Ki arrived in Livrik alone.

It was smaller than she thought, less of a town and more a collection of buildings situated right where the foothills of the Athes started to end and the rocky slopes of the mountains themselves began.

The thick below thinned and thinned the higher she climbed, and the village of Livrik itself was surrounded by copses of scattered trees. The houses were built into the steep terrain almost as if they had grown from it.

Red. Red houses.

Ki knew why all the buildings were red in Livrik. She—like probably every other Yarvan on the northern side of the range—had heard much about this strange little place across the Athes. Since her village was one of the southernmost of the Northern Territory, it had usually been considered Livrik’s sister town. Pilgrimages to the sacred place would usually start there, and on their return journey, they would stop at the local taverns to share their tales and stories of the Livrikians. Ki never knew how many of them were true, but she had loved to listen.

The Yarvans from Livrik had a reputation for being several things, including that they were tough. They battled the elements with only the scant resources that were transported through the Old Way—the proper Yarvan name for the winding, treacherous rode that predated the larger, higher pass which was now commonly used. Historically the Old Way could only be used part of the year, due to snowstorms and superstitions, therefore for generations, the Livrik-dwellers had had to make do without many northern resources.

Which led to another part of their reputation, they were strange—peculiar. They had their own traditions and practices passed down from generation to generation, and when most of Yarva had modernized after the Tinarian crusades, Livrik had held more tightly onto the traditions of their forebearers. They were looked at as quiet, mysterious folk who believed in the power of the mountains and forests that surrounded their homes.

And that was why their homes were red. It was the color that signified that power. They painted every building to represent the lifeblood of their ancestors—a symbolic protective color that made the village stand out vibrantly against the purplish forests and black rocks of the Athes. You could see it from miles away, a small clump of humanity rooted in the side of the rock, like a stray seed that found itself swept away by the winds to an inhospitable place and then decided to sprout anyway.

At least those were Ki’s thoughts as she climbed the ancient stone steps leading toward Livrik. She had never been to the city, but her grandmother had, and only once. As a young woman, she had journeyed with one of the last caravans to ever use the Old Way. Ki would hear her tell the story a hundred times growing up, and this village had slipped from reality into legendry in her mind.

That was until she saw it from the crest of a hill a few miles away.

She didn’t know at first if it would be a good idea to head toward it. Her original plan was to wait for another airship to go through the main pass and see if she could catch a ride, but upon seeing Livrik like a bloodstain on the mountain, she felt pulled toward it—somehow she knew that was the direction to go.

And now here she was, standing at the gate. All those stories her grandmother had told her, all the tales from the stream of pilgrims over the years, all the legends about the heroes and the monsters—Livrik had been at the center, and now she was going to see it with her own two eyes.

But there was something wrong.

The closer she approached she noticed the gates to the city hung open, one of the doors was leaning at an odd angle.

Ki pulled out her glitzer and approached. The wind which was formerly blocked by the forest whistled through the red buildings almost hauntingly, and the broken hinge squeaked slowly as she walked past the limp door.

The town was completely deserted.

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No voices, no children’s laughter, no vendors selling their wares in the town square. It was completely and utterly empty. Doors were broken off their hinges, carts were upended in the street, and the evidence of various scuffles was written plainly in the dirt, decipherable even to her untrained eye. Ki continued down the central street, careful to watch every darkened, vacuous building.

There was no one left behind. No bodies. No corpses—it was all completely empty.

“Hello?” She called out. The sound of her own voice sharply contrasted with the silence, but she almost wished she hadn’t said anything. It made no difference. No one called back.

The wind picked up a little and Ki could hear the sound of papers fluttering. At the end of the central square was an oddly shaped building, one that she immediately recognized from paintings and illustrations.

It was supposed to be older than any other thing in Livrik, and in fact, perhaps older than any other building in Yarva.

The Athen Shrine of the Ris’alan.

It was built in the ancient Yarvan style, with swooping eaves and a brass-domed top. This small building was famous throughout the entire country, and for good reason. This was Livrik’s prized treasure, the shrine contained the oldest and most culturally significant records known to Yarvan culture.

And pages of those records were muddied and torn and fluttering throughout the street, dancing in the whistling wind.

Ki was suddenly very angry. Someone or something had come in and not only taken all the people living in Livrik, but they had purposefully desecrated this building—Iit was unbelievable. Even during the crusades, Tinaria had respected their beliefs enough to leave Livrik relatively alone. This was the holiest place in Yarva, and even if most Yarvans didn’t believe in the myths, it still represented them as a people—it was still significant to anyone who was raised the way she was raised.

She suddenly dropped the glitzer and began gathering the folding, scroll-like pages. Some were still in good shape, some less so. She remembered her grandmother telling her that in the old days, the average Yarvan citizen would never have been allowed to even look at these records, and now here she was gathering them out of the dirt.

She filled her arms two or three times with scattered scrolls, placing them in a large pile in the center of the floor of the shrine. It wasn’t ideal but at least in here, they’d be safe from the wind. More than that, she couldn’t save them—she couldn’t take them with her. The mass of surviving texts alone would be too much to carry, and she certainly couldn’t save the ones that were already gone—whisked away by the Athen winds to be forever lost in the wilderness.

What do I do? What do I do?

Some of the scrolls were hundreds of years old or more. Ki doubted they would even last through the pass even if she decided to try and take them with her. There was no one who could help, and there was nothing she could do to rectify the desecration—a desecration against Yarva’s very history.

As she was gathering up the papers and placing them on the worn, wooden floor, that was the one thought that wouldn’t leave her mind, this is Tinaria’s fault.

She didn’t know how, she just knew that somehow it was true, it had to be. The republic who had come in and quashed their political structure, the brutal oppressors that had made them vassals, the nationalistic animals that had made her father’s father go to war and never come back—somehow it was them. It had to be them.

They will pay, she thought, for this and for everything else.

After as much collecting as she could manage, she gently laid the last armload of pages on the floor and looked at the toppled shelves and the broken wooden carvings strewn about the floor. Someone had come in and sliced through Yarvan tapestries probably older than her great-great grandparents.

In that moment, for the first time in a long time, Ki felt emotions other than rage creep up. She looked down at the torn, muddied pages and felt weak. She felt lost, scared, and hopeless.

“How?” She finally said out loud, and it was a good question. How would she make that happen? How was she supposed to help the uprising? She hadn’t even fought in any real battles, besides the other night, but even then she had run away. All her life she had wanted to defend Yarva—to avenge her family, but now, when looking at the results of absolute cruelty and disdain, she questioned whether she had the energy to fight back after all.

“How?” she said again very quietly, and suddenly—in the strangest way—one word entered her mind. It wasn’t necessarily audible, neither was it an image or a written word. It was more like the idea of a word. And as soon as it entered her mind, she knew what it meant. It was somehow, in some way an answer to her question.

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