“I can never recall my first memories,” Yuta said. His disembodied voice echoed through our awareness. “Whenever I try, I am confronted by a mountain of a moment, beyond which I can never pass.”

Yuta remembered the rumbling that came before. The sun had been hanging high over Vaneppo. Shadows and window-shutters flung open onto narrow streets. The stoic timber-framed buildings lining the terraced hillside and gently sloping roads had been greeting the day, their serene white walls and curl-tipped tiled rooftops seeming to smile at the seaside. The ocean was calm, its waves sparkling over the distant beaches’ sands. The surrounding, eroded stone hills rose like elbows and thumbs, awash with jungles’ green.

Then the earthquake came. The land itself shuddered across wide, distended seconds. Yuta remembered the feeling of his feet trembling atop his shoddy sandals’ soles. He remembered the scores of bids taking flight from spastic palms and twitching evergreens. Yuta remembered his mother, tightly gripping his hand, pulling him along through the staggered streets, her brown face warm and kind, even as fear flashed in her eyes. He remembered the panicked horses drawing carts of fruit and silk. He remembered pots and goods tumbling onto the streets. Smoke brumed as fires broke free. They broke free in the familiar streets, with their tiled alleyways and rows of loudly painted homes, and in distance, and in the Mu-folks’ white-walled paradise up on the hill, where his mother had served as concubine in the Magistrate’s paper palace.

All of us felt his memories. We felt his terror as a chasm opened in the earth. The underworld opened its jaws, swallowing buildings whole as the sky rained liquid fire.

Yuta followed his mother, running as fast as his lanky legs could carry him. They ran into the hills, up and up and up. The boy’s panting breaths snatched the questions from his mouth, so that all he could do was gape and gasp.

“Is this… the Great Indakon Earthquake?” Brand asked.

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“If it’s not,” Yuta replied, “I pity anyone misfortunate enough to have lived through it.”

The Costranak people called their archipelago the Land of Sea and Flame, and it more than lived up to that name. The islands straddled the boundary between two of the earth’s oceanic places, causing the frequent volcanism and earthquakes for which the islands were known all over the world. The frequent eruptions enriched the earth, turning what would have otherwise been a severed appendix of land far to the south of Trenton’s eastern reaches into a verdant gem. Combined with their location, the islands’ natural bounty made them into a nexus for intercontinental trade. But the land of sea and flame had a savage heart, and all who lived there had to endure its tantrums.

Tsunamis that wiped the lowlands clean.

Lava flows that prowled like dragons along the land, burning everything in reach.

And earthquakes, to keep men humbled.

And the king of them all was the Great Indakon Earthquake of 1581.

The tremors opened an active lava tube beneath the heart of Vaneppo. Buildings plunged into the earth as molten rock spewed into the air. Within half an hour, the city was in flames. Strong winds blowing in from the sea whipped the firestorm into tornadoes that scattered like shrapnel in every direction. Historians estimated at least two-hundred thousand lives were lost in the first few hours.

On its own the earthquake would still have gone down as one of history’s great natural disasters.

Then the tsunami hit.

Yuta and his mother had been hiding in the trees when it happened. With a wall of water, the Triun doused the blaze They had set. Torrents of steam hissed through the ash-choked air. Yuta’s mother shielded him with her body, cupping her hands atop both their mouths to keep their insides from getting cooked.

“I will never forget the sound of her pain,” Yuta said, “those stifled cries…”

We watched the angry red blisters welter through her skin.

Yuta’s mother wore a kimono the lecherous magistrate—Yuta’s father—had purchased for her. It was pale gray, tinged with the barest hint of blue, embroidered all over in purple fuji flowers—the flowers of the sacred trees that grew in the magistrate’s garden. It was smeared with ash and mud.

“But my mother was a fighter,” he said.

Everything in sight was a kingdom of smoke and steam. The vapors seemed like spirits, churning with a will of their own. Hours passed. The screams subsided as the sea breeze slowly cleared the sky. Noise turned to silence, and for a time thereafter, the land was deathly quiet. The city was crumbling—a ruin of charcoal darkness.

The combined effects of the quake, the firestorm, and the tsunami proved too much for Vaneppo’s ancient aqueducts. Only a few of the aqueducts survived, and those that did brought water contaminated by the acids and minerals spewed out by eruption, leaving the survivors with barely any potable water. And the firestorm had burned the city’s stores of rice-wine and fermented fruit juice to the ground.

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When the skies cleared, Yuta and his mother wandered over to the banks of the river Anga, hoping to quench their thirst, only to find the water blackened and sludge-like. The polluted water bit at their skin when they cupped it in their hands.

But the worst was yet to come.

In search of help, she led Yuta down the charred hill.

“Compared to what came after,” Yuta said, in the now, “the earthquake might as well have been a drunken barashai’s prank.”

The Great Earthquake was unrivaled not because of its intensity, nor the grandeur of its devastation, but because of the human evil that it awakened. In the days and weeks that followed, Vaneppo would be rocked by mass killings as desperate people boiled over with hate. As the tour guide had told Pel and I when on our Vaneppo honeymoon, there was general agreement among historians that the mass killings’ proximate cause was the lack of available water.

If only it had just been that. The massacres went far beyond mere desperation.

Nearly 200,000 people lost their lives, with anywhere from a quarter to half of that number coming from those murdered during the riots.

Yuta would never forget how it began. For hours, the once bustling city had been deathly still; wails and lamentations were the only sounds. Yuta had been hiding out in a half-ruined shack, waiting for his mother to return from her search for food and water.

She’d pulled the broken door from its hinges and lunged forward to grab him off the ground.

“Mom,” he said, looking up at his mother, seeing the fear in her eyes. “What’s going on?”

“Something terrible. We have to run!”

At first, Yuta thought she meant another tsunami was on its way, making him wet his pants.

We watched them run.

“No one knew who started it,” Yuta said, in the now. “But once the killings began, they spread like wildfire. Costranaks said the Munine caused the earthquake by having angered the gods. Munine accused the Costranaks of hoarding drinking water.” He lowered his head. “But it did not matter. Both sides formed up in mobs, roving the streets, slaughtering one another.”

Yuta’s mother guided his younger self through the deadly streets. The mobs carried torches, clubs, katanas, improvised bamboo spears—anything they could get their hands on.

“Come, Lord Athelmarch. Here are true demons.”

Yuta ran by a dead woman, her head bashed into a fractured bowl of blood, brain, and shards of bone, all because she wore a sarong.

Rage-eyed Costranaks chased down pink-kimonoed Munine courtesans. Leaping onto them, they raped the women, then silt them open from crotch to chin.

Munine mobs killed anyone with a beard.

“You see,” Yuta explained, “the Emperor did not care for the appearance of beards, and for that, thousands died. Only ‘inferior’ races sullied their jaws with hair.”

People who failed to pronounce Munine shibboleths were killed on the spot. Foreign merchants were slaughtered based on what clothes they wore. Children with the wrong skin color were tied to posts and skinned alive. The living and the dead were violated in equal measure, their used corpses dumped into the Anga’s inky current.

Geoffrey watched in horror.

“She tried to shield me from horrors,” Yuta said. “We turned down street after street, but the violence was everywhere. We ran and hid, then ran again, and hid elsewhere.”

We watched Yuta and his mother peer out through cracks in walls or between slats of wood, watching screams and shadows rush by.

“This is inhuman,” Geoffrey said, barely above a whisper.

“I don’t know how long we were in that hell,” Yuta continued. “We were too afraid to sleep. My mother passed the time telling me stories, to keep me from crying. She told them in a whisper, her lips nearly touching my ears.”

They ran and ran, passing through parts of the city Yuta hadn’t even known existed.

“No place was safe,” he said. “If my mother took refuge with the Costranaks, they’d have killed me. If any Munine caught us, they’d kill her, thinking she’d stolen a Munine child. But the fighting got so bad that the only places left to hide were up on the hill, in the Munine fortifications.”

The way Yuta watched his past self run told me all I needed to know.

There would be no happy ending here.

“Come, Yuta,” his mother hissed. “Quickly! Quickly!”

She led him to the collapsed foundation of a half-charred building. A shop, from the look of it. Broken urns spilled spices, smoked fish, and tubers on the ground. Much of the food had already been looted, or eaten by rats or crushed underfoot, split open and rotten.

But it was better than nothing.

“Get as much as you can,” she said.

He wrapped them up in his shirt, and then followed his mother, crawling under the shop’s wood frame foundation.Yuta scraped his legs along blackened, splintered timbers and the rocky ground beneath them. When they reached the center of the ruin, they lay down, making a bed of ash and earth, tilting the world on its side. The position gave them a clear view of the first foot or so above the ground along the path by the ruined shop, just past a wooden palisade wall.

Yuta watched voices, feet, and torchlight run this way and that. Bodies fell, spilling out blood.

His mouth was so dry, the food hurt to eat, the salted fish most of all. But he was so hungry, he didn’t care, just like he didn’t care that much of the food tasted of ash and dirt and crunched grains against his teeth as he chewed.

Hours passed in near silence when the mobs moved elsewhere.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“We can’t leave,” she whispered. “Look,” she said, pointing at the gap between the foundation and the ground, “there are soldiers there. If they find us, they will kill us.”

“I don’t wanna do this anymore, Mom,” Yuta said. “I wanna go home. I’m so thirsty.”

“Shh, shhh,” she said. She coughed. “Don’t talk. Save your strength.”

They waited. Voices came and went.

A cut opened up in the roof of Yuta’s mouth when he bit into a rotten mushroom that had been speared through by a splinter of wood too small for him to see.

It hurt so much. He started to cry.

“Shh, shhh,” his mother said, holding him close. “Don’t cry. Please, don’t cry.”

“But it hurts. It hurts so much.”

She coughed again. Daylight reflected in her eyes, showing her ash-smeared cheeks. They were sunken in around the eyes.

“She’s severely dehydrated,” Brand muttered.

“Then let me tell you a story,” she said. “It’s my favorite.”