It was gone midnight by the time he made it home, exhausted but unable to rest just yet. First, he had to get clean, breaking into fresh water and soap reserves. Afterwards, he washed the donkey, and them himself again. He buried his clothing in the back of the garden, it would rot down in the spring weather, and he didn’t trust the fumes from burning.
Daisygreens nuzzled him as he worked, worried and unused to seeing her friend walking around without his fur on, so she ended up with a bath too, just in case.
Chores done, and satisfied he was clean, Brickwrath crawled into bed and got a solid fourteen hours of sleep.
-
By the time he woke up, it was already dark again, and he had a moment of disorientation as he opened the house door, expecting morning sun and instead finding darkness.
The next two days were spent recovering from the run and sorting out what he would need to take with him. It would normally be a week's journey to the big city, but he was hoping to get there much faster.
No trade goods, just the basics. With some light saddlebags on the donkey, and with the newly-sharpened machete at his side, he was ready to go.
-
The first stop was to find the neighbour who owned the donkey, and see if she’d heard any news about Tole, the dead city.
There was a certain amount of trepidation as he approached the farm and saw no smoke at the chimney, but the fields around the house were well-tended, and a few minutes later she emerged from the woods, a basket of mushrooms over one arm.
A brief conversation later and he had determined that she was as in the dark as he was. She let him take the donkey but didn’t want to join him on the journey, instead giving him directions to a few nearby farms.
Walking away from her smallholding and back towards the road, a part of him felt fear. What if something terrible had happened and they were the last two people alive? No matter how bad things were, there should have been somebody maintaining the road. To cut a road out of the forest was a humongous effort, and no government would let one fall to ruin, even in times of war.
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The next few farms were all still inhabited, bar one. That one looked like it’d been empty since long before the winter, the roof of the house caved in and the buildings stripped bare.
His heart had still skipped a beat when he’d seen it, but a half-hour of snooping around had reassured him that the inhabitants had left of their own accord, and not due to whatever had happened.
More walking, alone with his thoughts and an unsocial donkey. Two days later he hit a small village, a halfway point between somewhere and somewhere else. Typical of its kind, the village consisted of several cottages and shops, all surrounding a large inn.
The inn was a two-story affair with a nicely maintained roof, indicating recent habitation. It was almost 3 in the morning by the time he reached it, and he didn’t feel like waking the innkeeper, so he took shelter in the only room that was left permanently unlocked.
In small villages like this, the inn doubled as the town hall, and towns halls always had a room open to the public, the Memorial Hall. A small, or sometimes large room, with memorial plaques on the walls for all of those who had died locally. Along with the plaques, there would always be a book, where families and friends could write down their memories of those now lost.
The halls were never locked, and always had fresh water and a bench to sleep on. He would be expected to draw more water in the morning, and to buy breakfast and a couple of drinks from the innkeeper, but otherwise, it was quiet and free.
He had left the donkey in a field at the back, letting it find its own breakfast. Poor thing, it wasn’t used to this much exercise!
Before he settled in to sleep, he read the memorials by lamplight. Most of them were very old, dated years before, but three people had been lost over the winter.
Staring at the walls, he wondered who would put his name up here if he died. Would anyone remember him?
After that rather morbid thought, he browsed the village noticeboard. These were normally located in the same room as memorials and were a way for people to post jobs or advertise events. There was nothing much interesting posted though that he could see. A few notices for shows, months out of date, a flyer stating the council met once a month, somebody had rats in their cellar and would like some advice, the usual stuff.
He squinted at a small hand-drawn map in the dim light, trying to work out if he lived within the jurisdiction of the local council, and if he was thus eligible to attend the local meetings, and decided in the end that he was. Not that it meant anything, they weren’t meeting for another two weeks and he wasn’t going to march for three days, just to listen to the elderly moan about how much better things used to be, before the newcomers moved in!
Newcomers like himself, he was well aware. Maybe if he married a local and they had children, and then those children had children, maybe that generation might no longer be considered “the new folks”, but he wasn’t so sure.
With a rueful shake of his head, he wrapped a blanket around himself and settled down to sleep on the bench. If he was lucky, the innkeeper might even be alive to greet him in the morning!