Morning all. Running a little behind today but not too badly. It was raining when I woke and I was stuffy so i couldn’t resist hitting that snooze button just one extra time. But soon all will be back on track. Let’s start with the morning prompts. wiggle those fingers and stretch those brains, it’s time to jump in. Let those timers fly.
I like this one. It is an interesting start I think. There are many options to explore. What happened to the town? Who escaped and why? Details about the empire. So many threads to weave. This is one I will return to. Although i will probably rethink the names and come up with a unified pattern of naming so it feels more like a real place with real people.
Thursday, August 3rd: Grief came in waves.
Grief came in waves. It was too encompassing to all hit her at once. Too many people were gone. Each time a thought of one of them would occur to her she would feel swamped with a fresh wave missing them sharply, the pain all encompassing.
Harder than the individual deaths was the death of a way of life. Overnight her entire community was gone. All of the things that made them one place, one people were gone. The thought of those snuck up on her even when she was too numb to grieve for the individuals.
There was Trina, who she never really liked, throwing out the fish guts in the back alley instead of disposing them properly. The mess caused a permanent stink and a small army of cats to guard the alley fiercely. She avoided it out of habit. There was Old Nan who loved to tell stories both of times gone by and of fantastical events that never could have happened. When the morning was slow, she would angle her path towards Old Nan, when rushed, away.
It was these and a million other tiny little pieces that she found herself missing as she began to pick out a new life in Derab. Perhaps it was that Derab and Feran, her home village, were laid out in the same pattern, the maze of their streets nearly identical.
When she squinted, she could imagine she seas looking at her former home instead of the new. It was both comfort and hardship. The people of Derab were nothing like those of Feran. Both lived in a city built in the same style by the Empire, but they started out as different tribes and while the blanket of the empire covered them both, the small details of their history and shared past poked through the weave of the imperial cloth, like straw.
She was not one of them. She looked different, talked differently and despite being empire had completely different traditions. There were times when she wished she had not been off mushroom hunting when the end came. That she had not been one of the few spared.
There were others of course, a fact she didn’t find out until a few months after she came to Derab. That alone was a shock. She went to the well to fill her water jug and found herself looking up at the sound of a familiar laugh, a laugh that cut short as she was spotted.
Sento saw her and raced over. “Wenga,” he exclaimed. “You…you are alive.”
“I was in the forest gathering mushrooms when …” she did not finish the sentence, did not need to.
“I was sent to fetch supplies from Cartonal,” he told her. She nodded. Cartonal was a two week journey and one of the places that his father purchased needed supplies annually.
Ten til Midnight 