NANO

They Who Have Been Found In The Valley is a fantasy novel written for Camp Nanowrimo in April 2017. It's in progress. <blockquote>(css: "font-size: 75%;")[In the valley between the sister mountainsides, in the shadow of the Colossus and its offspring, a caravan train winds its way through the country. It is a new plague on the land, a quiet disturbance underneath the skin. The mountain men scatter from the sight of it — from the newcomers, their skin too weathered and their eyes too bright, from the harried, snorting creatures they pull along behind them, from their rope-woven bags, heavy with treasure. They speak in chattering voices and show their teeth. They came from over the sea, from lands far away and unknown, and built their city in the river basin. The Ventach had no history of any such thing, and so, as they are wont to do, they deliberated. Torches that had never before been lit were burnt. Birds were called, captured, and returned. Old mothers spoke to their husbands and wives about danger, and old fathers spoke to their children about the dawn. A great period of silence ensued, swallowing the mountains with the solemnity of it. At the end of their conference, when the men in the river basin had begun taking trees from the hills for their homes, a messenger came down from the Colossus. She made her way carefully into the valley, a path that was no less treacherous for a thousand seasons of wear, and walked — not towards the foreign men, who blocked her way to the sea, but back in the direction she had come, towards the mountain peaks and the first breezes of the imminent winter. The Ventach did not trust themselves to identify fear. Her singular task was to confirm their worry. Four days she slept. Four nights she walked, aided by the summer-bright stars and the birds and the jackals in the valley, which smelled honesty on her skin and scared the insects away. The walls of the valley caved away on either side, curling up. The messenger looked at the canyon walls, and climbed. This is how friendship was born in the valley.]</blockquote> In essence, this novel deals with two sister societies on an unnamed continent, the Ventach in the mountains and the Kelkaan in the steppe, and a merchant people called the asos who build a colony on their shore. Act I takes place shortly after the asos arrive. Act II takes place fifteen years later. The main characters: — [[Sansael|SANSAEL]], from the steppe — [[Toma|TOMA]] and [[Mecc|MECC]], from the mountains Minor characters: — The Ventach, twins who are the spiritual voice of the Ventach people — The royal family of the Kelkaan: the ruling father, the ruling mother, and their son Asok — The royal family of the asos: Sai and his wife Satai, the heir Hadoch and her husband Himen, and her younger sister Laiju — Cay and Dami, Mecc's brothers — Aayen, Kyna and Esm, Sansael's companions in the capital — Sang, an artisan from Diastmian who becomes Mecc's partner — Uncle, a member of the mountain council who houses Toma — The jackal, who follows Sansael — The chickadee, who follows Toma Places: — [[Diastmian|DIASTMIAN]]. Youthful, lively, profitable. — [[The capital|THE CAPITAL]]. A city on a hill. — [[The Ventach|THE VENTACH]]. Inside, the prophets. — [[The mountain council|THE MOUNTAIN COUNCIL]]. Dreamers dream.

The brilliant colony of the Ahchos, full to the brim with artisans and merchants. -- Act I: [[The arrival of the greatships]] Act II: [[Hadoch teaches Laiju]]

The only specter of urbanism in the steppe, once drought-plagued and hollow verging on empty, now growing cancerously around the asos' trading caravans. -- Act I: [[Trade is established]] Act II: [[Introduction to the royal family|Asok n co]]

A mountain range, a people, a hallowed wisdom expressed through the worship of age-old twins that enjoy obfustication. -- Act I: [[Toma asks for guidance]] Act II: [[Mecc visits his brother]]

A method of collective rule, led by dreamers with weak-boned hands. More often than not forgotten. When Toma visits in Act I, it consists of: a female couple, a crone, a blind man with a bear cub, a mother, a young man, a working-woman, a weaver, a hunter, and an old man with a chickadee who Toma calls Uncle. -- Act I: [[Toma's first visit]] Act II: [[Toma's second visit]]

A fisherwoman and prophet from a remote village on the edge of the steppe. She leaves her family and child for the capital, called by news of strange men and the birth of a royal son. -- Act I: [[Sansael's introduction]] Act I: [[Sansael's journey]] Act I: [[Bartering with the asos]] Act II: [[Sansael sends Kyna on her way]] Act II: [[Sansael saves the jackal kit]] (content warning: kinda gross bug stuff)

A quiet, stern child of the Lesser Ventach, the side of the mountain range cut off by the valley from the Colossus proper. He worries about the new men building on their shores and seeks guidance. In Act II, Toma is referred to as the general. -- Act I: [[Toma encounters the asos]] Act I: [[The chickadee swallows Toma's prophecy]] Act I: [[The aftermath]] (content warning: gore) Act II: [[The general rejects the prophets]] Act II: [[The chickadee returns]] Act II: [[The general greets his army]] (content warning: animal death/butchery)

A young messenger for the Ventach. He brought the news of the asos' arrival to the steppe city, beginning their hesitant partnership. Curious and warm, he eventually moves into the asos' city, Diastmian. -- Act I: [[Mecc visits the capital]] Act I: [[Mecc meets Sang]] Act II: [[Mecc heads into the mountains]] Act II: [[Mecc goes home]]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[And so Toma outfits himself in the cleanest clothes Mecc can find him and finishes the journey. He follows the flocking birds up the snow-covered slopes and slips between the remnants of a rockslide into the mountain. The stone tunnels hum with life. Half an hour and a young Tacham greets him with the welcome of a sister, and others file out of the myriad passages, each nodding to him in turn or offering a hand. Their fingers are covered in dust, and Toma can hear the faint sound of stone chipping somewhere further below. None tell him where to go. That is part of learning the Ventach. He wanders, letting his fingers brush against the wall, the memory of old engravings, and chooses his paths as the grooves grow deeper. At parts the tunnel arches so steeply downwards that he fears for his footing — at other times, it extends forward flatly into darkness. Sometimes candles smolder on the pathways, but he is mostly left to finding his way by feel. The few Ventach he sees begin to be quieter. They give him long, solemn looks. When he begins to feel light-headed and worries for the tired air his lungs are committed to inhaling, the path opens up above him. He climbs for a brief minute, and comes out. Sitting back to back, dwarfed by the cavern above them, are the lords of the mountain, the children of the Colossus, the Ventach. They look as old as ages. Toma sucks in a breath. Faintly, he notices men and women lining the walls of that vast cave that sit quietly, not speaking, and watch him. The Ventach turn their heads toward the intruder, veins bulging beneath their dead paper skin like worms. Twins, Toma knows, though their faces are crumbled and inarticulate enough that resemblance would be inevitable regardless. They will die together and another pair will take their place, as old as the ground and as endless as the sky. Beneath their bony knees the rock is smeared with drawings. The ancient hands of the Ventach are covered in gold that falls in clumps with their inattentiveness, and their glyphs spread to the walls. The pilgrims who line the cavern dip their hands in bowls that Toma hadn’t seen and return to their task. They clarify the lines, wiping away the hesitant yellow borders with their thumbs. Disquiet lances through Toma’s bones. He should not feel this way in the house of his lords. “You,” says one of the Ventach. “Come here,” says the other. Toma walks forward, at a lack of what else to do. They do not look at him. Neither do they look at each other. The few moments it takes for Toma to cross the room to them are the longest of his life. They wipe their hands with twin movements. Dust the color of saffron settles on the ground. “My lords,” he begins. “What do you take them for?” say the Ventach. Toma closes his mouth. One of them turns their head up to the empty air at the center of the cavern. Their eyes are yellow and spotted, blind. “The strangers,” the other says. “Speak.” Toma says, “They are foreign.” He searches frantically for the emotion that nests in his gut whenever he crosses a peak and sees that city in the bay, buzzing. “They are quick, and new.” One of the Ventach snorts. The other says, “Does that warrant fear?” “My lord,” Toma says. Fear is not the word he would have used. “Even our children do not lose sleep over worry of monsters,” the Ventach say. “You were not born a coward.” The stitch in Toma’s chest aches. “We are not afraid.” “Friendship with the plainsmen.” Toma says, “Yes.” “Friendship with the seamen.” Toma stays silent. “He comes all this way for this?” “He thinks us fool prophets.” “Our youngest has no interest in taking a friend.” Toma knows as surely as he has ever known anything that those strange men will never walk in these caverns, and that the Ventach will never leave these caves. He bows and leaves. “So?” Mecc asks when he returns. Toma sits down on the hard ground and cleans the delicate traces of pollen off of his boots.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[“What--" Mecc starts, and then stops. “What’s happening? Here, I mean. The woman who showed me to you wouldn’t explain.” “I’m surprised you didn’t see it,” Cay says. “We all did, even the ones that don’t dream. Though they are still seeing it, I guess.” Mecc says, “Please just tell me.” Cay calls him little brother and tells him to follow. In the vast cavern of the Ventach, the open and beating heart of the mountain- children of the Colossus, the Ventach channel their prophecy through twins and seers and voices, dreamers, the clearest manifestation of the collective will of their people and their land. Mecc used to get messages from them, direct and precise if wary of action. He used to talk to the twins, those cloaked characters grown wrinkled and gray as the years passed. He remembers the clear snap of their voices as if it was yesterday. He remembers the circular, open floor, the fresh wet smell of the pollen, the figures they used to trace for seer-work. Where they used to sit, back to back, now drapes a great and twisting vine. It curls down from a crack in the ceiling, dull brown and heavy with shriveled berries and fruit, ornamented with dead leaves and dry petals. From its end, already three times the size of a man and crawling with steady persistence along the stone floor, spreads a hive, humming with life. Bees and moths and spiders and beetles and long, slithering creatures that they have no name for breed inside its folds. They leave tracks of sticky honey in a ring around their construction, marking the area where they take free reign to wander. Mecc can see beneath the honeycomb, almost entirely covered, a few glimpses of fabric and the last visible segment of a bony dessicated claw. It may have belonged to someone once.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[Mecc, who has come down from the castle, wanders through the streets with barely concealed bemusement. The new men are making themselves comfortable. They were gifted an empty plot as a storeroom and have stuffed their tents full of their plunder. Their animals graze on the trampled grass outside, looking perturbed. The men offer them pale liquid out of transparent jars, and the creatures settle themselves. At the border of this camp a crone sits cross-legged with a foreign woman, protected from the cold ground with a fabric of such rich color Mecc has to blink to convince himself he’s seen it. They talk with their hands, the crone steadfast and smiling as the woman fights to make herself understood. There are shimmering bands woven on her wrists, around her throat, disappearing underneath her blankets, and her eyes are lined like those of a priest. Next to her, the crone looks colorless, disappearing into the grass of the steppe. Mecc touches the hair-covering he donned in an attempt to blend in and feels a bit silly. The Celka see through his disguise in an instant, and these new men, whoever they are — they don’t care. He makes his way to a group of young Celka, watching the proceedings with interest, and kneels down next to them. They don’t disguise their surprise. He doesn’t blame them. “What’s going on?” he asks. They look at each other, unsure of this newcomer, but come to a decision quickly. “That is their mother,” one girl says. “They are merchants.” Mecc knew that already. “She wants to talk to your mother and father,” Mecc guesses. The girl shrugs. A boy at her side says, “We can’t understand them. They sound nothing like us.” “You are from the little Lentak?” the girl asks. She eyes his hair-covering dubiously. Mecc shakes his head. “The mountainside.” The group starts. “You shouldn’t be here,” the boy says. The girl adds, “You should be careful.” “I brought a message for your mother,” Mecc tells them. The girl extends her hand. Mecc takes it. “Tell your fathers we are glad that you are with us.” “These men talk to Tacham at their kingdom at the seaside. They should be honest.” The girl shrugs. “We are glad anyway.” Mecc leaves the city that night, bundled in blankets and swaddled in starlight. The aurochs at the city limits whuff at him, their handlers giving a brief wave. He walks all night, following the lip of the valley a hair’s-width too close for comfort. These men have made him reckless. He thinks with longing of the way their city looks from the mountainside, and gives a brief prayer for the Celka and their wisdom. By the time the sun peeks over the side of the Colossus, the Ventach have swallowed him up.]

Toma makes a few visits to the city in the bay once the trade routes are established. He never likes it any more, but he learns it. The streets are wide enough for two aurochs, or four of their animals, and always crowded with people. They must have brought hundreds over on their boats. Children play in the mud, running loose along the seaside, many more than in any of the settlements he knows. The men are louder, the women taller. All of them are prone to drink. The boats that he saw from the mountains are impossibly vast up close. They span the length of houses and are outfitted with oars as well as great canvas curtains stretched across their side. A helpful girl mimes, by puffing her cheeks and blowing onto her hand, that they catch the wind. They could have held dozens each, and there must be fifty tied with greatrope to posts in the harbor. He never sees their leaders. The ventach whisper to each other that the woman who went to the Celka is a queen, but he never finds out for certain. He’s not sure he could tell them apart, anyway. The lowliest peasant in their city dresses like a king. It grows in him a renewed appreciation for the Ventach. When he goes home, he unearths an old bone sword. He passes villages nearby and sees a similar thing: men at the springs planting hemlock, women carving dead pine branches into sharp, sharp points.

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[The caravans are bloated. The new men hold more than they can carry, their pack animals breathing hard underneath the load. They struggle with the terrain. Toma wonders what the land they come from is like, what unfamiliar place where their stained cloth shoes are enough to protect them from the ground. They must not have mountains across the sea. Nor river-rocks, if the way these men lose their footing is any indication. Perhaps they are unused to doing their own walking — they certainly cling to their boats. But it was their own stubbornness that doomed them to make this trek alone. Some of his friends have grown quite fond of them, how quick they are to share, how loose they are with their laughter. He is tempted occasionally to stay in the city and attempt the cosmopolitan lifestyle. But the crowds are too wild, and the language slips far out of his grasp — he keeps his trips short and retreats back home. He’s not surprised that they forced themselves into this position. These men are bound to something more present and more demanding than any god. Had they waited for an answer from the Ventach, they could have gone with a blessing. Instead they crawl up the valley at the tail end of winter, weighed down with goods for an unfamiliar market. Toma would laugh, if he thought it was appropriate. Instead he follows the caravan along the mountainside, keeping his steps light when the path splits itself or wears away, entrusting the mountain with his balance enough to have some breath left for surveillance. It’s a dull task. Were he braver, he would try to get close enough to decipher the words they chatter amongst themselves, but it seems a naive risk to take. Nothing they could say would be important enough for him to reveal himself. Not now. Down in the valley, one of their animals stumbles and whines. The caravan halts as men and women rush toward the anguished creature. Toma sits on his haunches and settles in for a long wait.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[To the east of the steppe lie fishing villages on the sea. Long since parted from the herding life of their kin, they are all but forgotten by their children in the city. The Kelkaan live their lives by hawk hunting and the auroch. The fish that are sturdy enough to survive in the water are bony and lack nutrition, so the villages make them into stew with meat of wading birds and the stringy seaweed that lines the coast. Auroch are slaughtered for their hide and frozen, a practice considered barbaric by their brothers — as such, the few traders give the area a wide berth, and the city leaves the villages comfortably alone. A boy in winter clothes on a young auroch is the first vistor they recieve in well over a year. The village mother, an aging crone so old she seems moments from washing away, brings the boy stew and kefir, which he accepts gratefully, though he has to bite against the taste. He tells them that the child has been born. He stays over a week. The fisherman ask him to tell tales, and he does gladly: of the widening expanse of the city, of the foreign traders that have taken residence there, of the glimpse he was afforded of the swaddled child. The village rumbles with uncertainty. In a hut nearby, a woman begins to speak to her infant child before she sleeps. Stories from long ago, passed from her mother’s mother, that she hasn’t thought about since she was old enough to tiptoe across the cracking ice to sea. She waits to fish on the day the boy leaves, watches him trundle away on calf-back, and that night places her baby child between the slumbering forms of her husband and wife and follows him. Sansael walked the road south with her mother when she was eight. A fanatic, her mother had been — driven mad by the Colossus that followed ever behind her, hypnotized by the desire to summit it. They had walked the tundra until their faces were burnt blood-red by the wind and sun, and spent weeks eating gristle from the bones of old birds. Sansael remembers her mother delirious from dehydration in the days before she died, rambling about touching the sun. She has been a better mother than that, in the short time she had been afforded the pleasure. She had been dutiful. The baby cried, but she also slept and ate and smiled and played. Each child-noise she made was the most beautiful sound Sansael had heard, and her chest pounded as if she had borne the girl herself. But madness finds a way to manifest itself. Bugs crawled from Sansael’s bedclothes that would not die under her palm, and the ice-eels that gathered around her fishing line talked in tongues when her eyes were closed. She had spoken to the village mother, who gave her no comfort. It could be a blessing. In the hills to the far west, men were supposed to live who talked to the mountain. They interpreted its guidance, lived by its word, and in the ancient times they had given the steppe prophecy in exchange for meat and milk. The village mother said she could be their sister, but the blood of dead men seemed a sad explanation. So she built a home on land and spent her days out at sea, speaking with the fish and tracing the tracks of incorporeal beetles up and down her arms. Their natterings were mostly nonsense, but kept her company. At the end of her day she would tie up her haul, say goodbye to the whispering halibut and the gossipy mackerel, and return to her daughter and household. When the boy came from the city with news of the ancient family and their child, Sansael had watched in fascination as he spoke. A spider slowly crawled its way out of his mouth, tumbled off of his tongue, and drowned in the broth and auroch meat.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[On the first day, in the waning hours of twilight, Sansael shoots a suid and roasts it. The meat is impossibly rich, soaking her fingers in blooded juice. She feasts until she feels ill. The pig is much too big for her to finish, and for a while she sits by the fire, feeling hazy and sated, until chattering above her makes her start. The vultures float in lazy circles above the carcass. Sansael gathers her things and moves back to a safe distance, watches them devour. One lifts its gory head from the corpse, sinew dangling from its cheek, and looks at her. “Where did you come from?” it asks, in the candid manner of condors. Sansael shakes her head. “Eat your dinner.” The second day, Sansael meets a trader. His auroch pulls a cart loaded with glittering things that she doesn’t recognize and he greets her with excitement, clasps her hand. The products, he says, had been brought over the sea, and he got them for a steal — he pulls one out and lets her run her fingers over the engravings. A great jackal prowls across the rim, hunting soft-looking creatures with its body crouched long in the grass. If she spins it, the jackal feasts, and a man rises from the grass, cocks his bow. Truthfully, she tells the trader that it is beautiful. He invites her to join his fire. While they eat — dried meat the consistency of bark and a handful of root-nuts the trader said he picked up a night ago — the trader tells her about the foreign men. They came through the river basin and climbed up the side of the valley and settled in his city, he says, and he admires them. They outfit themselves in violent colors and fear nothing, not the hostility of this land or the unfamiliar people that live in it. Kelkaan have even begun to learn their tongue, so as to better trade. Sansael says, “Where did they come from?” The trader says he never asked. On the third day, Sansael finds an auroch calf dead, so fresh it hasn’t been found by the vultures yet. She kneels down next to it and presses her palm into the birth-fur, a blush expanding underneath her handprint as she draws it away. The baby is covered in a thin, crackling skin that falls away when she touches it. She follows the white traces to the rump of the calf, and there lies the afterbirth, blood- filled and scalded in the sun. Something whuffs behind her. Sansael turns to find the auroch mother, a female colossus, her horns arching towards the sky. “Were you sent for me?” Sansael asks. The auroch studies her. Then she turns and leaves Sansael with her dead child. A wind-storm comes down from the taiga on the fourth day. The air is bitter-cold, slitting into Sansael’s skin its icy path from the Colossus down the glaciers to the empty, spinning plains. On the steppe, there is nowhere to hide — she desperately misses her sturdy little hut as she pulls her furs over her head and crouches into a divot in the ground. The howling of the cyclone serves to muffle the approach of the jackal, far away from her dead river home. She sticks her snout into Sansael’s armpit and whuffs. She knows that the steppe hasn’t seen jackals since its creation, but she still lifts her arm and lets her slink into the small measure of protection, as a kindness. Five days and Sansael swears she should be almost to the city by now. It has been an age and a half since she was last there but surely the plains have never gone on this far, surely this much space has never separated the holy family from the sea? She worries that she has lost her way. The sun and stars are how she navigates, but perhaps she had misremembered, or misread. But the ground hasn’t gotten colder, so she hasn’t wandered south; the grass isn’t greener, so she’s not following the coast; she can’t see the mountains, so she hasn’t left the path and gone north. You can’t lose your way entirely in the lowlands. There is always something at the edge of it. So she continues to walk, for her own sake and for the sake of her child, who should not have been left without reason. Perhaps starvation and frostbite were meant to take her, a fool wandering the steppe like her mother. But the jackal trots ahead, every so often looking back to make sure that Sansael follows, so she doesn’t think so. Sansael spends the sixth day walking until her feet can’t carry her, lays to rest for a few short hours with the jackal prowling guard, and walks some more. Sansael arrives at the lip of the valley on the seventh day. She had heard stories but never seen it herself and the reality more massive than she ever imagined, as grand and awe-inspiring as the sight of the Colossus in the background had always been. The river at the bottom looks no wider than a string, and the bushes are the size of beetles — a man would look like an ant. The jackal rushing past her almost causes her to lose her balance, and she steps quickly back from the cliff face as the jackal skids towards the edge. It catches itself with its front paws and yips as loud as its tiny lungs can muster. The answering barks echo in the grand valley so masterfully that a pack of the dogs, missing their sister, sounds like an army. Sansael watches the jackal with fondness and surprise. What a blessing, that after all of her help she turned out to be real.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[Usually, Toma doesn’t dream. Not since he was a child, at least — he’s more likely to sleep short and hard and feel as if time has barely passed since he laid down. Somehow he expects it to be different on the mountain. He had expected the same with the Ventach, too, but that had been easy to separate: the dark, crowded tunnels of the Ventach; the warm hollow of Mecc’s home. He had been restless, but the sleep he had gotten had been black and deep. On the mountain he tosses and turns, and waits: for the council’s gift of prophecy to sneak over, perhaps, crawl its way into his head and make prescient colors bloom behind his eyes. As he drifts he envisions them as beetles, opalescent little things that he can reach toward but not touch. They scuttle in a swarm towards his exposed face, and as he instinctvely reaches up to cover it, he realizes that his arms have frozen into place. Paralyzed and moments from falling into blackness, he watches as the chirping chickadee flutters onto the floor and gobbles them up. He wakes the next morning from a dreamless sleep. He waits until Uncle leaves the hut the next morning, assuring him that he’ll be along, and holds out his finger for the bird to perch on. Obediently, it comes to him, singing in its nonsense tongue. Toma lets it hop along his hand for a moment and then catches the bird by its foot, holding it in place. “You ate something that was sent for me,” Toma says as the chickadee tries to fly, flapping its wings. The bird chirps wildly and flaps harder. He pinches the thin leg between his thumb and forefinger and says, “I need it back.” The bird shrieks in fear. Startled by the noise, Toma lets it go.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[That night he takes his leave too quickly, bidding farewell only to the crone and the young man, who insists on shaking his head. Shame rises like bile in his throat and makes him hurry past Uncle’s house, though he is breaking strict tradtion by not giving a farewell gift to his host. The sun is almost setting, and if he rushes he can make it past the frost-line, find someplace with thawed ground to sleep. In the dark, the events of the past days seem larger than life: that carved-out cavern, those strange and isolated chosen, their inexplicable dreams. He had seen nothing magical in the Ventach, but that collection of men and women — they existed too cleanly in their sorcerous state, their bodies too solid to be unreal. His own experience already felt like a dream. Past the frost-line, it is hard to remember that prophecy has always been a part of their world, that one day long ago his ancestors came down from the hills starving and told history to the plainsmen for a bite to eat. They have grown taller, since then. Their bodies have grown stronger. They have borne more children. Somewhere, in the unwritten space between those two existences, they stopped dreaming. Toma digs into the remnants of a badgers den, trapped beneath a bush and a pine tree, and covers himself in his furs. He gives himself a moment to thank the mountain for guiding him. The beetles are almost forgotten. To listen to the council, to do as he is told, when his assignment is to protect his people — that, he can do. He drifts to sleep, thinking he is done with it. When he wakes, his hands are on fire. The pain is so explicit, so savage that he almost throws up. Involuntarily, like the muscles have given up all control and are running singularly on instinct, he balls his fingers into fists and dashes them into the ground, cracking his knuckles on the ground and splitting the skin. He stares, sick and horrified, as blood seeps out into the dirt, as he moves against his own will to spread his hands and bury his fingers further in the frigid earth. Stones wedge themselves firmly and painfully underneath his nails. He can feel the cuts, the needle-sharp points. Toma lurches forward onto his knees, off-balance due to his pinned hands, and barely stops himself from breaking his elbows falling forward. He needs to see his hands, needs to know what is happening to him, but he can’t — the idea of relieving even a hint of the cool pressure on his skin makes him feel faint. He pants, staring at the pale expanse of his exposed wrists in the moonlight and frantically trying to remember what he could have done. There is nothing wrong with his hands. He realizes this, somewhere in the back of his mind. This is punishment. This is a test. It takes all the strength he has ever had to yank his left hand out of the ground and hold it up. It takes every inch of muscle, bone and blood in his body to not pass out, to splay his fingers on the destroyed ground in the path of the moonlight and look at the scratched, burning mess of his skin. There’s something underneath it. Bubbling under the surface, as blue and ugly a thing as he has ever seen, something is burrowing in him. Everywhere it crawls is fierce red. Toma tears his other hand out of the dirt and claws at it. His nails snap or split, he scratches with such force; the skin ruptures and spurts, gushing. The formless, opalescent thing is too quick, though — it darts over his knuckle, between his fingers, into his palm. Toma digs for it with his jagged nails and distantly registers the sound of his own screaming. His finger severs something, quick and bitterly wrenching. His hand snaps shut with the force of a vice and Toma sobs, falling onto his forearms as he tries to pry it open with his shaking, bloody hand. It takes three tries for his muscles to work precisely enough to wedge underneath his fingers. He pushes his fingers so far back they crack, and there, sitting in the raw open wound of the remnant of his palm, fluttering its blood-wet wings, is the beetle. With blacking vision and fading control of the muscle in his left hand, Toma picks out the insect and crushes it into shining goo and gore between his fingers. It tumbles out of his hand. Everything shivers around him. He fights for consciousness. He will later convince himself that he was dreaming, but as he tips forward into the dirt and blood and skin and viscera a jackal trots out of the forest, two kits following behind. The kits’ snouts are covered in gore. They watch Toma with beady eyes, teeth and tongue shining red, proud in their kill. The mother walks toward him. She carries a bird’s leg in her mouth. And there it ends. The morning is savage and bright. Toma wakes up dizzy from blood loss and tense and feverish from pain, unsure, for a moment if he is still alive or if the gross injury of his body has sent him over the edge into the dream of death. He lies on the ground aching and wounded and fearful and gasping and prays, prays for unconsciousness, prays for the blessing that would be blackness. No such luck. The sun rises with characteristic stubbornness and casts cheerful light on the massacre of Toma’s body. His eyes refuse to shut. His heart, his godawful ignorant determined heart, continues to beat. Every tremor and sensation in every metric inch of this carcass insists on reminding him with each labored breath that he is, in fact, alive. The nighttime horror cements itself as Toma watches his flayed hand twitch, throbbing between dull pain and numbness. In minute detail, in the pretty, spotted sunlight, he sees gored scratches and torn skin bubbling through with foul brown-red carnage, and thinks faintly, I did that, at the bidding of this mountain. It turned me into this. There is dirt in the wound, along with tiny stones that had been caught in his skin and, somewhere in the gore, probably the hangnails he snapped in his fervor. He’ll be lucky if he ever regains movement in the hand. An agonizing game ensues: Toma using his moderately-less destroyed hand to lever himself out of the dirt, and his shaking muscles refusing, sending him smashing back down. The struggle to get himself onto his knees lasts a full ten minutes, as every fall sends him gasping for breath, spots flying in front of his vision. He finally sits up and pulls his hand into his lap, the joints refusing to work any lower than the elbow. He stares dully at the coagulated blood, the shredded remnants of skin barely stretched over impossibly deep wounds. Forget regaining movement — he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t lose the hand. He’ll be lucky if the infection that has surely already seeped in doesn’t burn through his brain like dry grass and leave him dead or witless. He’ll be lucky if he ever makes it off this fucking mountain. With great effort, he lifts his head and surveys the clearing. He’s alone, at least. No one else should witness this. His furs are crumpled in the dirt and dust — he must have flung them. He leans as far as his stiff body will allow and tugs them towards him, digs out his water-skin with his working hand and drinks the whole thing, parched and trembling. The blood loss is still frightening, the beginning of a fever simmering in the back of his skull even more so, but with the water he regains enough stability — and stubbornness — to stagger to his feet and sway, desperately battling the urge to throw up or crumple back down. He leaves his furs on the ground. He’ll be cold without them, but if he kneels back down he’ll never get back up. One step forward lances a sickening bite through his bones, somehow traveling like a current enough to stab at his dead hand. Another jolts the wound against his side in sadistic glee. Like this, he moves forward: one foot at a time, biting his teeth against the pathetic remnants of his body, until he trips and almost stumbles against an unseen obstacle. Sitting there in pieces by his boots is the chickadee, torn in two. Feathers and flesh and brittle bird-bones spill onto the ground between the two halves, as if something had grasped it by both sides and pulled. The body is legless. Toma falls to his knees and sobs and screams and vomits, alone on the side of the mountain with that knowledge.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[Sansael speaks to the asos after a needle she uses for leather repair breaks in the middle of her correcting the sole of her boot. It’s a good excuse, an understandable reason for a woman who has had no contact with the traders thus far to inquire about more specialized goods. What’s more, it is a way for her to assauge her own fears that she is unprepared for the task at hand. A crone with a wicked glint in her eye has taken the de facto role of translator as the asos adjust to the new language, and she drags Sansael to a young merchant with a bony hand around her wrist, assuring her that this is where she could get what she needed. The boy works with wood, she says, or his mother does: his bags are full of thin, sharp needles made out of something stronger than pine or willow, though he also makes beautiful engraved boxes and carved knife-sheaths tucked under leather. The boy seems to know something is different about Sansael, recognizing her dissimilar outfit and the way the crone laughs at her words on occasion, but he keeps politely silent about it. When he speaks, he frames his sentences with a wide smile showing all his white teeth, and he waves his hands along with his words, giving Sansael a glimpse of how his hand-wrappings follow down his arm, around his elbow and, presumabely, go up. He seems uninterested in the beads Sansael brings but points at the scaled skin that she uses for water. Through the translator, he says: I’ll give you much more than a needle for that bauble. She doesn’t need sheaths or boxes or figurines of carved wood. He tells her to come back the next day and he’ll make her an offer. The crone whispers something to him, even though she knows Sansael wouldn’t understand anyway, and he nods, flashes his bright smile at Sansael again. That night she tacks her boots together with sap, a temporary hunter’s fix, and goes out to the fields with the jackal, who enjoys the sense of power when she yips at the auroch. She watches as the animals chase each other and considers, briefly, the wealth of her village if it were open to trade. Their fishskins are unique, their weavings larger and more artistic than others she’s seen. They have something to offer, without a doubt, and their scarcity would only drive up the price. But that is the greed talking, and Sansael shakes it away to watch the auroch graze. The next day the trader offers her a box of needles, a heavy pot and a thick, lined quilt for the dried scales of a salmon sewn to squirrel-skin.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[The commander of the halls on the hill is sixteen years old and bold as day. The darling child of the ancient family is a boy as tall as any man now, strong and brave, the jewel of his mother and father’s eye, who walks with a purposeful stride and lays claim to all within his dominion — the comfortable halls of his childhood, the gaping promise of the canyon beyond his back door. He has gained a reputation for being cheerful and kind with the few who know him, those servants who operate within the halls and the asos merchants who come through once a fortnight, offering the best cuts of the most recent caravan and sweet-talking the boy into consuming to his heart’s content. He fills his room with colorful trinkets, intricate carvings, pottery with legends painted onto its side and tapestries with history woven between the threads. He even buys books in scripts he doesn’t speak and leafs through the pages until they fray on the edges, tracing the lines and characters with a nail and imagining what lies inside. When he was younger, his parents hired a young asay to come sit at his bedside and read, both the world-reaching myths of their people and the repackaged stories of the Kelkaan, who dragged their favorite heroes through mountain and steppe in so many infinite ways that he could never hear the same story twice. Asok preferred the consistent predictability of the asos. They would come to him every other night and tell an identical fable down to the detail, his idols and saviours always familiar and easy to understand. As he grew, he wanted to create his own, and began to storytell to his perplexed mother, who entertained her son’s strange humors but didn’t pretend to understand the impulse of a young Kelkat boy to create. She attributed that to the influence of the asos, as she attributed his wide smile and strange height, thin but close to his father’s size already even though he would have years to grow. It was her responsibility to teach the boy to parlay, and he was so careful with his words that he barely needed any encouraging — the Kelkaan hadn’t entertained any threat since the mother of her mother’s mother, but she rested easy with the knowledge that even if their people would have cause to worry, Asok would be there to convince and sway, the most charming and honest of them all. His father, a genuine if lazy man, was responsible for teaching the boy to influence — a skill untrained and unnecessary among the Kelkaan, who had never utilized deception in their few recorded years or their many remembered ones. He forfeited those lessons in favor of the glamour and dressing of the boy, who in time became the most beautiful and outfitted of Kelkat men, glitter dripping from his hands and earlobes and neck as he gathered the wealth of the asos around him and dressed like some foreign king. They made an interesting picture: the Ruling Mother with her severe braids, her aging petite height, her necklaces of bone and leather; the Ruling Father with his head-covering, his bright and distracted eyes, his height incongrous to the the delicacy of his form; the son, tall and broad as an auroch, dark-complexioned and dripping with strange ornaments in such a manner that he looks a collection as much as a prince, smiling wide.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[Down in the city, the heir Hadoch takes a rare and uncomfortable break from her work to answer a worried and incessant knocking on her door. The king has taken his leave for the day, citing headaches, and left her to go through the most recent pile of missives alone. Technically she must not have them sorted and assessed for another week at least, but it grinds on her to leave work unfinished when she is still awake and able to concentrate, and as such her room is crowded and messy, half- melted candles on every stable surface and piles of papers surrounding her on all sides. What’s more, she has the slightest sense of nausea in the pit of her stomach and though she refuses to admit it, she knows what it signifies. She’s too young for it to be anything else. The missives stare up at her, ink-stained and dim brown in the candlelight. Some of the trade deals are interesting. She is especially proud of her translation ability, and enjoys when they recieve ships from Ods or Zamar, whose characters she has just recently learned to decipher. They are beginning to cycle out the native alphabet and replace it with the Achae polphanic letters, and she secretly mourns the transition, though she knows the replacement of power is healthy for the city and good for their sister-governments abroad. It had taken her such a long time to learn. The knocks stop for a moment. Hadoch hears a small huff behind the door. She listens for the telltale sound of footsteps walking away and hears nothing. It makes her smile. “Come in, sis,” she calls. She hears the creak of the door as it’s shoved open, the soft pad of feet on the stone. Her sister Laiju is full-blooded and stubborn, with all of her father’s single- mindedness and none of her mother’s charm. Just as Hadoch recieved dangerous focus and a tendency towards depression, Laiju recieved the bluntness of a bull with the character to match. She rarely smiles, for a nine-year-old, and has been pestering their father to sit in on meetings since she could get out the words. Their mother never let her, assuring Hādoch that she needed time to be a kid. As far as Hadoch can tell, Laiju never bothered. “Dad’s got the doctor with him,” Laiju tells her. “What’s going on?” Hadoch sighs and shoves her seat back, standing up and turning around to look at her sister. Laiju is dressed in her sleeping-clothes already, though she has a fur draped around her shoulders and her outdoor boots on underneath the linen. Her hair is pulled back into their royal twists, which Hadoch knows she never would have stood for if her mother hadn’t insisted on it. She stands with her hands holding the fur around her shoulders, glaring. “Don’t look so foul,” Hadoch says. She gestures to her desk chair so Laiju can sit at the table, which Hadoch knows she likes, and falls down on the bed she takes on nights when she’s not with Himen. The blankets call to her. She suddenly feels very tired. “Father is resting. He’s been reading a lot, and you know that makes his head hurt.” Laiju purses her lips. “Why does reading make his head hurt?” “His eyes aren’t good.” “Why aren’t his eyes good? Dayem is just as old as he is and he doesn’t have bad eyes.” “You know I don’t know the answers to these things,” Hadoch says patiently. “We all grow and age differently.” “That’s why you’re tall and I’m small,” Laiju says. “I know. What are these?” She pulls a missive off the table and scrunches up her eyes at the text. The characters must look like pictures to her. They had to Hadoch, too, until she’d put the time and effort into learning them. Laiju was far away from being patient enough for that. “They’re from our cities across the river,” Hadoch says. “I know that,” Laiju says. “But what are they saying? Will we have to go back?” Laiju was born a year and a half after the Ahchos first arrived on the unexplored continent, and she is mystified by the idea that there is a world all the way over there that she cannot see. “No, we won’t,” Hadoch tells her. “Do you remember why we would have to go back?” This is Hadoch’s pet project, a small experiment that would incur the wrath of their mother if she ever found out, but Hadoch doesn’t have a child yet and Laiju should know how this works. In four years she would be let in anyway — it never hurts to have a head start. She wonders if Laiju will connect the dots when she begins showing, start asking questions about the propriety of these lessons. Perhaps the duties of motherhood will make her less keen to throw around the responsibility of leadership. She briefly envisions a future where her child is held by its aunt, both content with their lot, too young to worry about what’s across the water, and then discards the image. Laiju draws her feet up underneath her in the seat. Their mother has theorized that it makes her feel taller. She says, “If trade was blocked. If the continent stops being profitable. If we are met with significant resistance.” It sounds recited, like Laiju had read it in a book, but Hadoch knows that she had just latched on to the way she said it the first time and repeated it over and over to herself, like a well-told story. She catches phrases and words like that, too, her voice pronouncing them with the cadence and tone of whoever she took it from. “So explain that to me,” Hadoch says. She leans up and grabs one of her pillows, dragging it under her head, and looks at Laiju. Her eyebrows are slightly furrowed, like she doesn’t understand the question, but Hadoch will wait for her to ask. Laiju takes a breath as if to start talking, then abruptly stops. She starts again. “If trade was blocked. If we can’t reach the other cities or they can’t reach us. If the ships stop coming.” “What could cause that?” “Um.” Laiju bites at the inside of her cheek. “Storm.” “Good. What else?” “The whales?” “Yes, but we plan for that.” “If something went wrong with the whales.” The sentence strikes Hadoch with a deep sense of foreboding, like nightmares she would have as a child when she could see the migration through her bedroom window. She pushes it away. She has no reason to cross the sea now. “That’s true. What else?” Laiju closes her eyes, thinking. Her fingers are laced against her calves, holding her legs to her chest. “If something happened to the other cities.” Hadoch nods. “Good. What would we do, if that were the case?” Laiju’s eyes fly open. “You didn’t tell me that.” “I know,” Hadoch tells her. “I want you to guess.” “Guessing is stupid,” Laiju says. “Just tell me and I’ll remember.” “I want your advice. If we went a year without hearing from Ods, what would you tell Father and I to do?” Laiju frowns. “I don’t know.” “Come on. Think.” Laiju waves her hand vaguely, drops it back to clasp at her other hand again. “Send someone to find out.” “And if they didn’t also come back?” “I don’t know,” Laiju says crossly. “I barely know where that place is.” Hadoch exhales. “Okay, sis. That’s fine. We would wait until the end of a migration and send a fleet across the coasts to drop ships.” “I don’t know what means,” Laiju says. “What is that?” “Can you find me a map over there?” Laiju turns to the messy desk, the piles of paper stacked in every corner of it. She rifles through the manifestos, then a pack of old shipping inventories, then a short pile of letters from family across the river. She looks at Hadoch with an implicit question for help, who shrugs. Finally, Laiju finds it, folded in the desk drawer between unfiled feathers and a short pen-box given to Hadoch as a wedding gift. She spreads it out in front of her, holding her arms parallel to the ground. It’s much bigger than her. “Bring it here,” Hadoch says. Laiju comes obediently, sitting on the side of the bed next to Hadoch so she doesn’t have to sit up. Hadoch says, “Can you read the city names?” “Ods,” Laiju says, pointing. “Anadiast. Diias. Sachr-Diast. Zadar. Sachr-Nast.” “And which do we come from?” “Diias,” Laiju says. “Before we first built ships.” “So if something goes wrong we will go there again. Do you see this sea at the bottom?” “That’s the river,” Laiju corrects her. “We’re below that. We don’t have maps because we don’t have cartographers.” “Hmm, almost,” Hadoch says. “We have cartographers, but they aren’t explorers. Father and I are working on this.” “Doesn’t the Lent have maps? Can’t we use theirs?” Hadoch smiles slowly. “No, sis, I don’t think they have maps, at least not like ours. If they did, I’m not sure they would give them to us.” She doesn’t quite know how to explain to a girl who has only known the calm, unoffensive existence on the new continent just how grand and challenging and torrid it had been across the sea, just how much they had had to worry and watch just to stay alive. They had been blessed and natural expansionists, and talented seamen, but even so — There had been enough blood in their recent history for her to grow up with a healthy regard for what their civilization entailed. Laiju, because of her removal, looked like she would have to gain those attributes secondhand. Thankfully, Laiju nods and seems to take this in stride. She has met a few of the Lent, those mountain men who come down every so often to drink and trade. None of them speak their tongue, so they had never talked, but she had stared with fascinated intensity at their heavy fur garments and their long hair, heavy beards, not trimmed or decorated like the Achae men were wont to do. She had never met any of the Cach, who, as far as Hadoch can tell, never left their plains or descended into the grand valley. Hadoch herself had only seen them when she had made the trip up to their city, first to establish their parternship and a few times subsequent to check on their operation. Laiju says, “What is dropping ships?” Thankful for the interruption, Hadoch says, “It’s an old navigation tactic. You take a fleet of small longboats across the coast, perhaps twenty or twenty-five, and calcuate how far you are from your destination so you know how often you’ll need to drop. Then you sail near the coast, keeping in sight of the continent, and leave a ship anchored with its crew at every certain distance. If you are having trouble making it to a place, this gives you reassurance, and assures a quick message chain if anything happens.” “Hm,” Laiju says. “How would you do that back home? We don’t have a coast to follow.” Hadoch raises her hand to her lips, as if asking her to keep a secret. Laiju narrows her eyes. “Huh?” “You see this?” Hadoch points at the bottom right corner of the map. A peninsula peters off into a half-hearted island chain, the smallest of which is only half-drawn. “Our father and I have an idea.” Laiju doesn’t say anything, but her eyes widen, and Hadoch relishes for a moment the honesty and rarity of her excitement. “We haven’t been to the east of this continent. You know that. But these islands,” she points again, ”disappear into the sea. We know there are settlements there, but they’re swampy and infested, and as the whales swim past them every year we’ve never felt the need to reach out to them.” “Yeah?” Laiju says. “I have a theory,” Hadoch says, “And Father has a theory. We think those islands come down and touch this continent, and they could be followed like a coast.” Laiju gapes, then wrinkles her nose. “All those islands and we don’t know about them?” Hadoch smiles. “That’s what I thought. But we know islands have sunk before, remember? They’re in Diias bay.” The bay outside their capital city is vast, three or four times the size of the bay where their city on this continent is built, and frighteningly deep but also a strange, clear blue. In certain places you can see sunken ships lying in wrecks at the bottom, and in others you can follow the coral for miles as it twists and turns and blooms. There are islands around the edge of it, some developed with cities, some long extended ports, others inhabited or forested over and populated with hissing jungle animals. There are others that can be seen at low tide, barely cresting over the edge of the youngest waves. Still more lay below the water and never surface. They had been sunken long before the Ahchos’ time. “So there are sunken islands,” Laiju says slowly. “And we can follow them on boats if we need to get home.” “It’s an idea,” Hadoch says. “But it’s only an idea. You’ll have to be watchful and come up with your own ideas one day.” Laiju presses her lips together. She seems pensive. After a moment, she asks, “What if I’m wrong? When I have to come up with an idea?” Hadoch presses a hand against the small of her back comfortingly. Laiju twists her head to the side as if to look at her but reconsiders at the last second, turns back around. She looks at her hands in her lap. “You’ll figure that out when you get to it,” Hadoch tells her. “But I don’t think you’ll be wrong.” Laiju exhales and closes her eyes.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[The general is net-fishing in a stream for his week’s dinner when the messenger arrives, briefly out of breath from the steep descent down the trail near him. Her approach frightens him, and he stills in his fishing and sits silent until she makes herself known around the tree next to him and raises her hand in greeting. “Good morning, Tacha,” she says, though it is closer to midday or afternoon. He raises his hand in acknowledgement and takes up his net again, unhooking it from the rock where it had briefly gotten caught. “I just came from the mountain council.” The general raises his head. “Why were you there?” She takes a seat gingerly on one of the rocks near him, careful not to sit on a sharp edge or slip in the stream, and begins to remove her boots, shaking out gravel and dust. “You sent me to the frost-lines by the ocean, and they recently sent a new prophet to the mountain. Did you know one of our councilors died?” The general shakes his head, though he isn’t surprised. Some of them had been ancient things. He hopes it was the bitter old blind man. “You went to meet him?” “Her,” she corrects. “Yes. They said she may be a voice in our favor.” The bay border had always been more receptive to his message. They were both the most communicative with the mariners and the most wary of their wealth and openness. Some of their settlements sat uncomfortably close to the mining operation, and others had complained of logging in their area, though some had successfully established boundaries near their hunting grounds. “And?” A minnow speeds defiantly past his net. A trout chasing it gets tangled, and the general hauls it out, holding the net with one hand just above the surface of the water. The fish flaps violently for a minute, then goes limp as its gills catch up with the aggressive abundance of air. He drops it onto the stripped skin at his side and tosses the leather hook on the edge of the net back into the water. It catches on a filed protrusion of rock and settles, the net spanning the stream again. The messenger says, “She is eager and willing, Tacha.” The general looks up. Eagerness — now that is a surprise, in the Ventach. “Her daughters spend time in the city,” she says. “One brings house-gifts when she visits her mother, so she is not the problem. The other has lapsed into their drink.” “So?” the general says, and he turns back to his fishing. “So she opposes the influence of these men on her daughter, and wants to fight it.” A weed drifts by and gets tangled. The general shakes his end of the net until it slips out and floats away. “We have drunks in the Ventach. That is not a punishable offense.” The messenger huffs. “We have very few drunks in the Ventach. There are more lost to drink in their city than in all of our mountains.” The general raises his head and looks at her. She blinks under his gaze, looks down. After a moment, the general says, “She is a prophet now. Has she dreamed of anything that can help us?” The messenger shakes her head. “No, not that she said.” The bottom edge of the net hooks itself onto a rock. The general tugs it away with a bit more force than necessary. “Our prophets are useless,” he says. “I have told you this before. Until she sees something that can guide us, I have no reason to believe she is any more than a paranoid mother.” The messenger doesn’t respond. Then, she asks quietly, “Can I speak frankly?” The general waves a hand. Go ahead. “I don’t understand the criteria you have given us. Very few in the Ventach dream. We would be more successful if we looked for women like her.” A carp comes swimming down the river, nibbling at weeds as it goes. “Tell me what you saw,” the general asks. “Then think about the direction you gave us. Then think of the use of women like her.” The messenger bites her lip, presses at the calluses on her bare foot. She looks up. “There are not enough of me for an army.” “We’re not an army yet,” the general says. The carp catches in the net. He pulls it above the water and waits for it to die.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[Even such a long time later, the chickadee’s death is still wild and bright in Toma’s memory. He never regained full use of his hand, though the fingers can bend most of the way, and the scars are drawn transparent white and ugly across the whole palm, through his first and middle fingers, spanning the back of his hand. He never left the vision behind him, but he never left behind the conviction that the bird’s death, that torn destroyed little corpse, hadn’t been part of the sight. It was one of the few things he could grasp onto, the clear demarcation between what the Colossus had been telling him and how the world that he could operate in, create and plan and plot in, responded. As the chickadee twitters around his home, investigating what little personal effects he keeps, he slowly disassembles the grand protections he had built around this life to let in one more possibility. “Are you a sign?” he asks dully. His voice sounds useless in such a tiny room. He can’t remember the last time there had been anyone in it to speak to. The chickadee perches on top of the hanging knife and chirps. “You are an inconvenience,” Toma tells it. “I have work to do.” It hops in place, then launches into the air, floats for a moment, and darts out the door. Toma follows it with his eyes, not daring to hope that it would leave. There are a great many places in the mountains for a little bird to go, but if it wanted to go anywhere else, it would already have been there. He should have listened to the messenger. He guesses this means that Uncle is dead, the last witness to his lie and his wickedness dead, unable to betray him to that crone and her sharp eyes and her beckoning hands. The chickadee flies back through the door, a stem full of ripe, bulging berries in its mouth. Not the last witness, Toma corrects himself. The bird flutters down onto the floor in front of him. It seems fearful to come too close, but hops as near as it dares before dropping the stem of berries and fluttering off, coming back to perch on the swinging knife. He reaches out and picks up the offering. They are dark, so blue that they’re almost black, with juice and condensation dripping off the delicate skin. He knows these, berries with the richest and brightest flavor to be found in the mountains. If they grow on bushes they are delectable, but if they grow on vines too many can poison a grown man. “I don’t want your gift,” Toma says to the bird. “You are not welcome here.” It doesn’t respond. He walks to the doorway and throws the berries as far out as he can. The chickadee chirps indignantly. At his dull look, it coos low and swoops out, follows them. He looks down at his hand, where the slick berry juice stains his palm dark purple, fading into violet on the edges, fading into red. He makes a fist and watches the liquid bubble out.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[Sansael sees Kyna off the next night as the tent-city buzzes with excitement as their caravan leaves. Their pack animals are loaded with months worth of trade, but they still have a trailing line of ten or twenty of the creatures, which Sansael assumes are being brought back to be stabled during the temporary stall of trade. Kyna is lightly outfitted with just a pack for traveling, though it is filled with a blanket and food to keep her fed during the journey, as well as a few small crafts for her to trade once she arrives. She has two water-skins slung across her shoulder, and her clothing is grayer than their normal dress, a weak attempt at a Lentak disguise. With reluctance, she unwove her hair-covering and gave it to Sansael, who cradles it like a sign of luck. Esm is there to say goodbye, but no one else so much as knows about their plan. Esm doesn’t cry, to Sansael’s great surprise, instead smiling widely and sending Kyna off with a kiss. She can’t hear what they whisper to each other, but somehow what she already knew still surprises her: Esm has great optimism for the trip and believes she is doing the right thing. Sansael bites away the doubt and extends her hand to Kyna as she turns to her. “Thank you,” she says, trying to make her sincere appreciation come through in her voice. The look Kyna gives her is curious. “You’re still worried,” she says. She raises her eyebrows at Sansael like this is something she should be over by now, like the phenomenon of doubt can be grown out of like old clothes. “I don’t understand the faith you have in me,” Sansael confesses, as quiet as she can be. Her subtlety is unsuccessful; Esm strides over, arms crossed. Kyna tilts a head towards Esm and nods pointedly. “I think Esm and I are on the same page here. You’ve never led us astray before.” “I’ve never done something like this before,” Sansael says. She lifts her chin. “I’m not doubting. I believe this is the right thing to do. But you are my friend, Kyna. I fear like the rest of us.” “I’m not afraid,” Esm says, her head held high. She’s such a broad thing now, but she’s still lanky and awkward and young, in Sansael’s mind. “I’m a bit afraid,” Kyna says, with a look at Esm. “But so are we all. We can’t fight fear by sitting in circles in the night forever.” Sansael bows her head. This weakness of theirs must be addressed. She did not walk all the way across the steppe to become redundant. “Sansael,” Kyna says, until she looks up. “Mother.” The affectation makes Sansael shift uneasily. She’s heard it before from younger members of her network, but from a friend, an equal— “We follow you because we trust you,” Kyna says. “At least let that settle you.” She leans forward and embraces Sansael, and Sansael lets herself cling to her for a brief few moments before they break apart. Kyna smiles at her, then smiles at Esm, and then turns and disappears into the shadows of the streets, to wait for the caravan to get far enough ahead for her to follow it down the valley-side. Esm reaches out and takes Sansael’s hand. Sansael watches the bright, glittering children of spiders unearth themselves from the ground and scuttle after Kyna’s feet.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[The jackal wakes Sansael viciously, biting her sleeve and tugging until she is almost dragged out of bed, and Sansael pulls backward instinctively, fighting against whatever thing is touching her without invitation. She pushes the hair out of her eyes and struggles up onto her knees on the bed and looks down at the jackal, whose teeth are bared, staring up defiantly at her. “What’s gotten into you?” Sansael says, unbelieving. “What’s happened?” The jackal yips and runs over to her nest. Her kits are too big to fit in it together anymore, and so they sprawl on the tugged-open folds of the bedding, watching their mother with wary eyes. The jackal darts into the main cave of fabric, and Sansael follows her, sticking her head underneath the shelf to see as much as she can in the moonlight. Inside is one of the kits, a small yellow thing, looking up at her mother balefully. The jackal barks at Sansael again and nudges her kit with her nose, making her intent clear. “Hey, baby,” Sansael says softly. “What’s wrong?” She reaches in and touches the kit gently, feeling across the small chest for any swelling or scars. The kit’s head looks fine, and it doesn’t whine or whimper until Sansael touches its front paw, when it squeals and flinches, tugging away. The jackal growls warningly. “I have to bring it into the light,” Sansael tells the jackal sternly, but she pulls herself out from the shelf first and pulls a few candles down around the cushion on the floor, shooing one of the kits off of it. After the candles are lit she bends back down into the nest and — carefully, so as not to agitate the mother — pulls out the kit, doing her best not to nudge the hurt paw. The kit whines a bit but is mostly silent. The jackal trails Sansael to the cushion, keeping a watchful eye on the way she handles her daughter. Sansael places the kit in her lap carefully, laying it on its back so she can look at the paw, and it wriggles a bit, unused to the positioning, but the jackal comes to sit in front of her and licks it on the head comfortingly. The light is still too dim for Sansael to see the paw all that well, but she expects to find a cut or a splinter, so at first she can’t even tell what she’s seeing. There’s no blood and nothing poking out, though she feels carefully between the pads of the feet for gravel that may have gotten caught. The fur isn’t matted, and there’s no tear that she can see. But there’s a strange smell coming from the paw all the same, not the oxidized copper of blood or the mossy scent of the stagnant water outside. When Sansael draws her fingers past the pad of the paw and towards the dew-claw, the jackal kit shrieks so loudly she draws back, and the jackal barks. In the soft skin under the jut of the largest pad, right below the curve of the dew-claw, a raised welt is purple-red underneath the white fur, a small white dot center at the one point of it that protrudes past the hair. “It’s a spider bite,” Sansael says blankly. She looks at the jackal, which bares its teeth at her. “I don’t know what I can do,” Sansael mumbles, but she lifts the kit off her lap gently and settles it on the floor next to the jackal, then gets up to find her sewing-pouch. She settles back down with a sharp needle and a few scraps of fabric, along with her water-skin, and pulls the kit back in front of her. It whines, batting its feet inefficently, but the mother has trained it well and it lets itself be dragged. When she lifts its foot and pulls the pad of the paw away from the claw, it starts breathing heavily, its small chest expanding and contracting with every gulp of air. The jackal watches intently. With her steady right hand, Sansael takes up her sewing needle. Spider bites don’t leave pus or swell normally, but she doesn’t know what manner of thing would touch her jackal and can’t think of what else she should do. She spreads her left hand out across the kit’s chest to hold it in place. As careful as she can, she presses the needle to the welt and punctures the skin. The kit yowls loudly and struggles, the paw escaping her grip and smacking against the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sansael says to it, pulling the paw back up to inspect the damage. The welt bleeds sluggishly, the blood pooling in the curve at the base of the dew- claw. She whispers another brief apology to the kit and squeezes it between her fingers as the baby whines, hoping to see pus or a humor escape it. It bleeds insistently and refuses to give anything up. The jackal begins to growl, a low sound that Sansael has only heard a handful of times over the years it lived with her. “I’m doing the best I can,” she tells it. Bug bites aren’t normally so persistent or so painful. She doesn’t know what other options she has, other than to bandage the wound and pray. A brief image flashes into her mind of white-mouthed water snakes, sliding under the ice where she would fish, scaring away the cowardly trout. There is only one puncture wound, no intravenous swelling. The kit’s veins have not turned indigo. Sansael bends forward and locks her lips around the dew-claw and the skin beneath it, instinctively shutting her eyes at the dirty, rough taste of fur. She tries not to think about what she is doing or what could be lingering in that wound, how often those bites become two corpses because their rescuer didn’t spit out the venom fast enough. At first she just tastes coppery blood along with the mud and grime of the kit’s paw, but then a bead of something with a thicker texture touches her tongue and she recoils involuntarily, doubling over and spitting on the ground beside her until her whole mouth goes dry. She can’t see what she spit out in the candle-light. The other kits, awake now, circle around the small stain until she spits again and shoos them away, wildly and unjustifiably frightened of what it could do to them. The kit in her lap whines. She takes the water-skin from the ground next to her and swishes a swallow around in her mouth before spitting again, doing it again and again on the dirt floor of her hut before she feels like she can taste her tongue again. She picks up a strip of fabric and ties it tightly around the paw of the kit, trying not to tremble. The jackal mother watches all this with a cocked head, and now she stares at the stain from a distance, not leaving her post next to her kit’s side to go investigate but keeping an eye on it. Sansael carefully lays the kit down next to her and picks up a candle, getting up her knees so she can look at it closer. She sees the dark brown of blood on dirt, and the smeared transluscence of spit. Whatever came out of the welt is barely visible, miniscule and caught underneath the grass, dyed crimson red. About the the size of the eye of a cord-needle, it could be a seed, or a bead, or an egg. Sansael presses the back of her hand against her mouth. She tilts the candle on its side and lets the wax drip out over the stain, spreading and coagulating and hardening. Then she digs her fingers into the ground beneath it and tears up the whole thing, dirt and grass and roots and blood and wax, and walks out the door. She walks out of her hut and through the streets, farther west than she ever goes, letting her feet carry her thoughtlessly regardless of time or outfit or temperature. They bring her, finally, to the breakaway houses at the edge of the city, a few goats from the Lentak grazing aimlessly. Her feet take her closer to the cliff than any woman in her right mind would go. She gazes at the impossible expanse of the valley, the heady fall down. If she looks to the north, she can see the miniscule lights of a caravan train, camping the night before they will cross through the gap that takes them out of sight. She throws the clump of earth into the valley as far as it can go and turns, already walking away before it has a chance to hit the bottom.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[The camp Toma sets up by the lake shore is merely more than a tent hung down from a tree branch, a makeshift firepit, and the injured goral tied to the tree-trunk. He empties the contents of his pack underneath the canvas and accounts for them: quiver of twenty-two arrows, freshly-strung bow, two knives, a short-sword, a pack of jerkey, a fishing string and hook, a hide to sleep on, a blanket-shawl for the cold, two flints, two spark-stones, an empty water-skin, a thin roll of fabric for bandages, a small pouch of medicinal herbs that are surely dried beyond their usefulness. He scoffs at his own ill-preparation and ties the tent together lest the goral go searching for food, bringing the fishing string with him. As he sits and waits for the snappers to make their presence known, the first recruits come down from the mountain. It’s the messenger he stopped on the trail, and following him are twenty or thirty men and women of all ages, dressed in hiking gear, carrying hunting bows, knives strapped to their legs and packs full of walking-food. They set up their camp around Toma’s, fanning out in every direction like the sunset. When the others come they join them: thirty growing to sixty growing to a hundred by the time night falls, volunteers from every corner of the lesser Ventach, come because Toma made a decision and called. His messengers find him at the lake shore and sit on their heels, talking avidly of the reception they’ve gotten, of the eagerness they saw once all these men and women were brought together. The effort is not over by the end of that first night. There are dozens of messengers unaccounted for, many still gathering their own collections or making their way in unprecented crowds across the mountains, but the result still makes Toma hold his breath. Under the blanket of night, he knows their campfires can be seen for miles. When he calls, they gather: a group bigger than he has ever seen sitting cross- legged in the space between tents by the tree, looking at him with curious eyes. None of them have met him before. All of them seem interested to see what he’ll do. His three messengers stand side by side by the tree and watch as he unhooks the injured goral from the tree, tugging it in front of him. He slits its throat swiftly. Blood sputters through his fingers as he pulls the animal’s head back, exposing the wound. It bucks jerkily for a minute, then stops fighting. It feels uncomfortably intimate, to have so many people watching him as he skins and guts the goral. He has done the same routine a million times over but feels like he’s a child again, his father watching, making sure that he doesn’t slit the stomach and ruin the meat. It’s his father’s hands that he imagines snapping the bones in the place where his knife won’t do the job, his father whose fingers he thinks of, nimbly separating skin from flesh and flesh from intestine and marrow. Bare limbs accumulate next to him, along with skull and guts and stomach and skin, hooves, patches of fur. He separates the ribcage in two clean cuts and dumps it in the pile. The heart and the lungs are good and healthy — he puts them on a hide next to him, careful not to handle them too roughly. He hands the skin to one of his messengers, and the other two spring in to action, leaning up into the tree above them and snapping off branches to create a frame. He slits what is left of the goral into four tough, lean steaks and lays them onto the raised greenwood cage of his fire. The Ventach in the crowd watch him, waititng. Toma stands up, wiping his hands on his thighs. He speaks louder than he thinks he ever has in his life. “I apologize for my unimaginative guest-gift. Had I known there were so many of you, I would have brought the herd.” A moment for the words to carry, and then the Ventach begin to laugh.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[“Where are you from?” Mecc asks the painter, swinging his legs as he sits on the window ledge. The painter says, “You don’t know it.” His name is a long collection of vowels that Mecc cannot pronounce so he lets Mecc call him Sang, an abbreviation, which is easier. Mecc says, “Are you asos? You don’t look like them.” Sang has heavy piercings through his nose and lip that glint when he shakes his head. His clothes drape, and the furs he wears over them look ill-fitted. “Of course I am,” Sang says. “Why else would I be here?” The language isn’t coming quickly. Mecc has never had to relearn how to speak before. He looks for the words before saying, “My people look the same. The lowlands look the same. Why are you different?” Sang says, “Many of us are different.” He pulls the bottle that he’s painting closer to him with his feet and leans close for the detail. “You don’t need to be the same to be achae.” It’s too foreign for Mecc to understand, but he doesn’t push it. He narrows his eyes at the bottle. “And what is that for?” Sang looks up at him. There is a fleck of white paint on his cheek. Satisfied that Mecc has no ulterior motive, he returns to his work. “For a tincture.” “I don’t know that word.” “Hm.” Sang says, “Herbs and alcohol and water. Plants,” he clarifies. “To clean you when you are hurt.” “Ah.” Mecc is used to making them on the spot, becuase they rot if they are left out long. “You keep them in there?” “I don’t,” Sang says. “Our healers do.” “All of these are for them?” Mecc guestures at Sang’s wall of work, the delicate transparent instruments he has been painting for days now. “For—” he tries the word “— tinctures?” Sang smiles at him. “A few. Others are for dried plants, or paste from water. For the healers.” The patterns he paints are intricate and colorful, surrounding words in a script Mecc can’t read. They seem to be a great deal of fanfare for a simple purpose, but he doesn’t say it. “Where did you learn it?” he asks instead. “No more questions until I’ve finished this bottle,” Sang says. Mecc settles back to watch.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[Three months until the whale migration, Mecc counts. He doesn’t ask Sang for confirmation. The looming event has grown a tension between them, Mecc’s reassurance in that regard only being the fact that they had split during the last season as well, and once the whales had passed and trade began again it was as if nothing had happened. He trusts in the strangeness of the cycles to make sure this also passes. So he gathers a few things, not enough to give Sang the wrong impression but enough to survive, and hikes out of the city at sunset. The Ventach yawn up above him, his home on the right, its younger sister on the left. It almost overwhelms him, as he walks towards them. He hasn’t been out this far in years. It aches, how he could have forgotten it. He spends that night in the valley, reveling in the scent and texture of the wilderness. It all feels so fresh, after the city. The birds sing him to sleep, and he hears jackals in the brush near him, settling down alongside. It’s an overdue vacation, he decides the next day, watching the sun come up over the distant city. He loves it there, but it’s not where he was born. The Ventach call. He picks up his things and heads to the south. He’ll see everyone in time, but family comes first. His bow has atrophied from ignorance in the years since he left. His first task is to repair it — not the woven gut-string, which is still pleasantly tough from good tanning, but the wood of the arch which grew brittle in the heat. He finds a yew at the border of the valley and cuts off a young branch, still green, which won’t hold up for significant wear but will bend better and quicker for the few weeks that he needs it. When he reaches home he’ll have Cay find him some decent wood and he can go through the relaxing, forgotten process of bending his own bow. The branch twists easily to the tough cord. Mecc barely has to reinforce the notches. He slings it across his back where it clanks against his dusty quiver of arrows, then fishes it back out, pulls an arrow and notches it experimentally. It’s a bit shorter draw than he is used to, his arm not extending quite fully, but it’ll work. He lets the arrow fly. The arrow snaps with surefire precision into the stump of the branch he cut. Mecc smiles. He’ll figure this out after all.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[Mecc takes his time climbing the mountains. The city made him soft, he realizes — his legs tire quickly and he has trouble breathing in step with his feet, having to stop more often than he used to to catch his breath and more than once having to split from the trail in search of a stream of water. He knows that he has gotten older, that his muscles don’t work quite as smootly as they once did, but on the trails up he notices for the first time the soft fat lining his belly that had never been there before, a strange mark of sedation that will inevitably distinguish him from his brothers once he sees them again. He tries to imagine what they look like by now. Cay has certainly gone grey, and maybe he has grown big-bellied too with that leg holding him back. He’s sure Dami has grown into his ears, and probably his poky shoulderblades too. There’s no way his impressive adolescence could have lasted this long, though it had already significantly overstayed its welcome when he left. The feelings that going back evokes in him are unexpectedly strong. When he breaks from the main upward path to the smaller goat-trail leading west the familiarity hits him with sudden elation, like he had been reunited with something sorely missed even though he had barely thought about the Ventach in the city. He remembers summiting these peaks with Cay when he was a child. They took such joy in reaching the top, although these mountains are small and easily navigable compared to the monsters near the Colossus. They would wander off of the paths and catch gorals with their small arms, hugging the squealing animals to them tightly before letting them go and watching them dash up unscaleable rock faces. Dami would get lost in these woods often as a child. After their parents died it made Cay furious — he had always been a worrier. But Dami would come back a day later with handfuls of berries and flowers, or later with a string full of fat squirrels perfect for soup, and Cay would forgive him. Mecc had been a bit more sedate, but when he was running messages for the Ventach he understood why Dami was so entranced by them. They had a beautiful life in a beautiful place. If he turns around and cranes his neck, he can just see the gray dot of the asos mining-spread across the bayside of the smaller Ventach. That place is beautiful, too. He makes it to his home a few nights later, only because the altitude has made his pace even slower and he knows better than to rush himself. The first sign he has that something is wrong is that there are children playing outside it, a girl and a boy, no older than five. They raise their hands in greeting as he approaches. The girl smiles widely and the boy calls out a name. A man comes to the door — not one of Mecc’s brothers, not anyone he knows. He looks at Mecc curiously, though not with ill-intent. He lifts his hand as Mecc approaches, stopping him from coming any closer to his children, and says, “Are you lost?” Mecc laughs hoarsely. “No, I’m not. Do you know men named Cay or Dami? They used to live here.” “Don’t know a Dami,” the man says. “Cay... one leg, right? He went to the Ventach after his brothers died.” “After his brothers died,” Mecc says numbly. The man nods slowly. “Yeah. He went and devoted himself.” Mecc steps back, unthinking. He leaves the children and the man alone in his home and turns back to the trail.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[In the port city in the river basin, a ship appears. This one is grander than its sisters in the bay. It arcs up into the sky, spanned by canvas, hung with rope. The lip hangs too high over the water for oars to have any effect, and the crew hangs their weight on the lengths of cord to bring it into submission. On the shore, some gasp. Others laugh. The third group, the cultured and the displaced, close their eyes in recognition. The ship is anchored in the bay, a novel technique new to many. Its crewmembers spill out in rowboats, eager for solid land and something to drink. Her greathold is laden with gifts from across the sea. Her decks hold artisans and architects, painters and draftsmen, composers and choreographers and playwrights. They approach the city with trepidation and wonder, exhausted from the long journey. Their exhaustion is well-earned, the whispers say, once those onboard have filtered onshore. The shipment was rushed, the passengers hungry and the crew overworked. But they made it on time, the men say, relief heavy in their voices. We thought we wouldn’t make it past it. At that moment, the Ventach gather at the northern coast, as high up on the mountains as they can go. The Kelkaan that tread the edge of the cloud forest climb trees, seeking a vantage point, and their brothers in the marshes wade through the thick mud far enough to see the water. They begin as slight silver darts just barely breaching the waves, and then suddenly you can see them — thousands upon thousands of whales, swimming together away from the sun. The new buildings are workshops, crammed with men and women from over the sea who make all manner of beautiful things. There are weavers, blacksmiths, jewlers, engravers, sculptors, so many that Mecc can barely count them, and there are artisans who he has no name for, too, who take plant fiber and stretch it into fine thread, or who singe the green pine-wood until it writhes up into shapes, or who put bubbles of burning element to their mouths and blow hollow, transparent forms. Many of them speak in that foreign tongue, but there are a few who, he can tell, lose the words just like he does. One of them, a metalworker with broad shoulders and broader hands, has clinking beads laced through her hair. Another is shaved clean, a man who bites his tongue as he dips a needle through a tapestry and has wild patterns inked into his scalp. In those rooms are people lighter than the lightest Celkam and darker than the darkest seaman, as if whatever world lies past the whales and beyond the sea has seen more color than the steppe and the Ventach. As he has become a familiar face in the city, the crone on the quay who sells wine and dark liquor takes pity on him and explains that they are the grand triumph of their people, that there are many such ships full of many such people in many such ports across the earth. She reaches for a word — “I’m sorry, mother,” Mecc says. “I don’t understand.” She repeats the word, then digs in her dress and pulls out a handful of wood counting-coins, spills them across the countertop. One by one, she picks out the marked — those with six tallys, those with nine, those with five. She hands them to Mecc and raises her eyebrows. “You collect them,” he says, understanding. She spreads her arms wide. She says, “Our treasure chest.”]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[There are no translators between Kaal and the tongue of the new men, so the meeting between the ancient family and the merchant queen is long, littered with mistranslations and frustration. The crone, the closest thing there was to an interpreter, seems more interested in causing mischief than encouraging understanding. The merchant queen points to the Ruling Mother, says a name in her bad accent. “Kelkaan,” the Ruling Mother tells her. She whispers to her husband, “This is hopeless.” Her husband claps at the merchant queen, guestures to his wife and himself. “Kelkaan.” The merchant queen narrows her eyebrows. She points her finger at the crone. “Kelkaan?” “Close enough,” the husband whispers back. He nods. The merchant queen says something to one of her companions, and the woman shakes her head back. The merchant queen points to herself. “Ahcos,” she says. “Ahcae.” The Ruling Mother tries the new words. “Asos. Asay.” The merchant queen grins. She points at her companion, then to the men standing behind her, then to herself. “Achos,” she says, and lapses back into her strange tongue. The Ruling Father shakes his head. The crone says, “Mother, they want to trade.” “I know that,” the Ruling Mother tells her cooly. She leans forward across her legs and says, in a clear voice although the woman cannot understand, “Trade is fine. You, stranger, are not.” The merchant queen blinks at her with incomprehending eyes. She tugs at her sleeves. The shining bands go further than her arms can show, her fur blanket insufficent to cover them. The Ruling Mother notes beads looped through the lobes of her ears, woven into the hood pulled up above her head. She says something to the man behind her. He steps forward and places a box in her lap. The merchant queen shuffles forward onto her knees and says something in her strange tongue, holds out the box. “Give it to me,” the Ruling Father says. She comprehends his tone of voice and hands it over, settling back into her seat. The court holds their breath for the few seconds between the Ruling Father accepting the box and opening the lid. Then he pulls out the prize. The jewels are deep blue like the sea, and wound together with fine silver strands, glinting in the torchlight. The merchant queen looks proud of herself. She says something in her tongue. A gift. Those words need no translation.]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[The council forms in a human-dug hollow at the mountain’s summit, a bitter-cold meeting room that emphasizes the harshness of formality. The councilors trickle in one by one, wrapped in furs and fabrics, and put pillow after pillow in the divots on the ground before they deign to sit cross-legged on the floor. Toma, who has no marked place in the sitting-room, shivers by the entryway in his waterlogged boots. The bone sword he brought as a gift is cold under his arm, and he pulls his furs as tight as they will go — not very, as it turns out, at least not enough for this place. He stares with bitter wonder at Uncle, who sits cheerily in a nest at the far side of the room and winks at him. Some of the other councilors look cold, especially the young man, who Toma can tell may have only done this once before. Others, the blind man especially, show no signs of feeling anything. Once everyone has taken their place, and the sun has risen enough that the lines it makes through the cave entryway are not shining in anyone’s eyes, the crone stands up and lifts her free hand. “Good morning, siblings,” she says. “How goes the summer?” Muttering from the councilors, no real answers. Toma thinks faintly that this cannot, by any rational definition, be called summer. The crone drops her hand, sighs. “Ah, you brittle things,” she says. “Find it in your cold hearts to be something other than rude.” The weaver stands up and says, “Thank you, sis. You shouldn’t have called council.” “If I didn’t, who would?” she asks, her old voice snapping. “We aren’t making our brother wait in the snow for fun.” The weaver shrugs. “Dunno, sis. But you called last time.” “I have a long history of calling council,” the crone sniffs. “If any of you would bother to dream, I wouldn’t need to.” “I couldn’t,” Uncle offers. “The boy came to me.” “I wasn’t talking to you,” the crone says. The young man muffles a snort. “The point is,” she says, with a sharp look at him, “That we have a guest who has come to visit us, and that his grievances must be aired and taken into account.” Toma can feel himself reddening as the weight of the room’s stares turns to him. “Brother?” the crone asks. She holds out her free hand. In the icy stillness of the room, Toma takes the crone’s hand and lets himself be led to the center. The atmosphere, the way the air sticks in the cavern, is different than the Ventach. There is no core unsettling, no shaking feeling in his bones, just the sense of exposure and the councilors waiting. The shadow of the Colossus doesn’t reach here. He says, “I worry about the new men in the bay and their friendship with the steppe. I worry about how much they have built and how fast their ships come and how many of them there are already.” He breathes in. “The Ventach said fear is foolish and refused to help.” He bows his head. The crone squeezes his hand. “Fear is foolish,” says the blind man. His cub whuffs and growls. “It serves no purpose than to incapacitate.” “Bullshit,” says the young mother. “Fear is a survival instinct. All animals have it.” “Animals,” the blind man says, “are not Ventach.” “And Ventach are not immortal,” the mother snaps back. “Did you find your way here through magic and sorcery? No, you made it over the ice because that bear steered you from danger.” The hunter says, “There are children living by the tree-line. They know this city better than us already. Do they live in danger?” “Children have great capacity for friendship,” the crone says. “And they are easy to trick.” Toma clears his throat, looks up. The councilors turn to him. He takes a breath, says, “We are not children.” “No, we are not,” Uncle agrees. “So we should not be tricked.” The crone leans heavy on her cane and asks, “Do you see a trick?” The caravans run like a heartstring through the Ventach, cutting it in two. “I see a dangerous potential for one,” Toma says. “We will convene tomorrow,” the crone says. “Let us see if any of these useless fools dream.”]

(css: "font-size: 75%;")[The mountain council never convenes. It never had, and it never will. Toma considers his visit a courtesy, nothing more. He heads directly to Uncle’s hut, now inhabited by the suspicious older women the messenger had told him about. She seems overjoyed to see him and welcomes him in, insisting that she make tea and that he sit down and relax after his journey. He finds himself stiffly acquiescing to her requests, even after years of isolation and the abscence of formality. “The others here say they knew you before,” she says, squinting at him from across the smoky room. “I must say, they seemed sure that you’d never come back.” Toma shakes his head. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it important to tell you. I am taking my men and going to the steppe city.” She blinks her eyes, but smirks a bit. There is something satisfied about her expression. “And why is that?” “The guidance this council has given our people is unsatisfying,” Toma says. The lie sounds good on his tongue. “I have recieved prophecy of my own, and I will act on it.” A statement, not a question. The woman shakes her spoon at him. “That intent — that’s how we should be. What children we are, sitting here without aim or goal.” Toma bows his head. “I am going to the lake on the steppe and taking any who want to make our concerns clear with me. That is what I can do. That is what I will do.” She crosses her arms. “Alright, then. Colossus knows these dull fools won’t stop you.” It gives Toma a small twinge of vindication, to hear her talk like that. He stands. “Thank you for the tea. I won’t be needing it.” The woman waves her hand, says, “You won’t stay the night?” He looks at the hut. It’s barely recognizable as the place where he had once stayed weeks with Uncle and that chattering bird. “No, I don’t think I will.” Quickly and decisively, he leaves. He dismisses his sweating and nausea and the sudden goosebumps on his skin as the altitude.]

(enchant: ?page, (text-colour: black) + (background: white))