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Other holidays are pertinent to certain religious groups and are celebrated in certain locales but not in others; still others commemorate local events, such as the Festival of the Angel on 20th to 25th Fallow, in Merovingen, which unites a number of religious observances in a mutually agreed date. The general tenor of the festival is a purification and absolution in memory of divine intervention; but sects differ considerably in interpretation. The practice among almost all sects involves the giving of gifts and the mending of broken friendships and lapsed vows before the year's end: there is a belief in Merovingen that this festival is pre-Scouring; and that therefore it is the one festival which intervenes in the period between 24th Harvest and 10th Prime. There is even a legend that in the Det Valley, during the darkest day of the Winter, when sharrh were hunting humans up and down the valley, a band of starving humans decided to celebrate this ancient festival, and in a cave deep in the hills, with the attack going on in the valley, they gave each other gifts that became a miracle— since each of them had secreted things that, brought into the open, helped the whole company survive. The story is perhaps apocryphal; but the festival is observed by all sects and across sect lines throughout the Det Valley in some form; and the practice and the legend have been picked up by the Falkenaer, who devoutly insist that the site of the miracle was the Falkenaer Isles.
The Angel of Merovingen
The Angel, which is a copy of one which did predate the Scouring, was set in its present position in the year 55 After the Scouring, precisely on the 25th Fallow, in a civic ceremony. The original, discovered in about 22 AS in the ruins of Merovingen, disappeared when it was stolen by the governor of Nev Hettek in the intervention during the Adventist riots of 53 AS; the barge transporting it sank in the Det, some believe as a result of Adventist sabotage; some say that the barge was struck by lightning during a storm; and the implication is that the lightning was divinely directed.
Legend states various things about the Angel, which is a gilt figure twice lifesize, of a winged figure in flowing robes either drawing or sheathing a sword. Adventists say that the Angel's name is Retribution, and that he is in the act of drawing. Some say that the sword advances and retreats into the sheath by tiny degrees at each act of humankind that either advances or retards the day of Retribution. Of course this is immeasurable because of the number of people in the world, but some Adventists insist there has been measurable movement.
Revenantists state that the Angel's name is Michael and that he is sheathing the sword which caused the earthquake.
The Church of God agrees in the name and says that he is a divine witness to human affairs, and will remain to guard the world from the sharrh until the Church is restored to its former purity.
The Janes and the New Worlders incorporate him into their own beliefs as an entity of divine wrath which defends humanity from the sharrh: Janes call him the Watcher and New Worlders call him simply the Angel. Replicas of the Angel are venerated in Suttani, the Falken Isles, the Goth, and Kasparl.
The Scouring and Re-establishment
There is an event referred to as the Little Scouring, which was the purposeful demolition of structures and removal of dangerous information offworld by human forces in the face of the sharrh advance and in compliance with the sharrh-human treaty. This demolition was also designed to compel surrender of the holdouts.
It did secure some further compliance. It further and accidentally ensured human survival by driving the colonists into the hills to escape arrest; it also hardened the attitudes of the most determined resistance, the hard core of which was convinced (after repeated betrayal by authorities) that the whole alien threat was concocted by either the companies or the government to take their land.
But on 24th Harvest in the year 2657 of the old reckoning (still used for religious purposes and in official documents) the sharrh came down to eradicate the last remnant of human settlement on Merovin.
The first strike took out the space station, which by then was only a ransacked and stripped hulk. It also hit the major cities with C-fractional strikes, not, fortunately for the ecology and the remaining survivors, with atomics. Subsequent attacks were at close range with beamfire and finally with demolitions and air-to-ground missiles or with rifles as sharrh hunters carried out a site by site search for survivors, and perhaps, though sharrh motives remain obscure, a search for records.
Humans lost ground steadily, and finally devoted most of their energies not to attack but to evasion. This continued through the Long Winter of 2657-58, during which humans suffered from exposure and starvation.
By a time generally accepted as 10th Prime, the sharrh stopped shelling the hills and withdrew their patrols. After that, the sharrh left the world.
It was not until full spring that the first humans ventured out into their former lands. Some of these were true insistence fighters; others were human predators who were as apt to turn on other humans as on the sharrh. And for the next several years, that was the condition of the Det Valley and Megar and Kaspar River.
Eventually places like Kasparl sprang up, freewheeling trading posts founded on ruin; and places like Merovingen, Soghon and Nev Hettek, where farmers and traders reestablished themselves; and the hardy Falkenaer, who stripped their isles of trees in the making of boats of quite different sort than they had used in colonial days; but they had been fisherfolk from the founding of the colony.
This period of rebuilding is called the Re-establishment. It stretched on over fifty years before human life on Merovin achieved any feeling of permanence. These were rough years in which there were numbers of locally notorious bandits and leaders and would-be leaders who rose and fell and left little legacy. Noted in the area around Susain was the bandit Sager, whose band faded away into the elusive desert-dwelling folk who live mostly by trading and by petty theft in the outback around Susain; while in the Det Valley, Nev Hettek took its militia and marched south in 2672, sweeping up local militias by persuasion and threat until they reached the sea and Merovingen, using the Det as a highway for supply and communication which the bandits could not prevent. Generally this military action was hailed with relief, and it gave the Det Valley settlements the earliest start of any in the world in the Re-establishment of human trade and culture. Nev Hettek thereafter made a bid to be capital of the whole valley, but Merovingen refused to bow to its authority, and Merovingian resistance encouraged the militias to remember their regional loyalties, which more than any other factor served to put term to Nev Hettek's dream of being the world capital.
The Earthquake
Among disasters associated with the Scouring was the Great Earthquake. Merovan opinions differ as to whether the sharrh activated the Det Valley fault, or whether the calamity was merely a spectacularly unlucky natural disaster. In any case, quakes were known from the year after the Scouring, but subsided by 2662,
Then in 2690, an earthquake of great magnitude caused severe damage the length of the Det from Nev Hettek to Merovingen, with less disastrous effect for Merovingen, which had been among the most prosperous post-Scouring cities, building on the ruins of the Ancestors. There was a tidal disturbance and flooding in Merovingen, while Nev Hettek suffered extensive damage, but Rogon was completely leveled and abandoned.
The stubborn survivors rebuilt; but nature reserved a particularly cruel turn for the inhabitants of Merovingen. Less troubled by the aftershocks than Nev Hettek and certainly than miserable Soghon, they sent aid north to the relief of Soghon and the survivors of Rogon even in the midst of their own flooding.