Saddletown was a poor place to be, in every sense of things. No exports of consequence were sold from its farmers or craftsmen, and there was little cause for any large purse to travel there. Its singular road only penetrated its borders on one side, such that one could plainly see precisely where in town that wagons and carts of all sizes stopped bothering to extend their reach before turning southward again, opposite an open road that reached towards the outside world.

Seclusion was not the original purpose of the settlement’s construction, but it was a welcome attribute among its occupants. The road out of town led to a junction after most of a day’s ride that split into three other opposing roads whose relevance all usurped their own to any merchants or other less desirable riders who reached its sign. The sign had once bore four directionally pointed spokes which read each path’s eventual destination. But Saddletown’s section suspiciously was mostly torn away, such that only the last two letters were remaining. In an effort by either a disgruntled member of its populace or by the force of rot itself, to discourage anyone of curious eye who was not already familiar with its location and name to venture there.

Little grew within its ground, preventing its population from multiplying far beyond a hundred. Thus forcing most adolescents to eventually seek subsistence in places of greater warmth and broader opportunity. All the town’s founders were too dead to question their reasoning for such a location, and their remaining grandchildren were too old to care about the nature of its origins. They knew only that their cabins had been built strong, sealed well, and possessed an attribute the people who were born in them could take pride in sharing: sturdiness. From drought, to hail, to a spreading sickness of their livestock, there was no force of inconvenience or disaster that could bring so much as a private glare against the sky out of any man or woman there old enough to command respect among their peers. 

Adversity of any form was seen as almost desirable, as a method of deterring wills too weak and minds too accustomed to pleasantness from staying too long and laying a claim to one of the many empty lots that served to its population as visible reminders of the long vacated families who found themselves unfit to remain within their fold.

One of the younger couples, relative to their elderly neighbors, were the Kallerds: Rane and Faleen. Whose marriage had been arranged farther back than either of them cared to recall. There was no surplus of viable singles in the town at any given time. So sensible pairings were usually decided by the town’s elders unless an equitable alternative was argued for by those involved. But neither Rane nor Faleen had protested. Both had seen the few alternatives that were available, and neither were keen on them. And so it was that the two were wed into lifelong matrimony, by default. Adding the weight of their marriage to the ancient scale of those primarily bonded by proximal geography.

But the two fared well enough together, better than many in fact, at least for a while. It festered and stretched between them as would an unencumbered vine. For nearly one and twenty springs they had lived in quiet contentment, inescapably entangled with each other’s lives by matching promises made to their parents at the end of their adolescence. It had been a struggle at first, for both of them, being so inexperienced in lying next to another breathing body each night, and the differing anatomies involved. There were the initial petty frustrations that come from cohabitating with a stranger, but eventually, she learned how to breathe when she slept so as not to overtly wake him with a startling snort, and he learned to reach lower on the occasions she compelled him for assistance. But after a season or two of their beginnings, each found their partnership to be unwaveringly tolerable. With their shared days passing by without significant cause for complaint from either of them.

Until, when their second decade had concluded, Rane found himself to be more interested in the assorted chores of their homestead than in sharing the stale presence of his wife. A change whose gradual nature did nothing to obscure it from her perception. There had been times, distant times, when she would wake up to a slight cough. Nothing warranting a call for medicine, just a couple of wheezes before her voice would meet her  in mutual wakefulness. Times when Rane used to redress before her to contend against approaching darkness and pick pine needles in the chilled twilight, bind some together in a narrow stack, and sit them in a small pot of boiled water until their color started to bleed. Then he’d give her a cup of it to drink and warm whatever phlegm annoyed her lungs. Even at his most attentive, he hadn’t done it often. And would still grunt audibly at the performance of each step involved in preparing the concoction, but as he handed her the steaming mug he always held it from the bottom, leaving the handle free for her to grasp so as not to be singed by its sides. This gesture of care, and many less measurable, had atrophied from his character thoroughly enough that she no longer bothered even attempting to incite any of them out of him, so sure was she of their absence. An absence whose resentment had brought in her a brand of atrophy all her own as it decayed into a bland resignation. Wherein she finally thought no better of him than he was, and now wished no more from him than nothing, so as not to risk rekindling her forgotten disappointment.

  Presently, the two sat upon their respective rocking chair’s arms with their weapons of choice against the melancholy of an uneventful afternoon. Her with knitting tools and cloth, him with a narrow chisel and wood. Each of their chairs faced neither toward or away from the other’s, to do so would be far too overt an action for either of them. Preferring instead to aim themselves towards a shared point at an angle, so that each was only in the other’s periphery.

“Old Pyke is on his way to fading,” Faleen muttered hesitantly.

“That’s why we call him old,” Rane replied.

“He’ll only be another day or two.”

“So?”

“He birthed my child,” she affirmed.

“Hope his apprentice is better at it, then.”

“We should visit him,”

“And say what? Thanks for nothing? You go, if you want to see him so badly.”

“People will talk if you don’t accompany me, it won’t take long.”

“If you ask me one more time, I’ll go. But if he’s not already cold when I get there he will be when I leave,” he promised.

“I just thought it would be a posi–”

“A what?” he interrupted.

“A positive experience,” she finished quietly.

“For who? That miser’s eyes are even worse off than his ears.”

“It would look better if we went together,” she mumbled. “That’s all I’ll say.”

“The last thing his house needs is to hear me cursing his incompetence. Which is the first thing I’d say at seeing him.”

“I’ll walk over this evening then, you don’t have to go.”

“I don’t have to do anything, least of all listen to this nagging. And all for an old clutz who couldn’t even handle–”

“I told you he didn’t–”

“He did something, and don’t be trying to tell me otherwise. The proof is plain enough.”

“It wasn’t his fault.”

“Then it’s sure not mine, is it?” Rane chided. “Go tend to him then, but leave me out of it. Let them talk if they please. They’ll all be too busy minding their precious dying surgeon to care that you’re unaccompanied in a house. And it’s not like you’ll be alone…” he mumbled. “I just… hate the man too much not to cause a bigger scene accompanying you than not,” he admitted.

“Better for you to stay then,” she considered.

“Yeah,” he yawned uninterestedly. “Better.”

*** *** ***

Inside the darkness of a mellowly weathered night, something resembling a man laid in a bed surrounded by relatives, mourners, and socialites who wanted to feel involved in that day’s business. There was not a single person fully grown in Saddletown who had not at some point been tended to by Pyke Handel, a name even now only half remembered. His surname had died with his wife decades earlier, she’s the one who insisted on using it. Before her illness she’d taken great pride in her association with the only surgeon around. Even if no one was injured at the moment, there was usually a horse somewhere who needed reshoeing, even though many households only had a donkey or two. So on any given day there was always somewhere for him to carry his tools. Those tools were everything to him, each specially made by the smith at his request, or purchased by a passing merchant who’d lost his way. According to Old Pyke, as he was now referred to by all too young to remember his past youth, the pillars to good health were: staying sharp, staying clean, and good quality cooking. Mottos that he extended not just to his recommendations to his patients, but also to his tools. Which he sharpened, cleaned, and even cooked, between every single patient, human or otherwise. He cared as little for insects as anyone, but any animal that met his gaze with unquestionable cognisance was worth equal efforts to him.

It bothered him more than he’d say when people wouldn’t tend to their horses well enough to keep them standing, so eventually he stopped waiting for them to call, and just checked on them himself, only asking for payment at the end of the year once his value had been established. The cows and bulls even seemed to him similar in make and manner to many people he knew, and especially so for the steers and mules. Hogs though, he thought unfit to keep, even for their waste disposal and manure, foul as it was. He always found them to be menacing things. Smart as any dog, ravenous for everything, but loyal to nothing, even when clipped. Which he’d do, on request. But he’d cook his tools extra long afterward, fearing that something rotten might soak into them. 

He remembered what happened to Maylor’s boy, back in the day. Though no one talked about it anymore. Maylor even had to take his whole lot and leave once spring came, couldn’t face the shame of it. But Pyke still remembered, old as he was. He didn’t remember all his patients, especially the early ones. But he remembered being shown the teeth, and asked by a couple in the deepest pit of denial what kind they were. There was no mistaking them, Maylor could have asked anyone else for the same answer. But a surgeon held a higher word than most, so Maylor and Enrica both took their bag to Pyke, to ask him personally for his verdict, if only so that they could free their minds from any unsensible hope. A verdict that had replayed within his memories each day since, including this last one, which otherwise skimmed over him like a flat stone over stillwater.

The whole passel was bled and burned that day, too tainted in mind and body to be of further use. No care was taken to harvest any hog’s ashes or bones by anyone except the dirt and wind, who took their usual claim. And as the fleeting fuse of life burned away from Old Pyke’s consciousness, his final perception, was the unmistakable stench of that smoke. One that had festered through every open window for many hours, and whose scent he welcomed both then and now, as a testament to the proper order of things.

*** *** ***

The room was silent for many minutes, rather out of awkwardness or reverence none could entirely discern. But the people in and around the now breathless bed moved without resistance at the gestured behest of a man who deemed it his place to speak.

“I am grateful to all of you,” he said, projecting so that his voice reached each room of the house, and could also be heard by the majority of patrons whose presence would not fit inside the crowded room. “For sharing your company with Old Pyke up to his end. And also to those who came yesterday, not knowing when he would cease. You have all honored him greatly with your presence. I will leave to let any pay their respects in their own way momentarily. But first, as his last apprentice, I feel obliged to speak to his quality for at least a moment. He was the best of us. There’s not one of us here who hasn’t been tended to by his hand at some point or another. And tend to us he did, day or night, wet or dry, hot or cold, through mud, snow, and any manner of inconvenience. One pebble on his window was all it took, and his boots were always at the ready. He taught me to nail hooves, to sow skin, and countless other remedies of blood and bone. But what he taught me most, was readiness, to answer the call when it comes. Because there’s just no telling when it will,” he finished. His cadence didn’t crescendo at his speech’s conclusion. The apprentice was inexperienced in public speaking, and had simply run out of things to say. He was tempted to end it with something more fitting, but in the moment could only think of: so that’s that then, as a closing line. So instead he just went silent altogether, and slouched back into the people around him, attempting to signal them to stop looking at him so he could rejoin them in mutual mourning.

“That was well put, lad,” Dale affirmed as he patted the apprentice’s shoulder with a heavy hand.

“I’m glad, I tried to…” the apprentice muttered.

“You did, you certainly did,” Dale repeated. “May I help you bury it?” he asked.

“Shouldn’t we wait until everyone’s gone?”

“This your first?”

“I’ve seen death aplenty,” the apprentice said defensively.

“Your first being the closest kin?” Dale asked again.

“Oh, then yes.”

“It takes a lot longer than you’re thinking, needs to be deep enough to stand in. We can do it behind the house a waze, while the mourners disperse. His bowels were already empty, no need to move him now, but he’ll still start to fester by morning. Best to get him underground by then. “  

“I understand, you’re right. Should I go fetch a spade then?”

“Spade won’t do for a grave, would take us all night.” Dale snorted. I got two sharp shovels and a pickaxe, all we’ll need. Let us leave, give the guests more room to spread.”

“Certainly, I appreciate your assistance, Dale, I’m not usually this involved in…”

“Pyke did more for me than everything you just said, the disposal is the least I can do,” Dale’s eyes drifted off as he spoke, briefly reminiscing on a memory too personal to share before connecting to the apprentice’s gaze again and nodding towards the door, signaling them both to leave.

They dug together in a cooperative rhythm. Lifting the shovelfuls of soil into one large pile so as to ease them in refilling it. There were no graveyards in Saddletown, to them death was death and meat was meat. So its residents did not wait for a body to cool before paying their respects unless an unexpected tragedy left no alternative. They preferred to congregate while the dying were alive, and could see the sum of sorrow their imminent vacancies would soon induce. Tradition called for Lindow, Pyke’s apprentice and therefore next of kin to dispose of the body in a timely manner to avoid spoiling the house unnecessarily. And as he did so, through the difficulties of emotional turmoil and hands that were unpracticed in such work, doubt began to infest his thoughts as the magnitude of his newly appointed responsibility became more apparent to him.

“Do you think,” Lindow paused hesitantly. “Do you think I’ll ever be the surgeon that he was?” he asked, feigning flippancy.

“Never,” Dale grunted casually before sensing Lindow’s dismay at his answer. “No one could,” his tone switching from cold to comforting as he finished.

“True as it gets,” Lindow agreed with a sigh, before continuing to dig with a slightly increased vigor brought on by the rekindled memory of his former master and mentor.

*** *** ***

An eerie listlessness coated the empty house and those neighboring it. The contrast against its recent fullness could be known only to those who had been there, since it already bore no visible sign of life. There was a time when each house was quickly reassigned whenever its last remaining occupant relinquished his need for its shelter, but that was long past. Presently, housing was more plentiful than people who could practically maintain them. A cursory sweep was performed routinely thrice a season, to inspect the vacancies for nesting animals or leaks in their weathering. But even that effort was largely purposeless, and only performed to humor those who had worked on any of their constructions or upgrades. The carpenters among them took poorly to watching one of their projects decay, even when its purpose already had.

Only recently had communal approval been granted to salvage materials from one house whose seals had been poor and was condemned to eventually rot entirely unless extensive repairs and upgrades were performed. A wasteful pursuit, since it had been empty for nearly a whole generation.

On the occasion that a newly grown adult desired his own domicile, he often preferred to build his own, to his own preferences. It was not just a point of pride but of practicality, the older homes were often unfashionable and had more rooms than most occupants cared to maintain.

The only element out of place would have been exclusively visible to nocturnal creatures. And that was a small mound of fresh dirt yet to be impacted in a short row behind Old Pyke’s now empty house. A pile whose only visitor was a brief inspection by a wandering badger, whose hunt was temporarily interrupted when it traced an unfamiliar scent to the pile, before soon losing interest and resuming its pursuit of prey and fallen seeds.

*** *** ***

The primary concern of Mrs. Fay Nagel throughout most seasons was in maintaining the appearance of the flowerbeds she kept in front of her home. Each year at winter’s thaw her first order of business was in clearing whatever debris may have fallen or blown into her ring of stacked stones, then cut away any stray stalks of dead plant matter that might inhibit the perennials from resurfacing.

Whenever it rained she spent a few minutes gathering worms for her collection, keeping them in a large clay vat, which she lidded dutifully whenever a storm thundered past. The bottom of the vat was slightly inclined on the inside and angled towards a small screened hole that directed drips of excess moisture to fall into a thickly brimmed saucer beside it. Each day she’d empty her kitchen scraps and a scoop of fresh dirt into the vat, and pour the dark contents of the saucer into a different spot along her flowerbeds before returning it to its proper position by the vat.

Her methods were no secret, others often employed similar practices to fertilize their edibles. But she was the only one who devoted so much fertilizer to the sole pursuit of color. Dyes were laborious and cumbersome to produce in quantity, so all their woven clothing was usually bland and similar from one person’s linens to another’s. But when the cold relinquished its constriction and they were free to venture outdoors for more than just the usage of latrines and bucketing water from the stream, she took much pleasure in differentiating her home and herself from her neighbors through the cultivation she fostered between each corner of her garden bed.

On convenient mornings, after she’d watered and checked her usual checks, she’d go for a walk. Not usually for long and not usually at all, but when she did her eyes looked not out in front of her, instead scanning all along the ground for a desirable flower or sapling she could replant into her flower bed.

This morning she violated her routine by venturing in a different direction than her usual search, frustrated as she was to have been unfruitful in her last few searches. Her feet carried her past the edge of town and towards a section of woods long unhindered by the harvesting of timber or tinder alike. Until she eventually reached a thin patch of purple lilies scattered between a group of fresh trees. Gleefully she proceeded to gently dig around and beneath the root of one of the stronger lilies, taking only one, as was her custom, and leaving the rest to flourish. But as she knelt down into the damp ground, a realization cascaded across her senses. Perhaps instigated by the omnidirectional cacophony of insects and birds that surrounded her, or perhaps by the shrunken sight of town she’d glanced at behind her. Fright poured through her as she wrapped her flower in a handkerchief, holding it sideways and loosely in both hands before turning around and trotting home as fast as her clothes would allow. And internally scolding herself for having gone so far out for such a small thing.

*** *** ***

Two small boys both equally unfamiliar as unconcerned with the upcoming touch of puberty raced from one end of town to the other. Cutting down the middle on the edge of the road, paying little heed to the possible dangers of colliding with anyone who might be crossing from around the corner of a building. But somehow their own instinctual agility combined with the townsfolk’s reluctant avoidance of their antics were enough to have thus far avoided any injuries or destruction resulting from their repeated contest. Decker was slightly older than Sal, an attribute that he managed to bring up regularly, especially whenever Sal questioned his knowledge of grown-up matters. He was stronger and taller as well. But Sal was faster. And every time they raced Decker always ended up watching how the back of Sal’s legs seemed to keep his body suspended in air as they moved under him with uncanny rapidity.

At each of their race’s conclusions, Sal would look to Decker for approval to stop. While Decker, through heavily panting breath, would stubbornly insist that they go again. So they would go again, and again. Up to six times in a row on some days. Until Decker’s own legs could no longer propel him beyond the speed of a soft shuffle.

“Just, wait a bit…” Decker gasped, leaning on his knees with both hands for support slightly before their usual finish line.

“Sure, yeah,” Sal agreed, effortlessly winding down the cycle of his feet beneath him the way a wheel slows its spin against a source of friction. “You feelin—”

“I’m fine,” Decker interrupted sharply. “Let’s just rest though for a while. We can just walk it this time,” he said. Sal slowed his pace even more until his friend caught up and they were walking at each other’s side. “Don’t ever let me win,” he muttered angrily.

“You haven’t, I mean, I haven’t,” Sal said nervously.

“I know. But when I do, it needs to count. If you let me it won’t count. So don’t let me. Not ever,” Decker asserted.

“I’m not. I won’t.”

“Good.”

*** *** ***

Beneath the boards of a small platform at the center of town, once constructed on a whim to aid in dispersing announcements, but whose function was long ago deemed to be unnecessary, lived a dog known as Tail. Her age and origin was unknown to all, even Cadi Stoppenhook, who had in years past drowned the rest of her litter for practical purposes and had somehow miscounted as she retrieved the pups two at a time to lessen her own strain. By Cadi’s second trip, Tail had become keen to her owner’s intentions, and sneaked out of a small hole in the side of the barn. Cats and Dogs were the most replenishable livestock in the community, and so were usually paid the least notice. Unlike Tail, who was by now renowned by all for her size, the shine of her thick coat, and her friendly demeanor, which broadly betrayed no memory of Cadi’s past treatment of her. The exception being one time when Cadi was with three of her friends and happened by Tail passing perpendicularly. One of her friends gawked at the dog’s beauty and offered her an apple from her basket in exchange for permission to pet Tail’s mane, a deal which the dog eagerly accepted. But when Cadi knelt near to join in the activity, Tail hopped away at once without a growl or a glance, thinking the woman to be worthy of neither, and returned to the platform repurposed as her kennel. Which either due to her own uncanny aptitude for nesting or the anonymous aid of a well meaning human, was well insulated with hay and scraps of cloth to shield her from any chill too low for her fur to sufficiently resist.

Tail’s breed was indecipherably mixed, with tranches of mutts on either side. So it could scarcely be decided if her instincts compelled her more fiercely to hunt rats, pull loads, or merely swim. Activities which she’d often dabble in, but to her were of far less import than sleeping, which she could be found doing deeply and often beneath the boards of her customized kennel. Perhaps to conserve her energy, perhaps to avoid unwanted attention, or perhaps just to commune with her lost siblings, in their only shared realm.

*** *** ***

There were no signs in the town, and no numbers or nameplates on the houses. Everyone there already knew where to find which tradesman or farmer one needed. The founders had brought with them much coin to facilitate exchanges, and there was no sense in hoarding any for one’s later years, since it was ubiquitous that at least minimal care would be taken of you by your child or a sensibly appointer caretaker if you could no longer contribute in the usual gathering, crafting, maintaining, servicing, growing, harvesting, or other activity you would normally work towards. And at a man’s twenty-fifth winter he would be allotted a boon equal to roughly two years of earnings to aid him in any project of his choosing, rather that be the betterment of himself, his family, or in advancing a venture that required more materials than he could have afforded by his own income. Stinginess was nonexistent among them. Anyone of any age could make a request from anyone else for some work if they had none presently, and it would be offered. A standard basic rate was expected for a day of generic chores and any tool usage as elementary as hammering. There were some allowances made for children due to their differential in strength and productivity, but mostly they too were paid proportionally for their efforts, being that their studies took half of their days, and barred them from participating in any other work on study days.

Lessons were usually taught by Miss Meri Trunket. An unattached woman at the conclusion of her familial possibilities. The children were sometimes curious as to why she would sometimes abruptly take off her coat and shawl at random and even especially cold times. But Meri never let a symptom so much as interrupt a word of any lecture she was giving. Cord Massy was also passed over, and he even occasionally shared in intimate company with Meri when the urge overcame his many aversions to her. On the fifth and final study day of each tenday, what children there were would be sent to him for instruction. Not in their usual lessons of language, arithmetic, and faith, but in the more tangible pursuits: farming, preserving, and bushcraft.

He took no joy in this part of his allotment, but it was the common thought that practical skills were also necessary to properly attune a child’s education, and the rest of the men were too occupied by their own to attend to everyone else’s with scheduled regularity or too productive to be pulled away from their work.

   The children did not share Cord’s dislike of his lessons though. And instead thought them a welcome reprieve from the unrelenting barrage of Meri’s voice. Which she used with great satisfaction to dominate the flimsily constructed wills of her young students.

When it wasn’t his teaching day Cord would work on whatever happened to suit his inclinations; today he was foraging for berries. One for him, two for them. Counting had never been his strength, but when it came to food he had no difficulties at all. He was still tempted to short his basket, but his duty outweighed his hunger enough to keep his count true.

Two large curved rows of bushes were tended to just outside of town, among a few fruit trees and raised beds of potatoes that anyone was welcome to tend to or harvest from at will, which was not where Cord now knelt. He was at the edge of the bordering woodland, where the berries were far sweeter and more plentiful since the others preferred not to venture so close to the untamed beasts that lived behind the trees. And while there were occasional rumors of wolves, cats, or bears, none were frequent enough to warrant the legends told to the children to keep them out of trouble or from getting lost somewhere searching would be impossible. So he routinely feasted from its invasive breed of blackened berries, whose thorned branches did more to inhibit him than any cautionary tales from his childhood of young ones eaten by monsters behind the trees.

*** *** ***

Inside a bedroom sat a girl looking out her window. She wasn’t tall enough to see much, so she piled a mound of sacks against the wall to stand on when she cared to peer past the borders of her room. As her eyes scanned beyond the open shutter and through the unbarred aperture, the door behind her slammed open without warning and startled the girl, causing her to fall backward onto the floor.

“What are we going to do with you…” Faleen mused confusedly, with crossed arms and tapping fingers. After a moment’s hesitation she seized the girl’s arm above her elbow and dragged her down the hall into the dining room, then placed her onto a seat with a bowl of boiled carrots and cabbage which the girl ate timidly with her hands.

“She’s too big for the room now,” Faleen asserted.

“She’s not getting a bigger one, if that’s what you’re implying,” Rane scoffed.

“I’m not implying anything. I’m telling you she needs to be taken outside now, before she climbs through the window and causes us problems.”

“What do you want me to do with her?”

“Take her for walks.”

“We already do that.”

“Without the leash.”

“Why?” he asked indignantly.

“If she climbs out on her own without us it’ll be worse if she doesn’t know how to handle herself.”

“We can just start boarding the shutter,” he reasoned.

“You can’t keep putting this off. If people see boards over the shutters it won’t be long before they start questioning if we can hold our own.”

“I could board them from inside—”

“Rane!”

“Fine, we can stop using the leash, but she’s just going to run off and get lost as soon as we do.”

“Then you need to help me show her where she should run to and where she shouldn’t,” she said, her voice slowing for emphasis.

“Which?” he asked confusedly.

“Running to a neighbor’s house, in town, would be bad,” she whispered covertly.

“And good would be?”

“Everywhere else,” she quietly clarified.

“Oh… yes. Yes we should, you’re right,” he said knowingly. “I just didn’t want to be out chasing her.”

“You won’t have to chase her at all, if you just teach her where not to go,” Faleen reasoned. “Then, who knows?” she mused. “Maybe the Red Ram finds her one day?”

“He might,” Rane agreed quietly. “He certainly might.”

Many common legends were shared by people across nations and religions. But a select few were exclusive to the populace of Saddletown. One was of a great snake that hunted the unholy while they slept, and upon waking would hypnotize its prey into leaving town so the snake could consume them in solitude and safety. 

The other was of a giant Ram with red fur that ate children who went exploring for too long and too deeply in the bordering woods. The stories of both monsters were older than any of the parents who told them. And were propagated indiscriminately to all children at each stage of development until adolescence had completed with their obedience established.

*** *** ***

Their town had no official designations for positions of authority. No one was appointed as Mayor, Sheriff, or even Preacher. Some individuals temporarily fulfilled these roles during instances of social upheaval such as a tragedy or unresolvable dispute, but it seldom came to that. Wilnum was a man whose oratory, strength, and communal approval allowed him to fulfill any of those roles interchangeably when others compelled him to. Roles that he took no satisfaction in occupying, and was always quick to discard at the earliest opportunity; which was the primary factor in his peers repeatedly reappointing him.

But interpersonal peace had been kept for many seasons now, so Wilnum was free to attend to his preferred tasks of tending to his farm. His plants, his goats, and the state of his home all meant far more to him than the petty squabbles and rivalries or his neighbors. Weeds could be pulled, soil could be fed, and uncooperative livestock could be retamed, but the problems that arose between people of relativistic status could never be completely rectified no matter how many times they returned to arbitration. An eventuality that he had become progressively more insistent in avoiding when speaking to aggrieved parties with recurring disagreements. As an additional measure to quiet roughened tempers he would sometimes intentionally broaden public awareness of a dispute in an effort to shame the people involved into quickening their efforts towards mutual resolution.

Presently, he was sawing logs into long boards of uniform thickness, the strokes of his hands guided by a rig he’d crafted for just this purpose. Wilnum had a rig for everything that warranted one, and even some tasks that didn’t. To him, any rig that at least narrowly improved either the efficiency or quality of his output was worth building and rebuilding. A position that always induced his wife into rolling her eyes whenever she caught him constructing a new one in the backyard.

“What’s this one do then?” she’d ask sarcastically whenever she noticed a new project of his. A question he used to answer literally, before eventually just ignoring when she’d continue to belittle his descriptive response. But next time she chided him, he wouldn’t ignore her. He had it planned. When next inspiration struck him to optimize a task with even the smallest imaginable rig, once she repeated herself, he’d be ready and say: “More than you, I’d wager.” The thought of this future rebuttal brought a narrow grin to his focused face, even though the appropriate time to employ its use had not yet arisen.

He repeatedly replayed his line in his mind as he worked. Each time with varying differences in emphasis and tonality, searching for the combination that would sound the most spontaneous while also being the most cutting. A matter to which he dedicated much serious thought, before eventually deciding upon a more measured and monotone delivery, which he determined allowed more space for the meaning of the words to resonate with greater effect.

*** *** ***

The weather was dim, damp, and rustling. Enough so that birds retreated to the shelter of their nests. Albern Fredon never liked this sort of weather. He never liked it at all. When the ground was too soft to safely trudge through and there was too little light to guide your step in any substantial work.

His brother Dav was thrilled by it, which angered Albern all the more; that Dav could not properly appreciate the delay or its consequence. Every idle afternoon was an entire day closer to privation. Rather that be a shortage of sustenance, an unrepaired tool, or an unmaintained piece of furniture. To Albern, all it took to get behind the tending of things was a few too many days of idleness before a real storm comes that reveals that the roof is leaking, the cellar is flooding, and the food in it isn’t enough to last. It would be. It always was, he made sure of that, he made sure of everything. He had to. Because Dav had absolutely no qualms about letting things get away from him, even when Albern specifically reminded him not to. Sometimes he’d ask Albern just to fetch water for the basin in the morning only to find when the specified time had long passed, that the bucket carrier was unmoved, and that his brother was using the buckets as drums, tapping away at them with two thick sticks that he’d scraped the bark off of. And if Albern questioned him, asking him something like, “If those are the buckets, then where’s the water?” Then Dav would pretend not to know, not to remember, or be obstinately literal.

“In the stream,” Dav would say innocently. While still Prodding his brother’s pressure points with intention.

“Is it too much to ask for just one thing? It was the smallest chore I could think of.”

“There’s more to life than just chores,” Dav would retort.

“Is there more to life than being alive? Because that’s what work does, it keeps us alive,” Albern would argue. 

They’d had this argument before, many times from many angles, but it always led to the same place: to Dav finding a way to do exactly what his brother asked of him, while still infuriating Albern just as much as he had by not doing it in the first place. Between them it was a well practiced and tightly choreographed routine they could perform at a moment’s notice on any given day, and on most days they did. It was an argument their mother used to resolve for them as children. One that throughout their youth, both subconsciously knew to initiate if she wasn’t paying them a degree of attention that was sufficient to their liking. And although their mother had died many years previous, they each would still tirelessly replay the routine, if only as a hopeless outcry against the forces that govern mortality, for denying them from receiving their mother’s attention ever again.

They still lived together, as decaying elders. Unchilded and unwed due to their all-consuming lockstep of conflict that remained each man’s only connection to the one woman they had ever known whose touch was always tender, and whose words were always wise. An incomparable love the likes of which they both saw no appeal in trying to replace, or even replicate in another. And resenting everyone they knew who had ever once insinuated they should try.

*** *** ***

Two annual festivals were held in Saddletown, one in mid autumn, the other in late spring, where the town’s sociable residents would gather and commune in whatever consumables they primarily produced. Those attending without goods, who had only services to share offered a small amount of coin in lieu of foods, rags, soaps, oils, hay, or the like. Coin that was pooled and would be dispersed to any providers who accepted their portion at the festival’s conclusion.

The event served many functions, not just as a brief respite from productivity, but as a public advertisement of one’s wares to the community so that lines of mutually beneficial trade could be formed and refreshed without rapping on every individual’s door to ask which goods they had in excess.

A small choir also performed there, consisting of the few citizens whose vocal talent accompanied a willingness to share it. Their sets were short, usually two or three songs, a length carefully calibrated to satisfy the few eager listeners among the crowd without disturbing the many reluctant ones too egregiously.

What children there were would exploit the simultaneous distraction of their parents during these occasions to explore forbidden areas or play with objects deemed too dangerous for them. The object in this case was a freshly honed sickle commandeered from Teacher Massy’s shed. Its shelved position within the shed was carefully noted so that when they were done borrowing it, no notice would be paid of its temporary absence. Normally only the adolescents were permitted to use it, so the novelty of its handling was a broadly appreciated treat for everyone present in its sharing. The children eagerly took turns tying small bundles of grass together, tossing them in the air, and swiftly cutting them in half as they fell down. Usually their swings would miss, either due to a mistimed swing or too strong a toss. So when one of them hit their mark, and two split tufts of grass exploded before sprinkling back to the ground, they all roared with hushed cheers at the successful attempt. There weren’t more than ten of them there at the moment, and each child was allowed two attempts before losing his or her turn, so rounds were quick to repeat. Governing this process was a boy named Fil, who whilst not quite being the oldest, had much greater discernment than the rest of them. An attribute that was acknowledged not just by the children, but by most of their parents as well. Which meant that he would be primarily culpable if any single element of their antics went awry. So more than just insisting on the fairness of turns, he also compelled the others to maintain a safe distance between the cutter and the onlookers, even quietly reminding each child holding the sickle to grip it tightly, and to face away from everyone else so that if it was dropped mid-swing, it would not risk being accidentally thrown at anyone.

Whilst the sickle was sharper than any other tool the children would normally be entrusted to use, and was certainly capable of causing catastrophic injury with one false move, there was no carelessness in their play. Each boy and girl who handled it did so with absolute respect of the danger it posed to them, even the smallest among them was aware of the potential fatality of consequence that just one mistake could create. Which was also why Fil intentionally concluded this particular game after everyone of them had finished their third turn, so that apathy would not have time to set in. One girl who had missed her swing on all of her turns requested a fourth, and was quickly obliged before she succeeded on her final attempt to the excitement and congratulations of everyone else. 

A short groan of protest was uttered by the children when Fil declared that it was now officially time to play something else and put the tool back. But he quickly overruled their disappointment by reminding them that none of them wanted to risk Teacher Massy or anyone else finding out what they’d taken without permission and what they were doing with it. So Fil reclaimed the sickle and tucked it in his shirt under his arm before he approached its respective shed, just in case an adult’s wandering eye happened to glance at him from afar, then they would not see him carrying anything of consequence.

*** *** ***

A girl lay flat on her stomach against the grass. Without the leash around her waist she found the position most comfortable and relished in its recent availability. She laid there silently and as motionless as moss while watching a group of other children from afar. Her parents had warned her of other children and their many dangers, but boredom and what she did not understand to be loneliness compelled her to see for herself. So sometimes, if conditions allowed, she’d covertly follow one of them and observe. This time the one she’d followed led her to a whole gathering of them, which she was careful to keep far enough away from to be undetectable from even a perfectly directed look. She’d seen two boys practice chasing the other day, and so knew to a certainty that they’d be more than fast enough to catch her if she was spotted.

As she watched the group congregate she observed to her horror that they were practicing their slashing in identically measured swings, and repeatedly screamed in unison before passing a weapon between them. Her body froze, stunned in fear at the possibility of being found. They’d cut off her arms first, she reasoned. So that she couldn’t try to push them away. Then they’d cut off her legs, so she couldn’t run. She thought they’d probably let her keep her head though, so they could hear how she cried and know how bad it hurt.

She’d crouched sneakily to get into this position, but now that she could see what they were training for, it was too risky to get up to leave. So this time she crawled and rolled. Through the grass and grime of the moist and itchy ground. She crawled for a long while, until she could not detect either sight or sound of the other children or their practiced violence. Once she’d escaped any risk of being hunted, her relief was not expressed in a sigh, but in exhaustion. As all the blood bequeathed to her limbs and abdomen returned to her chest in a rushing wave too heavy to brace for, she collapsed. For a full palm of the sun she laid there still and stiff, breathing heavily as her lungs gradually began to accept the notion that these breaths would not be their last, and that it was safer to go home now.

*** *** ***

Dale sighed gladly as the festival wound down to a close when the foretellings of night began to appear. All the presentational productivity and the cosmetic busying of people sharing their paltry portions of hoarded items with others who only accepted it as an excuse to push their own foods, crafts, or ornamental trash right back in return. One giant circular game of pass the potato. A senseless waste of day, he thought. A great deal of collective effort with nothing to show for it at the end.

His most hated part was the infernal singing that they insisted on performing each time. Six or seven men and women who had all long outgrown any remaining excuses for such childishness. Yet they could even be heard rehearsing on the edge of town some nights, if you happened to be on the same edge. An occurrence that would have been much more tolerable to endure if the singers possessed sufficient skill, or any inherent ability. But two of their group didn’t have the voice for it, and none of them had the ear for it. An insufferable combination of incompetence that resulted in an almost tuneless cacophony of consonants interspersed with staggered layers of unsynchronized vowels.

He didn’t understand how they could take so much practice and pride into such a painful performance. The nature of a choir is that the truest voices coalesce, and drown out the rest, resulting in a sound that is as pure as the best while being only minimally tainted by the worst. But this talentless handful of posturing vocalists were too small in number for that choral effect to occur. So twice a year on the festival, and even during their rehearsals a few days before, he would have to hear that infernal gang of voices manage to bellow their breath into songs that resembled nothing more than the enunciations of frantic tambourines.

As a child he had been the highest tenor in town, having no need of accompaniment, he could belt loud and far enough to instigate a gathering of everyone around whose hands were idle enough to spare a moment. An ability that had mutated into something else entirely once his height began to lengthen and his face was laced with stubble. With those notes lost to him, he had no desire to explore any deeper ones, and so stopped singing at all. But he could still parse the keys with clarity, and count a beat as well as any drummer. So the incalculable errors of the festival singers always stung him more deeply than they did to any passing listeners, who rarely even noticed a fraction of the incongruencies within the songs.

*** *** ***

Helin and her husband Loo sat across from each other as they ate. Neither spoke at first as they aggressively cut through the strips of smoked cow on their plates.

“I noticed you didn’t speak to Cadalina at the festival yesterday,” Helin remarked.

“Uh, should I have?” Loo asked confusedly.

“Not unless you wanted to.”

“I don’t think I saw her there.”

“She saw you there, I can assure you of that.”

“I haven’t spoken with her since our youth.”

“Then why was she too nervous to speak to you yesterday?”

“You’d have to ask her,” he shrugged apathetically.

“I’ll tell you who wasn’t there, though,” she said. After waiting a moment for him to guess she impatiently finished the thought. “The Dumb Girl.”

“Wasn’t she?” he mused.

“No, they didn’t even bring her.”

“Should they have?”

“If we had any I’d have brought them. Don’t you think it’s odd that they didn’t bring theirs?”

“Maybe she was unwell.”

“Obviously. Nothing well at all about that one. Something putrid in the pot, I said so at first sight of her.”

“Or sour in the seed,” he suggested between bites.

“Certainly an awful combination, there’s no denying. First dumb child there’s been since Rukut’s son.”

“He was dumb?”

“The whole time.”

“Huh, I thought he was just timid.”

“Dumb as it gets,” she repeated.

“I knew it would go bad as soon as I heard they were together. Set and certain I was.”

“You had it right,” he agreed.

“And I’ll say something else, I pity those poor Kallerds. At least Rukut had a boy, good for working. But who’s ever going to pair their son with her.”

“None I can think of.”

“None to think of. Useless little thing. They’ll be stuck with her until she trips on a tree or chokes on her spit, certain as it gets.”

“Such a waste,” he muttered.

“What do you mean?” she pressed sternly.

“Nothing, just that it seems wasteful.”

“Waste of what?” she repeated. He paused and considered before answering.

“Since they can’t have another one,” he mumbled, looking away from her as he did.

“Oh, yes,” she agreed, her scrutiny dissolving with his answer. “I’m no surgeon, but it should have come to no surprise that Faleen was never built to fit a head through her holster. Just looking at her… I almost blame her for trying.”

“They won’t be trying again, at least.”

“A blessing for all,” she concluded.

*** *** ***

Every tenday an open meeting was held under a shade shelter broad enough to cover nearly every resident. Half of which usually preferred to stay at home so there was room to spare. It was not formally structured. Just a quick opportunity for any concerned citizen to voice his or her mind, followed by a short recounting of recent events, and sometimes concluding with a brief encouraging word.

Wilnum reluctantly facilitated the meetings for no reason other than it was expected of him to. As per their law he would first ask all attending if anyone else would care to speak. Each time avoiding eye contact while still scanning through the crowd and silently hoping that someone would stand and free him from the task. But someone rarely did. So he kept things as curt and brief as possible. Speaking without flourish, description, or platitude, and merely recounted whatever simple facts of broadscale relevance had occurred since their last meeting.

He preferred the winter, when weather was most likely to cancel the meetings, often several in a row. When people stayed inside and subsisted from the contents of their cellars without feeling compelled to press him for asinine details of trite happenings. His wife’s feelings were oppositional to his, as they usually were. Linia proudly put on her best clothes to each meeting, and sat almost directly in front of him, ready to inconspicuously mouth any events or talking points he might have missed. And at the conclusion of each meeting, she did not clap, but only because it would have been obtuse. Instead, she clenched both her fists excitedly and brought them close to her chest in muted celebration at how very important her husband was to their community.

*** *** ***

Among all the working age men who lived there, only one was not able bodied: Samil. His foot had been crushed by a collapsing woodpile years previously when he had only just concluded adolescence. An accident that would have been seen as more tragic, and garnered him much more sympathy, were the pile not of his own making.

From then on, not only was he physically incapable of bearing any weight beyond his crutches, but he was trusted by no one to contribute to anything of consequence. A communal judgment which relegated him to the binding and knitting of textiles, which he had no affinity or fondness for.

So he spent his days patching worn clothes that had already been crafted by hands more skilled at the task. And spent his nights cursing the influential men of town for refusing his participation in more important responsibilities. Having no place with anyone else, he pitched up his voice and feminized his mannerisms when included with the women in their circles of sowing, which he seldom was, less due to his outlying maleness than to his perpetual irritability and propensity to interrupt any anecdote that was not his own. A fault that had avoided correction from any peer due to their pity for his condition.

But despite all this, he still maintained one item of private valiance. Before bed, when his coverings were prepared and there was no shoe to hold the structure of his mangled foot together, he would stand at the side of his bed. He’d make no futile attempts to walk. Only to stand as still and tall as he could manage. With his crutches and shoes already set aside, all his weight relied on the balance of his good foot. But for a few fleeting breaths, when the pain of his prior attempt had just begun to subside, he’d slightly lean to his left with his bad foot pressed flatly against the floor. A motion that illuminated within his tired mind every edge of fused and crooked bone as they expanded against the floor. He bruised and swelled the first time he’d tried. Swelled so wide that he couldn’t even fit it in a shoe for appearances, and had to tie rags around it to keep it warm when outside. He didn’t bruise anymore though, calluses and capillaries had strengthened and oriented themselves such that his only remaining issue was the jagged and misshapen structure of the bones that would bear his weight. An insurmountable obstacle.

He could have the foot amputated, the risk would have been low if done by Pyke’s hand. Then he could have had a peg fitted for him. Any of the carpenters would have done it for nearly nothing. Then he’d need only one crutch instead of two. Perhaps only a staff or a cane if the calf mended well. The reason he’d foregone that option then and every day since, was because regardless of how he was treated, and how he was injured, he never viewed himself as a cripple. But if he were to ever bite on the belt and fire the knife, a cripple is just what he’d be, with a wooden foot for all to see.

There was never any weighing of possible function, risk of amputation, or even the risk of inaction within his considerations. Only the unmovable resolution that he would die as whole as he was born, and not as some hindered hybrid of timber and flesh.

*** *** ***

A girl waited in her room to be let out for the morning, she didn’t have to wait long today. Rane was quick to enter her room and carry her by her upper arm to the back facing door and tossed her out of it.

“Remember what I told you,” he ordered before shutting the door behind him. Eagerly, she scampered towards the outhouse and relieved herself before hearing him. She did remember. She was permitted to play anywhere in the woods or along the stream, as long as she didn’t bother any adults, or let other children catch her. And she couldn’t come back before dinner. It was a freedom she had only ever imagined. At first she spent her days watching other people from afar, but quickly grew bored of that. She was much more interested in how her new environment felt. Ecstatically touching everything around her until she reached a bush with thorns under its leaves. She was fascinated by how many types of bark there were on trees. From a distance they all looked the same, but their textures and roughness varied in both aspects depending on the leaves. And noticed that trees of matching leaves also matched in bark as well. She’d seen annoying buzzing bugs before, and knew to avoid the ones with stingers, but here there were so many more. Some without wings, some without legs, some bright in color, and some were just black from end to end. It was so much to explore that she’d often miss dinner, which was no problem. Faleen would just leave a tray on the girl’s bed to be eaten on her return, which they both preferred besides.

She also saw many other creatures of every size. From as small as her feet to many times larger than her, the only commonalities between them she could see were that they were completely covered in hair, had ears that moved and stretched far out of their heads, and could run incredibly fast at any instant they wanted. The only one she had managed to touch after attempting for many days was a smaller brown one with a long fluffy tail that lay dead and mostly covered in fallen brush. It was hard as stone to touch and left an unpleasant residue on her fingertips when she poked it, so she aggressively wiped her hand in the dirt out of disgust. And she wondered how its kind managed to run up trees and across branches with such a stiff and inflexible body.

*** *** ***

Miss Trunket glared at Tam for staring at a boy sitting in front of her until the room was siphoned into silence and Tam was the final child to notice why. Miss Trunket smirked as Tam shrunk embarrassingly in her chair.

“In conclusion,” Miss Trunket said, “our success is determined by your success, and your success is dependent upon how well you fulfill your roles. Does anyone remember what success means?” she asked. No one raised their hands. “How about you, Tam? Were you paying attention this morning?”

“Yes, Miss Trunket…” Tam answered meekly.

“Then define success, for the class.”

“Doing good things?”

“That’s a good start, does anyone else have anything to add to Tam’s answer?” she waited a moment in the vacuous quiet before continuing. “Success means obeying your betters and helping your lessers just-the-best-you-can,” she grinned widely and clapped her hands together in unison with her last five words. “Which I’m sure all of you respectful children will be certain to do when you get home today, next season, and next year as you continue to grow. Yes Miss Trunket?” she asked lavishly.

“Yes Miss Trunket,” her students answered in unenthused unison.

“Perfect, school is dismissed today, go play, frolic, and be blissful,” she announced, raising her hand towards the schoolhouse door, which the children escaped through with unconcealed desperation.

*** *** ***

Tail mosied up and down the unpaved streets on an afternoon that was calm of weather and quiet of mood. Conspicuously weaving her way between the houses, shops, and meanderers until her presence was paid in notice and food. She wouldn’t overtly beg, at least not often. Only imply by means of sideways glances and a temporarily limping gait that any edible donations would be eagerly accepted and rewarded with brief permission to also provide pets. A permission which she was sure to withdraw mid stroke with a sudden leap away, to emphasize her control over the exchange, before prancing back to resume the retrieval of additional scratches and rubs; which she learned from watching a housed cat with his owner on their porch and henceforth reenacted.

After extracting all she cared to from Mrs. Nagel and the friend she was with, Tale scampered away haughtily. Taking great pride in her recent harvest from people who required no more loyalty for their offerings than the none that she offered.

“You ever wonder where she came from? Originally?” Lora asked her friend.

“Probably just a stray,” Mai shrugged indifferently.

“Out here?” Lora asked skeptically.

“Sure.”

“From where?” she repeated.

“Could be Herrelef.”

“That’d be four days of straight walking,” Lora skeptically replied.

“Maybe for you,” Mai teased.

“But why come all the way out here?”

“Probably same reason our parents did.”

“Huh… yah probably.”

*** *** ***

In a bout of uncharacteristic productivity, Rab worked beside his house and split wood against a stump to replenish his paltry drying pile. It was a task he had little affinity for, being scrawny of build and short of stature. So he would often find ways to justify avoiding it out of dislike for his own ineptitude. 

When, to his excitement, he noticed Samil walking past his house. At first Rab tried to catch his attention with exaggerated grunts and heavier swings, but when his window had nearly passed he finally resorted to standing as tall as he could and releasing a singular heavy whistle, which worked. Rab stopped for a moment against his better judgment and searched for the source of the sound, which he found upon seeing Rab smirking at him with a taunting nod. Samil quickly faced forward again towards his intended direction and continued walking.

Rab contributed much to his drying pile that day, satisfied at his obviously superior execution to Samil’s, regardless of the elementary nature of the chore.

*** *** ***

A well seasoned man approached Saddletown on a wagon pulled by two oxen. The road there was poorly maintained and especially difficult for his animals to traverse. So he kept their pace leisurely and allowed them plenty of breaks to stop and feed on the plentiful forage and flowers on either side, which they did eagerly. If asked, he wasn’t sure if they would have thought the abundance of overgrowth to be worth the trek, but it certainly was for him.

His wagon was fully loaded with mostly salts but also peppercorns. Commodities that he would be traded very favorably for in seasonal combinations of furs, dried fruits and meats, soaps, and sealed pottery. Unless they were lying, he was the only merchant their village allowed to deliver there. An odd restriction, considering more merchants meant lower prices and were universally welcomed across the province. But price was a small concern of theirs. The only inconvenient aspect to conducting business there was that they completely refused to trade with him in coin, insisting on barter. This had not always been the case, when their population was quintuple its present number, and the Kingdom’s collectors still bothered to venture this far west, he hadn’t needed to add an extra trip to a market on his way back just to liquidate more goods.

The arrangement was profitable, and an exceptionally reliable segment of his annual route. But each trip he would be sure to time his arrival in the morning, and leave before the sun had peeked, so he could be far beyond their sight before he had to leave the road to rest his animals. They had never threatened him, shorted him, or even spoken a single harsh word in the decades of their business. Yet, the place still brought him a relentless unease each time he arrived. More than ten men would remove and reload his wagon with purposeful efficiency, but not only did none of the loaders ever speak to him, they also refused to look at him. Shunning his presence and treating him like a tolerated but unwelcome element to the exchange. Only one voice would willingly communicate with him, it had changed a few times over the years, but a lone delegate would consistently be appointed as his sole contact to settle approximate scheduling and the details of price.

What struck the merchant as most unusual about the shrinking village, was that the monks within it made no mentions of religion, wore no sigils, and constructed no monoliths directed towards the heavens. Neither were their clothes uniform in nature, albeit uncolored, they were crafted in all manners of styles and techniques. Which implied they were made by many different hands. Although it was not especially odd that many men would occupy themselves with such things, the merchant reasoned; having never once seen a woman or child among them since his first delivery.

*** *** ***

A girl explored the woods behind her parent’s house, basking in the copious forms of unfettered life that canvased every piece of it. She’d orient herself by driving two sticks into the ground diagonally into the top of a triangle to mark the ground, going further in, then doing it again once the previous one had just passed the edge of her vision.

Deeper and deeper she’d go as day progressed towards its end. She’d often stop to look at different bugs and birds she found along her way, which didn’t seem to pay her much mind. But the body-haired ones were all extremely wary of her presence, and quick to run, jump, or climb away as soon as she approached, and wondered what it was about body-hair that made animals so frightened.

But their timidity did not dissuade her fascination. So she would sometimes hide behind a wide tree for a long while, peeking around it only slightly as she watched in patient devotion for other forms of life to disregard her presence enough to bring theirs closer. The effort was usually futile, but would rarely result in a passing deer or badger to wander past her. An event that she was diligent to suppress her excitement over during its occurrences, for fear of frightening the animal into fleeing.

What struck her most about the environment was that it was endless. The walls and ceilings of her room and the cellar were intimately known to her, so well that she could even visualize every board of either of them with closed eyes. But not in the woods, here there was more depth and complexity than she could ever attempt to memorize. Behind every branch, under every leaf, and around every trunk, there was an endless array of spectacle beyond her comprehension.

Eventually, as she was scampering across the crunching ground, searching for sticks of appropriate size to use as markers, she saw something in her periphery that insisted upon further inspection. A hill of boulders, dirt, and vines just a bit deeper than where she stood. After placing another mark she excitedly ran towards the hill, eager to climb up to its top and look down upon its surroundings. But her pace slowed steadily as hesitance burdened her legs. A hesitance induced by the sight of a formation too strange for her to recognize: the entrance to a cave.

As she approached it, lined with vines and naked rock, a quiet and unexpected sound beckoned her towards its gape. A beckoning that she slowly obliged up until the instant the sound evolved to a bestial grunt that echoed out from its depths.

She ran, faster and more frantically than she ever had. Until her thighs burned and her breath depleted beyond her ability to resist, and she risked the briefest pause so she could safely look back towards the creature from the cave that surely was on the brink of clawing the skin from her back. But to her confusion more than her relief, there was nothing. Only the indifferent whisper of a bone-chilling breeze.

*** *** ***

The meeting commenced with its usual formally flavored banality. Wilnum kept it moving towards its universally desired conclusion, despite many asinine interruptions. Which took longer this time than he cared for, but such was his burden.

“It would be nice to have a well,” Helin suggested assertively.

“As I’ve previously explained,” Wilum sighed before continuing. “The stream is too near for such a project to be practical.”

“But a well could be even closer and cleaner,” she pressed.

“If you can’t carry your own water anymore there are plenty of people who would be happier to do it for you than to dig a well just for you.”

“It wouldn’t be just for me, everyone could use it, and I carry my water by myself, it would just help if it were closer is all,” she protested.

“If you can find six men willing to work on it to its conclusion I will sequester the necessary materials. But until you recruit them the proposition is definitively closed.

“What of a militia?” Corlin asked loudly. Corlin had just recently become independent the previous year, and was anxious to assert the validity of his adulthood at any opportunity. An effort that Wilum both identified with and found to be a nuisance. Rather than dismissing the young man’s obvious attempt to seem strong, capable, and ever so grown-up with his imminent suggestion to lead the town’s new militia, Wilum disarmed the issue using all of his available diplomacy.

“A militia… For what purpose?” Wilnum inquired.

“To protect what’s ours,” Corlin answered confidently.

“Of course, that is what a militia does, but from whom?”

“What do y—”

“What dangers of security are posed to us here?” Wilnum interrupted pointedly.

“Uh, anyone,” Corlin confusedly suggested.

“Since you were first swaddled, there have been a total of two separate intruders, one we accepted for a season before he decided to seek his shelter elsewhere, the other was a poorly disguised footpad who was easily dealt with. 

Our isolation wasn’t chosen by the founders haphazardly, it was by design. Geography, Corlin, that is our greatest protection. Out there, in their curs’ed kingdom of chaos, they fight their wars, worship their gods, and hoard their gold, but they do not come here. It’s too far and too inconvenient for too little. No armies, no raiders, and no brigands will bother with us. Even if they managed to find a map that we’re on. They are entirely too occupied with their own conflicts to add us to their concerns. Our sanctuary is a place of order, there is no purpose for weaponry here. Trapping already provides more rabbit than we care for. Which is a skill you are absolutely free to practice independently, if you please,” Wilnum concluded sternly. “Does anyone else wish to speak?” he asked.

“The apples have been marvelous this year,” Meri interjected.

“Yes, thank you for tending to the orchard so judiciously, they have been most fruitful,” Wilnum stated.

“My pleasure,” she proudly responded.

“Then this meeting has concluded, thank you all for participating,” he announced before rapidly peeling away from anyone else who might care to elongate the meeting even further for needless and communally irrelevant reasons.

*** *** ***

Lindow Roikot was a fearful man in all things except one: medicine. When tending to wounds, setting bones, or just soothing angered livestock, he was free from any trepidation. But once he removed the bandages, dressings, stints, and splints, his countenance fell. Patients stopped being patients once mended, and became people again. People who were much more complicated than a bruise or cracked bone. He preferred the sickly to the healthy. The unwell were focused only on cure. Those in pain were concerned only with relief. But the able bodied had interests of every kind, interests too complicated for Lindow to analyze with any amount of understanding.

So whenever he felt overwhelmed by the expanding branches of human characteristics, he’d go attend to the pastured animals, who occupied a form of peace that people forgot when language emerged from the primordial age. A horse could see a discarded shirt blow into its stable one morning, and the next day have no sense of its nature or origin. Seeing it again as if for the first time, taking in the observations and experiences as they came, without regard for what came before or what was coming next.

He envied the animals in that way. And used them as psychological anchors at times when the tumult of his own feelings was too uneven. However, he was also keenly aware of the caveats to such an existence. An undeniable fact of every pastured species is that they are stupid. In a strictly technical sense, their intelligence is nearly nonexistent compared to even dogs and hogs. Hunger, tiredness, affection, playfulness and anger were all they knew of consciousness. And so their company posed no risk of reminding him of the many less savory motivations of his contemporaries. Contemporaries he often wished he could be free from altogether.

Pyke had known how to steer him properly. Showing Lindow how to orient himself in pressing situations. If someone was injured in an accident, had fallen especially ill, or merely needed checking on, Pyke was there with the proper attitude and the proper words to do a proper job. But he was gone now, leaving Lindow with no one else to turn to for guidance when others were depending on him. He often felt like an imposter whenever he held the arduous weight of his master’s tools in their case. Finding it wholly incomprehensible how Pyke had managed to lift it with such ease. Because to Lindow, it was the heaviest thing he’d ever carried.

*** *** ***

Fay Nagel grew a large variety of foods on her farm. Most of her neighbors rotated between the simpler ones such as tubers, carrots, cabbages, and lettuce. But she had seeds to every kind of root vegetable, many kinds of berries, and even a few fruit trees, all completely fenced off from any livestock. A fence she was currently repairing with posts and boards sold to her very cheaply, in the interest of common good. Most farms were not so well insulated from wandering animals, but her collection of seeds was the only remaining one of import. So if while waiting for a unique crop to germinate that bed happened to be overrun or singled out by anything from anything as small as vermin to as large as deer, ordering and acquiring new seeds would be a long, costly, and unreliable ordeal. Since there was no controlling the quality of the strain that would arrive or how well it would acclimate to their climate and soil.

Better to enable Fay to preserve her harvest whenever reasonable, was the shared thought; which she was keen enough not to exploit unnecessarily. Goodwill was a greater currency than coin. Many make verbal offerings or thoughtful mentions in times of bounty. But when the hail falls, the fungus spreads, or the fences are burrowed under, that’s when the truth of those words is revealed. So she accepted the processed lumber at a price approaching thievery, under the mutually tacit understanding that she would return any remaining excess at the conclusion of the repair, along with a basket containing all the necessary contents for a stew. Because what was cheap for one to offer was often expensive for another to acquire, surpluses of goods being so rarely similar of type.

Use of coin was primarily reserved for the exchange of services and as nonperishable tokens of last year's harvest. It was universally understood that the town could not afford further losses, and that if one perished needlessly then so soon would they all. So excess currency was usually spent as soon as expedience allowed, under the theory that the more hands it changed each year the better. Misers had been few even during their most populous periods, and they were easily rectified when accused, usually by a compelled purchase of communal infrastructure or a large order of raw metals.

Fay detested this system, even when it worked to her benefit. A veritable hodgepodge of favors disguised as gifts. Expected reciprocity was the falsest of offerings. Much better to pay what’s due and be done with it, she felt. But the fence needed mending now, she needed the boards now, and had not the time to process logs herself before her farm would be scavenged from again. But now Dale would be eyeing her at every opportunity, probing her for excusable moments to check if she needed any more wood. Were it not for the animal tracks she’d have thought he kicked in her fence himself just to oblige her inevitable request for material.

Her husband had been dead for nearly half her life by now, and there wasn’t a single suitable replacement to be found. Even the young ones were too sour of temperament to tolerate. So she barred her doors at night as a discouraging measure to anyone who might think themselves worthy of ending her isolation. A needless effort, but one that still brought a sense of agency to her evenings, and smugness to her mornings.

Manerd had built this house for them both with his own hands, and no lesser men would bring theirs inside it until her bones were over his. A resolution she obstinately reiterated twice each day when she handled the bars.

*** *** ***

A girl stood at the edge of the woods. A sight she once thought wondrous she now viewed as a precipice from which she might not return. She thought of the beast from the cave, and of how fast all the animals were. It frightened her greatly what might happen if she disturbed it. But boredom eventually overcame the danger. And the wild’s call beckoned her ever louder as the day progressed. So she went in again, this time resolving to avoid the cave as widely as possible.

Until she happened on one of her previous marks from the day before. It was untouched, aside from another mark which was made directly above her own. Atop her two sticks arched into each other at the top, was an identical formation much larger in scale. Two gigantic logs were anchored into the dirt on one end and leaned together, forming a point on the other, towering over her own piddling mark as if it were a sapling beneath a tree.

She stood and stared at it for a long while, stunned by confusion as to what had placed the logs there, and what could have lifted them at all. And as she started, a terrifying notion began to morph into an inescapable idea, until soon its final form was propelling her feet towards the most dangerous place she knew.

When she reached the cave’s opening, she saw nothing inside but darkness. Frightened, she grabbed a rock the size of both her hands and prepared herself to throw it at anything that might jump out from the shadow. A period of preparation which was promptly cut short by a heavy thud within the cave. Panicking, she hurled the rock towards it and was troubled when it made no sound against either the walls or floor. A mystery whose answer revealed itself as a large hand emerged from inside, holding the rock. Before she could look up to observe the hand’s owner it had dropped the rock and seized her wrist with its thumb and forefinger, not squeezing at all, but still closed too narrowly to pull her hand out, like a shackle.

“Who sent you?” his voice demanded sourly. She looked up towards the source of the sound. A cold and unkempt face glared at her through wide and piercing eyes. Desperately, the girl yanked and pulled at her trapped hand, trying to get it free. “Calm yourself, child. No sense in it,” he stated. “Just tell me what they want and I’ll be done with you,” he finished. She just stared at him in response, too overwhelmed to process his words. “Did you hear what I said, child? I don’t care about you, just tell me what they want,” he said slowly. “Are they near? How many?” he yelled conspicuously this time, hoping to goad any observing parties out of hiding. But when he was met with only silence he went back to inspecting the girl. Something about her expression was odd, he realized. Curiously, he raised a finger and slid it towards and away from her eyes, then side to side. Her gaze followed in fear. Next, he brought his hand to the side of her head and snapped thrice in quick succession. She winced and tried to pull away from the sound. Lastly, he grasped her nose, sealing her nostrils shut and inspected her mouth as she opened it to breath. Seeing nothing amiss, he paused for a moment, considering what to say.

“What’s your name?” he asked skeptically. She looked at her hand once more, still inescapably trapped by his grip, and was then saturated by regret that she had ever come back here. “Your name, child. Tell me now,” he commanded. She panicked again, knowing from her every experience how mad he was about to be. But eventually, as her desperation burned out, and she resigned herself to the incoming pain, she answered him.

“G-ggg… Gi… g…”

“Galliel? Gonny? Gilli?” he pressed. And with that question, he unlocked a torrent of excitement within her she could neither understand or contain. “Gilli?” he repeated hesitantly as her thrashing wrist went suddenly limp within his hand and the belligerence in her eyes changed unrecognizably to anticipation.

“Do you understand me, Gilli?” he asked. She nodded clumsily. “Can you speak?” he asked. She only frowned in response. “Has anything ever happened to your neck? Was it injured before?” he asked. When she looked at him confusedly, he lifted her chin with a finger and inspected it quickly, seeing no signs of scars or bruising. “Why are you out here by yourself?” he mused aloud, releasing her limp wrist as he did so. “No one in that town knows what to do with you, do they?” he reasoned quietly. “Probably think you’re sick of mind, not just of tongue. But I sense no dullness in you,” he explained, weighing his observations carefully. Gilli looked at him patiently, before reaching towards him and attempting to insert her wrist back into his hand. The man recoiled surprisedly and scanned her motivations before arriving at a minor understanding. “My name’s Cliff,” he cordially informed her. “You can’t write?” he asked. She looked down shamefully. “They aren’t schooling you… so you’re just exploring,” he stated, rubbing his brow as he squatted down into a more comfortable position. She mimicked him immediately, falling at her first attempt but immediately retrying and balancing properly into the squat the way he was.

He watched her do this with contemplative eyes for what felt to her like a long time before he decided what to do next. “Are you hungry? Food?” he asked her. In response to her silence he arose to retrieve something from the cave, and returned with a folded cloth containing shelled nuts of differing kinds. He demonstrated their edibility before presenting them to her and watched. She ate one hesitantly but expressed little interest in the rest. “They must be feeding you then… Good… That’s good…” he mumbled. “When I found your footprints yesterday I thought– it doesn’t matter,” he reasoned. “Your only problem is your voice, then… And I’d wager your parents gave up on it a while ago. Yes. Yes, that’s your bane,” he reasoned, watching her expression for any signs of disagreement as he spoke. “So you’re out here, past the green curtain, by yourself… to play…” he sighed. “There was yesterday, there’s today, is it every day for you?” he questioned. “Hmmm. Can’t say that I approve, but I don’t blame them much either. Parents aren’t told how to differentiate ailments like this, especially not in this region…” He sifted through his thoughts for a moment before continuing, choosing his words with pronounced intention. “I understand you’re not a scout, and I’m not going to grab you again,” he opened his hands widely to accentuate the point. “Looks like they’ve deemed you as a dullard by now. I don’t know what your parents— you have both parents? Good. I don’t know what their plan for you is, but I doubt it’s much. So… I can help you, with your speaking, if you want. Well enough so you’ll be schooled with the rest at least. Would you like my help?” he asked cordially. She smiled at him with an inexperienced expression that would have been ambiguous were it not so unabashed.

“In that effort… There will be… uh, two parts to your practicing. The speaking part and the listening part. We’ll start with speaking. “Start by… repeating these sounds: Ahhh, Eeee, Ehhh, Ohhh, Oooo, Ouuu,” he instructed. She looked at him perplexedly. “Repeat means to say something that was just said,” he clarified patiently.

“AaaAA—Agha,” she muttered.

“That’s alright, just start with the first one for now,” he pressed.

*** *** ***

Saofor grumbled groggily next to his wife in their bed. Both were fully clothed in their nightwear and were additionally divided by separate covers that insulated them entirely from both the chill of the air and the warmth of their spouse. Little was usually said between them once the sky darkened. Their child had been grown and independent for several years now, leaving them with nothing else on which to mutually attend.

His audible emission brought her into a wakeful focus. One which she directed fully towards him, even rolling the cylindrically sealed blankets that encased her so that she could better view his profile. She stared at him in silent scrutiny and questioned how his unconscious expression could so closely match his waking one. He looked peeved, as if unsatisfied with his own sleeping mind’s malformed imaginings. But he was always peeved, if not at her, than at someone else, unless he could find no immediate fault of his present company, then he’d turn to the weather, whose temperature, wetness, and wind offered countless angles from which to gripe between being too high or low in any combination of the aforementioned attributes.

His unwavering orneriness had begun to emerge when their son Sal first began adolescence, she recalled. When Sal was still a boy her husband took little notice of him, but as their heights gradually became commensurate, that’s when Saofor’s treatment of both Sal and her proportionally declined. Until eventually any shared activities he had with either her or their son were abandoned from lack of interest.

Whatever his reasons once were for pairing with her or siring their son had long since concluded. Now the two lived in a malaise of loosely coordinated melancholy, crossing each other’s paths during the day only when coincidence dictated. Until each night, after tiredness compelled their rest but before sleepiness arrived, they rejoined again in bed. Separated only by blankets, which divided them just as distantly as a chasm between opposing cliffs.

Except this night, when his usual placidity momentarily lapsed either due to the absence of conscious hindrance or the presence of unconscious desire, his hand reached towards her precipice and touched her hair. A movement she did nothing to invite or resist, only remaining still in watchful waiting as whatever dream he’d slipped through reclaimed him. And compelled his hand to recoil from her along with his thoughts from her proximity. Leaving her to consider in her lone wakefulness what merits remained within her lot, and what trepidations she had in leaving it.

*** *** ***

There was a time when Bridan Doreer was largely held in high regard, but he did not remember it. He didn’t remember much of anything anymore. His eyes were faded by a wilted mind, and his nose was reddened by his only remaining means of borrowing mental acuity. He distilled it himself from tubers he could spare from his garden. Any laws against imbibing were unwritten due to lack of cause. It was thought of by his neighbors only as a cleaning solvent for the surgeon, but to Bridan, it was so much more than that.

A weight bore down on him, it always had. During his youth he’d attempt to question his peers about it, to see if they had it too, but whenever he’d try, they’d get confused. So he wasn’t sure if he was the only one, or if he was just bad at asking in a way they understood. What he was sure of, is that a single swig somehow relieved him from that ever present burden of being, for a while at least.

His proclivity was widely known, but seldom thought of by anyone else. During his binge days he would quarantine away from others, either on long solitary walks or just collapsed onto the floor of his home. No anger or belligerence was amplified in him by the practice, only a calming relief deceitfully suggesting that this time his peace would be lasting.  

Two others would join him a couple times per season just for novelty’s sake. But neither of them carried the weight like Bridan did, and they especially didn’t understand his need for the lightness that nothing else provided. He always had a little on his person, enough for a taste for when his thoughts got too thick. But the binge days were what drove him. Most people worked four days on and used the following two to tend to minor projects or just rest entirely. Bridan only had one project, which he attended to as dutifully as a soldier preparing for battle. His binge would begin at the conclusion of his fourth work day, and continue until dusk on his second rest day, at which point he’d chug as much lightly-salted water as he could stomach to dampen his sickness the following morning.

He’d perfected the practice over the years such that his dosage was exact enough to be sustainable in perpetuity. A state he managed as routinely as many manage the feeding of their prized pets. By now he had lived this way for longer than he hadn’t, to the concern of absolutely no one, his own especially.

*** *** ***

Cadi sat in her attic, thinking. Her husband Hal lived one door down from her in a separate house, but even with so many walls and boards between them she still felt too close. The couple lived their lives alone each day, except for one day every five when he would come live with her. Or during public events, which they would also attend together regularly.

No one minded that the couple took two whole houses for themselves. There were already enough superfluous dwellings that keeping an additional one occupied and maintained was easily unobjectionable. But they did judge her for being quasi separated from Hal, of which she was fully aware. He had no love for her, or even anyone else. However, there were no suitors available to her, and being unmarried at her age was so thoroughly unfashionable that she felt compelled to continue their intermittent marriage. Which suited Hal just fine, saved him from having to go scrounging for another one. By his reckoning: every day she wasn’t living with him was just another day he didn’t have to hear her yapping away about any old idiotic thing she might be thinking.

On her alone days she’d tend to their animals while he tended to their field, such was their arrangement. She wasn’t fond of her work, but didn’t mind it much either. The only aggravating element to it was in the morning when she had to scrape and rinse troughs and feed buckets before the goop from yesterday’s excess food and saliva rotted too badly. A task which her dislike of caused her to always tie a thick cloth over her mouth and nose during its completion. 

Her husband’s needs were simple, and hers were small. So they gave no effort to expand either half of their homestead’s enterprise. A little crop, to feed a little livestock, to feed them through the winter, was all they endeavored to have. Which came easily enough each year, there was nothing to spread disease to her livestock, and his crop was always strong. She didn’t understand how he kept managing it, simple-minded as he was, but each year he crop kept coming in stronger, irrespective of its rotation. A fact that, although to her practical benefit, she found most annoying every harvest season when neighbors would emphatically compliment his soil and question his techniques. He’d be perking up with pride for tens of days afterward every year, and it was exhausting for her to cut him back down to size each time.

She much preferred the docility of winter; when the ground was too hard to move and the animals were too cold to be noncompliant. There were fewer parties then, and even fewer expectations from her peers. But winter also brought ice, which had to be scraped or hacked away when it formed in obstructing places, like around doors and entrances. Work that she was heavily reluctant to do.

   Every season had its own sense of sourness to her, which one’s was most pronounced just depended only on whichever one was presently transpiring.

*** *** ***

Gilli approached Cliff’s cave with a hesitance barely overcome by hope. Upon hearing her approach, he stepped out to meet her. She couldn’t help from feeling a twinge of fright as his feet planted into the ground in front of her. He was sextuple her size, at least. Larger than any man she’d seen through her shutters or from the tall grasses at the edge of town. As he came towards her a sudden concern struck her that he might just keep walking, into, through, and over her. And crush her head beneath his gigantic feet.

But relief was quick to arrive instead when he stopped and knelt down, a motion that took him longer than she thought. Once his eyeline descended from the height of trees, he spoke.

“You came back,” he pondered aloud, musing the observation around his thoughts. “What a strange child…” he mumbled. “Then… Then we’ll proceed. Can you say your name?”

“....” she huffed back, looking away.

“Then you can just listen to me for a bit instead,” he proposed.

She nodded excitedly.

“Hmmm. What am I to say to you?” he mused. “Better to avoid questions then, since you can’t answer. There’s—There are The Principles. Good place as any to start. It shouldn’t matter much what I’m saying anyway, as long as you understand the words,” he paused. “Gilli, when I speak a word you don’t understand… raise these front two fingers upwards, like this,” he instructed as he demonstrated.

“||..”

“Yes, just like that. What order was I taught them in? Ah, I don’t remember anymore. The fickle thieves of memory,” he sighed. “Regardless, we’ll start with… The Tree. Come Gilli, let’s sit over there,” he instructed as he walked towards the long log of a fallen tree. She hesitated confusedly for a moment, waiting for him to push or pull her to where he wanted her to move. But when he merely continued on without her, she sprinted quickly towards his heading. They both sat aside each other upon the log. “That tree is the oldest we can see from here,” he said, pointing forwards a waze in front of them. There are different kinds, but they are still alike in many ways. Look at the width of its branches and the height of its trunk, then follow it down with your eyes… All the way down to the ground. Feel how long that took. Beneath the ground, that tree is still there. Its roots grow just as deep and just as wide into the soil as its branches stretch into the air. So to with all things… What was the next one… ah. Time. When you were born, you started as an infant. Then day by day by season by year, you grew. And with more years you will grow more. Just as this tree started from a seed, grew into a sapling and then to its current size. Look at the stump beside us. See how many rings it has? Each ring is another year it grew. Year after year it added another ring, growing that much wider and even taller.

To you, a day is a measurable chunk of time, wherein you move around and take action between sleeps. But to the tree, a day is just a moment, a tiny fraction of its next ring being formed. Your season is just a tree’s day. The slower it grows the longer it lives, so to with all things.

What else… What else… I could recite the epic poem of Santil the Fallen Kin– no, that would be too improper for you just yet… Would you like to try your name again?”

Gilli looked down and softly pushed the front of his leg.

“What do I even say to you, child?” he whispered behind a sigh. “What might your eyes see me as?” he inquired perplexedly. “A different kind of forest creature perhaps? You know, I’d prefer to avoid your ilk. There was a time when this sliver of land was free from men. But I suppose your people saw the same appeal… 

About me then… There was a great cat in these woods once. He patrolled a large swath of territory, I’m still not sure if he saw me as a threat or as competition at first, but he came for my flesh, and that I could not abide. I’d sensed him stalking me before, and so was plenty prepared. When he finally entered the cave, I netted him solemnly. He flailed and hissed in rage. Made me think of the parable of the fisherman who lost his hand pulling the hook from a shark. But this beast was no shark, he was famished and terrified. The terror was what stopped me. I’d seen enough of it.

I eventually left to fetch a deer. It took me longer to find an elderly one but eventually I brought it back to the cave, placed it in front of the netted cat… We watched each other, neither quite understanding what I was doing, I crossed behind him with my spear and went deeper inside. Once in position, I gradually cut away the net, one cut at a time, and that was a good net too… very good net. Wasn’t any sentimentality about it once he was free. Just dragged that deer away, quick as lightning. Never came back. Until he got too brittle of bone and dull of tooth to hunt anymore. Then I found him here waiting for me, lying on his stomach and hiding his head under his paws. Wasn’t many more deer later before I buried him. But I came to know that in the years proceeding, he’d cleared this territory all the way down to the Bent Boulder and all the way up to the Wilted Falls from any wolf, bear, snake or fiend who might have taken an interest in me. And though his scent has long faded, the sanctuary remains. I can tell you now, to a certainty, nothing will hurt you here. So, would you like to try again?”

“G–g–ggg…illeeeuh,” she muttered embarrassedly.

“That’s a thoroughly excellent start.”

*** *** ***

Linia eyed Wilnum as he slept. He was disgustingly feeble, had been since they were children. In their years together she’d managed to mold him into being measurably more prominent, at least outwardly. But when he slept, the entire veneer she’d spent their marriage crafting fell away into the abyssal plane of their bedside, and she’d see him again for what he always was: a mouse in man-sized clothes.

Which suited her motives acceptably, so long as no one else saw. A glimpse is all it would take, one leg-lifting trollop trying to infringe on her position for a night, and Wilnum would be exposed in a nakedness so full that he’d never be able to redress himself again. Of those who were eligible, only a few would risk the scandal it might bring upon them. Among the single, the unmarried, and those loosely married out of convenience, her concerns could be narrowly directed.

It was a fragile endeavor, maintaining his status in the community without directing too much attraction towards him, but she managed it, nearly as neatly as she managed him. Except during the unwaking periods between his projections of power, when his expression betrayed his true nature without regard for who could observe its resurfacing.

*** *** ***

Faleen was sitting in her rocking chair working a spindle on her porch. The open air seemed to make better yarn, though she had no ideas as to why. Such were the highest truths, she thought; the ones which were just as unanswerable as they were undeniable. Like the coming day or the inevitable triumph of gravity over anything with legs.

A force that overtook her brother several times prior. He was older than she was, so it was sensible, but their disparity of age in no way warranted such an early defeat. He was frail from birth, and somehow stayed that way no matter how much he moved or what he was fed. Upon seeing him she always wondered how an insistent breeze never carried him away, which is what she would have imagined was the cause of his absence had she not seen his breathless body coiled on his bedroom floor.

His name was Mak, and as a child she’d revered him. Thinking his lightness of figure and thinness of bone to be due to an undiagnosed relation to eagle-kind. And that before his twenty-fifth summer his feathers would start to come in, revealing to all of his doubters that his affliction was no detriment or imperfection, only a necessary prerequisite to flying.

But when her perspective matured in conjunction with his growth, his form showed no signs of any propensity for flight, only a difficulty in lifting loads and ascending stairways. She did not blame him for this development, not consciously. Only on occasions when his physical incapabilities became too pronounced to allow her lofty childhood perspective of him to be continually held.

Upon his death, her feelings for him were purely sour. Despite no quotable cause being officially proclaimed, she could see what happened as plainly as the tail on a tadpole: his neck gave out. After enough decades of struggling to function in the most basic of capacities, the structures that held up his head had finally worn themselves to exhaustion. An occurrence that she hated him for. A hate whose reasons she would never outwardly articulate or inwardly admit. For never getting any stronger, for always needing so much help, and for letting himself die. Leaving her to live the rest of life alone without her longest confidant, whose words could fly her out of any pit in ways his body never managed to. 

As her fingers spun the wool into a more workable form, she bitterly wondered why they could never manage to do the same for Mak, and hated him all the more for exposing her own helplessness of action, if only by his continued helplessness of form.

*** *** ***

Hal laid along his woven hammock, shielded by the shade of the well-trimmed trees behind his house. And contemplated his temporary commonalities with gliding birds, both being free from footedness without requiring any physical effort to remain so. As breezes flew both under and around him, the blanket enshrouding his body from toe to neck was pressed even more firmly against his body, combining with his clothes as a second skin that extended his sense of touch wide enough to differentiate each brush of open air from every other.

It was one of his preferred methods of passing a discretionary day, the other being crushing rock. There were many methods one could use to do so, depending on the size and type one started with, all of which he excelled at. It didn’t matter to him whether he was using a pickaxe or hammer, each was equally satisfying. Needs for gravel and sand across the town were not high, so he always had large piles of excess. But whenever one pile regressed lower than another he was certain to restore its size. Stones, bricks, and gravel were piled in mounds, with the sand protected from the elements in a repurposed barn.

He had first taken up the task when the occasional spots of blueness on his wife’s skin were becoming a point of unpopularity amongst his peers. Sal had always been good about covering up when outside but pesky peckers and nosy neighbors eventually pried their way into his familial affairs and made an issue of it. So now when bereft of laborious work, he’d intentionally exhaust himself making gravel or rest his thoughts laying between two trees where he didn’t have to hear her pester him about every pedantic grievance she might have on that particular day.

He used to try to appease her when they were younger, but whatever her discontentment was either pivoted or escalated just outside the sum of his efforts to satisfy it. Until finally he’d had enough and ignored her completely, which only resulted in stoking her coals even further. She’d follow him across the house, going on and on about this or that or something else entirely until he’d have to force her to stop. Which worked for a while, but eventually he needed to force her harder, then harder still, until she physically couldn’t continue to badger him at all.

But she’d simmered down a lot since then, now that they had a scheduled arrangement agreeable to them both. She didn’t come into his domain to antagonize him and he didn’t intrude into hers except on their designated days. It was a perfect partnership for him. So much so that now he wondered why other couples even bothered sharing an abode at all.

*** *** ***

      Gilli looked down as she exited her room, careful to make her steps silent and seamless with the ambiance of the house. She’d almost made it to the back door when Faleen spotted her suddenly. Gilli froze and meekly faced her mother, unsure of what transgression she was about to be punished for.

“Go on, then,” Faleen muttered dismissively. “No sense in meandering.” Gilli obliged with repressed eagerness and proceeded to walk out the door, gingerly closing it behind her so as not to betray her excitement by its sound.

Into the woods she went, past bushes, over creeks, and through openings in the tree-line that she’d become intimately familiar with during the recent and wondrous happenings of her life. She didn’t need the markings anymore, every distinctive element of her surroundings served to orient her as truly as a signpost.

She wasted little time exploring past the edges of her mapped knowledge before redirecting back towards Cliff’s cave. Upon arriving she found he was not there, so she left again to explore some more.

Deeper into the forest she ventured, mindful to keep her bearings straight so she could safely trace her return path. If an obstacle required her to move around it, such as a tree trunk of exceptional wideness, or a steep drop in terrain, she dragged the back of her boot along a softer patch of dirt in a straight line to reinforce her original orientation. After traversing over a hill that felt taller than it looked, she found a long and narrow pond lining its other side. Cautious not to slip and fall in, she lowered herself down to her knees and peered into its waters, fascinated by the ripples of its surface and the soft buzzing that emanated from all around it.    

A strange looking dome emerged out of its shallows and snapped at a long fly with wide wings. Flat green circles floated atop the water’s surface with a small, brown, and speckled creature sitting atop one of them. Along with a cornucopia of other plants she had never seen before. She was tempted to climb down and get a closer look, but resisted the urge. Either out of fear from falling or of something dangerous emerging from the water faster than she could climb away. The body of water filled her with unease just as it filled the basin it occupied. So she ran, ran back to the cave, where the unseen creatures that hide in mud and murk would be of no danger to her.

Cliff was there this time, he was crafting something, but wasn’t far enough along for her to determine what. He looked at her and paused before gently placing his tools down and heaving himself back up onto his feet.

He walked towards her as she approached, closing their gap much more quickly by his steps than she by hers. When near, he stopped and knelt down in front of her, peering into her the way one might inspect an abandoned den of indiscernible occupants.

“What a curious child,” he muttered to himself before addressing her. “Have you been practicing with your parents?”

She hesitated a nod at the half-truth.

“Tell me, then,” he goaded.

She clenched her fists tightly and severed her gaze from his as she prepared to answer. She had been visualizing this moment her whole walk here, but now that the time had come, whatever preparation she’d endeavored to achieve seemingly dissolved into the open air.

“G-gghhilleee,” she whispered.

“Would you like to try it again?”

“.....”

“Just one more time, it’ll be quick as a hare’s hop,” he assured.

“Guuiiilli.”

“Can you hear how much better you’re doing?”

“.....”

“You are, I can attest to it.”

“||...”

“It means to assert one’s word that something happened. Hmmm… What can I recite for you today then?” he said as he walked back towards his abode, she followed him as he went. “Would you like to hear about how to carv– no, I doubt you would. There’s the identifying characteristics of leaves…” he muttered, scanning his surroundings for inspiration. “What about… Three couples of sparrows built new nests in the spring. One couple built theirs on a— no, that won’t be good either,” he realized. I don’t think sifting through appropriate parables is a good way of doing this, since I can’t place your cognisance.”

Gilli was tempted to ask about the word, but decided not to. Since she had just done that and she didn’t want him to think her stupid.

“You’ll just have to tolerate my own stories then, however benign they may be,” he sighed. “Remember the great storm last year?”

She looked at him knowingly. It had rattled the shutters of her room so loudly she couldn’t sleep some nights.

“It destroyed my hut. I used to live much deeper than this. Deep enough not to risk discovery by exploratory little girls. But I needed the cave then, and once the storm subsided I decided not to bother rebuilding where I’d been. The tubers and roots were unscathed, but everything else I’d planted or constructed was washed or blown away. I still plant there though, better soil. Do you know what you want to do once you’re grown?”

“.....”

“No harm in considering it, you can always change your mind. When I was newly speaking I never would have imagined I’d be here, in this land. Do you know where this is?”

“Hffm?”

“This is the Forsaken Forest, west of the Forgotten Plains, where your town lives. Great wars were once fought along its edges. The plains were lush and brimming with orchards, enviable to all who knew of it. But the travel was so far that no kingdoms could reinforce their hold over time. Eventually the orchards were leveled down by battles, and the woodland beasts were relentlessly ravenous of any regiments whose scent was winded westward. And the conquering of this region became too fruitless and costly for ego preservation to be sufficient cause for the continuation of anyone’s campaign,” he sighed. “But that was all a long time ago… You can still find bones just beneath the surface in some spots, fields of them, except— actually, do you know what I like? Mushrooms, I have some fresh ones, if you’d like to try.” He fetched a clay pot with two types of mushrooms, large spherical white ones and clumpy brown ones. She curiously tried them and found both their tastes to be simultaneously novel and undesirable to finish.

“Some are better stewed, you are quite correct,” he said with a nod. “But I am bereft of spices, as you might deduce from my living quarters.”

“||...”

“It means to know something indirectly, by means of logical conclusion. Ah, we could speak of that I suppose… perhaps not. Also, do not eat mushrooms that I haven’t picked for you, some varieties are deadly poisonous.”

“....”

“Because I already learned which ones are nutritious, and which are dangerous. Those were perfectly safe,” he paused to consider something. “I have an idea. Why don’t we walk around for a bit and you can point to things you’d like to know more about. That should make for more fitting conversation. Come, follow me,” he instructed as he put away his mushroom pot. She obliged him with mixed hesitance and eagerness.

They walked for a while in unhurried silence in a direction that she recognized to be parallel to the forest's border, so that they were going neither further in nor further out. Eventually they reached a long entanglement of vines with large flame colored funnel-shaped flowers.

“|....”

“Those?” he asked, masking his surprise. “Those are horn vines. They’re not nutritive but sickly women sometimes drink the boilings of their flowers or roots. What else do you see?” he goaded innocently.

“|....”

“That is a dead buckthorn bush, let me see if we can find a living one… There’s one. Its berries are tart and highly nutritive, but it must not be planted, only gathered from. You could try it but this one has already been stripped. Try looking around for animals instead, there are many near,” he said. She looked around confusedly but noticed nothing. “Check the branches,” he whispered.

“|....”

“That’s a tree squirrel, they gather nuts and bury them for later. Very clever creatures.”

“|....”

“Tree bark?”

“|....”

“Oh, I see. That is a kind of moth. There is much peculiar about moths, but this variety especially. Its eyes are so sensitive that it can perceive many colors that people are blind to.”

“||...”

“Hm, how to explain…” he muttered, fetching a firm stick from the ground and scraping the inside of his boot in a long stroke, clearing a portion of dirt from visual obstructions. “There is a great wave,” he said, drawing an oscillating line along the ground that gradually straightened. “It’s called a spectrum. Humankind can perceive a narrow portion, here in the middle,” he drew a rectangle that segmented the line as he spoke. “And in that middle are all the colors that you’ve ever seen. But that’s just a narrow slice of actuality. That type of moth has eyes that see many more, colors that people can’t even imagine. Most animals actually see fewer than humans. It may seem odd, that a four-legged animal larger than I could be so blind compared to the sight of a mouthless moth a thousand times smaller. But one’s perceptions… so rarely exceed one’s need. Perhaps the deer even finds its own sight preferable, being so unburdened by the wideness of scope outside of its life’s relevance.”

Gilli didn’t understand what relevance meant. But neither did she ask since she was made mildly uneasy by a sudden toneless timber in Cliff’s voice that she hadn’t heard in him before. 

*** *** ***

Fil wondered why his parents seemed so constantly stilted. He listened to them speak during mealtimes about the importance of obedience and how to properly behave, it’s all they usually talked about. But their words meant little to him; he was much more interested in their manners. They both acted as a unified monotoned woodpecker, who used corrections as a deniable ruse to peck at him from whatever angles they could find. Trying to goad him into reprisal so that they could correct that behavior too.

It didn’t matter how quickly he ate, he was outnumbered and as physically overwhelmed as a lone lamb from his side of the table. Eventually, once they’d deemed their antagonizing completed, they would proceed to the next phase of their daily dinner practice and pointedly speak to each other in rapid bursts. As if forcefully passing the same breath of air between them. More quickly than snow smothers an ember, they would go from accusatory jabs and recurring demands for his capitulating remorseful response, to shunning him from the conversation in unison by their own coordinated signal. Whilst still insisting that he stay seated for however long it took for their exercise of exclusion to bring them sufficient satisfaction.

He found this behavior odd, and noticed that it had started escalating in length and intensity the older he got. They had also recently started to talk to him a bit about his change. Which as far as he could understand, only meant that he’d be getting taller soon. But this change, as they put it, was something on which they directed much concern towards. So he’d listen to their lectures about its dangers and repeated back whatever they’d just said when their pauses indicated that he should. He’d do this until they’d eventually give him permission to go out to school, to go out to play, or to go to bed.

It didn’t particularly bother him to participate in these scripted reenactments each day between his education, his fun, and his sleep. But he did find it boring. And was curious why they weren’t bored of it also. Until, once while he was playing catch with a ball the other children had carefully crafted with clay and twine, he observed Bahnly (a toddler) from the porch of someone’s house tantruming profusely as he was being carried inside.

That combination of appearance and tone was the closest thing he’d yet observed to his parent’s daily liminal rituals. And then he came to wonder about two other things instead: if his parents were actually just having one long continuous tantrum of a different, more grown-up variety, and what had sparked it to begin with? Because unlike Bahly, who was involuntarily being carried back inside, they could already do whatever they wanted. So what could they be so upset about?

*** *** ***

Corlin walked around the confines of his house with smug satisfaction. For his whole life he’d been required to exhibit obedience in all things. Until recently. He’d been crafting furniture out of reeds and half-cuts of wood his parent’s friends donated to him. They were crudely crafted constructions, but superior in appearance to the vacuousness of empty rooms. His woman had been arranged five seasons ago and she was scheduled to join him once her maturation was reached. Her mother needed sufficient time to prepare her of course, and there was no rushing such an imperative process.

Simee was her name, she was acceptably pretty for him but he’d have much preferred her sister Jelimee, who had unfortunately already been assigned a match before his parents could pursue the pairing. But Corlin knew Simee would be almost as good, at least she was the smarter one. Which would be more useful over the long-term. Corlin prided himself on considering the eventualities of things. It seemed to him like all of his peers were only obsessed with the fickle and fleeting gratifications of whatever day they happened to be in. But he saw each season as a stepping stone to the next. Always planning, always plotting, always preparing.

At this moment he was hungry, so he fired a pot of water and dug out some tubers from the garden to boil, but instead of grabbing just enough for lunch, he decided to overfill his basket so that he’d already have some precooked for dinner as well. Afterwards, as he put away the small pitch-fork, he allowed himself a proud nod for intelligently saving himself the future effort of digging more that day.

As he continued the necessary tasks required for dinner he thought about how stupid his father was for always waiting until whim moved him to accomplish something. As he had watched his father do with every project of his growing up. Regardless of its nature, planting, harvesting, building, maintaining, cleaning, organizing, and especially communicating, the latest possible juncture was when it always happened. Whatever it was. But not Corlin. With him things were calculated, measured, and performed promptly. And that night, when his pot was dried, his bowl cleaned, tomorrow’s clothing unfolded, and all the rest of the possible preparations for the following day were completed, he relished in his own power and success in positioning every object in his house to exist in accordance to his will.

*** *** ***

 Lindow approached Ali and Barl Anpeela’s house and knocked on the door. It was doubtlessly unbarred but he was not friendly enough with her or her husband to enter or even cross their fence without being granted recent permission. Eventually his incessant knocking caused the home’s residents to relent and Alli answered it.

“We won’t be needing checks, Lindow. We are feeling perfectly passable,” Allie informed him curtly.

“I’m glad of that, I’m only alerting you that I’ll be inside your fence to do animal checks,” he corrected.

“Oh, yes. Go then. But I’m sure they’re all well too. As much as they’ve been eating.”

“Then the checks will be quick.”

“Latch the gate–uhh, when you finish.”

“I always do,” he assured politely with a nod, before leaving her doorstep and walking around her house towards the fenced pasture behind it. He was immediately greeted by a number of cheerful animals who recognized his scent. A dog, a donkey, and three horses all gathered around the gate. He didn’t risk opening it and instead heaved his legs sideways and swung them over the fence’s top, using one hand to support his leap.

“Been well, have you?” he asked them cheerfully. But his mood migrated more seriously when he detected an open gash on one of the horse’s legs. He refused to recall the name of other people’s animals, but he recognized every other aspect of this one. It was an aggressive mare, whose moods were as fickle as her health. It seemed like she always bore at least one bruise of her own doing somewhere at any given time. Except this time her skin had split, in a gash too long for scabbing to suffice. If he didn’t wash it, honey it, and secure its continued covering, the animal would die from its festering. Not for many days, but inevitably its leg would be lost, and its life would follow.

Anger simmered beneath his every movement as he retrieved the relevant items from his tool case resting outside the fence. A feeling brought on by the unmovable apathy of the Anpeelas towards these creatures. Knowing that after he left, and they saw the bandaged leg, there would be no appreciation within either of them of the severity of the treatment or the lethality of the injury. Just a shared shrug that Lindow was humoring himself on trivialities again. Looking for excuses to be of use and earn his yearly fee. Only he knew that with such pitiful daily care being taken by their owners, a quarter of the livestock in town would be sickly within a year without his intervention. And half of those would be dead by the next.

But no one else cared, except for Old Pyke. So now he was left to tend to the untended without a single outside word of understanding. Just reluctant acceptance from anyone he approached that he had a job to do and it was probably simpler just to let him do it. 

Unless they were already in pain, injured, or sleepless, then it was his own door that was knocking. Present pain and debilitation seemed to be the only forces that could bring his words to the surface of consideration. Until then, his forewarnings were always washed over by salty waves of indignance, ready to pull down any notions that dared to contradict a person’s preestablished patterns of self-destruction, into their mind’s depths of disregarded dangers, where childhood fears and fictional horrors were drowned in unremembered depths, and carried away by the currents of their lives to unsearchable waters.

So he would treat them, and their livestock. Again and again. But exclusively when the truth of his words resurfaced and manifested as unmanageable symptoms. Only to be drowned again soon after by the ever rising tide of causal forces, whose perpetuation his patients would invariably insist upon. Their culture was such that ills were never cured, only abated. A communally shared practice that he was powerless to cease, and had consciously withdrawn himself long ago from attempting to.

*** *** ***

Cliff sifted through the surrounding woods for victuals. Engulfed by the greenery and foliage that crept across every spot of ground left uncovered by the canopy of trees. With every plant reaching for its own personal patch of light to sustain its growth. In one hand he carried an old rugged sack partially full of contents of an imminent soup, in the other he held a short walking stick, hewn from the branch of a dead tree and wrapped at its top where it was handled. His clothes sagged loosely over his shoulders and hips in an unmatching overlay of protective drapery. These accouterments did much to disguise the outline of his figure, which was betrayed only at the outstretches of his limbs with each stride as they protruded from the hulking mass of his torso.

His appearance was such that from a peerable distance, he looked not like a man at all. But perhaps some tri-legged mound whose motives were certainly as unsavory as any other undiscovered beast that lurks in the unsettled corners of unnoticed countrysides.

However feral he seemed now, his lineage originated in nobility. During his long departed youth, multiple tutors, trainers, and academics of wide variety had been commissioned to aid in his education. Lessons that he’d studied dutifully as a child until reaching adolescence. An evolution that after many nights of reluctant introspection, revealed to him that the totality of his arranged learnings were merely twaddle, and tantamount to the mindless musings of drunken vagrants.

So instead of continuing along that charade of enlightenment, he left his adopted home as a young man and forsook the comforts it provided. The only actionable lessons he’d been taught involved sparring and the striking of wooden dummies, so to earn coin he found his most successful option was soldiering. There used to be many legions and lords across the lands who had disputes they would happily pay to resolve. But borders move, provinces die, and people forget which battles were once fought where and for what.

Except for Cliff, his recollections were equally as strong and as scarred as his body, with previous wounds painted plainly for him to identify at any moment’s want. He once delighted in it, basting himself in the blood of lesser men. Until one night, after a particularly hazardous victory, he noticed his senses were still primed for battle, as they often were for one about to be fought. But that had all been finished in the evening. Night was upon him now, and the musculature buzzing that powers one’s feet to fly across a field of chaos and gore should have long since dissipated. Instead of deflation, an unignorable restlessness overcame him, propelling him to move at once in any direction except here. He reluctantly acquiesced to this urge against his want. The final goal of every fight was that night’s rest, but this pressurized injection of mental energy was infuriatingly making that impossible to reach. So, without disarming or disrobing, he abandoned his tent with a disappointed sigh and went out for a walk into a breeze whose briskness only increased his longing for the tempting warmth and relief of his tent.

The sensible thing would be to walk a circle around the encampment until his mind caught up to the tiredness of his legs. But that would likely result in him being spotted, confronted, and obliged to converse with whichever officers or captains spotted him seemingly wandering around. Cliff had no desire for pleasantries, especially now. He just needed to acclimate his mood into accepting the sleep that he craved more with every waking moment.

He didn’t usually remember any of the individual men of a battle. For him the strikes, the screams, and the fervor all melded together into a singular event the same way memories from a hundred days meld into a singular season. Except, one man that day had stood out. The soldier fought for the opposing force, rather because of coin or country, Cliff knew not. What was so striking about the soldier was his reaction to his body’s hopeless circumstance. One leg had been cleaved off at the knee, which was bleeding faster than he could sustain for long. And there were a number of smaller gashes to the side of his abdomen which immobilized him further. The beat of his heart and breeze of his breath were fleeting things for him now. Yet from his pool of blood and inevitability, he did not do as most did. Instead he reached his most agile arm up above his head as he laid flat along the ground, and plucked a puny flowering weed from its root, to then bring it clumsily to his eyes for a time knowable only to himself. Cliff watched him do this with pointed curiosity, directing as much attention as he could spare from the clashing dangers of his surroundings.

Now, as he marched away from the victorious encampment of a quiet battlefield, he found himself still linked to that soldier. Cliff considered what his final thoughts might have been, and to what extent he regretted where his loyalty to either royalty or riches had brought him. But even more so, Cliff wondered what the soldier had seen in that tiny petaled plant of such import that it usurped the objects and happenings of everything around him.

He walked for a great while that night. Until the chosen point of that soldier’s sight had cauterized its image into the gaze of his mind’s eye. The netted layer beneath his outer gambeson had wicked away the sweat from his chest and back since he’d started his quest for exhausted slumber. A pursuit that he found in a warningless wave of weakness that began at his neck and slid steadily downwards. There exists a degree of physical limitation that once reached, invokes a paralyzing nausea that can be neither resisted nor relieved. He frantically scanned his immediate terrain as his stomach wretched in obstinate protest to his wakefulness. Instinctively, he unhooked his weapon from the two loops on his back, and collapsed atop an encirclement of bushes at the base of a tree, somehow managing to fall in such a way that his back was positioned against its trunk. He had already checked-in to his officer when he collected his fee. No trouble or fuss would result in his tent being empty until morning. And even if it would, there was no negotiating to be done with his limbs. Even were he not clad in armor and otherwise burdened, his hands could not reach for his helmet high enough to move it, and his feet could not be made to bear his weight. So as he succumbed to the unanimous demand of every muscle, joint, and web of sinew holding him together, he sighed in a great and bellowed breath that bore much resemblance to the last moment of the dying soldier he’d seen that day.

In sleeping he was as dreamless and dead as the dirt he laid upon. No sound or shove could have raised him out of the comatose void in which he had dived. His slumber was such that hibernation briefly became a human practice during its duration. Eons passed across the scope of his unconsciousness, forming every possible ephemeral idea from the nonsensical to the profound. Each mixing into a slurry of irrelevancy and philosophical breakthroughs whose truths could have cured all avoidable causes of contempt, chaos, and confusion, if only an iota of memory was also present to retain the unlocked answers. But no semblance of self existed to witness the torrent of visions that engulfed the spacious abscess within his sleeping mind. Thus, when he awoke with a sudden heave of breath to an unknown time on an unknown day, the only thing he remembered was the welcome stillness of his limbs as he gradually defied their demands to remain motionless in their present positions. A surge of blood then began to press through the statuesque flesh of his thighs and down to the fronts of his feet, forcing a painful thaw along his frozen flesh that brought a snarl to his unwetted throat.

Fortunately, he was not unaccustomed to resting while fully suited. So he knew how to tie the hinge points such that they did not dangerously impinge his circulation. Which allowed his limbs to reanimate in accordance to his will as he awoke to a troubled urgentness, the cause for which he was not initially aware.

A feeling of dread crept over him, coming not from what he could sense, but what he could not. Around him there was naught but natural quiet. When he had marched out here the echoes of battle still simmered through his ear in a hushed hum of cries and clanging. But that would dissipate, it always did. What should have remained was the clamoring of his encampment. Thousands of men all packing, heaving, gloating, and recovering from their work in one central location was an unquietable place. The fear of having been left behind sprang into him as he affixed his weapon to his back, sipped from his canteen, and jogged towards his fellow soldiers of fanaticism, fortune, or convenience.

Discouragingly, as he approached nearer, no sounds of men or sight of smoke could be perceived of his encampment. Only an eerie noiselessness that affronted him more painfully than would a blow of horns against his head. In accordance with the nature of travel, the return back was quicker than wandering away, so it wasn’t long before his eyes caught sight of the emptiness his ears had prepared him to expect. But it was not smothered fires and fading wheel tracks that he saw along the location of his previous encampment, but carnage. Unorganized corpses strewn across it in haphazard disarray. Speckled only by a few individually fallen members of the cavalry charge that had obviously ambushed them in the night, deducible in that most of his allied soldiers were either naked or thinly robed.

He had neither loyalty nor love for these men or their cause. This army was as colorless to him as any other. But the field of death before him were not the remnants of a fight badly lost, or even a surrender coldly refused, but an extermination swiftly executed.

The battle, his battle, the one he’d fought in to the brink of exhaustion, had been a sacrificial ruse, he realized. A feigned attempt at victory from its first futile attack by an army ordered to fight until its inevitable death, orchestrated by a commander who cared nothing of the casualties of what must have been at least four fifths of his available force, with only the successful final charge of its remainder.

Whatever scouts were left and available to patrol during nightwatch after his battle would have been thinly spread and eager to return. The enemy would only have had to eliminate one or two for their approach to have remained undetected, which it clearly had been. There was a finishing wound on the breast or upper back of every corpse in the field. No prisoners were taken. All were slaughtered.

Cliff walked across the field, careful not to foul his boots or ankles in the decaying muck of men once living. These were not his comrades or compatriots, they were his coworkers. Of those he’d met, most of which had treated him poorly out of either distrust or disgust. So it was not sorrow which sank his heart at the sight of their demise, but pity. A sincere pity that extended from the most professional officers to the lowest grunt with the worst intentions. All whose lives were now indiscriminately spent with equal futility for a cause that would be forgotten in fewer years than their names.

Once he’d reached the edge of the encampment’s raided ruins, and saw nothing forward that resembled death, his mind made room for additional ruminations to fester, one of which clawed itself more deeply than the others inside him. Resisting every attempt to sweep it away with the other unreasonable questions. Until that clawing question burrowed itself so deeply that to remove it would require an internal dissection of fatal consequence. 

It all came back to it, every plan, plot, or purpose he tried to formulate just dissolved into its implications like powder in a pond. Bringing its resolution to the forefront of his every action and thought. Until that night, once he found an acceptable shelter beneath an evergreen, had finished firing out any bugs or ticks that might be hiding around the branches he’d displaced, and allowed himself to return to the sleep that had saved him the previous night, he mouthed to himself in a breathless whisper, “How did I know?”

Soldiers and sailors were a superstitious lot. When a stray arrow could fall upon your neck at any moment, or a rogue wave could capsize your vessel on the calmest ocean, then delusions of destiny tend to percolate people past the precipice of reason. He’d seen its shade of madness bring many surviving men to drink. But coincidence was no compass, and thinking it to be served only as a compensatory measure for one’s own relative powerlessness to random circumstance.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

But this was not a dodged arrow, or a hurricane survived. This was his own exercised agency driven by inexplicable means. Too inexplicable to ignore. A fact which haunted him all that loathsome night, and forced him to fundamentally reconsider the nature of his perceptions, the stimulus of his surroundings, and the very solvency of his sanity that had somehow merged the two to such a crucial result. 

*** *** ***

Linia was unamused by the incessant barking outside. Children were running around in wild abandon, communicating exclusively in what seemed to her as shrieks, shouts, and yells. She didn’t hate them for being a nuisance, but she did hate their parents. How anyone could possibly raise a child to be so unreservedly boisterous was something Linia couldn’t begin to understand. She took solace in the knowledge that eventually winter would come again, and communal behavior would eventually return to being regimented and considerate when the weather urged them back inside where they belonged.

The children didn’t know any better yet, she understood. And neither did many of the parents. Those who had never experienced the dangers of the outer territories. She hadn’t personally, but her late mother had. And she’d recounted to Linia every evil, treachery, and tribulation that thrived throughout them. From her very first words Linia was given detailed warnings of all that lied beyond their borders. Warnings that imparted to her a unique appreciation for her way of life, bereft of worry or need. Her wants, however, were plenty. She wanted other people’s spawn to louden the air in front of their own homes, instead of so frequently migrating in front of hers. She wanted her neighbors to understand the importance of their continued diligence in maintaining the structures that allowed their prosperity. She wanted her husband to be less daft of mind and more assertive of speech. But most of all, she wanted the threats against his authority to dissolve.

His position wasn’t officially appointed, which was partly advantageous in that neither could it be officially unappointed. His role, however, was of unmistakable import. Yet there were still occasional challenges to his commands from those who were so stubbornly insolent as to think them mere suggestions. Saddletown was his, in every functional sense. Acknowledgement of that was unimportant to her, just so long as practical compliance continued. His leadership was paramount to the entire town’s survival, and any who were still unaware of this were allowed to be so only by Wilnum’s own humility on the matter; a quality of his that she took much pride in.

Presently, she busied herself by aggressively stringing beans from the perch of a stubby stool in her kitchen. Unadmittedly imagining with each yank and snap that the pail of discarded ends to her side was actually being filled, one at a time, with the unkept fingernails of the shriekers outside. Who by such discipline could be simultaneously informed both to keep them clean and proper when they regrew if they wanted to keep them at all, and far more importantly, to segregate their ruckus in their own parent’s yards. So as not to needlessly disturb any adults who were just trying to finish their chores in peace.

*** *** ***

A girl skipped through the bouts of branches and brush as she made her way towards Cliff’s home. Eagerly and with reckless disregard for any possibly unnoticed protrusion from the canopy or ground that might sabotage her step enough for her to lose it. An oversight she was presently either too surefooted or too fortunate to be punished for.

Her gaze naturally flitted between the ground beneath her and what was directly ahead. It was easier and faster to see the forest floor as not a singular semi-walkable surface, but a long intermittent series of hoppable ones. Roots, rocks, and low hanging branches were much more solid points of propulsion than the soft and usually covered soil that filled every space between. An environmental characteristic that out of practicality, caused her to move in a manner which was unrecognizable to her usually slouching saunter. She could enter both modes of movement without thought. Swinging, skipping, and jogging when in the woods, and keeping her steps light and head low when at home.

Faleen had forced her to feed before she left. The porridge had been too thick and undercooked to sit well, which staggered her a bit. But to her that small discomfort was an easily ignorable form of pain, especially against her excitement. Cliff had been unimpressed by her progress last time, she sensed. So today she wanted to show him how much better she was getting at it before he decided to quit; which was something she feared immensely.

When she would practice whispering at night, at first she couldn’t decide which words to do first. There were just so many to manage that she was nearly overwhelmed by the chasm of her incapability. So she started with his name, and the one he had given her. A decision whose shortcomings became immediately evident to her. Cliff was such a clumsy word. It started easily, she could do the cuh almost every time she tried. And iff wasn’t especially bothersome either, when she remembered to end it soon enough. But the quick transition both to and from the La was like heaving herself over a hurdle between the syllables. She didn’t understand how to effectively merge the consonants together. Ca and La were like oil and water in her mouth, sloshing around in an incompatible slurry. To be easier on herself she tried only saying them individually, intentionally repeating ciff and liff in alternating rhythm until both were reliably achievable.

When she’d gotten as far as she could with that, she pivoted to the name he’d given her, which she found much easier. The Guh was slightly problematic at first to say only once each time, but the second part flowed effortlessly from her tongue. Even once she’d already mastered its pronunciation, she’d continued repeating each night. After her door had been shut, when her parents were sure to be sleeping, and the only detectable movement was the breeze against her window’s shutters. She’d quietly enunciate its syllables in reverence to their sound. A sound which rang sweeter to her than any other.

Before long she’d reached Cliff’s home, a place she found to be somehow both seamless and unmistakable against the surrounding greenery and rock. Unless he was to be found outside crafting or cooking, no wandering eyes would pause upon it in a search. But, having already known where it was, her own eyes were instead transfixed by its splendor. She hoped he would soon show her inside the cave wherein he always disappeared upon her departures, but she was too terrified to go inside without first being given permission, something which she did not yet have the words to ask for.

This time as she approached, she saw he was squatting in front of its entrance and facing away from her. In accordance with an inexplicably mischievous urge, she quieted her steps before continuing. Choosing the harder spots of ground and stepping with only the outsides of her feet to limit any audible crunching. Before five of such steps had completed, and while she was still many more away from reaching him, he stood up with a snap whose suddenness startled her so much she nearly fell backwards off her feet. His hands were to his sides now, still holding their original objects. He appeared to have been repairing a large woven basket of an unusual shape. She froze as he did, too transfixed on his reaction to continue her prowl. After a short moment, the tension erecting his shoulders and neck loosened with what she ascertained to be either a sigh or a snarl.

“Do not do that,” he bellowed deeply, such that his voice made his words unmistakable despite its opposing directionality to their intended recipient. She obeyed as she neared him with her normal gait. He stayed standing still until her arrival, at which point he gingerly but with the highest possible intentionality leaned down and placed his basket and some sort of small hooked tool in a fitting position beside him. Then he turned around to face her, bearing the sternest look she’d ever seen from him. “Here you come again,” he said slowly, contorting his tone to play more softly than its current tuning’s pitch. “Upon consideration, it may be better for you to continue your practices at home, with your parents. Now that they hear you can, they’ll be much more involved in your progression than I can be,” he suggested. Panic erupted down her spine as she nearly jumped towards him, but she desperately redirected the surge further up and into her throat.

“Cliffgilli!,” she barked. “Clifffffgilli. Cliif Gilli. Cliff. Gilli,” she paused to catch her breath before continuing, but was interrupted by his acquiescence.

“As you wish, child. I’m not sending you away, it just seems impractical for you to keep returning here.”

“||...”

“It means— hmm, it means doing things in a hard way that could otherwise be easier. But easiest is not always bestest, I suppose,” he said assuringly. “It sounds like you’ve already mastered our names. Have you decided which words to try next?”

“.....”

“Then let’s start with: bright, dark, far, and near.”

“.....”

“Not all at once. Just try them one at a time. Slowly.”

“Bvvviieeettttk,” she croaked.

“Shhh, you don’t have to press so hard. Just try the first part, as slow as you can.” 

*** *** ***

Decker stood at the edge of town, staring down the street that cut through its center. He was alone this time. He hadn’t called Sal or any other kids to play with him. Not because he was tired of racing them, but because he was tired of finishing second. Sal might be older but Decker was still stronger, and it irked him tremendously to be so indisputably inferior at the activity.

Which is why he was training. Initially he’d train every day. But his thighs would burn too sorely the mornings after, so now it was only every other day. Still, he’d run up and down the street again and again as steadily as he could manage, not saving any energy for a finishing sprint, but pushing himself to the absolute brink from the very start. After a couple of laps across he’d have to stop and clutch his hurting chest while he heaved, but he still resumed the lap once his breath was caught.

He kept going, on and on. Until his breath burned and his legs lost any lift between them. And when attending to other things, such as school, chores, and assisting his parents with work, his mind was never where he was. Not until he came back to his designated starting line and trained his body to accomplish the speeds that his friend could already reach without directed effort.

*** *** ***

Sile was one of a few unclaimed cats who preferred wandering over obligation. She saw little utility in being locked inside when there were always open places available to take shelter in. Some cats were killed for being overtly hostile to people or their pets, but she knew better than to approach either. Bowls of water or bits of food were left in some of the barns during the winter, but in the fruitful seasons the strays were expected to hunt for themselves. A skill which had never been domesticated out of her. There were always mice, rats, birds, and undeveloped rabbits or hares around. All of which knew to be wary of her prowl.

But wariness served as insufficient protection for each of her daily kills; which would often tally to more than ten in number. Her coat was a benign blend of browns and grays that striped across her in an alternating fashion from the end of her tail to the points of her ears, which bore spurs of pointed whiskers that honed in on the rustling of anything so small as a cricket that dared move within her field of sound.

Most larger animals ignored her, not out of malice but disinterest, except Tail, who snarled her away at first sight whenever their paths happened to cross. Sile resented the dog’s contempt for her, but was powerless to rebuke it other than by erecting her tail as she left his view. As had happened today just a little while prior. She’d turned a corner around a house and the sound, sight, and scent of Tail had struck her as suddenly as the thunder of a distant storm. The dog roared at her viciously, furious at their meeting. Sile instinctively leapt away in a swift heave of considerable distance, before turning her head back for one sour moment only long enough to curse the tooth-baring source of unwarranted hostility that followed her departure with fixed and fervid eyes.

Sile lackadaisically tried hunting for morsels, to distract her mind from the reality of her recent retreat, but it did nothing to alter her mood. So she altered her strategy to something less demanding, and began prowling for nests. It was a cumbersome task, but lacked any of the required pouncing or stalking used in the pursuit of most other forms of prey. She searched across the unkept corners and crannies of buildings and barns, beneath bushes, and inside mounds of discarded branch trimmings, but nothing could be seen from her usual spots. So she wandered around in the aimlessly intentional manner innate to all subspecies of felines, whilst being continuously burdened in both her pride and by her unprosperous pursuit. Until a stroke of prospective fortune struck her senses. Without a thought or hesitation she traced the tiny scampering to a soft mound of especially dry brush that must have blown over the entrance of a mouse’s burrow. The hindrance wasn’t enough to obstruct its occupant’s way, but it was enough to announce to any passing listener to its location. Before long Sile was carrying it away to a more convenient spot.

She found a wide patch of moss behind an ancient tree and, despite its incessant squirming, lowered her head and pinned it down against the green. Careful to keep it pinned with her paws, she crunched the bones of its hind legs with surgical technique before releasing it entirely to flee of its own accord. The mouse took no time to consider the circumstances of its newly regained freedom, and desperately crawled across the moss towards a form of foliage that might provide a modicum of cover. But Sile just seized it again when the mouse approached the edge of the patch and excitedly placed it back in the center to watch it scurry again. The two repeated this action for scores of times, one for survival, one for amusement, but both out of instinct. Eventually either from pain or exhaustion the mouse stopped crawling, leaving its only movement to be the rapid pulsation of its chest. In fading interest, Sile tried prodding it with her paw, but to no result. And as she finally gnawed through its thin hide to feed upon more than just its helplessness, her mind contained no remaining thoughts of her recent unsavory encounter with that devilish dog.

*** *** ***

Cadi removed the kettle from the fireplace and cautiously carried it by its hand with a thick rag in each hand across the hallway and into a small shutterless room containing nothing but a full washbasin with a small table beside it. After pouring the kettle’s steamy contents into the ambient water and placing the empty kettle on the table, she removed her slippers and stockings in ritualistic preparation. Her robe was last to be removed, which she fondly folded and laid next to her slippers and stockings in an organized row. Aside the kettle was a lone tallow candle whose flicker shadowed the wall behind her with every line and bend of her silhouette as she slowly stepped into the water. It was hotter than she could tolerate at first, so she started standing patiently before incrementally lowering into a squat, then a kneel, and lastly to submersion up to her chin as she released the weight of her back against the inner edge of the washbasin.

Having achieved her proper position she softly released a huff of breath whose force was only barely sufficient to blow out its wilting wick. Then, with her body enshrouded in the blind warmth of weightlessness, she allowed her imagination to follow suit, so guided through the featureless dark only by the familiar path of a revisited memory.

As an adolescent she’d been fine of figure, so much so that her mother had demanded her wearables always be baggy and loose to conceal her contours from public view. Her imminent pairing with Hal had already been arranged, an arrangement whose practicality her parents were loath to jeopardize by the risks of any wandering eyes that might sway the whims of their shortsighted juvenile.

But Shand had been unencumbered by this visual obstruction, armed as he was with a gaze which to her seemed to penetrate every layer of material that insulated her heart from the open air. For over a year he’d been seeing through her, answering her every unspoken question with unmistakable approval. An approval not shared by either of their elders, who had inarguable authority in all such interpersonal matters, and had already made their optimal selections for the good of the township.

The summer before she was relocated to Hal’s domain she’d secretly couple with Shand upon the ground, hidden from sight by a nearby prairie of tall grasses sequestered for future grazing. After washing in the stream to cleanse the evidence of their meeting, they’d stagger their return, being sure to be seen in passing by different people on separate sides of town. So thorough was their cover that she would even frequent equestrian activities long after the whole of a day’s chores and work were completed just to improve the plausibility of her burst prior to marriage.

The two had risked much with each meeting. His punishment upon being discovered would have been twenty roddings. Out of accounting for the weaker female anatomy, hers would be only one, so that she could still know of his pain, and grieve of her culpability in it. To equalize their suffering, two crossing cuts would have been made along the outside of each of her calves, to render the scars too prominent to leave her legs unexposed to any public eye so that her unwaveringly covered legs would serve as a tacit example of the consequences to unsanctioned coupling.

But in all their careful meetings, whose numbers were too many to count yet still too few for any to be forgotten, they were never caught. Perhaps the two would have continued on until the day of her marriage when her whereabouts would be more monitored, were it not for the cooling ground at summer’s end. They resisted the weather’s deterrence until its persistent decline in temperature induced an unignorable shiver to their skins that siphoned too much necessary circulation for their continued sharing of anything beyond the interweaving of their fingers.

He was married too by now, and avoided her on every social occasion, so ardently that she used to wonder troubling things about his past motives and his nature. She didn’t have those wonderings anymore. Now she only took her hot baths, in the lightless privacy of her house, where she would firmly bring her fingertips right beneath her ears just the same way that Shand used to all those summers ago, and worked her way down.

*** *** ***

   Cliff slumped exhaustedly inside the confines of his cave. The child had left to return home several hands ago, but the residue of her presence still weighed on him slightly. Her psyche brimmed with anxiousness, frustration, and fear, the overflow spilling everywhere around her like the contents of a handleless pot carried carelessly. It was not in him to refuse her, but he would be admittedly relieved once her oratory competence surpassed her need of him, and he could return to his business without interruptions. Her current need for him was no large inconvenience, but having been free from foreign thoughts for such an uncountable time, this brief respite from his relief was still a noticeable hindrance. She was now interfering with his greater directive: preparing for his next teacher’s arrival.

All that time ago, when he first avoided that ambush on his last contract, he conducted a search for answers about what he’d done and how. He sought out sages, seers, and magicians from the corners of every kingdom and country he could travel across. Whomever he could find to ask, he would consult in the hidden machinations of matter and mind, without presupposition or prejudice. On his journey, he wore many hallowed relics and chanted many quotable magics as he prodded past the precipice of every form of faith in his hapless search for an actionable explanation concerning his broadening senses.

Gradually, after years since the start of his personal quest, desperation turned to disappointment, and then finally mutated to resignation as his familiarity with every shade of charlatan became more intimate. Despite all their rehearsed assurances to the contrary, all evangelizing envoys of higher truth and greater knowledge eventually exposed their truest motive to be some form of self-aggrandizing. Rather they were Seers of the Secret Sky, disciples of a poorly chronicled prophet, or self-purported possessors of a power beyond the confines of common thought; he would always eventually find their teachings to be either elementarily accurate or uselessly false. Until on an otherwise unnoteworthy day, in a city he had every intention of vacating as soon as he could manage to resupply his pack, he happened upon a soothsayer’s tent whose sign bore a unique insignia he vaguely recognized from a text he’d once perused, but could not quite manage to identify.

“I’ve been expecting you,” a woman greeted from across the tent.

“Do you all say that?” he asked with a sigh.

“Who is we, in this context?”

“Mystic Men, Wise Women, Dreamreaders and the like.”

“I would hesitate to cast myself amongst them,” she said.

“Then what’s my name? Since you were already expecting my arrival,” he goaded dismissively as he lowered himself down to sit on the cushioned floor in front of her table.

“I do not know, you haven’t told me. But I do know why you’re here.”

“That makes one of us.”

“You’re seeking answers.”

“Am I really?”

“About how you survived,” she continued.

“A fitting observation,” he remarked.

“The extermination of your army,” she finished. His slightly off centered gaze zeroed in with precise focus directly onto the skin around her eyes 

“But I haven’t even shown you the wrinkles on my palms yet.”

“There isn’t nee–”

“Or the ones on my sack.”

“Don’t be defensive,” she sighed. “My words are as true as your fear of them.”

“What do you know of it?” he sneered.

“You speak too broadly but… very little, if that comforts you. Your concern should be of what I do know.”

“What then?” he demanded.

“Since you’ve asked so politely, I’ll tell you. You seek The Weaver.”

“Is he some kind of soothsayer pimp?”

“She is nothing of the sort,” she corrected. “And you should be better mannered to those who help you.”

“Paying you to send me on a featherquest doesn’t strike me as helpful.”

“Strikes are all you know, but you misunderstand. My motives are not personal profit. I ask of you no payment, only patience, as you make your way to her.”

“A way that you mark?”

“Yes.”

“Into an ambush then,” he reasoned.

“I run no such grift,” she said softly.

“Then how are you in business, if you don’t charge?”

“Whom I choose to charge is no concern of yours.”

“Then why am I the recipient of such…uh– generosity?”

“Your relationships and encounters have always been transactional, a saddening perspective. But I am tasked to direct you to The Weaver, and so I shall, despite your belligerence.”

“What use to me is some sower of cloth?”

“She can answer what you’ve not dared ask, and direct your path forward.”

“I find vagueness to be a poor substitute for wisdom,” he said skeptically.

“Questions like why you never injure and only tire, and the nature of the senses you’ve spent your life denying,” she continued.

“I hurt the same as anyone,” he argued quietly.

“I said nothing of pain,” she clarified. “Only injury.”

“So– I’ve been fortunate.”

“You can deny it, you can even deny this world, but you cannot deny yourself. Your ignorance isn’t willful enough.”

“If… I were to humor this– this escapade of yours,” he said with a shrug. “How far to travel?”

“It is not the length of the trail, but the thickness of the brush that will trouble you.”

“I’m sure I’ve cut my way through worse.”

“Some things can’t be cut through, only worked through.”

“Do you keep your platitudes written down somewhere, or are they all memorized by now?”

“The Crooked Creek, do you know of it?” she asked, ignoring him.

“I’ve seen hundreds of creeks, few were noteworthy.”

“Anriken Fortress.”

“Yes.”

“Follow the northern wall to The Great Flats.”

“That’s Plains People territory.”

“Do not feign worry of their kind,” she scoffed before continuing. “Since you know of it already, just make your way to anywhere within the flats, then follow the Hallowed Star until you reach the creek. Trace it northward for four day’s march, from there you will hear her call.”

“This is not a short journey you speak of,” he remarked.

“Which is why your previsions are already prepared and packed,” she responded.

“What?”

“As I said before, you were expected,” she answered. He stared at her cautiously, deciphering her words in contemplative silence. “You can see my motives as clearly as my eyes,” she stated. “Do not pretend to doubt them. Take my offerings, and seek hers out. But I do warn you, she does not share my tolerance for rudeness.”

“By now, I doubt some woman could manage to injure me.”

“I speak not of injury,” she warned. “Do not insult her so in her domain, as you have me in mine. Humor is not among her attributes.”

“So, this tailor woman, she knows about… she can tell me–”

“She knows of your skin, she knows of your bones, she knows of your sleep, and of all the rest.”

“If you both know so very much,” he whispered pointedly. “Then why not just tell me yourself, save me the trek.”

“Because, I could only tell you what you are,” she said sympathetically. “But she…” the soothsayer sighed sorrowfully before concluding, “she can show you.”

*** *** ***

Corlin stood before his personally crafted stack of tied straw and squared his shoulders against its inanimate form. Squaring his shoulders against the rectangular mass with unabashed bravado. After a moment of exaggerated preparation, he kicked it as hard as he could manage. A kick whose force nearly knocked him backwards off his own feet. In frustration he immediately kicked it again, careful this time not to lose his footing from the impact.  

 After many staggered strikes against the straw, his breath began to follow suit, causing him to falter in his footing enough to nearly fall again. Now exhausted, he dropped to a knee and reoriented his bearings between heaving inhalations. Inadvertently he subbed from the sweat of his face that flowed across his hairless mouth, its saltiness matched his mood, and forced him to look directly downward as he recovered to avoid saturating his sinuses in his own water with his breath.

As he looked at his bent leg beneath him he became additionally drenched in disappointment at his current strength. This perceived weakness unburied in him an unrefined anger whose direction and drive he had no knowledge of. Possessing only a vague inkling that wielding some form of authority could allay this newly erupted anger. A notion he presently had no actionable outlet for testing. So instead he stayed where he was, and stewed in his own heat, considering possible schemes for how he might advance his position amongst his peers sufficiently to satisfy this burgeoning desire.

*** *** ***

A girl stealthily wandered around Saddletown’s perimeter, curiously scanning the inhabitants from her untraceable position as she moved. She knew some of their names from when they came over to the house and spoke to her parents, but most were familiar to her only by their visage. One couple was resealing the roof of their house, two children were taking turns throwing what seemed to be a small stuffed round sack at each other but catching it before each impact, a man was beating up a person sized bale of straw, a woman was hanging up lines of wetted laundry along a thin rope, and an attack dog was patrolling the paths between them.

All seemed to be in order, and so she tucked further away out of any possible earshot to practice enunciating. Cliff didn’t like it when she wasn’t noticeably better between visits, so she made sure to keep her progress constant to quicken when she could see him again. Last time he’d instructed her to breathe between each word, even though it sounded too slow. It made her nervous to do so, she liked saying words all at once so she could stop talking sooner, but she obliged him anyway, however reluctantly.

When she came back she planned to know the colors, the shapes, the seasons, and all the trees he’d taught her to name. A goal that when tested, she would only fractionally reach. She was always better by herself than she was in front of him. A difference whose nature she could not manage to decipher and one she was always too embarrassed to ask him about.

In Cliff’s presence, sometimes her thoughts would stir like a boiling soup, each element churning up, over, and down the confines of her mind, as if he were holding a ladle and skimming off the accumulating froth. It was a process that left her feeling clearer only at the end as she was leaving, and much more clouded during, almost painfully so. She liked his turns to talk much more. He spoke in a way she’d never heard from anyone; using an unpredictable tone that rose and fell like a song he’d only recently written, and had no need to remember. 

He made no demands, or scoldings when she stumbled, mumbled, or mangled a word. He’d only stop and kneel down beside her and wait for her to get it right, usually for many tries. She both relished and resented it when he did so. Because then she’d feel so much pressure to get it right that she could barely keep her composure, even though she also knew that he’d patiently wait there with her for the rest of the day if that’s how long it took before they could continue. She wished he would kneel still with her like that without her having to talk, so she could just simmer with him in the silence for a while, without needing to be stirred or skimmed. But he stoked the coals beneath her just by his being, raising an unstoppable warmth that resulted in the whole process continuing irrespective of her want. Still, she wished that just for once, he’d stop to kneel next to her and look her in the eyes for its own sake, without expecting her to say a single thing.

*** *** ***

Decker fetched Sal immediately at school’s end and led him to their previous starting point. Sal reluctantly agreed but was trying to delicately prepare his friend for the approaching disappointment. To Sal, this game was no longer fun and the ensuing sourness from Decker afterwards was even less so. But refusing would have induced more sourness still. So there they both stood with opposing feelings that were equally abject as they counted down in monotone unison.

Upon their start, Sal did little to strain himself, casually building up a pace that would carry him to nearly the end when he would break into his usual sprint and squash any delusions Decker had of overtaking him. Alternatively, Decker was dashing as hard as his body could propel itself from the start. Leaping as long as he could with each stride and switching his feet with a practiced precision that bore no observable signs of inconsistency or imperfection.

And yet, despite his determination, preparation, and persistence, it was clear to them both that as soon as Sal saw fit to begin his finishing sprint, their temporarily similar speed would reveal itself to be Decker’s strained maximum, and Sal’s comfortable pace. Instead of surrendering to this outcome, Decker reached inside and found a part of himself to which children are rarely acquainted; a place where physical distress becomes a muted signal under the purview of mental resolve. His thighs were blazing, in every way. His lungs were protesting progressively more profusely in their mandated participation of his sprint with each concurrent breath, and his vision was blackening at its borders, narrowing steadily until he could only see directly ahead. A compounding encumberment that soon proved to be of catastrophic result when a small rounded stone happened to rest beneath his frantically darting feet. A stone his stride flung backwards as he tripped upon its surface.

Decker panicked at his unexpected total loss of balance, waving his arms widely in desperate protest to gravity’s insistent pull. But his coordination was too undeveloped, and his exhaustion much too high to resist the total loss of trajectorial control as his body propelled over and past the final fumbling of his feet before he fell.

An unexpected pile of boards and dirt struck him higher than he’d thought. An undefended blow against his belly that blew the little remaining air from its bellows with an abrupt thud. As he used his forearms to lift his collapsed frame off a mound of cool soil and thin fencing, he became suddenly cognizant of what had happened and where he was. Worriedly, he stood up and looked around barely soon enough to see the fuzzy shapes of two women standing before him. One approached him with two quick steps and reached beside her towards nothing before surprisingly striking him across the face with her palm powerfully enough to knock him back to the ground next to where he’d just arisen.

“You stupid, worthless, boy!” Cadi spat after slapping him. Decker looked up to see Cadi staring down at him with Fay beside her kneeling before her mostly flattened flower bed. “Do you see what you’ve done,” Cadi demanded.

“Sorry, I didn’t—” Decker sputtered.

“Don’t you talk back to me Decker. I will be informing your mother what you did to Fay’s poor garden. I most certainly will. That’s a guarantee. So you can go home and see what she’s going to do about your reckless foolery,” she scolded. Decker caught a glimpse of motion beside him as she spoke. It was Sal, walking away from him in the distance without a claim or a care for the current conflict behind him. An abandonment that wounded Decker more than his embarrassment from falling, or the shaming from the woman towering before him. “Look at me when I am speaking, boy. Were you listening? I said go home! And just see if you can concoct some sort of explanation for your behavior to Sinila before I get there. I dare you to even try.”

Decker staggered back up to his feet, nervous that he would be knocked down again, but seeing that he wasn’t, he obeyed Cadi’s command. Not out of obedience, but because he was anxious to leave, and too upset to think of anywhere else to go.

*** *** ***

Over the ground of his cave, across a flattened bedding of dried brush, Cliff slept the sleep of the damned; tormented by the malformed visions of unsavory times. He had a whole rotation that plagued him. An untamed collection of wild dogs that each took their turns in howling their own designated memory of his back into his present awareness.

On this night, he dreamt of a boulder he used to use inside a Lord’s house. The house had been built around the boulder by its owner, designating it a private room with no furnishings, and double-bricked walls on all sides. Tied to the boulder through two carved notches on either side, was a well-dressed man of clear complexion. Cliff had carried in two lamps, and placed them between him and the bound man on both the left and right side, so Cliff could see his whole face.

“What do you want of me?” the man asked desperately.

“Do you know who I am?” Cliff asked politely.

“Why would I know you? We haven’t met.”

“But you know Lord Igis,” Cliff clarified.

“Of course I know of Igis.”

“I am working for him.”

“What does he want with me?”

“Him? He wants nothing of you. What he wants of me, is to find the three men who stole from him five days ago. The men in your gang.”

“I didn’t orchestrate that, it wasn’t my fault,” the man affirmed.

“Ah, but I’m afraid you are mistaking fault, with responsibility. For example: if I ordered men into an unforeseeable ambush, their deaths may not be my fault. But I would still be responsible, because they answered to me, and I led them astray. These three unwise burglars, they answer to you. So now I have a question for you to answer, and it would be much easier on both of us if you would say their names quickly and clearly, who are they?”

“The Talag brothers, Mince, and Filly,” the man said quickly.

“You’re being vague, I told you to be clear,” Cliff sighed.

“No, no, I told you, it was them.”

“Full name, one at a time, starting now.”

“Sim Talag, Onni Talag, Mince Anta, and ‘Filly the Fiery’ Santon,” the man recited.

“You gangsters and your monikers…” Cliff mumbled. “Thank you, for telling me so readily. That quickens things. But why add a name, when I only asked for three?”

“You must have gotten incorrect information, they worked the job together,” the man answered. Cliff used to just be a solver for this boss, when someone was causing problems, Cliff came in to solve it. But eventually this Lord caught onto another one of Cliff’s skill sets, deciphering motivations. Lies were like lemons in an orange orchard to him, obtuse as anything could be. All he had to do was see someone’s eyes and mouth and get them to talk for longer than a sentence, and there was no fooling him. Disingenuousness always betrayed itself to him by its incompleteness, it lacked the wholeness of sincerity that he found equally unmistakable. Obfuscation was to him just as tell-tale a sign of dishonesty as any actual proof could be. Which was only one of the reasons Cliff knew the man had actually added another name to lend credence to his claim of cooperation, a false claim.

“And you did nothing to orchestrate the job?” Cliff asked flatly.

“No! No, no. It wasn’t me.”

“But they are your men.”

“Not anymore. I had them ended, once I heard of their score. I can pay Igis back too, for his whole loss.”

“Then why didn’t you already?”

“You caught me off-guard, literally. I only just finished taking care of them, once I’d heard– you know, I had to send a message to the other guys about who not to cross.”

“So you didn’t sanction the job.”

“I didn’t.

“You didn’t orchestrate it in any way.”

“I keep telling you, it was Sim, they all listened to him when– when he sees a score he takes it.”

“Took it, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“So, you already took care of them.”

“Dead as desert sand.”

“Buried in it too?”

“What?”

“Where then?” Cliff pressed.

“Where what?”

“Where did you bury them?”

“Our usual spot, just some uninhabited marsh land.”

“The bog?”

“Yes.”

“You carried them there?”

“Not by myself, but that’s just where we dispose of things. So you see? It’s already been taken care of. Made an example out of them, just like you want to. No need then, to make an example out of me. I was going to make the recompense, I assure you I was. But it takes more than a couple of days, to get those kinds of funds together, you understand.”

“Why hadn’t you sent any word of these, magnanimous intentions?”

“I didn’t want to begin a dialogue empty handed, I was afraid it wouldn’t go well for me.”

“Are your methods going well for you now?”

“Definitively not.”

“Did you order them killed?”

“No, actually I did it myself. The others needed to see that it was me.”

“When, precisely, did you do this?”

“Just yesterday,” the man stated. It wasn’t enough for Cliff to know the dishonesty of something, he always had to let people expose their own lies for themselves, beyond any deniability. Unless forced to, people will always profess their false cases to their bitter ends.

“Yesterday you performed the executions,” Cliff recounted.

“Correct.”

“So I don’t even need to bother with them.”

“And none amongst me will disturb Lord Igis or his property ever again, unless they want to be dealt with similarly,” the man stated.

“Then you buried them too.”

“Straight to the bog for them.”

“You carried four corpses… by yourself?

“No, obviously not. I had associates assisting me with some of the carrying.”

“Let’s go visit them then.”

“Who? Which ones”

“The men who burglarized a place they shouldn’t have.”

“They can’t say anything though.”

“I disagree, they can say very much indeed. Do you know where I can find them?”

“I’m not sure precisely what spot we put them at.”

“But you had assistance in their disposal.”

“Yeah, like I–”

“Then at least one of them could take me there, if I asked.”

“Sure.”

“This goes one of two ways, you should know. Either I end you here, two slits to your arteries, for trying to steal what wasn’t yours. Or I get another couple of questions deeper, I leave to find someone to bring me to the freshest bodies in that bog, and I check for your mark on them. If your story of unsanctioned meddling is corroborated, I come back here and untie you, and if it isn’t, I don’t come back at all, until the next time I need this boulder. And you should know, I’m absolutely the only person who ever comes in here. It’s like my own personal pocket of business in Lord Igis’s home. The one you thought you could send your goons to grab from.”

“I didn’t send them.”

“Then who knows where they’re buried?”

“My number one, Flags– Arin Flagstile,” the man croaked.

“So I just have to go visit this Arin fellow, and he’ll tell me all about it, just what you’ve said, and take me to these readily rectified rogue agents of yours?”

“Correct on all points.”

“I’d like to. But I’m just afraid that would put me in a compromised position, with you being his boss, whilst I’m keeping you so uncomfortably detained.”

“Not him, he’s solid. He’ll understand. It’s all business with Flags,” the man pleaded.

“I think it unnecessary to involve him in your predicament. Considering there is, I’m saddened to say, a slight flaw in your proposal. About the three men, who I know to a certainty, have already cut you in on the spoils. Therefore I shall not be visiting this Arin friend of yours, I won’t be out digging for fresh flesh where none exists, and I won’t be continuing this conversation. You reached beyond your grasp. And though I may not be personally fond of him, I still simply can’t allow my employer’s belongings to be plundered by such a poor businessman, you understand.”

At the time, Cliff felt no remorse from the man’s ensuing excuses, pleads, and promises. But now, so many years after this interrogation, it followed him some nights. The grandiose pointlessness of the ordeal, all just to entertain his own flawed form of morality. It was a crock. The whole thing, in all its putrid grandiosity. That job, along with his meticulous method of performing it, had been nothing but a twisted farce in a long line of farces meant to fool his own foolish self into collecting coin by a means he could rationalize as just. A realization which was primarily why he eventually moved on to soldiering from there; a much simpler vocation, albeit noisier at times.

*** *** ***

Helin stood next to Fay in Helin’s kitchen as they prepared an elaborate meal together. The cuisine consisted of a simple stew and a baked loaf of pressed potatoes and lentils with a boiled-berry spread. An emotional intensity humidified the air between them with a thickness rivaled only by a rainforest, an environment that neither had seen or could imagine.

“I heard what happened,” Helin said, slicing through the silence.

“I thought about putting it back together, but I decided it’s too late in the season to bother. I suppose there’s always next year,” Fay sighed.

“Destructive little vermin… I don’t know how his parents allowed him to be so senseless. That’s why Loo and I decid–”

“Please don’t,” Fay interrupted. “Can we just have a pleasant evening, without making mention of young ones.”

“Absolutely we can,” Helin agreed loudly, consciously overturning her previous remark by a difference in volume. “We’re just glad you agreed to come over, Loo should be over soon when he’s finished.”

Fay kept her hands to work with slicing, stirring, and preparing her portion of the meal. Attempting vainly to distract herself from long lost aspirations she’d once shared with a man whose voice she could scarcely remember. But with her primary outlet for nurturing now nullified, she found her efforts to be mostly futile. The listlessness of her life had just been revealed, with its original covering now demolished in a mound of flattened soil. Helin had recognized this, and reiterated her open invitation to seize Fay’s change of circumstance. Helin had another childless woman with whom she often confided, but Fay’s participation could expand them into a trio, which would grant them much more influence socially. But before Fay would ever be interested in allying herself to anyone other than that dead husband of hers, Helin knew that she’d have to gain Fay’s favor more consistently, and not just during a time of distress. So that evening she was as accommodating as she knew how to be, and was quick to squelch any boring ramblings from Loo during dinner that might sabotage her efforts towards recruitment. Efforts which he rendered increasingly difficult by his uninsightful interjections spaced throughout Fay’s entire visit. A behavior Helin intended to correct just as soon as she was next alone with him.

*** *** ***

Fil wandered around the town without notice of anyone else, distantly observing the various forms of life. It was early in the evening, but there was still enough light to guide the concluding outdoor tasks of the adults and the winding-down recreations of the children. There were few adolescents between them, those few spent their evenings preparing for their upcoming rites. Their recitations were few and mostly formalities for the current generation, but the remaining elders who still remembered when their own rites were paramount took some satisfaction in the cursory continuations of even the more antiquated traditions.

As Fil meandered around and between the domiciles of his superiors, he contemplated their motivations for living here. He’d never mentioned his trepidations concerning his future, not to person, pet, burdened beast, or passing breeze. Yet he still feared the potentially fatal consequences of suspicion. Within the spaciousness of his isolated township there was a tacit understanding between all citizens, that theirs was the place of paradise. An unsqualored site of unbroken belief whose soiling was communally thought could only be committed by the ungrateful dissent of an ideologically corrupted member. The wars, the plagues, and the necrotizing poison of the conquered world were beyond any redemptive possibilities to the unquestionable authority of his elders. An authority that he came to question more and more with the approaching completion of his childhood.

The only notice of him taken on that walk was from Tail, who approached him on her own hapless path towards their shared destination of an ideal dusk, with view unobstructed by the many shuttered perspectives surrounding them. Or perhaps, Fil considered, he was merely misappropriating Tail’s motivations to align with his own, and that in actuality she only sought a moment of mutual companionship with a copasetic soul; a distinction which the dog’s actions did nothing to display. So the boy met her paralleling pace with an acceptance that encompassed the whole scope of possible drives behind her approach, welcoming her ease of movement that by a means as unknown to him as it was unresisted, infected him with a similar ease of thought. One whose peace overcame whatever worries the coming night might bring, and the leaving day had wrought.

*** *** *** 

It had been a passable day, Cliff decided. Nothing had disturbed his senses. No thunder echoed from distant hills, no falling tree had broken an already settled ground, the insects had kept to their own kind, without swarming any sickly or injured rodents in their uniquely grizzly way. A falcon flew overhead, patrolling for food, but keeping the sky peaceful by his presence. A peace that permeated downward, beneath the canopy and through its trees. The piercing bickering normally being exchanged between every kind of furred and feathered creature was temporarily removed, leaving only the quiet rustling of branches brushing against each other.

Sleep was his primary activity, which he often found to be more active than he liked. Not just at night when lying still, but also during the day whilst moving. There were many oddities about him, some apparent and some he concealed from even an animal’s view. But one hadn’t always been: the flashes. Instantaneous blinks between where he was and where he wasn’t, to times that he either couldn’t remember or wished to forget, to places unmistakably recognizable or of untraceable familiarity. 

That had all started because he followed the directions of that soothsayer. When the flashes became more frequent, and his focus became too divergent to redirect, he would question if the cost had been worth the gain. If perhaps he would have been– irrelevant, he concluded. It was necessary. Had he not gone, he’d still be helpless to his nature, ignorant of all the fundamental findings that were brought to him so sharply that they skewered the totality of his life, with a hole just fine enough to pull a thread completely through. A thread whose ends would never fray, and could only be severed by she who had sown it into her grand design.

*** *** ***

Dav sat across from Albern in mutual conflict, as they usually did. Presently, they were sharing in a meal they’d prepared together, not out of cooperation, but out of spite, neither approving of the methods and technique the other used to prepare even the most basic victuals. They both drew from the same pots of water, as well as whatever seasonal harvests each had spent the day reaping, but then only begrudgingly and solely due to hunger’s usurping power over any argument.

Wordlessly, each scolded the other’s taste, culinary aptitude, and table decorum; with one being considered too insufferably rigid and the other being seen as shamelessly sloppy. The noises were so extraneous that to a sightless listener, the torrent of grunts, huffs, sighs, and clacking of dishware would have seemed sourced by many more than two.

Their percussions concluded when Dav finished consuming his meal slightly prior to Albern, and took that point of distinction between them as an opportunity to silently stare Albern down  from across the table while gratuitously finishing one long sip of water from his cup. His brother was not amused by his obviously dominant display.

“You shouldn’t eat so fast,” Albern refuted, attempting to discredit Dav’s victory of pace.

“Why is that then?” Dav asked, feigning apathy at his brother’s words.

“Bad for you, is why.”

“Oh, did Old Pyke tell you that?”

“It’s true,” Albern asserted. Dav liked to argue with as many questions as he could to control the dialogue, a tactic Albern played into just often enough so that when Dav tried to rely on it too conspicuously, then he could circumvent it completely in deniable obstinance.

“He wasn’t fraudulent, I’m not saying that. Best skinpatcher we’ve ever had, but he regularly advised beyond his expertise, and I’m not afraid to say it. Even if half the town still worships him.”

“Can we just let the dead lie?”

“You’re the one quoting him,” Dav refuted.

“I only said–”

“You said what he said. And if he was so smart at curing stuff, why’d he die of disease then? What’s your answer to that?”

“He was literally the eldest man among us.”

“Mrs. Ceriflew has a whole winter over him.”

“I said eldest man.”

“And I don’t recall her ever heeding a single one of his flappable theories,” Dav pressed.

“I don’t want to talk about the dead,” Albern muttered.

“Then stop quoting them. Every day with you it’s always something or something else. From Old Pyke, from Mother, from– from Nandel.”

“Nandel is still alive.”

“That’s hardly true, and not even important. What I’m saying is that for once you should say something you thought of yourself, instead of hiding behind other people’s words like they’ll shield you from scrutiny.”

“If that’s what I’m doing then I must be doing it pretty badly judging by our current discussion.”

“I’m not scrutinizing you I’m scrutinizing what you say! Which just coincidentally is always something someone else already said, so actually I’m really scrutinizing them if you bothered to actually think about it.”

“Sometimes, when you’re like this, I don’t know what it is you want from me.”

“When I’m like this? There’s a clever tactic, you haven’t used that one in a while. Just turn it all around on me in a few little words. Fine, I’m done talking to you anyway,” Dav declared triumphantly before standing up and deciding it was more dramatic to take his unwashed bowl with him as he left to partially fill another room, although as to which, he hadn’t quite decided. 

*** *** ***

Decker found a secluded spot outside of town with the only tool he was allowed to use by himself: a shovel. With care that was indistinguishable from clumsiness, he used its edge to split a long straight stick he’d recovered from an ignored patch of ground, pressed his heal firmly on one end, and pushed the point of the shovel down the inside of its center, gradually carving a groove along its length.

As he hollowed out the stick with as much precision as a shovel would allow, he fantasized about the imminent look of fear on Mrs. Stoppenhook’s face. He wasn’t allowed to have his own flint, and his parents would notice if he took theirs out of the kitchen, but he didn’t need one. He’d paid attention in Mr. Massy’s classes. Most of the other kids hadn’t. They’d usually just ignore his instruction and use his tools to make toys or carve figurines. But Decker had been as focused as a boy his age could be. Logging Mr. Massy’s every word, even the gratuitous ones, as clumps of ore to be refined for its infinitesimal fraction of useful metal within. One day’s lesson, interspersed within a long and slogging monologue of Mr. Massy’s many discontents, was a litany of methods for firing a forge without a usable flint. With the proper tinder, it could be ignited with a hammer, a knife, or even a rope. None of which Decker was permitted to obtain unsupervised or at least without being conspicuous. But if time was of no consequence, then no tools were needed at all. Only broken branches of dry enough wood, notched and grooved in the proper places, enough tinder to catch the smoldering dust, and enough patience to grind it.

It would take him a long time, he was aware, perhaps an entire evening to grind the dust. So his tools would need to be properly crafted. If the fire plough wasn’t straight enough, wasn’t smooth enough, or wasn’t tight enough, it would fail no matter how many strokes he tried. It would also be much easier to use a chisel, but there was no workshop he was allowed to remove one from, and he couldn’t let anyone see what he was making. Not any child or adult. No one could know it was him, she wouldn’t know it was him. Which did irk him greatly, but this was the best he could do. He couldn’t even risk a passing remark or taunting look, lest she accuse him of the arson, however baselessly, and draw suspicion. Suspicion was eternal, he knew from listening to his parents talk from his bedroom. After they were done wrestling, sometimes they’d have long talks that he listened to through a hollow cone pressed against a particularly conductive beam that ran between the wall of their rooms. He’d carved and disguised the cone in his room as an innocuously removable piece of a formless sculpture, always mindful to return it back in the precise position he’d left it in so as to appear unmoved whenever his father happened to come in.

They’d talk about all sorts of things. Things they used to do, people they used to know, and ancient crimes whose perpetrator was never punished, only suspected. He didn’t understand some of the crime’s names, and dared not inquire to them or anyone else what the unfamiliar terms meant, but he knew when they were bad. He could ascertain that well enough. Which was how he also knew that if he was going to do this, that no one could be given even the thinnest of reasons to suspect him.

*** *** ***

After leaving the soothsayer, Cliff fumbled over thick grasses and under a sky of brush-stroked clouds so picturesque as to be almost unignorable, then stared forward in front of his steadily stepping feet. Bitter and begrudged as he was to be humoring this illogical instruction, he continued to comply, orienting himself in accordance to his poorly sourced guidance.

Like he’d said before, it was a long way. Which took him enough days to thoroughly question the validity of his choice in continuing. But continue on he did, for reasons he either couldn’t decipher or was unwilling to admit. By the time he located the creek he found it to be unremarkable in appearance. Frustration tainted his mood as he marched in defiance with his weariness. Eating, drinking, and sleeping tailed far behind the forefront of his drive, to finish this foolish errand. There comes an eventual point when traveling on foot to which most are unfamiliar. When one’s legs have surpassed their limit of traversing up and down unleveled ground, when one’s heart can no longer supply them with sufficient blood to maintain normal function, and when one’s thoughts become undistractable from reaching one’s destination.

His issue was that he knew not the particulars of the location to which he was venturing. The light was leaving him, he had no shelter prepared and no knowledge of the area. Even if the materials for one had been already gathered and laid before him he would not have even had the energy to craft one. Finally, the prospect of a long and chilled night weighed on him too heavily to continue his pace. Loathfully, he stopped and knelt before the creek, not to drink, but to splash handfuls of clarity across his brow and behind his shoulders. He knelt there exhaustedly in a liminal state; unwilling to rest but unable to march. The air flowed past the edges of his wetted ears, cooling the heat in his head and slowing the pulse of his heart. And when his momentary comfort was no longer relieving enough to distract him from his physical impasse, something else flowed past them too. A faint humming from an indeterminable distance. Instinctively, he turned to trace its direction, which confounded him at first as it seemed to be constantly coming from behind him regardless of his orientation. Until suddenly and with one distinct shift, it changed from being faint to merely quiet, and from being behind him, to directly across the creek. The hum wasn’t melodic, but ominous, a dull and dripping tone that seemed to threaten an oncoming deluge at any moment. And yet, he followed it still. His feet now knew nothing of their previous reluctance as they pressed towards the unknown voice. The brush was not too thick to see through, still, he squinted curiously ahead in an attempt to peer past the limits of his pace. An attempt that was more successful than he’d prepared for when two eyes pierced through the veil of distance and dimness. He halted in surprise and was instantaneously startled again by the cessation of the hum and the emerging of a voice directly beside him.

“You are weathered,” she remarked. Cliff turned towards her to see the eyes were now there as well. Close enough to count their lashes and deep enough to contain a portrait of all things within just the confines of their corners. He began to step back in surprise but was interrupted by the grip of her hand upon his arm with a strength that greatly surpassed its size. “Recover here,” she ordered. As she spoke he felt a quick and frightening weightlessness overtake his body before immediately releasing him, like he had just been thrown through a waterfall fast enough to remain dry and had somehow still landed perfectly upon his feet. Stunned, he looked around to see no sights resembling his previous location. He was unexplainably indoors now, ensconced in wool before a roaring fireplace of burnished stone. Under his feet was a thickly brown rug whose promise of comfort demanded his immediate collapse upon its surface. “I brought you hither for your own benefit, I shall return you imminently and unmarred,” she stated as she stood beside him as he lay in a freshly collapsed heap.

“None have marred me yet,” he croaked through a laborious breath.

“Your professed insouciance is immaterial. Lie here and breathe, when you arise I will show you my machine. You will think it staggering.”

“What is, machine,” Cliff asked confusedly as he sat up and leaned his heavy head and arms over his propped and bent knee.

She withheld a sigh before answering, “A machine is a multiplicative tool, like an axe that cuts many trees with each swing. Think not of it yet, focus on the flow within your legs.”

“Wher–where is this?” Cliff heaved.

“My domain.”

“Which is where?”

“Calm yourself. Speak when you can do more than hobble.”

“Hobble you say?”

“Your pervicaciousness precedes you. But you make no refutations here. Speak of your purpose.”

“Some soothsayer sent–”

“Not in coming, but in being. If you can admit it outwardly.”

“What do you want of me?

“My wants are beyond you,” she scoffed. “Now rest here until your functions return.”

“Sleep isn’t–”

“Sleep and rest are not the same. Sit here. Rest. Wait.”

“I would consider it, but there’s this strange woman towering beside me who is… rather aggressive,” he said. In response to this she obstinately took one step in front of him, swiveled to face him, and knelt down to join him.”

“You’ve been accommodated.”

“This is all, uh–a lot to absorb.”

“Then improve your permutability, I have other obligations.”

“You’re the one who sent me here.”

“I am not,” she stated.

“Your friend then, she sent me to you.”

“You misunderstand.”

“On that, we agree.”

“You did not obey her out of deference, you came to appease your hapless vision quest.”

“Is it still technically a quest if it’s hapless?” he remarked coyly. Just then she lunged towards him with a quickness he’d never seen in all his altercations and pressed only the flat of her thumb against his forehead with enough continuous force that he was sent all the way down to his back. There she knelt over him in unphased stillness with her thumb still pinning his head against the soft rug that cushioned his skull from impact against the floor.”

“You make no refutations. Banter not with me. Your strength is the mere product of a morbid wager. I know of you, I know of your namesake,” she said plainly. He only looked at her in response from his entirely compromised position, too befuddled to concoct a wise utterance that he was sure wouldn’t further incite her wrath.

“You resigned your quest to failure and lept from the Corpsecliffs, but found the limits to your physical fortitude exceeded your estimations.”

“It was more than just fortitude that preserved me that day,” he muttered coldly. “Had to have been.”

“You’ve spent longer than most men live searching for explanations of your senses and deathlessness. If you don’t want mine then speak rudely again,” she said, staring down at him.

“Perhaps, politeness would be easier, if we made introductions,” he slowly suggested.

“You are Cliff. I am Aotha. You must rest now,” she ordered as she released his forehead from her thumb. “Your bearings and faculties are too compromised to continue yet.” Despite his trepidations, the irresistibility of the softness beneath him and the weariness that seemed to saturate his mind along with his every muscle, caused him to acquiesce to her words with a gradually encroaching ease that overcame any lingering lines of reason for resistance. There he rested in a mellow stupor until his breath evened and his thoughts cleared, once the functions of his body and the faculties of his mind were restored enough to recognize the precariousness of his position. In one panicked motion he leapt up into a defensive crouch and turned his head to each side to scan his surroundings. He only found Aotha squatting before him in relaxed boredom.

“You are unfettered,” she stated. “Follow me as I expound,” she instructed. He hesitantly obliged, unsure of his present circumstance. “There are tranches of consciousness, as you know. From plant, fungus, insect, animal, etcetera. Even among your kind there is a broad scope. Your particular type of torment is a result of your standing. And you were selected by two uncaring agents governing both life and its cessation as a show of force. But your novelty has long since expired, along with their interest, even though the consequence of it, that being your durability, have not. Your fault was in making more of your situation than either party had planned, an attribute that they found equally unexciting. Thus, leaving you like this, in an inexplicable state, with no possible notions of what to do with yourself,” she said evenly. She paused physically and verbally, then as they reached a door of odd proportions. “This is where I attend to my work. When you come in, be not astonished, but look only long enough to understand.”

“Look at what?” he asked. In response she only opened the door in one measured motion and beckoned him inside. As he entered he noticed only two items. First was a chandelier of many candles which illuminated its surroundings with a flickering glow, but beneath it was an object he’d never encountered or heard of. He had no context for its design but partially recognised its function. On one end were various spools of unwinding threads and yarns feeding into slots in sheets of metal that encased its contents almost completely. What little he could see inside it looked too unrecognizable to discern. Tracing its shape to the opposing end, he saw the beginnings of a tapestry. But as he attempted to decipher its design an uncanny difficulty hindered him. As his eyes tried to trace along its edges they seemed to be lengthening farther and farther apart, or widening, depending on which side he peered at. Out of frustration he began to rapidly switch his point of focus as he tried to find some source of continuity within its image. But the more he tried, the wider and longer its corners stretched, along with the machine. In hardly more than a moment the sight seemed large enough to reach past opposing horizons, but as he turned his head to take in the other side out of perplexing curiosity he was abruptly startled by a hand squeezing his shoulder.

“Did you see The Empty?” Aotha asked.

“I–” Cliff stammered softly. 

“How far out did you look?” she pressed urgently.

“The– the horizon ahead, and behind.”

“That is well,” she sighed with relief. “I warned you, foolish man… unlistening… unheeding…” she muttered sourly before leading him out of the room and shutting the door behind them. “Now you’ve seen my work, and my machine.”

“I do not understand,” he said with stifled bewilderment. 

“Your understanding is not required. Only your cooperation.”

“I believe I saw— I saw someone I knew in…”

“The tapestry contains many things, each seemingly separated by lines. But that is not the truth; in imagery there are no lines, only light and shadow.”

“Why have you brought– why did you show me that?” he asked.

“Some things can’t be told, only shown,” she said sympathetically. “Now you’ve seen my craft, The Craftsman who engineered it and I share a grand design, one that a man of your unique torments may be of assistance in forwarding.”

“Why would I trust in you? Or care for your cause?” he said, taking a small step away and leaning on his back foot in caution.

“Thousands of people have bled onto you and into you. The impurity of their purposes being as plain to your eyes as mud from water. So tell me freely, of what your senses make of my countenance.

“That is what frightens me… I didn’t understand it at first. But you bleed nothing, not through your voice, not through your eyes, not through your movement.”

“You feel the sincerity in me.”

“I sense no signs at all,” he confessed.

“And that frightens you,” she reasoned.

“It confuses me. Like speaking before a lifeless statue.”

“What if I assured you that it was for a perfectly sensible reason. You sense the souls of the bleeding. But I have deceived you, however kindly, I admit now that my personhood is only by appearance. I was not born of womb, or sired from seed. It is not by fingers that I actuate material. It is not on fruit which I feed. I am alien to you, that is why you have no recognition of me.”

“What kindness?” was all he dared ask, believing her words as well as their dangerous implications.

“My form is overwhelming to your kin, but would be to you especially. A cacophony of color shaped wholly outside of your experience.”

“Show me,” he said sternly.

“That would serve no possible gain.”

“Show me and I’ll help you.”

“A curious ultimatum,” she mused. “Considering I only direct you to help yourself.”

“Doing what?”

“My machine weaves windings into a fundamental fabric. Consider then, what kind of machine you are.”

“I do not understand.”

“Are you merely a receiver of bleedings? Is deciphering the motivations, the exhalations, exclamations, intimations, intonations, salutations, secretions, choices, struts, voices, and guts, the zenith of your functionality? If not, then what else? I do not ask you these things, I merely relay them for you to ask yourself during your undisturbed times when you have no one else to answer to. Because if you suspect the scope of your functions extends beyond a facilitator of physical destruction, then I know of one who can teach them to you.”

“Where then?” he inquired.

“The eastern border of Ruinwood.”

“I know nothing of this.”

“Perhaps… of course,” she realized. “I am occasionally chronologically challenged. You know it now as a section of the Forsaken Forest.”

“That is much too broad an area to search,” he said. 

“Walk southward along its eastern border until you find a charred stump with four identical triangles stacked into a rhombus that’s carved into its top, then stake your claim as deep into the forest as you care to. Your teacher will find you there when developments deem appropriate.”

“How long until this teacher arrives?”

“Already I have told you where. Already I have told you when. Already I have told you who. Your actions are your own to decide,” she decreed.

“My actions…” he said, pausing to weigh her words. “Then, I will act by waiting for this teacher you speak of to find me. And heed his,” Cliff glanced at Aotha’s eyes searching for any hints of confirmation but found none, “or her lessons with great interest.

“I– I hope you do,” she said melancholically. Stammering for the first time since they’d spoken.

“Before you take me back, I would like to see you for what you are. I’ve become so accustomed to it with people, that it’s difficult for me to trust otherwise.”

“If I obliged you, my appearance would stain your view of everything else.”

“I am unphased by your warning.”

“Perhaps unwisely so. It has occurred where people have tried to blind themselves to unsee my form, and having failed that, to end their lives altogether.”

“You say that, and I do appreciate the warning. But by my reckoning, if I could be killed I’d be dead already.”

“This is a paltry point on which to direct your insistence,” she said sternly.

“Then oblige me in it,” he insisted.

“You’ve endured much pain,” she admitted.

“It was only a fall,” he said nonchalantly.

“I want no part in adding to it.”

“Then it won’t be by your acquiescence, but by my demand.”

“You make no demands of me, bleeder of men,” she scoffed.

“My request then,” he argued.

“Explain why you want this,” she sighed.

“Because I can’t trust someone who conceals herself from me, and I want to trust in you.”

“Faithlessness,” she nodded. “Forgotten as you’ve been, by both agents who bet on your concocted annihilation. I can expect nothing else… I relent in this, in only this. So we must step outdoors, this domicile is sized to your particular proportions,” she said, gesturing toward the front of the house and politely leading him to the main door. Once outside the house she turned to him mournfully.

“This is avoidable,” she reiterated.

“Avoidance has never been one of my particular strengths,” he affirmed.

“No,” she sighed. “It is not.” She reached her open palm gently towards him and gestured for him to grasp it. He did so firmly. “Lightly, just the pads of the fingers,” she instructed clearly. “When you are overcome, release your grip,” she said. He nodded. 

She looked at him one last time with a free flowing mixture of admiration and pity, until the sockets of her eyes receded back into a deep and vacuous void that unified almost immediately as the two apertures grew and merged into one. Simultaneously, her height arose with a continuous growth that stretched at her legs, back, and neck, elongating at a pace that either rendered his mind too slow to follow, or was in itself too rapid to visually track. As she grew taller her wideness remained unchanged until, with an unexpected snap, it narrowed and collapsed into one long crack of flowing air that sparked in spontaneous eruptions whose frequency exceeded his steadily quickening pulse. He could no longer tell which changes were morphing first, the burgeoning being before him rendered irrelevant illusions like sequentiality to be as untraceable as the number of moments in a day. As shapes and shades of hues unseen by common man erupted from the spectacle, recognizable elements began to piece through the formless mass.

There was flame, blue and brilliant as a windswept meadow of Delphiniums on a cloudless afternoon. Brightly it burned into an unsealed circle whose size slightly contracted in conjunction with its formation of a clone beside it. Then they both repeated the action, and again with more rapidity. Until after the length of three unheld breaths, a growing arch of burning circles, bright and luminous as balls of metal freshly forged towered over him as a man might to an insect of peculiar interest. Especially so, when the burning circles were all within a blink granted their own depth, and with it stared into him like a horde of eyes, piercing through the layers of cloth and flesh that had always and until this terrifying instant, shielded his innermost mind from the pryings of powers beyond his own.

And just as the blazing gaze of this entity too colossal to comprehend had focused its sights upon him, he released his hold on whatever it was still meeting the grasp of his hand, and awoke lying next to the crooked creek with a desperate gasp of one nearly drowned. The immediate urge to wet the ground trumped all importance of compiling his mostly remembered dream, but just after he relieved himself from a pressure proportional to one many days in the making, he considered the Weaver’s cryptic words of dubious instructions, and decided before any amount of calmness could be restored, to regard them all as sacrosanct.

*** *** ***

Dale and Rane were working together on an early morning, first fetching water, then using it to wash the patios of each of their houses. Wives normally did the washing, but scrubbing floors in public view was too immodest a chore for claimed women, so husbands were exclusively tasked with the patios.

“Decent weather for this,” Dale remarked as they worked.

“The air is dry enough for it,” Rane agreed.

“The new barn coming along well?”

“Marc can’t even engineer a stool from a stump,” Rane groaned. “Couldn’t say why he’s been made lead on the project.”

“It is his barn,” Dale remarked.

“Won’t be his anything if it collapses under its first storm.

“What does Cord think about it?”

“That slop won’t care a shred if it falls or not.”

“But he knows a bit about barns.”

“Knowledge only matters when it’s applied. And he doesn’t apply his to much of anything anymore.”

“No disagreement there,” Dale remarked. “Haven’t seen your dumb girl in a while.”

“Oh, naw. Haven’t had cause to bring her out for… it’s always an ordeal and I’ve been avoiding it.”

“People are going to start wondering how well she’s fed if they can’t see,” Dale warned cautiously.

“There’s sense in that,” Rane admitted begrudgingly.

“I want to say something personal, as your confidant, and I can’t risk your reprisal about it.”

“Then do so,” Rane mumbled uninterestedly.

“I’ve seen a lot of people overcome a doubt on their deeds, Rane. But I can’t recall a single one who managed two.”

“What do you suggest I do then?”

“I suggest you don’t allow any more doubt on you to stick. You can’t afford ambiguity now, not like before,” Dale sighed. “It just won’t abide.”

“That’s what you’ve heard?”

“That’s what I know. I’m old enough not to need to be told.”

“I’m older than y–”

“And I’m telling you anyway.”

“You… haven’t got a single thing to be concerned about.”

“I’m glad of it,” Dale nodded. “When you’re done on the barn, is there anything of yours you need other hands on? The current docket doesn’t come to mind, I’ll have to check and see what my current wife remembers, you know how that is.”

“I know exactly.”

*** *** ***

  Decker waited until the tail-end of evening, most other children were already inside by then, but he’d intentionally been quiet and secluded around the house on recent evenings to normalize his absence. In a small ditch hidden by miscellaneous greenery, he knelt in secret and tended to his tinder with long embittered strokes. He didn’t allow himself the luxury of savoring the action due to the inherent danger of being caught that would be present until he had rehidden the fire plow and returned home unnoticed.

When the heat of the powdered embers matched that of his contempt, he carefully slid them onto his tinder and blew upon them steadily. Then he used the small flame to ignite the twisted corner of a tightly tied rag enriched with tallow. He didn’t have long now, efficiency of movement would be imperative. Concealing his miniature torch with his cloak from wind and wayward glances, he ran towards the back of Mrs. Stoppenhook’s house and flattened his body against the closed shutters of a window. All the shutters were closed and latched, preventing any inconspicuous entry. But this specific window’s shutters bore one tiny defect. A gap in one of its bottom corners where friction and frost had worn away at its outermost edge over the years. The gap was barely wide enough to push two fingers through, or the twisted corner of the rag he’d fashioned for precisely this purpose. Mindful not to let it slip through his fingers, he poked the lit end of the bound rag through the gap until it barely reached the window’s curtain long enough to share its flame. As soon as he saw the faintest flicker from the curtain he yanked the rag from the window and sprinted away to where he’d buried his fire plow. He had mere moments before the fire would be noticed, and he absolutely had to make it back home before it was, not a splinter of suspicion could be allowed to prick his parent’s thoughts. In three swift motions he dropped the smoldering wick into the small ditch containing his fire plow and smothered it with loose dirt using the inside of his boot, careful to keep his hands visibly unmarked by his actions. Once the patch of ground was indistinguishable from the surrounding grass he sprinted home with a technique so well practiced and prepared, that after he’d jumped back into his bedroom through the open window and closed the shutters behind him, his breathing was no heavier than if he’d been lounging lazily across his bed, waiting for dusk to conclude its daily task.

*** *** ***

Cadi lounged contently in her bath, having just ridden the fantastical nostalgia of her youth in addition to a shapely tool of her own making. The room was dim and warm, warmer than usual. Normally she’d supplement the water with the contents of a closely placed kettle at least once before she was finished. This time she must have been impatient, she reasoned. An unfortunate mistake but not one she’d allow to spoil her mood. There was no great harm in continuing to relax within the water, even if she’d already loosened every crumb of tightness within her. A looseness which was now so thorough and serene, that merely by leaning her back against the side of the wooden basin in a subconscious effort to maximize this moment of comfort, she surrendered her consciousness altogether to the soothing pull of the same fondly constructed daydream she’d recently completed.

*** *** ***

Rab took to bed early, as he often did. Relaxation was his only ethic, and one he would regularly rationalize as more important than any form of work. But before he could fully release his waking mind, a sound slipped through his approaching slumber: undecipherable shouting. There was a hint of hesitation to pursue the sound, and instead remain splayed out across his bed in uncaring ignorance. This possibility tempted him greatly for a brief moment before the shouting was overwhelmed by the unmistakable crash of collapsing wood. Rab leapt out of bed and ran outside, not bothering to change out of his night garments, and followed the obvious source of the shouting as quickly as his bare feet could propel him.

 A house had been replaced by a towering fire, radiating heat outwards much farther than he would have thought before feeling it. He looked around at both of its neighboring homes to deduce who had failed to properly tend to the fireplace. Just as he realized to whom the abode belonged, he saw her silhouette collapsed forward on her knees at what seemed to be the minimum safe distance from the fire. One of her hands was planted firmly against the ground, straining to prop up her torso. Her other arm was coiled across her chest with her palm attached to her opposing shoulder. It looked to be an awkward position at first, but her reasoning for maintaining it became clear as he came nearer and noticed her nakedness. The entire town’s populace had emerged from their homes to watch the building burn and take the necessary measures to contain the blaze. Houses were rarely condemned, and those that were usually still had much usable material to plunder before burning its unwanted pieces. So no one had ever seen a fire burn as high or as hot. 

The children had all been ordered to stay inside. Most onlookers were watching the fire with moderate interest. Even if it hadn’t already been beyond any hope of fighting, there would have been nothing to be gained by trying. The shouting came from approximately ten people encircling Cadi Stoppenhook from a considerable and uniform distance. Curses and rebukes of every variety spouted from their mouths, flowing along their pointed fingers and raised fists towards their intended recipient, who could not comprehend their words as she desperately tried to continue breathing through the continuously cycling pain of her charred lungs.

*** *** ***

Fourteen of the town elders sat on stools inside the living room of a recently vacated house that would be occasionally repurposed for gatherings requiring privacy. They faced each other in a somewhat circular formation, fitting where they could within the given space.

With dismayed voice Wilnum began, “This emergency meeting is concerning Cadi Stoppenhook’s public indecency, who is being detained for the night while this council decides her sentencing. And before any mention is made of customary communal strangulation I must protest on account of not only her lack of previous infractions, but also because due to the fortunate timing of her crime, no unassigned boys were exposed to her.”

“She was naked in the street,” Elleena spat from across the room.

“While all children were already inside,” Wilnum clarified cautiously.

“So we’re just supposed to ignore her flagrant disregard for modesty, after she walked her bare bosom around like that. You say no boy saw her, so what? How many husbands did? Spoken for, otherwise loyal, lawful husbands?” Ellena demanded.

“Frenik wasn’t there either,” Wilnum argued.

“He has nothing to do with this. And besides, he easily could have been. Only good fate and fortune saw to that. And I’m not just talking about me and mine. Are all the wives going to have to start competing with any salty slit that flaunts around?” Ellena asked heatedly. Grunts of indignation started to affirm her grievance before Wilnum hurriedly interjected.

“I’m not suggesting leniency, I’m suggesting further discourse.”

“This woman has been flagrantly keeping her lodging separate from her husband,” Roj stated crossly. “And we’ve all just been looking the other way for years. Now see what happens? Let one think this kind of dereliction, this defiance is tolerable, then… I mean it’s the principle of the thing, Wilnum. The principles that have kept us pure for more than a century.”

“Perhaps,” Linia said suddenly, turning the room’s heads curiously towards her. “What my husband means to propose, is a more nuanced response. Such as posting her instead?”

“I’m not going to aid her tending after such a filthy display,” Muri said, nodding to Ellena in agreement.”

“I will do it,” Linia confirmed. “Alone. Without Wilnum.”

“Or Lindow,” Ellena demanded.

“Without Wilnum or Lindow,” Linia agreed.

“Better be the whole day then,” Dale sneered. “If a posting is all we’re going to do about it.”

“Then it’s confirmed by the council, is there any objection to the sentencing?” Wilnum asked, trying to close the matter before any tempers had chance enough to flare. “Then it’s decided. Cadi will be released overmorrow to my wife’s custody until recovered, then back to Hal’s residence where, as circumstances have made obvious, she should have been to begin with.” he concluded. The elders all agreed with differing degrees of reluctance, but none among them thought it wise to press the matter unnecessarily. So long as the indecency wasn’t repeated, then most of their practical concerns were allayed. And after tomorrow, there would be no risk of that.

*** *** ***

In the dark of that descending night, Lindow carried a single candle down into a windowless cellar, wherein sat a woman wearing a large sack with a hole haphazardly cut to fit her head through.

“Put these on,” he instructed as he tossed her a raggedy shirt and shorts.

“Mercy, I beg,” she whimpered through a voice so hoarse it might have been overheard as a man’s.

“You are being posted until dusk,” he uttered quickly, relieving her desperation for survival and offering its explanation in the same sentence. She looked straight down in response, suppressing any expression of whatever feelings she might have of the unexpected news.

“Come up when you’re dressed,” he ordered, “Oh, and pee again, rather you need to or not,” he reminded, then left to stand outside the door to wait for her. Once she was decent to his eyes he walked her all the way to the dead end of the town’s lone road, where a rotting wooden post protruded from the ground. It had a thickly carved dowel protruding horizontally from opposing sides slightly above its base, one of which was slightly shorter than the other, being unevenly worn by the elements; as was its intended purpose.

“Which side,” he asked plainly once they reached it.

“I.…”

“They wanted to maintain custom, did you know that? But I stopped them. You should be thanking me, and my wife for that matter.”

“Tha–”

“Which side?” he repeated.

“L–left.”

“What?”

“Left side.”

“If that’s your choice,” he nodded. “Take your position,” he gestured boredly. She complied, sitting down and leaning her back against the post with the inside of her elbows wrapped over its protrusions behind her. Lindow proceeded to loosely bind her wrists together. “Don’t breathe through your mouth,” he muttered as he finished knotting the twine. “Linnia will bring raisinwater at dusk and carry you back. She’ll be your tending,” he sighed. Cadi intentionally turned her head away from him in response. A fitting rebuttal approached Lindow’s tongue, but he squelched it and said nothing instead, thinking that there was no need to be cruel.

Posting was a punishment usually reserved for especially insolent children when the season happened to be near either solstice. It was rarely used but once or twice per decade, the sight of its wood being a more than sufficient deterrent to disrespectful outbursts or other forms of inexcusable behavior. Customarily, the boy (girls usually knew better) would be posted from dawn to midday with only torso and pelvis covered. And oriented such that the sun would only touch one side, whilst shading the other. The days of ensuing bruising of the arms and peeling of the skin was invariably enough to permanently rectify the individual’s disorder, as well as reinforce the point to anyone who viewed the aftermath. 

Knowing this, as he trotted back to his home, Lindow relished in a flicker of satisfaction that he had successfully convinced the council to accept a modified child’s punishment for a fully developed woman’s crime, as they had plainly seen.

*** *** ***

Decker waited out the day’s schooling with a preoccupied mind. Participating only enough not to draw unwanted notice. When he was finally released and there was no one paying him any mind, he slinked towards the location of his own. Inconspicuously, he wandered up the road, feigning interest in innocuous things along the way. When he approached its dead end, he walked perpendicular to it and then curved his path in a wide semicircle. He turned behind him and scanned for any adults who may be checking on him or other children who wanted his company, but found neither. With his secrecy confirmed, he ducked inside the surrounding greenery and crouched towards the post to improve his view of it.

Posting was a threat he’d been given once before when he’d verbally defied his father, and it was something all children knew to fear. But he had never heard of an adult being punished so, their punishments were unknown to him but he was sure this wasn’t customarily among them. He grinned widely to himself at the sight of Mrs. Stoppenhook being treated like a child for everyone to see. He thought of how mad he’d been after she’d struck him and how it was her fault that Sal didn’t play with him anymore. In righteous satisfaction he stared at her from his hidden vantage point for a long time, until his elbows were sore from supporting the weight of his chest. As he shifted positions an unplanned thought occurred to him; that the wooden dowel sticking through the post was much harder than the ground that was straining him. A realization that branched into a larger one, which was that she couldn’t shift her position at all. With this altered perspective he watched her again with curious interest and a refreshed perspective.

Now he looked at the bend of her knees, how she’d wedged her heels against herself to relieve as much weight from her glutes as she could. How she’d layed one arm higher on its dowel to relieve the other of some pressure, a measure she was probably alternating as each arm reached its limit. But he found the most poignant part of her was the angle of her head. It had collapsed completely onto her shaded knee, facing the back of her head towards the sun. Written across the wholistic position of her body was a feeling that troubled him but he could not manage to define. It was unadulteratedly resigned helplessness, something he had yet to previously experience or witness, and so was yet unfamiliar with. But as he watched her longer and longer, his growing familiarity with it became more troubling still, altering his perspective further. An alteration which did not result in humanizing her, he had less fondness for her than he did for mice, or any other awful creatures. Instead, it resulted in dehumanizing her past the point of personal recognition. Until she existed to him only as a faceless endurer of a universally maligned agony that ravaged all of sentient life. An agony that hungered ceaselessly in every moment and across every domain. And one who was feasting before him as a result of his own doings.

  A pit formed in his stomach at this thought, heavy in his gut and sour in his mouth. The spite that drove him to this spot had now rotted into a putrid mass within him that he could do nothing to remove. Disgust, both of himself and of the sight before him flooded his skin with slimy sweat that coated across his brow and ran down into his eyes. While futilely attempting to clear his vision with his sleeve, he turned around and rapidly walked back the way he’d come, whilst grimacing contemptuously at the repugnance he’d played his part in producing, and being bitterly certain that he could never whisper a word about this feeling to anyone.

*** *** ***

A girl wandered around looking for Tail. The dog didn’t like to play very often but the girl looked for her anyway out of a mixture of boredom and hope. She checked under the platform boards but the dog wasn’t resting, at least not there, not at the moment. The girl visored her eyes with her hands and looked around for any signs of the mildly friendly mongrel. As she squinted across differing directions, the girl saw something strange in the distance and walked towards it to aid her vision. It was by the– she stopped suddenly once she understood. The girl looked down and walked neither towards nor away from the posted woman at the edge of town, wanting to seem nothing but indifferent to its presence. Once she’d cleared considerable distance she angled her path towards the woods. Her pace was casual and had been since she’d started walking away. Until after a long time of moving her legs through what felt like unheated honey, she reached the forest’s edge. The instant her outline was concealed by its greenery she broke out into a run, nearly tripping several times on risen roots and innocuous looking patches of loose ground as she did so. She ran as quickly as her tiny feet could propel her proportional frame, not out of fear of pain, but need for comfort.

Right now, she wanted to see just one face, and hear just one voice, who she was absolutely sure would never punish her the way that she’d just seen. She was exhausted as she approached Cliff’s cave. Her breath was shallow, quick, and threatening to keep running off without her if she didn’t address her hyperventilation immediately. So she stopped before reaching the cave and collapsed against the trunk of a tree, pressing both hands out and leaning on it heavily for support as she panted. She didn’t want to be like this when he saw her. She wanted to look like nothing was amiss, like just another walk in the woods. The first time they’d met he’d thought people were there with her to catch him. And she was afraid if he saw her running then he’d think this time she was here to catch him, that a bunch of others were right behind her ready to run in once she gave the signal. But that wasn’t true. The truth was: she was alone. She had never felt so alone. Not until she reached Cliff’s cave and found that he was not present in or around it. She could try calling him, she thought. A nervousness erupted up her spine at the notion. She could shout, she knew that, she’d tried practicing before. What she couldn’t do was shout a whole word. Words required more concentration and specificity of her than shouting allowed. If she tried calling him loudly, she knew that it wouldn’t come out right, and that when it didn’t if Cliff heard her and came, that he’d be disappointed she still couldn’t do a whole word correctly just because it was louder than usual.

Instead of calling out, and instead of going back home, she hopped up onto a stump that he frequently sat on, and waited in quiet silence for him to come back before the day was through, before he’d make her go home again. 

*** *** ***

Cliff sat on the base of a thick branch roughly three men high that overlooked everything around him. This spot was as deep as he would go into the forest. Any farther away and he feared he might accidentally miss his rendezvous. It had been multiple years since his unexplainable dream. That aspect of it didn’t perturb him, there was so much else unexplainable about him already. What did perturb him was the setting. He preferred deserts, deserts or tundras. Nothing could disturb him there. Unlike here; a veritable cacophony of disturbances. Badgers, birds, and bats all crawling and calling in perpetual shifts from the diurnal to the nocturnal. What sleep he could find was always invaded by incessant proddings of simpler forms of life. But these were all tolerable, or at least partially redeemable in their own way.

What truly irked him were the insects. The bugs. The crawling things too miniscule to match a mouse’s size. Rather of fur or feather, the conscious animals had dynamic perspectives. Finding food, obtaining shelter, pair-bonding, all understandable drives. But the mosquitos, the beetles, and the many legged monstrosities that burrowed their tongues in flesh and their holes in dung, had insidious effects on his psyche. They had no thoughts, only directives. They hunted the way humans breathed; without the slightest consideration. Their every action was an unknowing and uncaring pursuit of their basic instincts. Hunt, feed, fight, propagate. A ceaseless and deafening tone whose note never varied. They mangled their kin and others without cruelty or remorse, only practicality. Impediments were neutralized, ground was moved, and food was obtained from any edible source available.

His contempt was smoldering for all boneless beings. And they were plentiful in this place. Surrounding, engulfing, everywhere around him. Buzzing away and crawling nearer in a perpetuating churn. There was no relief to be had here, not in a setting so dense with life. Yet he remained here still, trapped until the Weaver’s associate arrived.

He’d been making the best of his circumstances, spending the winters fasting and the summers training, but after enough years that too became insufficient. Recently he’d inadvertently turned to reciting the prayers of his childhood just to anchor his mind into itself and segregate it from the surrounding onslaught. Of most he did not remember more than a word or two, but a select few were burrowed into him too deeply to drift away, no matter how long it’d been since he’d last heard them uttered. There was one he never liked, about a little boy whose cloak snagged on a fencepost as he ran from a flock of crows, which didn’t make sense to him then and made even less to him now. There was one about a farmer whose field was blighted by a curse of some kind. And another that contained the esoteric lines: The holly hole was never drole but neither was its lid. Into the dark was brightest spark wherein it lied and hid. A couplet whose continuation he could never manage to deduce or recall. But there were also some which brought him comfort, not necessarily just by their words, but also by their association with his youth. An eon ago that it seemed no related stories or writings remained from, perhaps fortunately so, since things used to be so much less organized. Savagery begetting tribalism begetting barbarism begetting the beginnings of civilization. This progression, however an improvement, was not as integrated as appearances suggested. Cliff had seen the cities and walked their streets. Met many citizens and saw through the veils of their projected personalities exactly who they really were when the sun went down and all torches were extinguished. 

One of the burrowed prayers that blew across his quieter moments with inescapable frequency was a warning about those he recognized as an adult to be spiteful. The dead will try to trick and pry you into their own box, and keep it closed to decompose you with their chains and locks. So never trust the words of dust or bones from bodies dead. They mean to trade the grave they made and keep you there instead. Whenever he’d catch himself muttering this prayer, among other such recitations, he used to wince and scold himself for speaking words that were not his own; a personal resolution he’d made long ago after witnessing too many followers of too many tyrants commit too many atrocities. But, if nothing else, somewhere along the undefined time he’d been subjected to this environment, a modicum of nuance had slipped through the previously impenetrable platform of his principles, like a growing stem through the crack of a stone floor: if the sentiment of someone else’s prayer wasn’t untrue, then what harm was there in its remembrance?

This change in perspective would have been minor for most. But Cliff’s modes of being were fossilized, and bore only marks made during their formation. So on the rare occurrences when sufficient sediment had solidified to form a new texture along the walls of one of his well-established reasonings, he would meticulously note its implications.

These, and many other disconnected tracks of thought waded within him amongst the psychological muck of the nearby animals, birds, and insects. Which eventually became exhausting enough to compel his return home before the day was spent. As he walked back towards his station of rest, his feet gradually grew heavier in anticipation of his arrival. But such was the symptom of knowing one’s destination, he supposed that the closer it gets, the slower it is reached. Perhaps that was true, perhaps only partially so, but wrestling with fresh axioms was presently of no interest to him. His only focus now was completing his increasingly urgent plan to lie down. A plan which was on the brink of reaching its fruition when Gilly did something that he could not remember any other person successfully doing; she surprised him.

There she sat, blocking the entrance to his cave, squeezing her knees together and into her chest, and staring off into a distant space that only she could see. As soon as she saw him approaching she hopped up onto her feet in anxious anticipation.

Cliff hid his agitation at seeing the child so unexpectedly, as well as his twinge of annoyance that he somehow hadn’t noticed her before his eyes did; an oddity that he wouldn’t decipher today.

“|....”

“Me?”

“|....”

“I’m just some man who’s made camp for too long.”

“|.... |.... |....” she repeated, jamming her finger towards him with as fervent emphasis as she could manage.

“Gilli…” he sighed, having not the resolve to argue with her or the coldness to send her away. “Where would to begin? Before I lived here I was– I was a bannerless soldier. Before then I was uh– a woodsman,” he lied. Just like now, but somewhere else.

“||..”

“It’s a man, who lives in the woo–”

“||..”

“A soldier is someone who fights against armies for money. Bannerless means fighting for anyone who pays.”

“Yuhoo f-fi?”

“Tuh, there’s a tuh sound,” he reminded softly.

“Fieetuh.”  

“I did, yes.”

“Whher?”

“Places far away from here,” he said reminiscently.

“Clifgilli awehee,” she suggested urgently.

“I think I understand,” he said, mistakenly. “But there’s more to that than you’ve considered,” he knelt beside her as he spoke, and paused to plan his phrasing with due care. “Kids can be cruel to each other sometimes, especially to ones they can’t understand. It’ll get easier for you the better you get at being understood.”

“Clifgilli ahwehee,” she repeated.

“This… won’t be what you want to hear right now. But I hope you trust in me enough when I say it’s true. Children… children need three things: a father, a mother, and other children. If I stole you away, you wouldn’t have any of those things. And that would damage someone your age in ways that you don’t see yet. So whoever it is that’s making you think that running off is the best option, try thinking about it a little longer and… we can uh– discuss it some other time if you haven’t changed your mind with the shedding of today’s mood.”

“.....”

“Did you want to practice today?” he probed.

“Fituh thhen,” she reasoned.

“I haven’t done that in a very long time, and I don’t think that me fighting someone’s child is going to solve your problems in the way that you’re hoping,” he answered, more insistently than before.

“Teesh me thhen,” she said after considering his answer. He sighed with a knowing nod.

“Fighting isn’t for children,” he refuted. In response she tried to abruptly push him over, as if by sheer will her hands might move him in ways her words were not. “You know not what you speak of,” he said with a growing sternness.

“B-buttt yoor stong fieetr. Y-yoo cun teesh.”

“No one’s good at fighting, Gilli,” he sighed. “Everyone else was just worse at it than me. And fighting isn’t what you think. It’s not going to protect you from being shoved or goaded. There will always be sources of hostility around you. Fighting isn’t for those, it’s not about threatening other kids into being nicer to you, fighting is whatever it takes to be the one who climbs out of the pit.”

“Whut p-p-et?”

“It’s a very large ditch,” he answered evasively. “And you’re not fully grown yet. No unarmed blow you land would damage, and any weapon you wield would just be taken.”

“Teesh,” she insisted. And rather by his own fatigue or just a temporary lapse in his better judgment, he relented.

“You really want to learn about fighting? So be it, I’ll teach you something. One move, then I’m done hearing about this,” he said. She nodded in agreement. Cliff knelt down before her and opened his hands, facing her with his palms side by side. “Bring your hands to your chest,” he directed. She did so excitedly. “Now press your thumbs into my palms. Harder. Yes. Now hands back to your chest. Do it again, but this time both thumbs at the exact same time, not one after the other. Again. Same time, that’s right. Back to your chest,” he instructed more formally than before. “Do it again, and after you press hard with both thumbs grab the outside of my hands and pull them straight down,” he said. She did it but hesitated out of confusion. “No, not like that. Not outward, straight down, with a quick yank. Good. Back to your chest… Now do it again. Thumbs then yank. Back to your chest… Hold there, wait until I say… Now,” he said. This time she did it as instructed, quicker than she’d done before. “If you ever use this, it can’t be just because you’re angry or– or some other child is trying to intimidate you. Only use it if you’re being attacked and seized. Because what you’re jamming your thumbs into won’t be your assailant’s hands, it’ll be the eyes, and what you’re yanking down will be the ears. If you ever use that, there will be a window, a brief window when the grip of your enemy is loosened. That’s when you’ll need to run. Run as fast and as hard as you can and don’t stop until you get home. Then explain to your parents exactly what just happened, and they’ll know what to do next,” he finished. She looked down in uncomfortable dismay, a gesture that he would reinterpret later, and revisit continuously throughout his life. “May we return to the practice of words then?” he asked impatiently. She nodded, despite the sudden numbness of her tongue.

*** *** ***

Bridan waddled around the borders of town and savored the cool breeze against his flushed face. He couldn’t drink any more, not yet. It wasn’t a binge day today and walking was becoming more dubious an activity than he could allow. So he found his relief in what other ways he could, one of which was pacing. He kept clear of anyone else’s path, careful to avoid having to relinquish the deniability of his current state by any obliged exchange of pleasantries. He wasn’t sure if he could presently manage to avoid slurring; an easily testable question whose answer he preferred not to know.

In the distance at the end of the road something unusual caught his eye and drew him a few staggering steps closer as he peered at it. It appeared that some boy was being posted again. Which was odd, since it was rather late in the day for that sort of thing. But the weather was fortunate for it at least, he thought as he rubbed his strained eyes. He started to wonder what the crime was this time but quickly discarded his curiosity from a lack of lasting interest.

Every handful of years some adolescent with delusions of personal import tried to swing his will around like a pair of bull’s balls. Personally, Bridan had never understood the need. He thought insolence to be a pointless pursuit. He had few concerns outside of his own, and of those all were subordinate. If everyone just kept to themselves then there would be no need for these reminding displays, he reasoned. But these thoughts, and any others he might have entertained all flickered away as a sudden welcome gust cooled his heated brow, causing him to close his eyes in momentary comfort. When the burst of wind concluded, he turned around and waddled back towards home, waiting out the throbbing in his head with a brand of acceptance that was many previous experiences in the making.

*** *** ***  

   Fil stayed inside after school, being too intentional of mind to play and too distracted in action to work. His window shutters were closed as tightly as he could tie them and his hearing was muffled by a thick winter hat he’d pulled down from the rafters. Something was troubling him in a way that never had before. A newly discovered brand of turmoil that seemed to seep into his mind and claw across the edges of every thought. He couldn’t ascertain the cause of this psychological ache, and his efforts to block it out of sight and sound only served to seal his sickness in more encompassingly.

He pressed his forehead against the wall beside him and heaved his neck muscles towards the unyielding stack of logs. An effort that quickly became unsatisfactory enough to compel him to bring his shoulders into it, then his back, and finally his hips, until his entire core was strained and struggling to inflict upon his head enough physical pain to sufficiently overcome the mental variety that now afflicted him. Which he succeeded at, briefly, but was disappointed by its unavoidable impermanence. He’d felt this way since walking down the road to school this morning, and then again as he walked back up on his way home. He had hoped an early evening meal would reinvigorate him but there was no morsel of food that he could bring himself to swallow. So he only riled against the various surfaces of his bedroom in careful silence, so as not to alert his parents of his anguish, since they would predictably attempt to inquire as to its source. An inquiry he couldn’t yet manage to answer for himself, and thus had no desire to be compelled to answer for them.

*** *** ***

Gilli strolled through the brush with Cliff close behind her. The daylight was still plentiful, but already she could feel the encroaching hooks of the inevitable dusk creeping towards her, ready to uncaringly signal that she’d have to go back home. She tried to trick herself into forgetting by inciting Cliff to speak more voluminously, either by asking pedantic questions or feigning more ignorance than she carried.

“|....”

“That is some sort of beetle, I’m not sure which.”

“|....”

“That’s an empty snail shell,” Cliff explained, squatting down and lifting it between his outer-two fingers with a technique she thought peculiar. Snails are just slugs that take their homes with them.”

“|....”

“That? Oh, it’s a tiny toad. Most types are much larger than that, careful, don’t touch it. It’s too fragile for that.

“||...”

“Fragile means easily broken.”

“|...”

“Stop. Stay completely still,” he ordered coldly. She obeyed, looking only at him now. “Let it crawl away on its own, keep your feet planted and don’t move towards it,” he said. Gilli didn’t understand his sudden seriousness but didn’t want to risk his disapproval either, so she complied in curious confusion.

“That was a serpent, seems it was just a harmless variety. I’ve driven out most of them over the years from this area, but it appears they are gradually testing the territory again. Watch your step for their kind. Especially any brightly colored ones, serpents are the only type of beauty that can harm you.”

“|....”

“Beauty?”

“Yeshh.”

“Pfft, there’s one for the ages,” he sighed. “Wiser men than I–, ehhh I’ll just try anyway. It’s uh, it’s the opposite of ugly… Nah, that won’t do… Means pleasing of sight or sound. It’s that feeling when you behold a particularly radiant skyline, a prosperous landscape in the luminous moonlight, the first song of morning birds waking from their rest. I’ve heard compositions of plucked string or blown flute that– but it’s been too long to describe… Succinctly: it’s the result of natural harmony in all its forms; when things are the way they’re supposed to be.” he concluded. Gilli looked at him in puzzled contemplation. He only shrugged in response, as if to say that was the best he could do, and she needn’t bother pressing the matter further. “Serpents are the exception, because they are of the scaled, not the furred, or the skinned, like us. The scaled ones don’t feel or think of anything besides hunting and heating themselves. Even the ones too small to eat you may nuzzle themselves around you, but not out of affection, only to steal your warmth for themselves. 

Some types can kill you with one bite, some types can squeeze your breath away until it won’t come back, and most types will only hunt easier prey than you, but none can be trusted. Those of the scale are cold of body and thought, make no moves towards them,” he warned casually, sensing her worry. “But the one that just crossed your path was only seeking mice, not humans,” he reassured. “You should try asking something with words this time,” he suggested, trying to change the subject. Gilli looked at him with nervous eyes and tried to prepare herself, she liked it more when he spoke instead, he was so much better at it that she often felt inadequate by comparison, including now.

*** *** *** 

Corlin brooded in his bedroom, alone, furious at the council’s decided punishment. Their decisions were so despicable to him. He thought it obvious that they were fearful of losing their grip of control and were escalating their power out of rising desperation.

Someday, when enough of the weak old geezers and menopausal gals were finally dead, he’d be the one to take the reins and steer the fresher blood onto better ground, he was sure of it. The results of his many planned successes and future achievements galloped through his thoughts in an escalating fantasy that concluded in him being lauded by everyone in town for his unparalleled guidance and exquisite leadership in all matters he influenced. This fantasy would recur with increased frequency proportionately to his own indignation at the relative lowliness of his station and the continual incidents of dismissiveness from his elders. When he’d feel especially dominated, he’d think not of his elders, but of the younglings to whom he was superior, and became satisfied that eventually they would defer to him in due time, so long as he patiently waited out the waning ones with their antiquated ways.

He felt preemptive pride that someday he’d be the one who people relied on to make the important decisions, it was as certain as tomorrow’s dawn. And all of these deflated bags with spines that craned just to see their own toes would be nothing more than an irrelevant recollection of worse times in the minds of his constituents.

*** *** ***

 Tail watched the sunset with the exhausted Cadi from the post at the dead end of the road. The dog laid down pressed sideways against the woman’s leg, waiting out the day in a matching pace of breath and with a mutually maligned melancholy. Sharing between them a commonality of having survived an attempt on their lives and being met only with communal disdain afterwards. A mutual experience that while being wholly unknown to the other, was jointly felt as deeply as a forcefully-swallowed stone in one’s gut.

Time didn’t flow in such a setting and circumstance as this, it trickled. Dripping with an unceasing, unslowing, and unapologetic steadiness that while still bearing the promise of all things coming, made no urgency of their arrival. Eventualities would not be rushed by a mortal’s reaching any more than the clouds could be quickened by the blowing of lungs. And when this experience’s trickling had lasted long enough to fill the lake now submerging Cadi’s drowned spirit, the eventual largening of Linia’s silhouette emerged from the distance. Then Tail squeaked quietly, and looked at Cadi in mourning at the forced conclusion of their fellowship before standing up and skittering away into the shadow of the encroaching night.

*** *** ***

Rane led Dale inside his house to Faleen’s surprise.

“Dinner won’t be ready for a while,” she said.

“He’s not here for your food,” Rane groaned dismissively. Faleen only looked at him with confusion in response, refusing to guess. “Dale and I have been trying to arrange a solution to our problem.”

“What’s he want for her?” Faleen asked.

“Not a thing, just came to look things over first. Don’t want to get anything officiated without being sure.”

“Girl!” Faleen belted, “Get over here, we’ve got company wants to see ya.” The girl walked out of her room, down the narrow hall, and into the livingroom to meet her parents, only looking up to check which one she was to stand beside. Rane pointed on the ground in front of his foot so she obeyed and stood atop the mark. Dale walked around her slowly, scrutinizing her features he could outline with his eyes, and tracing his hands along the rest.

“Not much of a bosom on her,” Dale muttered.

“What use for one?” Rane retorted.

“Some use.”

“It’s still early for that, besides.”

“It is… it is.” Dale admitted.

“But she’s already got a plumping little ass, be ripe before you know it,” Rane suggested.

“Perhaps,” Dale shrugged then turned squarely towards the couple. “I don’t want to over-promise anything. I’m not one to rescind obligations once taken. So I suggest that I come over and check on the developments in four or five seasons, assuming nothing’s malformed, we can officiate her over to me then.”

“A most reasonable consideration,” Faleen interjected before Rane could manage to reply. “Girl, that’ll be all, back to your room,” she ordered, trying urgently to reduce any possible interference from as many directions as possible under the guise of casual conversation. The girl slid away and smoothly sank along the background of the livingroom until she reached the narrow hall, wherein she disappeared as seamlessly as a raindrop in a pond. “We appreciate your interest, just let us know when you’re ready to check again,” Faleen concluded.

“I’ll be sure to do that, Mrs. Kallerd,” Dale responded before turning to leave. Rane leaned towards him, instinctively attempting to make his voice heard, despite having yet to fully decide which words to use, but Faleen squeezed his arm with a resolve that overruled his instinct. She knew better than to taint an agreement with further dialogue, and this was as favorable a one as they would get today.

When Dale had vacated their home and was surely out of ear-shot, Rane collapsed into a chair. “Another year then, my forsaken luck…” he groaned.

“Better than your wilderness plan,” Faleen sneered.

“They were both, my plan. And some lucky wolves could relieve us any day.”

“If there was a spec of sense in that then it would have happened by now,” Faleen argued. “But that doesn’t matter, just a while longer and I– we won’t have to be associated with a… Just a little longer,” she sighed in pain riddled relief.

*** *** ***

Cliff squatted in front of his cave enclosing a pile of wood with clay; a step involved in producing charcoal. His hands worked in gradual and smooth movements, piling the material into a dome with the minimum care required to complete the task. Because to him, this was all tangential busying. His rendezvous could arrive at any point, and potentially pull him away from here immediately, which was why at first and for many days into his encampment he hadn’t bothered to craft any comforts or store any foods. But when the first winter approached and his stores were nonexistent, necessity forced his hand.

It had been so long since his orders were received. And there were brief moments when his patience began to question The Weaver’s words, or even doubt her existence as a figure of his own imaginings. But then he’d remember her form, towering over him like a living mountain, and his resolve would be reaffirmed. He must do as he was bidden. There were no alternatives of action.

A focus he had previously acclimated to in relative peace, until his thoughts and business were recently muddied up with the trite demands of that wandering child. The regular tending to her was evolving from an inconvenience to a nuisance. Another consideration was that if his rendezvous was met he might be instructed to move without warning. An event that would be harmful to the child if she found him having suddenly vacated without explanation. It was an implausible occurrence, but its likelihood grew to be more likely the longer she persisted in returning.

She was not just hindered of tongue but slow of mind, often requesting repeat explanations to ones he had already made previously. It would take much longer to restore her cognitive and vocal competencies than he had prepared to allot when he’d first found her exploring around his encampment. There would be no conclusion to her sharpening, whatever the combination of causes, she could potentially remain dull for many years yet. It would be best to transition her away from seeking his counsel, he rationalized, and to rely instead on that of her parents, peers, and otherwise unoccupied elders who could tend to her more consistently than he could, without risk of sudden abandonment.

As he formulated this thought, solidifying its structure in tandem with what he was building and shaping with his hands, he sensed her approaching from the shallows of the forest. She exaggerated her gate and loudened her step as she arrived. A harmless yet puzzling gait that took Cliff a moment to trace back to a previous warning of his not to try to sneak on him, her clumsy and intentional obedience brought him slight amusement, but only until she brought herself directly before him again, as a little pile of neediness that would soon steal another afternoon.

“Tell me what you’ve practiced then,” he instructed coarsely.

“Fa-rruh, neeer, lawoo, hieee, fhound, loust-t, uh– wawtur, ieee-suh, suhnooooh,” she finished.

“My legs are tightening, let’s walk while you practice those again, none of them were correct,” he said with yawn. She obeyed dutifully, sad to have disappointed him. He walked a familiar trail they’d taken multiple times so as not to over-burden her focus as she followed.

“Fa-ruh–,”

“Far, one beat, again.”

“Fahr.”

“Well enough, next.”

“Nuheeer.”

“Near.”

“.....”

“Near,” he repeated.

“Emm I d-doo well?”

“Are yo–”

“Me?”

“You’re improving,” he admitted with a shrug.

“Do yoo lieee meh?”

“What? Try it slower,” he demanded, without slowing his stride as he focused on re-enlivening his legs.

“D-duhoo yoo liee-kuh me?”

“Yes. yes. You’re plenty likable,” he answered, oblivious to the nature of her question.

“Beecuz I hav a p-plump lidul ass?” she pressed. Cliff froze still as a statue, considering his response with a higher degree of caution than he’d prepared to employ.

“It’s a normal enough one,” was all he said as he resumed casually walking, instantaneously returning to motion in sync with his words.

“Do you remember where you might have heard that from?” he inquired. She stopped suddenly as a wave of uncertainly flooded her feelings. “Was it one of the older boys? Older girls?” he asked. Overwhelmed with a brand of sensations and fears with which she had not yet become familiar, she avoided his question the only way she could manage to, she turned and ran.

Cliff watched her sprint for a few strides before erupting with three great leaps that reached her so quickly that her fear turned to panic. Cliff seized her ankle with one decisive hand and lifted her high off the ground to save her head from the fall of her abrupt stop. Then he gradually lowered her down to the ground onto her back, keeping a hold of her ankle and only lifting it enough to remove her leverage when she tried to kick at his arm with her other foot. He couldn’t engage with her like this, and it was too important a time to be in hysterics, but he knew nothing about the calming of young temperaments. Their volatility was as far from him as a river from the desert dunes. But he did recall, somewhere in the buried bowels of his memory, an untapped image of a sorrowful boy too burdened by the burgeoning sensations of his surroundings, a soothing recitation that resurfaced completely enough to regale to her with as much of a tune as he could manage.

“In the sound of winds too loud to bear, there’s a voice that sings the hymn, of a breeze that brushes gently by and a torch that doesn’t dim,” he paused for an obtusely long interval before continuing when he managed to remember the rest of the song. “So listen for the song behind the tempest and the gale, and let her quiet voice remind you that within the wail. There’s something stronger than the gust and deeper than a dive, that through the fray will light the way to keeping you alive…” he finished, his voice nearly trailing off before his focus was reinstated by the softened protests of the child before him.

“I need to explain something to you, Gilli,” he said quietly. “I’m not sure if I’m the best person to introduce it, and I won’t burden you with the details… but it’s important that you know this now,” he clenched his jaw as he hesitated, calculating which words would be simple enough to use for such an explanation. “What you said relates to physical coupling. It’s what post-pubescent– it’s what grown people do when they like each other, when uh– they want to be so close that their skin is too thick of a barrier between them. But that’s not something you need to worry about for a while yet,” he said. Gilli sat up as he spoke, looking at him contemplatively. “And while we’re still thinking about it, try and remember where you first heard about such things. I’m not going to be upset with you, there’s no wrong answer, but you do need to tell me.”

“.....”

“There’s no urgency, just think on it, we can wait here,” he reiterated. She looked down and tried to pull her foot away in response.

“I know you don’t want to answer, and I know you’d rather– but you do have to. If it’s easier, I can start by asking. Did one of your friends tell you that? Hm?”

“.....”

“An adolesce– someone younger than the other adults? Is that who’s been mean to you?”

“.....”

“A relative maybe? One of your grandparents? Uncles? Aunts? A sibling perhaps? Do you have any siblings who might know?”

“.....”

“Whic–”

“Raeen. F-f-f-fa.”

“You’re doing well, try it slower.”

“F-f-f-f-f-fa.”

“Was it your father?”

“.....”

“Are you certain?”

“yes”

“I understand. You don’t have to speak any more on it, if you don’t want to,” he said, with an enigmatic chill permeating across his voice. “I’m going to need to pick you up and carry you for a while, are you going to let me do that?” he asked politely. She nodded and reached two limp arms out towards him. In one sweeping motion he heaved her up and into his sternum, bearing her weight beneath a forearm and balancing her against him with his other hand. “Could you close your eyes for a while and hum the tune to that song for me? That’s it, just like that, keep going,” he said as he walked. His strides were so heavy and long that from her position it nearly felt like flying, only in deeply dipping arcs, instead of straight the way birds do. She hummed his tune a bunch of times, forgetting herself in its repetitions, and for the first time in her life, forgetting everything else too. After a transcendent period of riding the relaxing rocking of his gait, her consciousness was reinstated when he stopped suddenly, against her wishes.

“We’re not going to go near it, we’re going to go around it, but in order to do that, I need you to look out and point to your house for me,” he ordered. She opened her eyes and saw he was standing sideways and facing her towards Saddletown from a distant vantage point she’d never used before. A sight which silenced her humming as heavily as would a blow to her belly. She looked at him confusedly and obeyed, pointing onwards.”

“That one?”

“.....”

“The one just farther?” he asked. She nodded, thinking the matter closed. “And where does the person in charge live?”

“.....”

“Your leader.”

“Nono.”

“It’s–”

“NO-n-no.”

“The other people have to know, you don’t have to talk to them, I can do it for you. Then we’ll–”

“Dontduntdunntd-d-d-d.”

“If no one else knows, then more children will be in danger. And I have find out if your mother knew before we–”

“Ssstop.”

“I’ll take care of everything,” he said as he walked towards the town. “You just hold on,” he reassured. Gilli’s mind raced even faster than the pounding in her chest. She didn’t know what to say and could barely bring herself to speak. But if ever there was a time to become clear, it was now.”

“Cliffgilli, snailshell. Snail ssshell. Snailshell us,” she clarified.

“Try to calm yourself, it’s going to be an uncomfortable day, but soon everything will be better. You won’t have to live with him anymore, you won’t be endangered again,” he said, ignoring her babbling as the senseless expulsions of stress. This wasn’t working, she realized. But she had to warn him, he was too different in too many ways, there was no explanation he would understand. So she focused herself and went still for a moment, directing every iota of skill that she now had.

“Theyall ugLY,” she declared.

“Ridicule isn’t–”

“UGLY!” she screamed.

“We’re almost there,” he sighed, “It would be better not to yell insults at them while I explain things,” he said. Hearing the heedlessness of her words, she changed tactics and tried to push and pry his arms away so she could get off of him and run for herself. But his strength took little notice of her struggling movements. He was not unsympathetic to her distress, but neither could he relent to the whims of her tantruming. Although he didn’t blame her for wanting to avoid resolving the issue entirely. There was much to work through: rather the mother was ignorant or culpable, what other children might be endangered, who the rightful godparents would be. All logistical complications whose necessity a child could not be expected to navigate or understand, especially one so stunted as her. Cliff was already more involved than he wanted to be, but he knew there was no one else to see it through, which necessitated him to act on the matter himself.

He reached the town’s road from its ended side, passing a weathered and precariously positioned post as he staggered onto the road, the cleared ground eased his feet as his balance was already hindered by the heaving child he carried. He saw someone close by, a cripple with crutches tending to some innocuous task.

“Citizen,” Cliff beckoned formally. The cripple stopped and turned to him in surprise.

“Citizen, where is the lodging of your leader?” Cliff inquired. “I have an important matter to discuss pertaining to this child,” he said. The cripple looked at him, expressionless and silent. “Who is in charge?” Cliff clarified, altering his demeanor to that of peasantry. The cripple stretched his hand towards an obtusely shaped house in the middle of the town, but did not turn his eyes off Cliff as he pointed. “I’ll try there first, thank you,” Cliff said before continuing towards the structure. As he approached, people from all around started emerging from their homes and peering towards him in what Cliff first assumed to be curiosity. Upon eventually reaching the home, he stepped up onto the porch and knocked on the door with a hand as heavy as his heart. This would be unpleasant, and he was eager to conclude it as expediently as was possible. A man answered the door and looked at him the way one might expect toward an unexpected stranger.

“My name is Cliff. I have distressing news to report, pertaining to this child. May I enter?” Cliff asked.

“You may,” Wilnum said, gesturing towards a desk with facing chairs surrounding. Two other men happened to be discussing something independently across the room which Cliff passed and turned away from as he sat down.

“Are you the authority of these people?” Cliff asked.

“As much as anyone could be,” Wilnum answered. “What brings you here with the girl?”

“Gilli,” Cliff placed his palms over her ears and gently tapped his fingertips against her scalp, “has unambiguously informed me that she is being sexually abused by her father at home. I haven’t heard anything of the mother.”

“This is distressing to hear. Before you provide further details, perhaps it would be best to shield her ears by sending her to another room instead,” Wilnum suggested.

“That would be wise.”

“Albern, take her upstairs please, while we converse,” Wilnum instructed one of the men Cliff had passed on his way inside. Albern nodded and approached them wordlessly, rudely fixating on Gilli without acknowledging Cliff in any manner. As Cliff passed him the frozen child, Gilli looked at him helplessly and did something she saw a couple do once during one of her watchings, and kissed his hand. They had her now, she knew, and soon they were going to get him too. She followed the back of Cliff’s head with her gaze as she was carried away for as long as she could. Until the corner was turned, and he was gone.

“And how is it that you know the girl?” Wilnum asked skeptically.

“I’m not here to answer to you, only to inform you of the malfeasance within her household. The child is being–”

“Obviously the girl has been defiled,” Wilnum interrupted. “And I assure you the source will be promptly stomped out. But I do wonder how you have come to know her to begin with?”

“Wonder as you will, but do as you’ve promised. She is in danger at home.”

“What troubles me though, considering what I’ve plainly just seen from her, is the directionality of the accusation. Because this town has always survived by unexceptionally forbidding parental incest, and Mr. Kallerd is a respected, upstanding member of this community. So it seems to me, that what I’m actually hearing, are the misguided projections of an intruder’s guilty conscience,” Wilnum declared.

As Wilnum spoke, Cliff noticed several things with simultaneous clarity, some retroactively. He noticed that the curious citizens he’d seen, were all eerily similar of feature. He noticed that their gradual steps towards him were not those of casual walking, but flanking in a steady and uniform stride. And, most critically, he noticed Wilnum’s eyes glance behind him. Cliff had been distracted in coming here, trying to console Gilli while keeping her harmlessly restrained. But with her gone, there was nothing to dullen his innate knowledge that the third man was now standing directly behind where he sat. Cliff didn’t wait for the confrontation to be initiated, because of two crucial facts he was already deathly certain: it was him who was being accused, and a mob was now waiting for him just outside the door.

In one fluid movement Cliff slid off the side of his chair, ducked, and swung it behind him, striking the side of the man’s legs. The man screamed in agony as the chair shattered against his knees. Then the front door slammed open in quick succession. Cliff knew he had the span of a leaf’s fall before he’d be overwhelmingly outnumbered in an enclosed space, so without any available alternatives, he smashed one of the chair’s broken legs against Wilnum’s extended arm, and sprinted two strides towards the nearest window shutter. Upon reaching its aperture, he leapt straight through its loosely-tied planks, breaking them by the mound of his protruding shoulder before rolling across the ground and sprinting away as hurriedly as a lone ibex from a pack of ravenous wolves.

When he eventually reached the cover of the forest, he turned to check behind him for pursuers, of which there were none, either by lack of interest or his unexpected route of escape. With the threat of being lynched now circumvented, Cliff’s concerns immediately shifted to the imprisoned child. He took the briefest of moments to recover his breath from the sprint, just as quickly as he could manage, he could not afford to exhaust himself now. Then he jogged back home, sliding through the brush and bouncing off the bases of trees with the agility of an animal yet undiscovered by modern exploration. Upon reaching the cave, he flung open a sealed sack of pristinely clean garments. In complete contrast to the clumsy carelessness with which he stripped himself of all clothing, he put on the clean garments with devotional attention and reverence in the securing of each article’s ties. From feet to hood he covered himself in the specially commissioned material. One uniform layer of unscratched, unmarked, and unseeable shade of black too dark to distinguish in any unlit setting. Its caveat was that when exposed to direct sunlight it rendered its wearer’s silhouette an unmistakably obtuse void that attracted every eye towards its shape. Which was irrelevant to him, being that by the time he returned to the town’s border, evening would already have begun to dwindle. Previously unplaced lamps now hung lining both sides of the road that cut between its houses, but he had no interest in its road, or the houses that stretched along it, except for one.  

His suit required a specific manner of movement to be effective. No notice would be taken of him, provided he moved silently. Were he to trip or attract the attention of a territorial animal, he would be irrecoverably discovered. Scanning his surroundings with each forward step he slid and slithered towards Gilli’s house, where he hoped beyond reason that she would have been returned. She’d tried to tell him what they were, he understood now. But in the midst of his regretful frustration, he caught a glimpse of uncanny familiarity along the edge of his periphery. Details were not perceivable from this distance and in this dimness, but the line of lamps that stretched along the singular road pointed to either ends of the town, slicing through the encroaching dark of the passing evening in a way that emphasized both the open end of the road along with its opposite. The post planted at its dead end, which Cliff had incidentally neared himself towards during his approach, was busier by look than it had been before, although he couldn’t quite figure as to why.

Determined as he was to stay on task, the temptation of the sight beckoned him closer to the undefined object of his familiarity. Nearer and nearer he lurked towards the last lamp in the line, whose illumination rocked by the breeze that apathetically worked against his designs. Moving light granted depth to the flat, and detail to the undistinguishable. He needed to be weary now. One stray look was all it would take to doom his mission, and for the sake of a useless distraction such as this. But he soon felt justified in the slight diversion, as dread struck his shoulders and knees in a conjoined effort to throttle his footing. He was close enough now to see two unsettlingly oriented shoes belonging to the purpose of his coming. They lay near the post, but strangely seemed to both be balanced on nothing but their toes, with their heels pointed upward. What Cliff knew before seeing it clearly, and what caused his pace to quicken in desperation, was that the breeze that rocked the hung lanterns would not have discriminated in its effects, and would surely have knocked those boots over from their narrow points of purchase. Unless, something else was holding them up whose rigidity could overcome the wind. As he approached, his perceptions clouded, unable to properly calibrate the inconsistencies before him. There was too much incompleteness to it. A reasonless display that defied the very prospect of recognition. But as he approached nearer still, unable to resist the pull of its strangeness, every unusual element was made unmistakably clear. 

Gilli’s shoes were being propped upon their toes by her feet within them. Feet that froze in perfect stillness by the position of her limp legs. Legs that led up to her pelvis. A pelvis which was now the highest part of her from the ground. Ground which he could plainly observe to be as flush and flat above her hips as everything around it, almost seeming as if half of her had disappeared into an unknowable void. But once his own feet met hers for their penultimate time, he saw the truth of the scene, in all its blatancy. Bootprints scattered all around the dirt, encircling and trudging across the corpse. Her torso and head had been flattened by the boots of multiple assailants, whose numerous overlapping prints were too haphazard to accurately differentiate or count. There was no telling which side her gaze was facing last; left, right, or perhaps just straight into the dirt. But the orientation of her hands was simple enough to decipher. Her left pointing straight out to the side, and her right over her head and parallel to the other, she had been reaching towards the woods.

Such an outcome had never occurred to him to have been a possibility. Savagery had never been among his concerns in the years since he’d first seen the town or in the time since he’d walked into it. Desperate questions bombarded his thoughts of possible alternatives to his choices that could have saved– had he not returned home to retrieve his cloak, had he stayed to resist the mob, albeit unarmed and unprepared, had he never carried her here, had he asked her better– had he cared enough to ask any at all…

These closed possibilities all flooded him as heavily as the horror splayed before him. This portrayal of cruelty whose involvement required a totally forsook humanity. Then, the inarguable culmination of these thoughts rang inside his soul with all the penetration of a squarely struck gong: that he never should have brought her here, and he was too late to take her back.

Before his voice, his stomach, or his emotions could betray his location to the town’s occupants, he slipped away as silently as he’d approached. Returning to his cave at a measured pace, unhurried in speed and unwavering in resolve. There was no cause for rushing anymore. Time was not a factor. As he made his way through the brush towards his encampment, his every movement and action were as choiceless as a meteor falling through the sky, each becoming only a physical manifestation of inevitability.

When he reached his abode he changed his dress in efficient methodical motions. But Cliff’s armaments were not nearly so lavish and owed no aspect to appearances. His cloak he removed with solemnity, feeling its softness to be a reminder of its uselessness to his revised purpose. He brushed the dirt off of a large sealed sack which rested in the back of his cave. He’d kept it for the rare occasions when a predatory beast dared to threaten his own sovereignty, or to thwart the efforts of any ill-intentioned travelers he may encounter. Uniquely, this time he unpacked its contents to contend against both.

Over a thin layer of meticulously woven netting, he fastened fitted steel plates over his shoulders and around his torso, calves, and forearms. And fastened hardened leather covering over the elbows and knees to preserve the freeness of the joints. After carefully inspecting the ties of his boots, he applied a scarlet gambeson over everything else, fashioned to be thick and broad enough to accommodate and conceal the layers underneath without restricting his mobility. Lastly, he adorned his helmet and affixed his gauntlets. The weaknesses to his customized accouterments were his feet, his wrists, and his eyes, which were uncovered to allow the full scope of his periphery to be unhindered.

With the acceptance of circumstance, he heaved his weapon from its resting place along the floor. A blade would be much better for this, a great-sword, ideally. But blades needed to be constantly honed, sharpened, and periodically oiled against moisture even when not in use, so he hadn’t kept one. More critically, his edge-alignment was too irredeemably unpracticed to make such a tool usable to him without performing drills for many days. The only weapon he had with him beyond wooden handled hatchets and carving knives was his linebreaker. Many soldiers, rather they fought for a kingdom, a god, or for hire, named their weapons with pride. But Cliff took no pride in his. His hexagonally flanged mace, which stood as high as his sternum, was not designed for tonight’s purpose. It was for smashing gaps through lines of armored men in battles much larger than this, where he could safely retreat behind reinforcements once his task had been completed. This was a different task entirely. At his strongest and most diligent of training, he could only complete nearly three-hundred swings of changing angles before fatigue rendered the weapon’s weight too unwieldy to safely use. The town’s size observably exceeded this limitation. He’d eventually have to put it down to finish it, if he could finish it. He knew his limits, the endeavor was unrealistic, impossible even for him. A calculation that his experience made without his intention or interest. Yet he still allowed no consideration of delay for the sake of tactics. Instead, only welcoming the approaching answer to a question he would bring his whole weight to pose: rather or not they could manage to hurt him more severely than his fall had, all that time ago.

*** *** ***

Fil laid in bed with his eyes wide and restless. An uncanny despair encapsulated him for reasons he couldn’t identify. He laid there in that state for a time so long he presently wished more than anything that he could somehow accelerate through its unknowable duration. As he counted down from a thousand, hoping to have found sleep by then, he noticed a faint flicker along the cracks of his window shutters. The lantern line had been hung that day, which disturbed the usual darkness of his room through the edges of his window shutters. His parents hadn’t told him directly why, but insinuated that the dumb girl had done something again and now they needed to keep the road lit through the night. What caught Fil’s attention, was that the glimmer went from a static annoyance, to sliding away in a quick sweep across the wall. This compelled him to rise from his bedroll and open his shutters out of curiosity. A curiosity that, once indulged, brought him no measure of relief. The thing he saw through his windowpane instead filled him with a confused dread. The lanterns were being unhooked from their hangers and collected one by one by an oddly shaped animal of unrecognizable proportions. Hanging them each along one of its horns before retrieving the next down the line. Fil stood statuesque of stature, transfixed in total by the fading lanterns being carried steadily away from his view. This hypnosis continued until, when the ninth and final lantern was collected, they started exploding against the houses on the opposite side of town.

*** *** ***

   As the flames ran across the walls, Cliff waited at the center of the open end of the road. He tested his grip on the shaft of his weapon, finding the proper balance between the head and the pommel for swinging wide and long. It would be optimal to begin as efficiently as possible, two or three per strike for as long as he could sustain the pace. His plan was to draw as many to him as would come. Pursuit was an expenditure of energy he could not afford. He had to prioritize two things, avoid running, and stay on open terrain. If he was cornered, if he tripped, or if he tired, he would fail. Which he resolved with all remaining fortitude his wounded will contained, would not happen again, not on this night.

  The savages flew from their homes in panicked surprise at the sudden commotion. As they called for aid and announced the magnitude of the emergency to their neighbors, Cliff took his aim. Without squaring up, stating his intentions, or waiting to be noticed, his weapon swung across the knees of four foul beings who chose the wrong direction to flee from the fire. He avoided killing blows at first, he needed the rest to hear, compelling more to come and stop him, he needed them to try, it would save him energy.

When he’d finally accumulated enough cripples to sustain a constant combined shriek between their individual gasps for breath, his aim became consistently fatal, so as not to limit his available footing with the threat of too many conscious assailants scattered across the ground.

*** *** ***

  Decker jumped out of the low window of his bedroom, seeing the roaring blaze that faced the front door of his house, and hearing the staggered screams from the same direction. As he took two terrified steps to improve his view, he saw the source of the mayhem as it smashed through the charging crowd surrounding it. Upon seeing it, there was no mystery in his mind as to the monster’s identity. He’d heard enough cautionary stories about the Red Ram that came in the dark to steal insolent children from their bedrolls, to recognize it at first sight. He could see the adults were trying to stop it, but however coordinated their efforts became, they each fell like wind-shorn branches from a dying tree. It was plain that no one had a chance as soon as it saw them. But Decker was smaller than them, and the sun had only recently set past the horizon, so by his fractured perspective, he’d be able to get closer than anyone else, all he needed was– the completion of the idea struck him in a flash. Now he could prove that he wasn’t stupid or worthless, which everyone would know once they saw just how fast and brave he really was. 

Thus, with pace propelled by excitement for his suddenly inspired plan, he stealthily scampered away from the fighting, and towards Mr. Massy’s toolshed.

*** *** ***

Cliff shifted his grip up towards the head of the mace, swinging upward with a long lunge that crushed the ribcage of one charging assailant, then swung the pummel in a wide arc beside him to strike another in the side of the head. As he plowed through his enemies by the light of spreading fires and the sounds of the multiplying screams, he stayed passively mindful to protect vulnerable spots from any haphazard blows, but most critically to conserve as much momentum as possible between swings. Every time his weapon slowed and he had to reapply power to either side of its shaft’s center of weight, it quickened the encroaching failure of his arms. He could partially delay this eventuality by heaving it with his legs, abdominals, and back, but his fingers, arms and shoulders would still be the first to relent in function. He was determined to finish before then, however impossibly.

They were starting to organize now, with groups of five or more engaging him at a time, all armed with hoes, shovels, pitchforks, and axes. But these efforts brought him less worry than clouds bring to a roaring wind. What did worry him were the potential attacks of archers, stone slingers, and spear throwers. Projectiles against which his only defense was to immediately eliminate their wielders before a coordinated volley could be fired. This was a flawed strategy, he knew. It relied far too little on his prowess and too much on random chance favoring his own ends. Part of him welcomed the danger of it, fantasizing that it might bring him the relief he’d always wanted. But it was a small part, miniscule in comparison to the bloodrage that surged through him now like whitewater through rock beds. Crashing over his joints and flooding his muscles with overflows of force whose singularly conditioned use Cliff had no reservations in obliging. No reservations at all.

*** *** ***

Corlin sprung from his house in fear from the noise of the fighting and brightness of the blaze. He paused to observe the carnage in frozen disbelief. He stared at it blankly for much more than a moment, taking it in. Until the heavy crash of a collapsing roof broke his focus, brimming him with a panic that disallowed any competing thought that distracted from his only directive: to get away. Wearing nothing but his undergarments, he fled. With feet as bare as his mind, he sprinted clumsily away as quickly as his cold and lanky legs could propel him across uncrafted ground. Without a spec of concern for his home, his direction, or his fellows, he ran from a degree of destruction he instinctively knew would be total. An instinct that was as ancient as the skies, and as insistent as gravity. He had to get away, he knew of nothing else. For there was nothing else to know.

*** *** ***

The savages were starting to hesitate now, Cliff noticed. Each individually reaching the same collective thought that their resistance may be futile, despite their numbers, for they could see no apparent signs of the growing exhaustion steadily threatening to drag Cliff’s limbs to the welcoming support of the ground. He was at nearly ninety swings now, with many of them contending against the resistance of multiple bodies. Between the widening pauses between waves, Cliff would move his weapon to one hand at the top of its shaft, and use his free one to seize a nearby well-clothed corpse by the arm, drag its legs over the edge of a fresh ember, and toss it through the shutters or onto the roof of an unsullied house to draw out anyone who may be trying to hide inside.

Eventually they became privy to his method, and would try to charge him while he was otherwise occupied. But this was easily disregarded. The fraction of an instant it took Cliff to properly rearm himself, with his upper grip at the center of its weight, was in no manner hindered by the miniscule encumberment of having to drop a smoldering corpse.

At first he’d had the incalculable advantage of fighting in the dim and dark, but that boon was fully spent by now, so wide was the reach of his arson that the road on which he fought had become more illuminated as it would have been under the highest sun with the clearest sky. Being that the day sends light only downward, but this hellscape brought it in from all sides. Drawing the attention of every breathing being towards the splattered behemoth who was indiscriminately smashing the bones and igniting the homes of everyone who lived in this wretched place.

His task was over half done now, but he was nearly finished. What structures still remained were few and doubtfully had many more armaments for them to retrieve. However, his arms protested emphatically with every exertion, threatening to give out without warning at the slightest miscalculated strain. Until Cliff saw something that relinquished his flesh from every form of fatigue, and sent him into a fury rivaled by neither the most ravenous of bears nor the largest of deafening tornados. Among the last large mob that gathered to resist him, was a man whose trousers Cliff recognized. What prodded at Cliff though, was not the wearables on his legs, but those over his head. The sides of which were both bandaged thickly and completely, along with one of his eyes.

*** *** ***      

Throughout the frenzied defense, Fil could see the fate that would befall him. His parents had told him to hide in the basement but he’d ignored them and gone outside to observe the battle from a distance. Despite only seeing the shadowed side of the faces, he could still recognize most of whom he saw. All of the adolescents and at least thirty adults were trying to form lines against the monster. But Fil had already watched the previous wave try to do something similar, who were all now fallen in a loose pile in the middle of the road, his parents included.

He didn’t understand what was happening, and had no presence of mind remaining. What to do, where to go, or how to act were concepts so alien to his collapsed consciousness that the only remaining drive within it was terror. So he sank into a deep stupor, sitting on open ground and pressing his hands against the impacted dirt, with all functions and faculties disabled.

When a distinct sound overcame the rest within his ear; his name being called through the torrent of noise. He hurriedly sought out the voice’s source and saw nearly his entire class of children had huddled together against a wall on the steadily shrinking unburnt end of town. He didn’t know where the idea came from, and yesterday even the suggestion of doing such a thing would have seemed unthinkable, but as he saw their helpless despair in the wake of their imminent demise, he knew precisely what he had to do. So without a sideways glance or a single pause of hesitation, he sprinted across the glowing road towards his classmates. None of them said anything to him, the air was too thick for them to open their mouths, except for the one who’d beckoned him, who was now coughing for the trouble. Fil held out his hands for the children to touch, which they all immediately did either in body or in spirit.

“Don’t move, I need to get something. I will come back. Wait. Here,” he ordered, with every shred of authority that he’d ever accrued over them. They all nodded with varying levels of dismay. This order wouldn’t buy him long, one of them would soon panic, then the rest were sure to run, probably in all directions. He’d never be able to find them then, not all of them, he knew he needed to be quick.

And quick as a falcon flies, so did he, past two houses and towards the incoming fires, he did something so wrong that he had to consciously reorder his hands at multiple points to perform his will. He entered Mister Altnoy’s barn without permission, and stole four things he could have previously been pelted for just for touching: a rope, a pull cart, a saddle, and one of the draught horses. From his lessons he knew it would take a couple of days to make it to Herrelef, and they’d need to go off the road at least once to water themselves, but they could make it. It was all they had now, everything else, everyone else… was gone. The adults just couldn’t accept it yet, and Fil knew beyond doubt that he’d never be able to convince the ones who were still standing.

*** *** ***

As he plowed through the few inconvenient individuals who happened to block his path, Cliff turned his weapon around in one smooth rotation just before driving the short spike of its pommel into the bandaged savage’s solar plexus. Then he angled it upwards with a lunge, driving it up into his ribcage and propelling him high off the ground in a gratuitous display. This was a tactical mistake, a fact which he did not recognize until a sickle wrapped around his right thigh from behind him and attempted to tear at his flesh. It slid dully against his armor for the briefest instant before Cliff overcame his state of hazardous irrationality. Without wasting another breath he dropped the defeated savage from his temporary perch, seized the sickle from around his thigh, and drove it deeply into the assailant behind him without even bothering to turn.

The grip of his hands was threatening to loosen around the shaft of his mace, his arms protested with cries as fervent as those around him, and his legs were steadily rotting underneath him, but he knew he couldn’t stop now. He was so close. So tantalizingly near to vanquishing this blight from the land he walked and the air he breathed. Their numbers were much fewer than the town’s size suggested. Of those he could see there were few remaining, and any who still hid would be burned away soon enough.

He had camped with barbarians before, never for long, but enough to experience their civility. Different tribes from different regions in different times had many variations to their ways. But of those that took him in, all maintained a plain baseline of morality that manifested its aims in all they did. But these savages had fooled him, though they did not sleep under tents and marquees, and their constructs were built for much more permanence than yurts, their entire order was merely a sickening facade; a stuffed glove masquerading as a hand.     

Unexpectedly and from an unchaseable distance, he noticed a carted horse of considerable size skipping away perpendicularly to the road he was presently blocking. What initial disappointment he had in being unable to end every citizen of this sinful place soon became relief, in that it also meant he had even fewer necessary strikes remaining before he was finished.

Fewer than twenty stood before him now, united in formation and all facing him. Some were frightened, some were brave, some were anxious, two were excited, and one was ready. Cliff dove towards the ready one first, smashing the section of shaft between his hands into the enemy’s nose and knocking him down on his back. Cliff trampled him as he fell and stomped in his skull with his heel just as what seemed to be a wedded couple confronted him in unison, one with a splitting ax, the other with a wooden club likely purposed for driving posts, Cliff eliminated the one with the ax first, out of practicality. After those two fell he confronted the rest with all his remaining might, spending it as freely as a child’s autumn afternoon.

Even of breath, clear of mind, and heavy of hand, he engaged these incarnate affronts to his senses indiscriminately. Hearing not their conjoined yells, but only one stuttering whimper. Seeing not their expressions, but only a young and curious face. And mourning not their shared ends, but one snuffed future denied of its potential in the name of no cause higher than bestial cruelty. None of these assailants were capable of defending against his wrath, for their counterfeited strength was immaterial unless used against the helpless. 

Only nine were left now, screaming and jabbing in useless defiance to his designs. One of whom swung a cold cutting chisel at his neck. Cliff rolled his head under the blow and punched his gauntlet under its extended arm hard enough to break the ribs, then he gripped his mace again and turned sideways, arching the pommel of his weapons over and down onto the assailant’s head. Using that momentum, Cliff continued the turn and jammed the rounded top of his mace into another enemy’s nose, caving her face in with an audible crunch.

The eighth he dispatched with one sweeping swing to the right. The seventh he downed by turning with the continued swing and lowering his grip along the shaft to extend the range. By then the head of the mace was halted by the combined resistance of those two bodies. So as he reestablished his grip upon it he raised his knee and kicked his right foot to the side, driving through the knee of the seventh as it tried to jab him with the spike of a fire poker. Cliff then executed the cripple with a swift swing of his pummel into his temple. The sixth had snuck behind him now, which Cliff could not abide. So he ducked low and arose with an upward arch of his head, smashing the top of his helmet under the assailant’s groin and launching it over his back to absorb the multiple blows that had already committed to where he’d just been facing. The fifth he tackled to the ground by the forward impact of his plated shoulder and crushed his throat with a quick kick. The fourth and third both landed simultaneous blows against his torso which nearly broke his footing, but only served to leave their makeshift weapons extended and their arms exposed; arms which he concurrently broke before efficiently smashing through each of their skulls in turn. The final two stood alone before him in deflated panic, suddenly aware with undeniable certainty that they were out of compatriots to linger behind. This hesitation was unaffordable to their predicament. A deficit which Cliff exploited as he noticed his grip could no longer bear the weight of his weapon. With the very last vestige of his finger’s capacity to contract, he flung his mace towards the second enemy’s chest, and released them entirely from the shaft, propelling it through the air with a poorly aimed throw that only glanced against the assailant’s arm. Cliff palpably understood that his hands were functionless now and could not be relied upon for anything. So he crashed his forearms in front of him with a loud grunt to distract the second assailant before spinning into a back kick against the first, striking him in the belly and sending him collapsing on his knees in agony. He quickly turned back to the second who had just turned away to run but was hindered by cradling her elbow that had just been impacted by the head of the thrown mace. This hindrance proved too great as Cliff sprinted behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and pivoting it up and over his hips, driving her head downward with all his weight, and shearing the neck against the unyielding ground.

With heaving breath and staggered step, Cliff approached the final felled assailant who was still keeled over meekly upon his hands and knees, struggling to wheeze through his wounded belly. Cliff collapsed his body over his enemy’s back and viciously coiled his arm around his neck, wedging it tight with the aid of his other forearm. He jerked the shoulder of his strangling arm downwards with concussive blows against the desperate flailings of his enemy several times, until no motion remained, and Cliff was finally left lying alone in abject exhaustion, surrounded by a company of mangled corpses in the midst of a widening inferno whose consumption would imminently reach the spot where he currently lay.

As he lay there, still as stone, accepting the shallow comforts of strainlessness and allowing the inertia of rest to permeate along his spine and down the ends of his limbs, he entertained the possibility of remaining here. He’d never been immolated before, perhaps that would be enough to do it, he thought. But that thought was immediately overruled by the jarring realization that he still had something left to do. So Cliff heaved himself back up in unheeding defiance to the protests of his flesh. He looked around briefly, then retrieved his weapon, and a recently unclaimed shovel. Carrying them both by the top of their shafts wedged inside the flexed bend of his elbows. With his back to the incoming blaze, he walked towards the post that marked the dead end of the road. It felt like an unbearably long way. His legs howled in complaint against continuing to support him, his chest and back were so badly bruised that his every movement reiterated some particular spot of freshly layered pain, whilst his neck threatened to give out more and more belligerently with each additional step.

When he reached his destination, he collapsed again, this time for much longer, long enough for all the flames behind him to burn to embers, and for all the darkness in front of him to turn to day. Eventually, as the function restored to his extremities and the full bodied soreness reached a stable equilibrium, he crawled up onto his elbows and knees and looked mournfully forward towards a pair of shoes suspended on their toes. He was filthy, coated in coagulated crimson, and wanted nothing more than to shed every layer from his skin, wade in the stream, and scrub off every trace of scum until he was as clean as the upstream flow of water. But he had provisions he still needed from his cave, he wouldn’t be able to carry his armor back without its sack, and once he took it off, it would need to be washed before it was supple enough to put back on again. So he couldn’t remove it before he went back, but he couldn’t leave either, not yet.

As dutifully as a fresh disciple of a sacred cause, he stood up, careful not to be fallen by the brushing breeze, and grasped the shovel with heavy hands. It was malformed, and poorly crafted, but he had fought worse foes than dirt, and with duller tools than this. So he continued digging, little by little, lest he snap its narrow shaft. He made no care of the hole’s shape. Its lines were rounded and sloppy, and its bottom was bumpy and sloped. The only measure that mattered to him was its depth, such that it would be enough to prevent scavengers and bugs from disturbing its contents. After a long and laborious while, with the day nearly spent and the depth to his satisfaction, he painfully struggled to climb out of his hole, and gingerly scraped the stiffened partial remains into its dusty embrace. Filling the hole was faster, of course. But it was no easier. The difficulty being that with every single heave and scrape of soil, he was forced to reconfront how avoidable this was. How he could have done it differently, had he been attentive enough to look twice at what he’d seen, or listened once to what she’d warned.

Alas, he’d been too preoccupied with his directive to understand its true meaning. As he methodically filled the gruesome grave, he considered where he would go after this. There was no reason to subject himself to this place anymore. His rendezvous was missed, and the remains of his teacher were being buried beneath him. As his hands worked, he thought fondly of a better day than this, when he’d heard a band playing for one of his previous employers. He’d pontificated at the time if he could ever learn to draw such sultry sounds from instruments so fragile of form. And since then, he’d sometimes return to that thought on rare occasions when his mood allowed broader possibilities of himself than the present sum of his experiences.

That was all lost to him now, he knew. Whatever chance he had of being something better than a breathender had died with her. His hands could play no strings, provide no comfort, be of no benefit, only strike things down, so he was and would always be.

Finally, when the ground was level, and every remaining hold on him was either buried or burned away, he threw the shovel behind him to join the discarded remains of his enemies, rested the head of his mace just over his shoulder, and headed back to his cave with bitter satisfaction in having purged this patch of land from such lowly forms of life. As he gradually walked the familiar way back through the forest, his imaginings were not of when he would soon be able to strip, wash, and rest, but on where he would go next.

If he traveled south of winter’s frost, he reasoned, then he’d need little to subsist, and he had no other remaining cares to drive him. He wasn’t sure yet precisely where he’d go, or how he’d know when he got there. He supposed, upon further reflection, that after a few days of recovering and packing, he’d just head south until the weather was warm in every season. Then find somewhere to make camp… Somewhere secluded enough to be unsullied by the presence of predatory beasts, or the pernicious patterings of people. Somewhere quieter.