. They don't want to be there any more than the prisoners do. ICR: Noted. Thank you.

The deserters

Humans who saw through it and were branded traitors before they fought anyone. They were not branded for siding with monsters but for refusing to pick a side.

The camps took them in "like lost children returning home", not for their strength but because they were proof that not all of humanity had gone mad.

Icarus and Nilah are the two the volume follows.

The rhyme with the far future

The saga tells this war twice, centuries apart, and both times the same way.

Neither war is caused by the species that gets blamed for it. See ../volumes/far-future.md.

Open questions

• Whether anyone in the far future remembers this one happened.
• Whether Akumu is stopped, and by whom. Its last line is in ch. 53, "Icarus Of The Freedom".