Good morning all. I hope you had a fabulous weekend. I ended up binge watching a show called Blood & Treasure. It has everything, stolen Egyptian treasures (along with bad historical adjustments you have to turn a blind eye towards), an arms dealer, a secret society, the potential for supernatural powers of Cleopatra’s remains, and to top it off Nazis. Oh yeah, there is nothing redeemable it is however a black hole of a show and can suck you in completely. It’s like they took every action adventure trope and put it in a blender and then sprinkled Nazis on top. As much as I laugh, I did binge watch a season so I can’t say too much. So that was a chunk of my weekend. and it was fantastically relaxing. So shall we start the week fresh? Excellent. Let’s go.
I like the idea behind this but i think there was just too much telling and not enough showing. I think if I were to write this out I’d start with the abandoned sections collapsing. Still I wouldn’t have had the idea if I didn’t start off with the sentence. So even if the sentence may get jettisoned in a rewrite. I like the idea.
Monday, July 25th: He was the leader of a tough mountain people.
He was the leader of a tough mountain people. They had survived incursions from nations on both sides of their ranges. They fought them off and came out with their independence intact. It was simply too difficult to conquer them and so trade agreements were made so that caravans could pass through the mountain region during the season when the passes were open.
The weather was something the people were used to battling annually. While the summer weather turned their upper fields into a paradise for their sheep to graze, their wool to grow thick and their meat and milk rich, the winters were brutal. Then man and beast took shelter deep in the mountain caves, sheltering from the storms that closed the passes isolating them from the nations who sought to control them as well as ensuring a separation from each other.
It was these caverns that were their secret to militarily ensuring their independence. When enemies were abroad, the people retreated deep into their caverns, securing their people and their wealth far from those who would harm them.
His people were used to dealing with the threats of invaders and weather. They were used to dealing with anything the world threw them on their own. They had never met a problem for which there was not a solution they could manage on their own.
But things were changing. Harast stared out over the ranges. It was summer outside on the mountains and from the window in his summer quarters he could see the sheep grazing on the fields. He saw hs people taking their ease in the sunshine, absorbing the heat and light while they could. This winter had been a long and brutal one. There was relief and delight in once again seeing the sun and feeling the fresh wind.
Even in his quarters, his thoughts filled with growing concerns, he smiled into the sweet scented breeze wafting through his open window. For now things were as they had always been. There was a continuity that had never been broken. They lived as their fathers had, as their grandfathers, great grandfathers and further back in the generations than even the poets liked to recall in the winter tales. Things changed so little her that each small change felt momentous.
‘Perhaps that is why the little changes seem so big now,’ he thought. Despite the stability, despite the continuity, things were not as they had always been. There was a trembling within the mountain. Their population had not grown in several generations. They remained the same. The numbers rarely varied. People paired up, children were born. There were those who did not survive the harsh childhood, but the population of the people remained steady. It did not grow or shrink overly much.
It remained the same for three generations now. The problem was that it was the same number as it was after the great wars. In the great wars large swaths of the people were killed. While they survived, emerging victorious, they had not recovered the numbers since then. Those that survived continued to live as they had but the population remained the same. Because it was much reduced from four or five generations past, there were places they didn’t go. Spaces that were formerly use, but now lay abandoned.
If the space was left for a short time it would be nothing. But now after three generations of disuse, time was taking it’s toll on those areas of the mountain.
Ten til Midnight 