AFT 3.0 Storm Birds
The soldiers lined along the edge of the valley, at attention, their stanchions firmly planted in the ground. But what was most striking was the bonfires which lined the surrounding cliffs. Perhaps it was an echo of the indigenous, who had lit bonfires on the headlands to communicate with the tribes up and down the coast. Or to alert danger, as they had done when the ghost ships arrived, filled with those strangely dressed ghosts with their firesticks; as frightened or bewildered as they may have been, they did not realise, could not have conceived, that their world was coming to an end. That the genocides past, present and future, were about to be visited upon them. And that the comfortable guilt of the white middle classes which would grow and festoon in the centuries beyond could provide no comfort whatsoever. But more like, as he gazed around the rim of those echo chambers, those sharp valleys, as he saw the bonfires burning on the cliffs, many located in the exac...