Arna awoke shivering. Her breath fogged above her face in spite of the mild summer night, wreathing the wizened face that loomed over her. The ends of the old man’s long beard didn’t tickle Arna’s nose like they should, but, reflexively, she raised a hand to sweep the hair aside. Her hand passed straight through. Arna realised she could see right through the man’s head to the branches beyond, and to the sky that should have been filled with the rising dawn but was these days permanent, oppressive grey. But the ancestor got the message and stepped aside.
“What do you want?” Arna grumbled, sitting up.
Shades had stalked her since she’d been a young girl, desperate to get her to see to something they’d left undone before crossing the veil. She’d tried to help them, at first, before she came to realise the trouble her gift could bring her. Now she was just bored of their relentless pestering.
The long dead ancestor straightened, pointed to the west. A spear faded into his had, and he shifted his feet as if poising to strike an enemy. Then he pointed west again.
“Warriors that way?” said Arna.
The ancestor’s bushy eyebrows shot up. He nodded eagerly, not used to being understood.
Arna scoffed
“No more warriors, old man,” she said. “Look around you. We lost, ages ago.”
Her short shift, which she really only wore to give the citizens of the Empire less immediate reasons to kick her out of their settlements, did nothing against the unnatural cold, and she rubbed the frost from her shoulders. Flakes of white ochre came away from her dark skin. It had been an age since she’d reapplied the ancient clan marks in the patterns of the bones beneath. Why bother. Not just because the sticks of her arms and legs almost allowed the natural bones to show through, but because there didn’t seem to be any power left in the runes.
Arna rubbed the sleep from her eyes and ran her fingers through her thick black. It was matted from a lack of care and years of sleeping rough, and the crest feathers growing at her temples had lost their brilliant purple and green sheen.
In a moment of weakness Arna made eye contact with the ancestor again. He shade pointed insistently to the west. She pointed just as insistently to her stomach, which grumbled on command. The ancestor frowned, clearly frustrated by her priorities. Arna spread her hands in a helpless gesture.
“Some of us are still being of flesh and simple needs, sorry uncle,” she said.
The night before she had lain down in the shadow of the sisters. Her bloodline took her past this formation of rocks once a year, and so had borne witness to its desecration. The Kith believed they were three giant ancestors who had crowded around a campfire with their legs pulled up to their chests, and had gotten to talking for so long that the land had consumed them until mossy growths took the place of their hair. Thankfully they were not conscious to what had become of them.
Mounds of rubbish and the refuse of latrine pits was piled up against the rocks, and in some places even thrown to pollute the higher crevices of the formation. Any reasonably flat surface had been befouled with crude signs and aggressive anti-Kith slogans, while the overhanging rocks had been attacked with hammers, destroying the natural beauty.
The final insult was the far cruder statue of the Empress erected some hundred metres away. Raised and then maintained with masses of votive candles by indentured Kith work crews, no doubt. The statue was modeled with its arms wide, welcome travellers into the Empress’s embrace and the settlement below, but it simultaneously looked like she was shooing the dirty Sisters and any passing Kith out of her sight.
Arna scratched around in the dirt hoping for some yams. The ground was hard and unyielding. After too much sweat, she was rewarded with only three pitifully small heads. When she shook them by the stems, they ripped free and fell to the dirt with a wet plop. Arna sighed.
In the valley below, Kith of the Demiurgkin slaved in the fields, their broad, hairy backs and docile temperaments the perfect fits for the harness of the ploughs.
Arna had tried it once, at her most desperate. She lasted all of half a day. She might’ve toughed it out a bit longer if she hadn’t discovered they weren’t even getting paid in coin. The Settlers claimed the Kith were free, but they controlled them through promissory slips instead of a real wage, which allowed them to take it all back from the Kith for food and board.
They were carving out a new patch of the Empire for the Settlers, from lands that were once their own. Lands that were now dying, in every facet.
Arna curled her feet and squeezed the loose earth between her toes. She could feel the land’s pain at the settler’s abuse. Their ploughs moved through the earth in the wrong patterns, like stroking a cat against the grain of its fur. The fertilisers they used poisoned instead of nourished. They planted foreign seeds at the wrong times, and had to divert entire creeks to sustain what the land tried to reject. The cloven hooves of their introduced hers compacted the soil, preventing it from breathing and leeching nutrients by way of stampeded dust.
Perhaps the Empire only wanted the buried blood and breath of the land, to feed the ovens of their great forges and fuel their next conquest. The Empire had slowly taken hold of these lands, like a slowly warning fever, and now it was rotting, and the Empire would leave this hollowed husk in search of new lands.
All Kith could sense this. It came innately to their people. It must pain the Demiurgkin, working so hard against the land they had synchronized with for centuries. Their land was in its death throes, and so too would Arna be if she didn’t get something to eat soon. There was nothing else for it. She’d have to risk a raid.
