The Poison Wall

Many years ago before the Sundering and even before the Black Mist took over the Delta there was a farmer, cunning and pre-emptive who lived in a little hut at the base of the Mountains, and his name was John.

John was a master botanist. He classified plants and identified them on the spot just by looking at them for a couple of seconds. His knowledge was passed on to him by his family. John's father, Professor Albert Pompidou of Gillis was a lecturer at the Great Mountain Halls. His mother, Ophelia Lepsi was an adventurer. She had travelled the far-beyond, into the jungles, and came back with samples for her husband to name.

John had characteristics of both his parents. He was adventurous and intellectual. The farms that he built on his own at the foot of the Mountains where the Blue River disappeared provided sustenance to his family; his wife Elizabeth Pompidou and the three children she nurtured.

No man in the Delta had foreseen the coming of the Black Mist except one. John had long preached about it's coming. He felt it in his soil, saw it in his plants, tasted it in the waters. He feared of what might come of the far beyond if the mist had to overcome the mountains. And he also feared of what might come across to the Delta from the jungles beyond, when no man was left to defend against the threat. He did not wish to see his home ravaged by beasts, neither did he want Skaipei and it's denizens to suffer from this assault if it would come to one.

So John devised the most cunning plan ever to come to his mind. He was to build a wall of poisonous plants, thick and long covering the base of the mountains. A wall that no man and no beast would be able to cross, for it would be the plants he loved that protected the Delta. 

He set out to build this wall ten years before the coming of the Black Mist. Those years the skies were still clear and the sun shone bright on the soil. The air, however, already felt thick and heavy. The wind that incessantly blew from the sea to the East reached the mountains where it broke and left it's cargo. And so it was when John sown his first seeds that the winds from the East brought the first black drops of moisture over the Delta.

From his gardens John selected a variety of plants most toxic to all kinds of beasts. He chose the most deadly of all, and picked varied species to leave no dent in the shield which he was to grow. To protect the soil, he sown Rapa filiformis a bulb plant with threadlike leaves. The bulb seeps out toxic chemicals that inhibit burrowers from advancing, while the tendrils above had sticky barbs that readily attached to beasts passing through. These then seeped the same poison onto their victims. 

Other kinds included plants of the family Corocoros. A blue form of shrub that had large nail-like protrusions from it's branches. A scratch on these needles poisoned the victim with a chemical that prevented clotting. Other plants unleashed a mixture of toxic gases all over the wall.

To grow his poison wall, John first sown his seeds all across the Mountain base and constructed irrigation pipe along his transect. Over ten years, the wall was watered through these pipes, for not even John was invulnerable to his own creation and would not be able to go close to them.

So eventually the wall grew, sixty kilometres long, five kilometres wide. It's height varied at areas, but was on average at least five metres high, yet thick and impenetrable. The plume of toxic gas that was emitted from the wall reached a further kilometre all around it.

This was a great achievement for John. He felt proud and of duty to his people though the same cannot be said otherwise. For the citizens of Skaipei outcasted John from their city. He was labelled a traitor, a heretic. No one believed of the dangers beyond the mountains, even less of the coming Black Mist. 

Only when the dark tide swept over the Delta like a mattress being pulled over a  naked baby did the people of Skaipei think back to what a crazy man had once told them ten years ago.

"I shall erect a wall of poison below the Mountains, for when the darkness comes, let there be a barrier between our lands and the jungles beyond. Let there be a sliver of hope for us in the dark, that the beasts from beyond may not make of us what cats make of mice of the fields."