To be continued...???
July 25, 2006

---The Prologue---

Ghost season, the reckoning year.

In October we fled the gallows and hid under the moss in a hot, damp place. The humidity was unbearable so we returned to our home in the ashes and dust. There we crumbled and whithered, and then became one with the wretched air. We were alone.

Then others, seeking a hot damp place, arrived. They were misled here instead by faulty navigational skills we assume. They did not want the ashes or other such deadly commodoties, but that was what they got and more. They got us. The desert wanderers breathed us in. We are in their lungs. We are death to them but they will never know the impact of our presence.

Until the ghost season, that is.

Href Slate gently placed the letter back in the box, and looked back over his shoulder to examine the letters, firey letters burning on their own in the charred floorboards. In a style of writing he had never seen before, a curly broken script, there was the blazing message:

"I, Equinox"

---The Source---

Earlier in the day, Href had been making his rounds in the abandoned homes of the colony, a habit he had grown accustomed to when feeling nostalgic. His wrinkled skin touched the fence surrounding the Broughton farm and a sad look came into his pale gray eyes as they met with the black abyss that was the hollow eye socket of a cattle's skull. It was then that he heard a most peculiar BANG coming from the direction of the old Gavin home. It had sounded like gunfire to his rusty old ears and he at first blamed it on his impending senility before continuing. The Gavin home was on the way and he could investigate when he got there. He sighed as his sad old eyes passed over the whithered plants that made up the vast farm...

He was nearly a mile away when he first saw the pillar of smoke. It was not easy to miss when he turned the corner of the rotting Broughton Barn. At first his heart sunk when he recognized the lapping orange tongues, but it suddenly swung back up when it hit him that no force on earth could have started a fire in this weather besides a man (or woman, so be it). But who would light the home on fire rather than live in it?

Href knew that none of his curiousities would be answered just standing there. With all the hopes and apprehensions that an aged desert heart could muster, he made the journey to the Gavin house, one leg after a limping other.

---

20 years had passed since the last of the settlers, aside from he and Terny, had perished in the Gavin desert (so named after the Chief Navigator who brought them here not long before). Now Terny was dying and there was no help for her. He too was showing the first signs of the plight and Rhef knew that he would fall not long after his wife.

20 years of living in isolation, feeding on the occasional snake or spider, rationing the water in the resevoir to a point where they were constantly dehydrated and stoned off the heat. Yet, he would not change any of it for all the water or livestock in the world.

The forests that he and his kind had inhabited before had become too crowded, polluted, and unhospitable. Of course, Href considered unhospitable to be "dull". The people of these woods called themselves the Terran Wael. No Tarren Wael had been permitted to leave the forest. The law was never explained, but anyone who ventured beyond the trenches built around the trees faced certain death. Their bodies were displayed in the trees as a reminder

Then came Vern Gavin and his solution to this problem.

It was Vern Gavin that challenged the imprisoning law by developing the Secret Navigational Brigade. At the time, Href had been a spry young man with bright eyes, dark skin (a rarity in the shady forests) and an active, adventurous mind. He was 25 and engaged to Mr. Gavin's neice, who was also an original member or the SNB. While most spouses or fiancees of Navigational Brigade members fainted on hearing their loved ones invested and dangerous interests... Gavin was sent into a fit of joy and eager to leave the forest when the time had come.

He would often shudder to think of what their life would otherwise have been like. Sure, they would die alone and at seperate times; but they would die as adventurers, proud of one another in all regards.

---to be continued and/or fixed up? maybe. ---