The Sailing Ships of Montok

I think I was ten, maybe eleven when the first Filters came to rest over England, enormous constructs that resembled a doughnut. They reminded me of a line I had once read in a book that they hung in the air exactly the way a brick shouldn’t! But these weren’t so funny. I don’t think I really understood until my little piece of woodland was gone but once it had, I knew that this was all wrong.

It was just a few short years later, mom had left after dad died in the War with the Fae and I was busying myself being a rebellious teenager except that I really was a rebel. I had gotten involved with Extinction Rebellion, they had only done peaceful rallies in previous years but now they were an organised rebellion against the extremist response to the Fae. I learned through them the atrocities that F.A.T were inflicting upon the world, it wasn’t just my little bit of woodland that had been ripped away but whole rainforests were now gone, all to support the War with faerie kind. We did our best to stop the drones, protesters were climbing up into the trees so that the drones couldn’t extract them but where money and power are concerned human lives were of little concern. The first shootings were in Sherwood, a F.A.T operative just lost it, he lifted his rifle and killed one of the protesters, a young lad barely out of his teens. I don’t think he meant to kill him but it was the turning point from peaceful protest to organised rebellion. No longer was it about saving the trees, our planet, now it was to stop the machine.

F.A.T or Fae Assault Technologies was mankind’s response to the magical force of nature that had returned to our world from ancient fairy tales. Understanding of their physiology had led to breakthroughs in untapped energy reserves, sciences that had mystified man since the splitting of the atom were suddenly accessible but where the Fae tapped these energies in harmony mankind just raped them, as they always had done in time of war. During the two great wars in our violent history England’s forests had been depleted to around 5% landmass coverage. The forestry commission had been instigated to save England’s woodlands but all the work that good cause bought to our little island has been lost to the greed of a corporate war machine hellbent on taking every last resource from our lands. The ecosystem began to break down, the Filters did their job carbon sinking all over the world but nothing could offset the loss of biodiversity. The land so long protected by our woodlands began to wash away as rivers burst their banks from heavier and heavier rainfall. Glastonbury was once more a floodplain, the mythical Isle of Avalon returned, I hear it stands at the heart of everything the fae have returned for, but no human gets near the faerie lands now.

England, long known for its grey days and absurd American concepts of smoggy cities was now shrouded in fog banks as the humidity began to soar. The Channel was actually drying up despite the rains getting heavier. F.A.T had scientific proof that this erosion of the source material… forests, would deny the Fae a victory. Without them the Fae would wither away back into the mythical faerie stories from which they had come. F.A.T had a recovery plan… they stopped talking about that nearly a decade ago but by then it was too late, our ecosystems had entered into something called a positive feedback loop, self propelling the collapse of nature as we new it at an ever increasing pace.

When my mom found me after nearly twenty years it was a difficult time, I was older, she was older, we were both much wiser and both invested in the same ideas. She was an engineer and I, a visionary. Together we spent the next five years building the Ships. We never gave them a name but somebody somewhere did, Montok, our family name. They were built on Fae technology, if technology is the right word, maybe magic is more fitting but I don’t know if that word means the same thing anymore!

The world has changed, we sail on thermal drifts bringing food and supplies to the rebellion across England and Europe, heh, I just about remember stories about the fractious animosity of the old world, Brexit, Coronavirus, the war on terror, building walls to divide nations. And now, as we sail through the mists of our future I wonder at the unification of mankind. Rebellion and War are all that exist for our species now, rebellion against the rape of our planet by a corporate war machine or the war to suppress nature’s fae dominance over mankind. Either way we are unified in destruction, let’s face it, it’s the one thing that has always unified mankind!