BLOG: A funny story, about a story that's not funny

About a year ago I wrote an opening line for what I hoped would turn out to be my first novel. Soon after, lots of piece fell into place with regard to the world, the characters, and where the story(ies) might take them.

I started writing. It was good, it was fun, and I took the story in lots of interesting and unexpected directions. I made it to Chapter 3 before I got distracted by what is now "Talking Man," my actual first novel.

So now I find myself revisiting this, my subconscious demanding that I dive into it as my next big projects. Every time I read it however, I realize just how goddamned wordy it is. My initial goal being "to write a novel," I really took the length seriously. I'm worried that it's a bit slow (read: very stupid slow) in the beginning, requiring some massive revision before I can really move forward.

Regardless of the revisions, I do hope to tackle this one as the next novel (or more likely, set of novels). Here below is the first chapter. Any thoughts on the wordiness and overall sluggishness of pace are welcome!

......................................................................................................

CHAPTER 1

“What’ll happen when the sun goes down?”

It was more a recitation than a real question. An old habit born of religious repetition - the kind of thing that children would go to sleep wondering about, only to find the question still nagging when they awoke.

“Wish I knew. Wish anyone knew.”

“What do you think will happen?”

Coal paused for a moment. He hadn’t been expecting to be asked for an opinion. What’s more, he hadn’t given much thought to hypotheticals since he’d been a child, oh, decades ago. But he knew his answer. It was the only answer.

“Everyone’ll die.”

Sky nodded slowly in his distant, introverted way. It seemed a bitter but matter-of-fact agreement.

From where the two men were standing, the sun appeared to be just barely touching the horizon, the bottom of the bright circle stretching with the distortion that warped up from the heated plains. It was the first time they’d ever seen it do that. Long ago it had turned this shade of blood red, and the deep orange wash over the desert was nothing new to them. But right now, maybe it was something about the clouds forming, dancing, arrayed above the setting fireball and shaping the light into new and ever-changing jets and streams that brought both men to pause; it was, in fact, beautiful.

It was as good a moment as any to continue the sordid reminiscing. “Remember how the old folks would smile when they talked about the Sunset, like they knew somethin’ we didn’t?” Coal asked, and glanced sidelong at Sky. It was difficult to speak with an air of nostalgia when every word needed to be shouted against the steady west wind.

Sky didn’t take his eyes from the sun. The darkened glasses he wore didn’t really protect his sight, but he knew that. “The old folks…I hope they’re rottin’ in some sorta hell. They smiled because they knew they wouldn’t have to deal with it. They’d be dead before it happened.” He spat - not out of disgust, probably, but because the wind had picked up distant sand and was flinging it into their faces.

Coal could only shrug. He knew Sky was right. There had always been a dark sense of fate hanging over their whole generation; a knowledge that they would, at long last, be the ones to face the fact that the sun would set and darkness would cover the earth.

“Well they’re dead now. And here we are” muttered Coal. Sky was already out of earshot, jumping back onto his horse. They’d paused to enjoy the scenery long enough. They had to keep moving west. They had to catch the sun.

No, they had to beat the sun. It had already begun to bother Coal, whenever he let himself think about it, that it was touching the horizon. When they had left the Shelters, more than two hundred glass-turns ago (or nearly a full cycle of the moon - the glass count couldn’t be completely accurate while being jostled on horseback), there was a finger’s breadth of space between the desert’s flat line and the slowly descending orb. Yet in Coal’s whole lifetime, there hadn’t been a drop of more than fifteen, maybe twenty degrees. Why were they suddenly losing the race now, despite the breakneck pursuit westward, pausing only for glass-worth of sleep when they felt they really needed it, or to give the horses a much-needed rest? Was it too late? 

“We’re in a decline. Not so much like a valley, as a bowl.” Sky seemed to read Coal’s concern right off his face, when they next stopped to let the horses rest.

Coal looked around. The whole horizon did seem higher than it had before. The descent had been so gradual he hadn’t noticed, but they were in a middle of a vast, empty divot that gave the impression that the sun had dropped lower than it had.

“There’s a rise up ahead. Hundred, maybe two hundred miles, we’ll be over it, and the sun’ll be right up where it belongs.”

Coal breathed a sigh of relief, though he hid it from Sky as best he could. The latter was skeptical enough of his companion’s greenness, and Coal suspected they would need to maintain their mutual respect for several more moons, at least.

“Still doesn’t mean our riding’s gonna do any good. We’ll keep going straight, but the sunset will just keep coming.” Sky’s words were hopeless, but his drawl was as straightforward as if he was  commenting on the wetness of water.

And it was Coal’s turn to feel the smart one, in spite of himself. Sky knew his way around the desert, but he’d never been this far. Neither had Coal, but his mind at least had wandered this far and farther. He had an idea, in theory, of how the world worked.

“It will. The riding will pay off. You just need to think of the world as being round.”

Sky’s face wrinkled, skeptical. The hard layer of brown skin crackled. “That’s hard to think about.”

“Try. It’s the only way to make sense of what we’re doing out here.”

“I know. I hope it’s right.”

Sky saw that the glass had run out, where it hung by the horse’s side. His back and knees popped as he stood. As he reached for the glass, he moved slower than usual, and Coal thought he detected weariness, or reluctance - as if, by refusing to turn the glass, they could make time itself stand still. But no, the sun was dropping, no matter their conception of time’s passage. Sky turned the glass and the sand began to fall slowly.

“Two hundred twenty two” noted Coal, making a tiny scratch mark on a small slate he carried, one side of which was nearly covered in similar marks.

Coal couldn’t afford to let himself lose faith. They would overtake the daylight. Of course they would. Maybe it would be another three moons of riding; likely it would be another twenty, but they would find a place where the sun still stood overhead, where another ten generations could live in the light until the present conundrum repeated itself. But when Coal did let himself doubt (what if they failed? what if food and water became nonexistent rather than scarce? what if, indeed, what if the earth is not round?), then he fell into a mixed mire of despair and anger. If there was to be no restoration of daylight, not for him, not for his people, then whose fault was that? The situation hadn’t caught anyone by surprise. Why hadn’t riders been sent sooner? Why, after ten generations, was this inevitability only being dealt with now? Did fear of the unknown, fear of the darkness, have the power to cripple the Families into inaction until this very last moment, when it had become an emergency? At least somewhere along the line, their collective survival instinct had finally overpowered the fear. Whether wise or foolish, at least somebody was doing something.

That’s why Coal tried to make himself stay hopeful.

They drew closer to the rise in the land before them. It wasn’t quite mountains and it wasn’t even quite hills; the land just sloped gradually downward and then again upward. And the wind began to decrease.

The wind was, for most of their journey, the worst annoyance they had to deal with. The poor horses, had they the power of speech, would have implored their riders to turn around and go leeward, traveling east with the wind. That constant rush into their faces was frustrating. The wind had been coming from the west steadily since living memory. Storms would come, fiercely charging in from the sun, rarely bringing rain. But when the storms passed, the wind was always there. Stories went, there was a time when there wasn’t wind at all. It was calm all the time. But that was during Noontime, and the desert was deadly hot back then. So the stories went.

But now the wind was stilling as the land rose higher and higher. Four glasses after the riders had seen the sun touch the land, it disappeared entirely. With it went the wind. They were in silent shadow.

“This must be what Night is like.” Coal didn’t dare to say anything so naive aloud. Not that he could have said anything if he’d tried. The silence, the stillness was too unsettling. Too awe-inspiring.

To their right, their left, and their forward, all the land was in shadow.

The ground softened beneath their feet, and grew softer the deeper they went into the shade. The ancient shadow had protected this ground from the sun, so the hard-baked layer of crisp sediment had crumbled. Here and there were shocks of a wispy brown grass that had poked its head above the surface, only to die from the lack of the very sunlight that would have killed it.

One thing struck the explorers most of all - the air was cool, even cold. This feeling was new. It had been described to them - by travelers who had found similar patches of sunless land, or by those people who liked to imagine what the Night must be like - but never experienced until now. Even the Shelters back home, which kept out the moving air along with the light, were home to stagnant, warm air. They had not been shaped to allow the wind an inlet for air circulation, since they’d been built way back during Noon, or even earlier, with the main purpose of keeping the sun’s deadly rays at bay.

With the cooling air and the lessened wind, the horses’ tempers improved. Water was easy to find here, even pooling right on the surface in some places. Coal had never seen that before. Sky didn’t trust the surface water at first, fearing for its cleanliness since it was exposed to the open air for so long with no sun to burn away the filth. But the horses wouldn’t be stopped, and lapped it up with enthusiasm. When time passed and the horses displayed no ill effects, the men followed suit. Cool water tasted good.

The water they’d packed had lasted them a carefully-rationed half-month, but as expected they had needed to stop and drill for more from time to time. It was not easy to spot where the water would be. Sky was good at it though. The underground pockets of moisture caused the dry ground above to sink ever-so-slightly. But the desert was far from perfectly flat, otherwise. Coal left alone with his unskilled eye might have stuck the drill into every divot and dip in the cracking ground, but Sky managed to hit water every time. There had been a long stretch - neither were sure how long - where there had been no water. Just dry, flat rock for hundreds, thousands of miles. They had begun to wonder whether they would need to let Coal’s horse die, to be followed by Coal himself. Sky was supposed to be the last to die, if it came to it - so had said the Council.  As of yet, it hadn’t come to that.

They took more rests as the ground got steeper. Maybe it was the extra strain from traveling uphill. But it was only a very gentle rise, so it was more likely a lessened sense of urgency. They found the shade calming, in spite of themselves.

Sky filled the canteens. Even his stern face betrayed some appreciation at such easily available water. Searching for signs of underground pockets of water, followed by drilling and pumping, wasted far too much time.

Coal’s attention was on the creeping green moss that was now appearing around the edges of the water pools. “What do you think? Worth trying to eat?”

“No” said Sky. “Better not to risk it.”

“Just saying, we haven’t seen an animal in over a hundred miles. Edibles have been few and far between. Whatever this is, there’s a lot of it.”

Sky’s eyes rested on the silky green plant. Greener by far than the dusty gardens being harvested around the Shelters.

“On your head be it, if it kills you.”

“Don’t worry - if I die, I won’t point any fingers afterwards.”

Sky didn’t so much as chuckle, so Coal suppressed his laughing smile.

He picked through the moss, and peeled a bit from the rock to which it stuck. Holding up the strange vegetable, he sniffed it. “Can’t be that deadly. Hell, the water was good enough.” A hint of instinctual doubt appeared in his eyes. “Still, I think I’ll cook it first. For purposes of flavor, of course.”

They decided to rest for a full glass-turn. The horses stood together, blinking in silent soul-sharing. Coal had boiled a moss-soup, which was tasteless but apparently not harmful. Even Sky had ventured a bowl. They both considered drying some out over the fire and taking it with them to snack on.

“We are making progress.” Sky’s optimism was surprising. Even more surprising was that he seemed transparently honest without a hint of patronizing. “When we come over the top of this rise, I think you’ll see. There’s gonna be plenty of sky beneath the sun.”

It was reassuring to hear this. Coal could never be quite sure what was on his friend’s mind (“friend” being only a term of necessity - they’d not seen another soul for some time). Nevertheless, now that the air was still, his own thoughts had room to breath and grow. The preposterousness of their situation began to sink in. An impossible number of things could go wrong. Rather, there was a near-impossible number of things that would need to be right. Even if the earth was round (a shaky, tradition-based idea if there ever was one), who knew how large it was? How long it might actually take to ride into another hemisphere, he’d never seriously paused to consider. It might be a lifetime before he found what he was looking for. And what then? If he were to find the sunny promised land as an old man, who would ride back to show his people the way?

And wasn’t it silly, really, that these specks of life on a dry planet were trying to beat the sun at its own game? Humanity’s disadvantage was exhausting, and Coal was already tired.

Seeing that Coal had drifted off to sleep, albeit fitfully, Sky dropped the facade that he considered to be cheerful, and contemplated in his own turn. There were other things on his mind. Practical things, closer to home. He knew he could trust the higher purposes of the mission to his younger riding partner; certainly Sky hoped they would find what they were looking for, but questioning the shape of the world and dreaming about sunnier lands wasn’t his job. He wanted to know how he and Coal were going to survive.

Food and water, or the lack thereof, were the reasons riders were never sent out very far. Those who had dared to explore beyond the outer circle - that is, farther than ten generations had been able to map out - usually didn’t come back. It was impossible to pack enough sustenance to make a journey of any significance, and the horses’ needs were even greater than their own. He would never put it this way to the younger, more hopeful Coal, but they had been exceedingly lucky to have even made it this far. The water had been relatively plenty, and easy to spot. The occasional snakes and varmint-holes had provided them just enough food. But they were never able to restock, and glass to glass he had woken with the question of whether they might eat at all.

“The kid seems to accept it all” he muttered, not aware that his thoughts had a voice. “Seems to think there’s some kind of good luck following us around, wanting us to find a new place. God above, I hope he’s right.”

And for the first time in a long time, Sky let himself sleep.

But not for long.

Even the deepest rest keeps a bright corner of the mind alert, ready to react if something is detected to be amiss. Some people are more attuned than others to listening, responding to that  alert. Sky was one of those people.

His eyes first darted toward Coal. Still prone on the ground, but asleep and alive. That was good.

Then to the provisions laying beside Coal. Also untouched.

But the horses were gone.

“Storm! River!” Barely a moment after snapping open his eyes he shouted their names, scrambling to his feet. “Storm! River!” They would always come when called. But now they were nowhere to be seen.

“Where are the horses?” Coal was awake now. Also scrambling. “River! Storm!”

“Sshh,” Sky held out a staying hand. The first panic over, it was time for caution. “Someone took ‘em.”

At least two sets of human footprints, difficult to read in the soft, mossy sand, accompanied the horses’ steps away. After a few yards, the manmade divots disappeared and only the horses’ prints carried on. They were heading forward, toward the summit of the rise.

“They must know horses, well enough to get ‘em going without making a fuss.” Sky was burning inside, hating himself for failing to wake, for being asleep in the first place.

“Can’t be that far ahead.” Coal’s optimism may not have made Sky angrier, but it made the anger more difficult to hide. “We couldn’t have been sleeping for long.”

With that, both pairs of eyes turned toward the glass, which sat now with the provisions by where Coal had bedded. It had run out. But how long ago?

“Long enough for them to make it out of sight. And that’s no short haul.”

“How long do you think it would take to make it over the rise, if they were pushing the horses?”

Sky cringed a little. The idea of Storm being “pushed” tipped his anger well into the realm of rage.

But he calculated quickly, taking in the landscape. Flat distances were easier to estimate, and this gradual rise was that. “More than a glass. Less than two.”

Before Coal’s mind flashed the image of the ancient clocks that he once obsessed over. By old habit, he instantly made the conversion and nearly blurted out “between three and six hours,” but thankfully stopped himself before making a fool of himself with something so archaic. Hours had ceased to be relevant even before “days” had, and that was prehistory.

Sky wasted not a moment. He had turned the glass and was stowing the provisions that had spilled onto the dirt. In the blink of an eye, he’d thrown several of the packs over his back. “You take the water, kid.”

“Kid.” Coal had never heard Sky say that to him. But it wasn’t the word - it was the way he said it. Relish. Excitement. Yes, there was something shining in Sky’s eyes (they’d both taken off the dark glasses when they entered the shade) - some part of him longed for climax, for some kind of punctuation to the slogging moment of time that was this undefined journey.

Both laden, and currently thankful for the lightness of their provisions, Coal and Sky set out in the trail of the horses. Both knew that, even without pausing to rest, it would take them three times as long to reach the ridge as it would take galloping horses. But to give voice to that reality would create an inlet for despair, which would in turn creep inside their hearts and consume the lively combination of anger and exhaustion which together somehow generated hope.

But anger requires energy. As the miles dragged by, the exhaustion devoured all else until there was no room for anger or even despair. What grew was a sense of wild mental activity. Coal felt a sensation which reminded him of the few times he’d been drunk. He was caught off guard by his own voice, a last-ditch effort to hold on to sanity.

“There aren’t supposed to be other people, though.”

“It would seem we were wrong on that count.”

“It was just us. Just the Shelters, and the outliers. If there are other people in the world…What does that mean?”

“Doesn’t mean anything. Situation’s still the same. Just more complicated now.”

“I guess we didn’t map out very far.”

“Coal, for all it’s worth, our people haven’t mapped out a dime’s worth of space. It’s a great big world, and we don’t know a lick about it.”

Frustration, Coal was sure he recognized. Under the stone-hard shell, Sky was probably just as curious about the nature of the world as he himself was. But like any thoughtful but simple man, he railed against his own lack of knowledge, and so chose not to care.

They rested twice, and only briefly each time. Coal stuffed his mouth with a handful of the green weeds, while Sky only stared ahead, impatient if out of breath. They turned the glass, near the end, when the ridge looked to be within sprinting distance.

Then they turned it again, the ridge still looking to be a step away. Flat distances are not difficult to read, but summits often deceive tired travelers with promises of being more reachable than they are.

Whatever trickery of perception it was capable of, the ridge proved not to be illusory in the end, when persistence paid off. Shortly after the second glass turn (seven hours, thought Coal’s feverish mind), they were really there.

The approach was unmistakeable. The first sign was the orange glow, far above their heads. Not the usual brown hue of the sky, this was brighter, and it was moving.

“With the sun comes the wind,” Sky noted dryly. Then Coal realized what he was looking at. A cascade of dust was blowing up from beyond the ridge, catching the light as it lifted into the air above them. It was no gentle drift, either. Wave after wave of airborne dust was shooting, swirling, splaying infinitely watchable patterns against the dim sky.

“At least we know the sun is still there,” was Coal’s attempt to look at the bright side. But neither man was particularly eager, not after this long calm, to step over the ridge.

Then they stepped over the ridge. Sky prepared himself; having set his dark glasses against his nose and tied them firmly to his face, he held to his packs for dear life and stood his ground. Coal on the other hand was bowled over backwards, dropping the bags of water.

Just to find his feet again was a fight, and his foe was a wind stronger than any he’d ever felt. Standing was difficult. Walking would prove strenuous, and talking was out of the question entirely.

But find his feet Coal did. He managed to lift a shaking hand in front of his eyes, partially blocking the burning light from which he’d had some sweet reprieve. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the land that unfolded before them.

The land was anything but flat. Beneath an increasingly-steep decline which fell off in front of their feet lay a valley, it’s north and south edges formed by massive arms of hills that, now rounded and soft, must have once been sharp with rocks and cliffs. More such valleys grew out of the ridge to their north and south, and even more branched out below, shelving downward for almost as far as they could see. Almost. Just before the distance where sight failed (the dust that blew up from the hilltops filled all the air in front of them with a bright brown haze), the land appeared to even out into what looked almost like a plain - a hard-surfaced, impossibly flat, eternal plain.

Before he felt despair at the extant of the valleys, or wonder at the nature of that distant plain, Coal first felt his heart leap with excitement. The sun was well above the horizon. Perhaps ten degrees higher than it had been back at home, or perhaps that was pleasant exaggeration. Coal briefly thought that he might be able to calculate the theoretical size of the round earth by taking into account their distance traveled and the perceived rise of the sun, but did not presently have the endurance for those kinds of thoughts.

Sky, on the other hand, thought none of these things. He wanted to know how the horses had dealt with this sudden blast of unexpected wind, without the rational ability to understand why God was suddenly smacking them in the face with dusty air. And as he studied the ground below his feet, he noted with a calm rage that the footprints, undefined before but unmistakeable in the soft, undisturbed earth, faded on the western-facing crisp ground. What was left, the wind was churning into oblivion. The only chance Sky and Coal had of following their horses’ tracks was blowing around their heads in a billion sandy particles.

“Do you think people live in these hills?” Coal screamed against the wind. It was a futile scream that went unheard, but Coal had good reason to wonder. The bottoms of the valleys, particularly in places of the deepest shade, were actually green. Probably for at least the past century the lower slopes would have been habitable, comfortable even. It was mind-boggling that such a place could exist in the world. With a touch of envy Coal thought: even if nobody lived there, why hadn’t he? He thought back, not to his childhood, but to a childhood he might have had in a place like this, surrounded by grass and water, sheltered by hills instead of walls. Such a childhood would have made him soft, though. It wouldn’t have prepared him for the change that was coming.

Not to mention, it was too late to think about now. Even those valleys, pretty as they were, would be in darkness within just a few years. To leave that place would have been more painful than never living there at all.

Coal’s thoughts lasted only a moment. Sky had turned, and was walking back now, behind the ridge. Coal followed. Sheltered from the worst of the wind’s blast, talking would once again be a possibility.

“Horses are gone,” was the first thing Sky said, without breaking his surface passivity. He may as well have been relating what he’d eaten for breakfast.

Silence followed between the two of them. There was no easy thing to say, since their predicament had no answer. Go forward? They both knew they must.

“We might pick up the trail again. They went straight forward, west. Maybe they’ll keep in that direction and the tracks will be there again farther down the hill.”

Sky licked at, and then bit his lower lip, squinting as he looked up at his namesake. Then he dropped down onto his knees, fell back to his elbows, and lowered himself slowly, stiffly, to the ground.

He began to laugh.

It was hard to keep track of the time they spent on the downward incline, with the hot wind at their faces. The glass was turned a few times, but on at least two occasions both Coal and Sky forgot about it until long after it had run out. The futility of keeping track of time started to sink home for Coal. What did the length of their journey matter, really? The sun was the only timekeeper now.

Sky led the way, keeping them on top of the southerly arm of the first valley. The wind up here was still too much to allow for talking, but Coal guessed Sky was simply being cautious, avoiding the delays they would surely suffer by crawling down into the valley. All the same, he would have given a lot to sit down there in the cool vegetation, even for a moment.

Maybe somewhere, thousands of miles ahead, under a morning sun, there would be a place like that, with green hills and cool water. He could raise his own children there eventually, if he ever got that far.

It was because he kept his eyes glued to the verdant basins below that he saw the horse.

A tiny moving speck, at first. He stooped on his haunches, giving in to the errant instinct that lowering himself three feet would make the distant object easier to see. After a brief moment he was certain that it was an animal, and a moment later he had identified it as a horse. Not one of theirs - this one was light gray, standing out against the darker colors of the vegetation below.

“Sky!” But Sky had already joined him, peering down at the faraway animal.

The wind was still too strong for discussion, but Sky’s beckon was all that needed saying. Together they turned off the high arm of the valley and began to edge their way down the sharp, rubbly incline.

The greenery at the bottom of the valley was a mixture of the dry, sharp weeds they were used to seeing (if a little more robust here because of the water), and the spindly moss that had no problem growing in the shade. The valley was deep but not particularly wide, so little time passed between reaching the bottom and crossing the marshy wetness that was all that remained of an ancient stream. In the places where the shadow of the valley walls met the sunlight, the vegetation had flourished the most and become nearly impassable. To clamber through the tangled green abundance took Coal and Sky some time. Traveling through foliage is frustrating for a traveller who has only ever set foot on dry dirt.

The horse made no attempt to move away, once it noticed their approach. It patiently munched on the moss, lifting its head to glance sidelong at them every minute or so as if to ensure they were still coming.

The wind was still again, the higher walls above the valley taking the brunt of its blast. But neither traveller felt the freedom to speak; the plants around them deadened all remaining sound, even absorbing the crunch of their footfalls. To break that silence would have felt blasphemous.

The horse felt no such respect, and whinnied as they came nearer. It stepped forward to greet them, lowering its head in trust.

Sky recognized this for what it was: the horse was domesticated. To ascertain that had been, of course, the only reason Sky had descended into the valley for a closer look, and now he knew that their horse thieves weren’t likely alone.

“They keep plenty of horses. Let them roam through the valleys.” He pointed out the now-obvious signs of animal presence, from the bare patches of moss to the heaps of dung. Coal nodded: “I think we can get Storm and River back, if they’re all being kept together somewhere.” His voice was soft, still respecting the sanctity of the quiet place.

“Worries me how confident they were. They trekked miles down to where we were sleeping for our steeds but didn’t give us a second thought. They coulda killed us, but didn’t even bother.”

“Hoping to turn us back? Send us away discouraged?”

“P’raps. You’d think they’d want to talk to us, at least. Find out what the hell we’re doing. It’s bound to be a surprise just to see other people out and about.”

Coal nodded again, but his attention was given to the horse. It patiently stood, waiting for them to end their conversation. Now Coal took one last step toward it. It sniffed at one of his hands, while with the other he cautiously began to stroke its muzzle. There was some comfort, and he thought Sky must feel it too, to know that even in this place far away from home, the friendship between horse and human was instinctual and intact.

One of its ears pulled back. The creature’s head reared, and it stepped backwards startlingly fast. Snorting, it turned and galloped west into the lower part of the valley.

This was enough warning for Sky. His eyes flew up to the valley walls far above them and he scanned one side and then another. For the briefest of moments, he saw a silhouetted figure standing against the orange sky. By the time his eyes bounced back to that spot, the figure was gone.

He dove down into the soft brush, dragging Coal with him. “Someone’s watching,” his breath hissed.

The concept of strange people was truly a new one to both Coal and Sky. With few exceptions, they had known the same people their entire lives; many died, some were born, but almost nobody came or went. Coal had heard stories about people beyond the outer circle, living outside of where their maps would show. Some of the stories were full of hope, but most were not, at all. Now all the stories came rushing to Coal at once. What would it be like, encountering a wholly new world of humans? Would they be like the people he’d known before, or would they be a different breed altogether? He was more afraid now, at the prospect of being watched, than he had thought to be before, even after two of the strangers had come right up to them while they were sleeping.

If Sky was nervous, he gave no evidence. He calmly peered, glasses off, up at the valley walls. No, he was not nervous, but he was angry. He should have known better than to let himself be led into this trap. Now they’d lost any advantage of elevation, and were cornered.

It never occurred to him that maybe he should not have blamed himself - it wasn’t his fault, after all, that nobody for five generations had anticipated or prepared for an encounter with another culture. It was only Sky’s intuition from his years of hunting that gave him any notion of what to do (or not do) in case of an ambush.

“We need to get out of the valley,” Sky whispered. “We don’t know if they plan to hurt us, but it’s best we don’t stay down here long enough to find out.”

Sky spent a few more moments peering through the stringy grass, mentally plotting a course, and then he was off, crawling on hands and knees. Coal followed as best he could. The going was not easy, and he did wonder whether there would be any real harm done by fleeing the valley on foot, rather than hunkering beneath the thin cover offered by the weeds. A keen eye from above would see their movement either way. Still, better safe than sorry, maybe.

The valley walls came together into a narrow pass, about a mile down from where they had encountered the horse. From wall to wall was only a few yards, and the sun was hidden from view. Any onlookers from above would only see a thin dark crack, so Sky thought it safe to finally stand upright again.

The long crawl had bruised and scratched their hands, arms and faces, and their joints were sore, but they were nonetheless relieved to straighten up. Just beyond the narrowest point of the pass, the walls fell off sharply into a wide glade, which had perhaps once been a shallow lake before the water dried up. After that, another drop into another valley.

Coal caught his breath, the last exhale coming as a sigh of relief. “Maybe it was just the horses they wanted, after all.”

“Or they’re just biding their time.”

Once they left the cleft in the valley, there was no more shelter to be had from any silent watchers, but the elevation leveled out and put Sky’s mind at ease. The wind returned at full blast, swooping up at them from that bright, flat plain in the distance (what is that? thought Coal again, once his eyes were reacquainted with the sight).

There was little sign of horses. While it was a fine field, and picturesque, the wind was likely too much to afford any sort of comfort to grazing beasts. The grey horse they’d encountered had likely passed over quickly and found its way into another valley.

After the glade came another valley, and then another. The going was strenuous and slow, and horses would not have hastened their progress, not in this terrain.

There were no more signs of horses or watchers. Wherever these strangers lived and kept their horses, Sky and Coal did not cross their path again, and that was probably best. Sky refused to take any rest as long as a full glass; his anger over the loss of River and Storm hadn’t dissipated, and a long period of inaction would only allow his rage to kindle.

As a result, they drove forward seemingly harder than they had before on the long, flat segment of their journey. The sharp rises and drops in the land began to wear on their knees and ankles, and Sky found himself looking at a point of optimism; the descent from valley to valley would have been hell for their horses.

But there was another thing pushing Sky. Ever since they’d left the first valley, he’d not been able to look away from that shiny flat plain for long. He’d never seen anything like it, but a faint idea began to grow in his mind as to what it might be. He said nothing to his companion - how could he, without shattering Coal’s hopes? No, he would wait until they were closer. And even then, he hoped he’d be wrong about it.

He hadn’t been wrong about it.

Once they had cleared all but the last valley, they started to hear high-pitched cries coming from below. Sky had motioned for Coal to duck behind cover, and they sat behind a rock for a full third of a glass, listening to determine what creature might be making those noises. For a while there was nothing to be seen, though the strange calls continued to drift toward them on the wind.

“God above,” Coal fell to his knees, covered his mouth and stifled laughter, all while tears sprung to his eyes. Sky thought his friend had suddenly gone mad with exhaustion, until he saw what Coal was looking at. “It’s a bird.”

The creature had fluttered out of the sky, taking its own refuge from the wind behind the large rock. It stood a few feet from Coal, shuffling and twitching as it studied the newcomers, but not shying away even when Coal had his burst of excitement.

“I didn’t know there were any birds anymore. Is it dangerous? Could it hurt us?”

Sky, himself mostly speechless, shook his head. “I don’t know.” His companion, enthralled, made a quick movement, experimental, toward the bird and back away. It screeched at him in the same voice they’d heard from a distance. “But if it can, there’s not much we can do about it. There’s a hell of a lot of them.”

Sky and Coal came out from behind the cover of the rock. A few steps took them to an outcropping cliff overlooking the last valley. The sky was full of the birds. White and grey, flecked with black, swimming through the air, navigating the wind with heavenly ease, occasionally diving downward and rising back up. So that’s what birds had sounded like, in the ancient times when they filled all the skies. Coal wasn’t completely aware that he was still standing in his own present reality; for all he knew, he’d stepped back into another age of the world, and the sounds of the wind and the birds filled his soul.

There was another sound too, and that’s what Sky latched onto. It was a rushing, a crashing. Something endless, without echo, thin but full. Their downward view to the west was obscured by the rock walls of the final valley, but once they came out of there, Sky dreaded what they would see.

As they descended the final incline, Coal plucked bits of his jerky - of which he’d saved a fair bit - and dropped it in front of the bird. Eagerly it hopped after him, anticipating each chunk of meat with an increasing sense of entitlement. “Look at it! It thinks I’m its friend now.”

Frowning, Sky said “No, it just thinks you’re made of food.” Sky’s gloominess was confusing to Coal. This new world they were standing in was a sign of hope, after all. There was more to the world than flatness, dryness, hotness. Beauty had survived. Why wasn’t Sky reacting to that?

When Coal saw the reason, he didn’t immediately realize what he was seeing. He couldn’t; a mind confronted with a new and foreign reality will avoid “seeing” it, until it has figured it out. This took some time for Coal, but not for Sky, who had already surmised the nature of the plain beyond.

The final valley had opened up. The grass gave way to pebbly sand. The wind returned, though not as intense as it had been in the hills far above. The sun was clear and bright, and illuminated the sharp black cliffs which formed the final walls of this last valley. And then, flatness. Flatness for eternity. Flatness, against which the sun cast a reflection so bright there may as well have been a second sun.

Coal shielded his eyes. Sky placed his glasses back against his face.

“What?” was the only word Coal could muster, once he’d wrapped his head around the fact that he was looking at something utterly unfamiliar.

“You’ve read about oceans, haven’t you?”