I have just begun this, and hope that you enjoy it. There will be more, much more, and I will do my best to keep it coming at a regular pace. If life gets in the way, I do apologize, and know that I haven't forgotten what I'm doing.
*****
One
My Grandfather's mother spoke of a time before, when gardens rolled of their own accord and the world lived through glowing screens and voices cast invisibly across the air. A sort-of, not-quite magic that pulled people together while it drove them apart. It was a time before the Shift, as she called it. When man drove through life by the power of his own ingenuity, and the ingenuity of others drove each man to new heights.
She called it Technology, and spoke of its power with quiet awe. She said mankind had once spoken of the difference between magic and technology with scorn. There was once a saying, she said, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They were wrong. Magic is magic, and it killed technology completely.
There came a day, she told me, when the screens went fritzy, then fuzzy, and then dark. Voices in the air slowed, and wandered, and were lost; cast no further than the power of man's lungs could throw them. The great flying machines plunged from the sky, ripping great furrows in the earth, plowing through the great dead cities and drawing streaks of fire across the world.
The world shifted, she said. It became a place of magic, of will. When magic came, technology failed and disappeared. Seasons changed, the air thickened and grew with power.
Magic changed everything. Power flowed from nothing, and could be bent and twisted to the will of men. Not all men, but some.
Wars came and went, men fighting amongst themselves to carve out their place in this strange, mad new world. My grandfather fell, and my father. My mother was lost not long after, and my raising fell to the oldest woman I'd ever known. The oldest woman anyone had ever known, called Baba by all.
She knew war well, and had fought her own and those of other fools before the Shift. She was ancient, crooked, and her eyes had gone blurry long before my birth. Baba had known steel all her life, worked with it, molded, poured and beat it into shapes both beautiful and useful. Even as her eyes went cloudy, her hands, so rough and thick and overlarge for her bent body, could feel the shape of hot forge steel and direct a hammer where it needed to go. Her life, when not at war, had been spent at the forge and in the forest. She hunted, fished, and foraged for food even before the Shift, learning when she was a child to live off the land in case she ever needed to.
My education came entirely from Baba, and she insisted I learn to read and write even as she taught me woodcraft and to work steel. As a teacher, she was hard, unforgiving, and unafraid to use a well-aimed backhand to drive a point home. As a child, I hated her every day for at least a few minutes at a time. The work was backbreaking, and my body was sore every night from pumping bellows, hammering steel, and learning to use what we made, my mind exhausted from hours of slogging through books that she hoarded and guarded and hid from the world like they were bars of gold.
Baba insisted that I know as much as she could teach me, that I learn not only how to forge plow and pitchfork, but also sword and axe and knife. It was important, she said, to learn to use each thing I made, to know the purpose for which every item I learned to produce would be used. She taught me to fight and to shoot, to ride and to farm. Everything of which she knew, she made me learn. What she could not teach me, her books could. I hated it, then, but as I grew older I came to have a fondness for what Baba and her books taught me, and what I could glean from the world for myself.
When I was twelve, she began to let me spend a full day and then some once per week away from the tiny stone house and forge to do whatever I wanted. From sunrise of one day to sunset of the next, I was free to do or go anywhere. I wandered into the forest, further every week, until I found my place.
It was a grotto, set in the bottom of a small ravine and hidden by thick brambles and ivy from every angle. The vegetation surrounded a small pond of fresh, clean water, fed by a hot spring, that made a perfect little circle that disappeared into the low, wide mouth of a small stone cave. The ceiling was also low, once I had grown I had to bend my head a bit to stand upright, but it was perfect.
Cool in the summer, warm from the water of the hot spring in the winter. I brought many small things to my grotto; blankets and the few books that Ma had gifted to me, a pan, a flint, some charcoal. I always brought some food with me, namely bread and cheese. Game I would find on my way.
It wasn't until my eighteenth year that the grotto was discovered by anyone else, and even then it was my own doing.
Winter came with a powerful vengeance that year, lahing away the last vestiges of fall as though it were angry that it had ever been denied its right to fury, the temperature dropping so low that a cup of water thrown into the air would turn to mist and sleet before it ever reached the ground. A blizzard howled across the world, blowing onto us two feet of clean, frozen powder. The forge stayed hot enough, but even to walk from the house to the forge required bundling, lest our sweat freeze to our skin.
When my day came, I wrapped myself in the warmest furs I could find and packed a bearskin to lay over the blankets already in the grotto. I brought milk and cheese and half a loaf of decent bread, setting off at sunrise.
Half a mile from my grotto, I saw the tracks. A lone person, foraging for moss and anything else that survived under the deep snow. Whoever it was hadn't even tried to cover their tracks, and was probably desperately lost. We were in a part of the forest where I had only ever seen signs of game and my own passing. The tracks were an hour old, maybe a bit longer, the frigid but somewhat lazy wind just starting to blow them away.
They curved gently away from my grotto, angling toward easier passing along the edge of the little ravine. I followed them anyway, my curiosity getting the better of me. The knife I had made under Baba's watchful hands found its way into my fingers, a precaution I took by instinct. Most of those who lived close enough to us to survive a trek this far from anything were decent folk, but some were not.
Halfway along the ravine lay a bundle in the snow. A somewhat ratty blanket wrapped tightly around a small, still frame. The forager had pushed on as far as possible and fallen in the snow, likely never intending to rise again, so cold that the snow seemed a warm blanket in which to nestle and finally end the awful stabbing pain of the air itself.
I approached slowly, quietly, so as not to startle the forager, if they yet lived. I needn't have bothered. When I pulled back the blanket I was greeted by a shock of blonde hair, and a porcelain face turned nearly blue with the cold. When I put my fingers to her soft, long neck, I felt the pulse of blood through her veins as a frighteningly weak flutter. It was too cold to tell if she was still breathing.
I lifted her over my shoulder, thanking both the years of hard labor that Baba had put me through and the girl's small frame for the ease with which this was done, and carried her back along her own tracks to the mouth of the ravine. I had to unwrap her from her blanket, which revealed a wool dress that would have kept her warm enough next to a fire but was useless in the frozen forest, and put it back around her in a sort of cocoon so that I could crawl ahead of her under the brambles surrounding the grotto and drag her behind me.
I did not know exactly how long she had been wandering the forest, or how long she had lain in the snow, but Baba's books had told me that minutes were important when a person was freezing. Despite the horrible cold, there was no ice across the little pond, and I knew the water would be warm to the edge, increasingly so until it was quite hot toward the middle.
Once through the brambles, I ran to the mouth of the cave and lay her gently on the floor, dropping the bearskin and food wrapped inside and peeling off my furs down to nothing. I pulled her blanket from around her and tugged the dress off, pulling away her flimsy boots and tossing it all into a pile near where I would build a fire later on.
