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The subalterns proved amicable, even friendly. Makes Coach Murphy’s massacre of our first guests sting more, really. These were low-status members of the extended clan networks of the Laval, a few bird-herders, a few clans on the highlands that no longer exist. Those left wandering around the rainforest and starving were the lowest members of the lowest caste, exiles and the like. Few unsavory criminal-types too but didn’t know that at the time.
Low caste though they were, they were more than happy to help us corral up some of the larger land fowl in big triangular pens. Two spiked walls that meet at an acute angle will easily get a retreating flock stuck in a dead end. Surround the open end with a dozen guys with long spears and you can pick ‘em off at your leisure. That’s how we ate our first “chicken” in months.
Oh, you’ve all seen us hunt centurion birds a dozen times a year. It was a common strategy across several continents back home, though it’s faded out of use anywhere I can name.
This was the beginning of our multi-species coalition, as it is. At the time it mostly just looked like we were letting some tall aliens bunk in our compound for the night.
It all continued like this for months, us gathering more food, learning to build locally sourced replacements for whatever Earth-stuff wore down with age. Maria became our “clan’s” de facto healer, a position she holds to this day. Likewise, Richard apprenticed little Rita and a handful of volunteers into trying to reverse-engineer Earth technology using only information provided in our surviving physics, science, and math textbooks.
Our first invention was the humble telescope. Primitive even compared to what Galileo would’ve used – he… he was an ancient scientist. Never mind. You use it to look at the stars.
“Why would anyone want to do that?” Our guests would ask mostly through body language (we hadn’t managed to create an English-Laval creole yet.)
“Everyone, even Jean’in, knows the stars are the corpses of a billion dead creation gods. They’re pinpricks of light at an infinite distance away in some aetheric void.”
How the hell could we have known that? Back home stars are giant burning gas balls.
Textiles and metals proved infinitely more valuable than any stunning scientific breakthrough. Never got internal combustion engines down – they always caught on fire, same as the buses. Got close to viable firearms, once.
Month by month, more subalterns came to visit the once-by-the-riverside temple. Increasingly, they stayed around. Extra manpower required more food, so most were put to work gathering rations, which in turn attracted even more exiles and low-status wanderers with nowhere else to go.
Day by day, the Torrent evaporated down to a trickle. Too extreme to be some quirk of this island’s dry season or the world’s strange physics. It was like someone had dammed up the entire Mississippi – that’s our world’s Torrent. And every day the river dried up meant no signs from Aminia.
Food and supplies were for once not in short supply. But as the river retreated, the foliage was drying up. Our equilibrium wouldn’t last forever.
The other big project was getting the lay of the land. I suggested checking up north, seeking the source of the river. Richard wanted to check inland, find more resources and potentially new settlements, new watering holes. This sentiment won out, and so I obligingly helped with the scouting expeditions. Still kept an eye to the north though.
Of course, the holy grail of discoveries would be a portal, spell, ritual, or whatever that could send us home. Locals didn’t know anything about that – oh, they claimed their clan-heads preserved a magic spell or two but had never heard of interdimensional visitors and could not understand the concept with our limited vocabulary of translated phrases. We’d never seen a clan-head, and as a rule they did not talk to foreigners, low-status subalterns, or Jean’in, and as the new kids on the block, we were all three.
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By month six the third and largest moon began to appear on the western horizon, gradually taking up most of the sky. Yeah, that’s when it dawned on us that we really weren’t in Texas anymore. Or even our own universe.
That first lunar new year eclipse (such as the Laval measure their calendar) failed to revive the ailing Torrent. The clans on both sides of the river were starting to panic. It was into this environment that the first band of angry Laval crossed the river, wanting to push us out of the temple to steal our watering holes and hunting grounds.
I was awoken by the night shift in my temporary bunk within the river shrine’s interior. Richard was already up and ordering us to plug some holes in the riverside defenses.
“What do we have?”
“Big band from that clan down the river, near the coast,” Hector said.
Hector’s glasses were smudged, some protective coating having been scratched and peeled away with wear and tear. It was a miracle he could still see.
A big band turned out to be about three-dozen warriors in light armor and spiked clubs. Positively massive for the average stormlander expeditionary force. The commander – easy to spot them with their fancy ribbons – barked defiantly at us all holed up in the keep.
Hector handled most human-stormlander relations, and was quickly becoming our second linguistics expert, after Rick. Couldn’t understand a word of Laval, but now he had friends who could translate. Or at least translate Laval into the rapidly developing system of grunts and hand signals that we could then further interpret into English, or Spanglish, or German, or whatever helped.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“They’re saying our presence defiled the shrine and hexed the river, causing the highland lords to complete their dam.”
“What dam?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Hector said, then ran a local messenger down to try and pry some more information from the hostile neighbors.
Laval didn’t like their own subalterns talking to them without a ceremony of subservient bows. Their commander backhanded our poor messenger, just some random, slightly awkward middle-aged subaltern who wanted to be helpful.
It was a message that required no translation.
Low-intensity warfare common to the stormheaths ensued.
It was new to us.
More of a brawl among rowdy highschoolers, really. And we happened to be rowdy highschoolers. So in a way we were in our element.
Ceramic football armor took blows from clubs well. Helmets aren’t recommended for taking direct blows, but certainly work in a pinch. Cheerleaders even joined in, wearing shoulder pads that didn’t quite fit them. Still, we were outmatched and woefully underequipped, up against guys with actual combat experience who were three heads taller than we were. It was not our finest hour.
Our newfound subaltern friends were the deciding factor. Nobody had ever jumped to defend the honor of a subaltern who got knocked around by the warrior caste before. They swarmed around us, unarmed but highly motivated, like a bunch of bees smothering a couple of wasps.
The Laval warriors were prepared to scrap with us, but wholly unprepared for our reinforcements. They looked about how we would if our pet dogs back home started talking about the poor quality of their puppy chow and vowing revolution.
Anyway, I took the sudden stunned look on the commander’s face to punch his fancy helmet clear off. Felt a satisfying crunch as his nose broke under my fist. First blood, technically; being quarterback usually puts you so high up the adolescent hierarchy that nobody dares try to fight you too bad.
The commander stumbled up out of the mud and roared out a retreat order. The heavily armored group broke out from the swarm and ran back down the dried-out riverbed, looking positively battered. We had to help two from being beaten to death in the mud and sent them on their way. If the gesture of goodwill helped the commander didn’t show it; he pointed square at me and roared out a speech of defiance and revenge.
Anyway, that was the future clan-head of all Laval. Father of that friend of yours, Lionli – oh? He’s not your friend? Well, never mind then. Anyway, the two of us would soon become something like friends, as I will describe soon. Enough to where I feel bad that one of his son’s killed him and threw in with the invaders. That seems to be a pattern with warrior castes; how do you think he got the job in the first place?
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So, at this point we’re about a year in. We’ve got the workings of a hybrid language going. Some permanent subaltern residents with nowhere else to go were living in our camp. Our beards are growing in. Our stomachs have fully adjusted to the local cuisine. We’ve angered the largest network of clans in the stormheaths and they know where we live.
New quarters were required. Something hidden. It was for that reason that we used the cover of nights to go looking for new, defensible locations.
Once again, our subaltern contacts came through. They’d been using a cave system to stash taboo goods and hide while in exile. It was spacious enough for our current settlement, and the porous rock offered room for expansion without too much effort. And so, Secondhome was born.
It was Richard who suggested the name. A second home away from home. Didn’t call it that for several years still.
On the lowest level, in a carved-out chamber long forgotten, we discovered a reliquary worn into the floor. Within this basin were some rudimentary etchings. Nobody, not even the most learned elvan, had the foggiest idea what it meant. This became Richard’s workshop. He’d discover the origins and purpose of this extinct runic text.
A few more war parties came by, briefly occupied the now-abandoned river temple, and left when it was clear they had no idea where we were. The evacuation worked.
Another three months passed, then the Laval had bigger problems. A lack of food from the river sent clans into starvation. Sent others attacking their larger neighbors to raid their food supplies. Sent massive columns of subalterns exiled into the rainforests, dismissed as useless mouths to feed.
Those refugees often found themselves in what was now Secondhome. But once again, there was not enough food to feed us all.
Whitewoods at least survived thanks to the prodigious rain of the stormheaths, a natural dew in the morning atmosphere, and very deep root networks. Carnivorous plants are also not so dependent on the river. But there are entire species of bush, grass, and shrubs we encountered in the first year that are now extinct.
“We’ve got to find out what happened to the river,” I said during one of our many outlander-only meetings.
“I agree,” Maria said. “It’ll help everyone.”
“We should redouble our efforts on trying to get home,” Richard insisted. “It’s only been a year – there has to be a clue somewhere.”
“At this rate the last of us will starve to death before we find a way home,” Hector said.
Everyone got to say their peace, and team solve-the-river-crisis won out. Richard acquiesced, though in hindsight he would spend many more long days down in the reliquary shrine. And so, the remnants of the football team suited up, alongside some willing locals who had joined up with the settlement, and went north following the dying riverbed. We left enough people behind to defend the cave entrance, if need be, of course. But if we didn’t solve the water problems, there wouldn’t be a need to protect the cave for much longer.
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After four nights of marching, we reached another temple, now high and dry. These temples were built at regular intervals along the riverside. Locals revered them enough to associate these structures with proper flow of the river but did not build them and seldom maintained them.
That third moon grew ever larger on the horizon. Lined up perfectly with some stonework in the temples.
The next temple we found was barely constructed, mostly consisting of some divots on the ground. Richard wanted to sketch out the pattern, but there simply wasn’t time. He traced out what he could onto one of a handful of notebooks we still had, and we continued onward.
Temple number three was at this point a full mile from the water. Drainage tunnels and irrigation canals were now mighty chasms. This made it highly defensible, so much so that we couldn’t help but hide up there for the night.
We rigged up a rope ladder and claimed the high ground. Didn’t carry anything with us that didn’t fit on our back, so we just carried everything up there with us.
Cookfires were set up in the central courtyards to heat up our centurion bird rations.
I staked out the central temple, where a shallow pool of water remained, all that was left of the river at this point. Things grew quiet here, the sizzle from the campfires and general banter falling away. The raised platform over a shallow pool created a quiet, contemplative atmosphere. Add in the subtle white noise of the unfettered river flowing around and it would make for ideal meditation.
“Not enough.” A voice emanated up and out of the water. “Power left to manifest. Keep going.”
“Is that… you?” I asked.
I was otherwise alone. Even the water grew still.
“Almost at the dam. Limited ability to induce visions. Free the river, then we can talk.”
There was no apparition to be found. Whatever magic was supposed to inhabit these shrines was drained, gone with the river.
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