I have to give hoooj hugs, kudos, thanks and general gratitude and appreciation to JillyW for magnificent beta job, and giving so much time and patience to do it. Especially translating parts in trans-orbital Chya-ese. All remaining mistakes are mine!
This is the second and final part of this story.
***** Ringing the Changes Part 2By Chya
The MiddleFive rings there were, five rings of those with power, those that led all others.
They lay alone, untouched by the living since their bearers laid them to rest deep within a mountain as the world waged a war of human versus mutant. A short war, but vicious and decimating, no side able to take the mantle of black or white, all battling in shades of gray.
The mutant rebellion had been quashed. The ferals killed or caged, the moleculars enslaved in mines and quarries whose automated robotics had been destroyed. Elementals kept tethered in power stations and factories, providing the energy for humans to function, live and rebuild, while psionics and those with other powers too dangerous, or which simply didn't have any practical application, were killed out of hand in the global freak farms.
For once, humankind was united in a hatred that would last as long as the planetary desolation, and destruction that would last as long as there were mutants to exploit and destroy.
For those very few renegades and outlaws of both human and mutant kind who still believed in the right to live, a legend was growing, the story of a small, elusive group who even before the war, as well as during, helped mutants to escape horrific fates and to integrate into civilized society with humans who accepted who and what they were. A group who fought tenaciously for the right of mutants to live in peace alongside humans. Legend said that only the plain silver ring they wore could identify a member of that group.
But the rings had been carefully abandoned as their bearers chose to go different ways, take different paths, each believing they were fighting for peace and equality, yet never quite able to reconcile and unite through their own differences.
Now, the war was over and exactly a year had passed since the rings had been buried here beneath the ruins of Sanctuary. And one person took it upon himself to find each ring bearer and return the band of silver to them.
He was a man of no side at all, a man who, in the far distant past, had been scarred and beaten yet survived to rule is own ruthless empire. A man who was not quite human, yet not quite mutant.
A man who, before the war, had been known as Mason Eckhart but, now that it was over, no longer had a name to call his own.
*****
