The Firmament Saga: Book I: The Rains of Sorrow

Waxday, Week 33, Month Quatrus, Year of God 487

Splash! Lineria’s boot-clad foot plunked down into the shallow water, scraping the uneven, rocky ground. Similar splashes could be heard around her; the other farmers of Mossflower Hold were also out gathering clams. All of them were clad in knee-length raincoats and boots that reached above the knees. It was Waxday, blustering and raining as usual, with hints of thunder but no lightning scourging the air. The rain plinked as it joined the water in the vast clamfields, the knee-deep water stretching off into the horizon.

Right in front of Lineria was a clam. Around the size of the palm of her hand, it clung to the muddy ground, oblivious to its impending doom. Lineria reached her gloved hand into the water and pried the clam free from its perch. She placed it in her basket, which was almost full of clams from just an hour of gathering.

“Hey, Eri!” a familiar voice called. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of the buggers!”

Eri’s older sister Syrenasha, the source of the voice, stepped up to her. Like Eri, she had a tall, stocky build, cropped black hair and rainwashed tan skin. Well, it had been tan once, like the other residents of Yalen District, but years of working in the rain had given it a pale cast.

“Indeed I have, Sye. They’re very active this time of year. Lots of them, for some reason.”

“Maybe there’ll be a surplus!” Sye said excitedly. Despite being four years older than Eri, she had always been the excitable, immature one in the family. “We can have actual meat in our soup!”

“I doubt it,” Eri responded. “The warriors near the border have been calling for more rations. The sea heathens have been redoubling their attacks lately, and the Wind Caste is sending more of their numbers to repel them.”

A look of disappointment flashed across Sye’s face. Fire Castemen like the denizens of Mossflower Hold rarely got to partake in the luxuries they produced. The clam meat produced in Mossflower got sent to the capital of Yalen, Ebar-Anhanvil. The residents of the farming villages made soup with the clam-shells that were left behind.

Sye glanced down at her own basket, half-full of clams. “Well, we’re almost done combing the field. I suppose they’ll bring out the rock powder in a few hours.”

“Hopefully the red kind. Last week, our clam production was nearly doubled. This blue rock powder doesn’t attract as many clams,” Eri replied.

Sye’s childlike, optimistic nature was rapidly replaced by her depressive, cynical persona. She was always like that - either completely happy or sad.

“The red rock comes all the way from the mines in the Umere and Lowenal Districts. It takes over three days to haul the chunks of rock here, and another to powder them all,” she said in a businesslike tone. “I think we’ll have to make do with the blue powder from nearby Thael.”

The two worked in silence, filling their baskets. After an hour, they decided that they had enough clams and began to mosey back to the village with the other farmers. All of them were clad in hooded raincoats and knee-high boots, their heads hunched over to prevent the rain from dripping into their eyes.

“Oh, Eri!” Sye said. “Didn’t you say you would get something for Alva?”

“Oh,” Eri said. “I forgot.” Alvadinine was Eri’s fiancee. They had been very close, but had drifted apart recently. Eri was getting less and less attracted to Alva and people in general, and their interactions had gotten less and less close. Pressured by her culture, Eri had proposed marriage to Alva a few days back, but she had rejected it. Now she wanted to stop their relationship, but felt too scared to just spit it out to her.

A pensive look entered Sye’s face. She hummed for a minute, then her eyes lit up.“Go get something fancy for her!” she said. “I’m not into anyone, but when Mother or Father got mad with each other, they gave each other gifts. Nice-looking rocks, bread, stuff like that.”

“I’m not sure I want to,” Eri protested. “If I’m being honest… I want to end it with her. Just end it with her.”

“Just giving up on her is cruel!” Sye exclaimed. “At least talk to her, give her something.”

“I guess you’re right,” Eri sighed. “A goodbye gift, if nothing else.”

“I saw some colorful rocks near the western clam fields the other day,” Sye said. “Colorful rocks always cheer people up. Well, at least me.”

“Thanks,” Eri said. “Let me get one.” She trudged off, sloshing in the water. What to do? What to get for Alva?

She put those thoughts aside. Let’s just get the gift and end this situation now. She trudged onwards, her feet sometimes sticking in the mud.

Eventually, she arrived at the western clamfields. This portion of the farm was rocky and had numerous small outcrops poking up out of the water. The stone was grey, brown, and muted red and gold in equal measure, reaching up to ten feet above Eri’s head in twisting pillars.

Immediately, her attention was drawn to a particularly large pillar a hundred or so yards to the northwest. It was structured more like a pyramid than a pillar, with gently sloping sides at the bottom that grew more sheer closer to the top. Chunks of loose rock sat around the base of the pyramid-pillar. The rocks were in every color of the rainbow, and ranged in size from the size of a fingernail to the size of a fist.

One finger-sized rock in particular drew her attention. It was green in hue - not a lush or dark green, but rather the murky green of the ocean. Also, the rain hitting it made a different sound from the plop-plop-plop of the water and the tut-tut-tut of the regular rocks - the rain made the plink-plink-plink sound of metal as it struck the murky rock.

Eri was intrigued. It was a very interesting rock, and would make for a nice gift. She sludged up to it, her boots making a popping sound as they stepped out of the water onto the outcropping. She walked to the rock and placed her gloved hand upon it.

It made a faint thrumming sound but did not otherwise move. She immediately jerked her hand back in surprised panic. She let out a gasp and stumbled back. What was that?

She took deep breaths, calming herself down. It’s just a rock, she told herself. A strange rock that thrums, but it’s still a rock. She touched it again. It thrummed for another moment, then stopped. As the sound stopped, the rock seemed to get a tiny bit darker in color. It was surprisingly weightless, almost as if it was hollow inside. It seemed solid enough when she tapped it, though.

She happily ambled back home, tossing and catching the rock. In a day that was otherwise normal, finding an object of interest made her feel good.

Her reverie was broken by a whooshing sound followed by a splash. Startled, she whirled around to see Dale standing behind her.

The middle-aged Rain Caste priest of Mossflower Hold wore his signature white-and-blue robes. He was bald and clean-shaven, and wore a sinister smirk on his face.

“Eri! What are you doing?” he said in a voice carrying barely-disguised hostility.

“Uhh, carrying a rock, Your Lightness,” Eri said. She shuddered and clenched the rock tighter.

“Oh?” Dale mused. “And why is that?”

“I was going to give it to my fiancee, my lord,” Eri said. “As a gift.”

“Peasants such like you and her don’t deserve such… lavish gifts,” Dale spoke. “Give it here.”

“But it’s my rock!” Eri protested. “It’s just a rock.”

“If so, then you won’t mind giving it to me. Here. The more you hold onto it, the more I’ll have to wash the peasant filth from it.” He held out his hand, smirking.

Eri sighed, walked over to the man, and deposited her green stone in his hand. Dale immediately flew into the air, carried on waves of Lux. He flew off without so much as a word.

She felt angry. Why was Dale so cruel to her and her kin? He was a Rain Casteman, that was why. He could exercise his Lux and say whatever he wanted - and do whatever he wanted, for that matter. For the moment, there was nothing Eri could do. She gritted her teeth, groaned, and walked back to the village entrance.

The village consisted of three buildings - one small, one medium and one large. Each was made of interlocked stone blocks. The medium building was the entrance to the underground complex where people actually lived. The small one was the church, where the village would worship every other Stormday. Small holes in the ceiling let in rain to bathe the congregants while worshipping. The large building was the warehouse, which stored crates and crates of prepared clams as well as stables for the cart-turtles who transported goods to and from the village. Eri and Sye approached the medium building, and entered it through open doors.

The entrance building consisted of a single cubical room with a spiral staircase leading down into the ground. It was wide enough for two men to walk abreast, and currently, villagers were hauling crates up and down it. Over a dozen of the dark wooden crates lay strewn around the room, waiting to be hauled to the warehouse or the cooking chamber below. Eri and Sye made their way down the stairs, passing many familiar faces - Halvanorsin, Dagdaria, Myceniam, Yageramnil, Octavia, and many others. These farmers had lived at the village for generations, and were as familiar as the ground and clouds to Eri. The village’s Marquess, Royce, lived in his own chambers with the rest of his family and Dale. He wasn’t as cruel and condescending as many Rain Castemen, especially Dale, but preferred to spend his time in his rooms alone, only emerging to worship and when other high-ranked people visited town.

The staircase ended in an alcove that led into a long hallway. The walls were of stone, over 50 feet below the ground. The hallway had signs written in both Lowscript and Highscript. The one pointing to the left read, “Additional Storage.” The one pointing to the right read, “Barracks, Cooking Facility, Marquess’s Estate.” As Eri and Sye had clams they needed to drop off, they began to walk to the cooking facility.

The familiar smell of cooking food wafted through the air as they approached the kitchens. People bustled in and out of the open wooden door, carrying all manner of things. As Eri and Sye approached the door, an all-too-familiar face greeted them.

“I see you have clams, Eri,” Alvadinine said. The young woman wore a long tunic over trousers, the staple uniform of villagers while not in the rain. She had similar features to the rest of the Mossflower Hold denizens, but her eyes had a sharp, intelligent cast to them. She currently carried a long wooden ladle that was currently dry.

“Indeed I do, Alva,” Eri said. “I… I’m sorry. I want to break things up with you. I tried to get you a gift, but Dale confiscated it. I hope you’re not disappointed”

“Me?” Alva incredulously asked. “I’m not. You weren’t close with me these past few months, and I just felt like I wanted to break it up. No gift could change that. My parents sure as rain are, though. They figured that you would be the one for me, and they wouldn’t have to go to a matchmaker to find me a better wife.”

“Look, Alva. You’re a great person,” Eri said. “I still like you. But I’m just not… How do I put this… Into people anymore. In a romantic way.”

“C’mon, Eri,” Alva said. “We’re already 20! Perfect time to marry. Most of our peers have paired off. It’s not too late to marry, even if it isn’t for love.”

“I don’t ever see myself as being attracted again. But maybe we can be friends” Eri put on a faint smile. Alva’s face began to light up.

“Well, we’ve been together since childhood, and it’s not like there are very many other single folks in a hovel like this. You’ll always be my special person.”

“True that, Alva,” Eri said. “We got some clams to cook.”

Sye had been huddling away from the two, hunched and averting her eyes. She had never been one for romance, and did not exhibit attraction to neither girls nor boys.

“If you two spring-rabbits are done slobbering, we have a job to do,” she said.

“We weren’t slobbering, Sye. And what the sun is a spring-rabbit?”

“Something I read in a storybook once. Apparently, these rabbit things liked mating. Just like-”

“Okay, let’s, err, leave it at that,” Eri said. They began to move into the kitchen. Steam blew into their faces as they surveyed the large, long room. Cooks and other folks were darting around the room, tending to a variety of tasks. Twelve huge cauldrons, six on either side, were boiling with water. The ones on the left were the communal soup-pots. Powdered clamshell was the main component of the soup the inhabitants of Mossflower ate as their regular diet. The soup also contained waterweed, nonflour moss, catbriar, and rat milk. It always tasted surprisingly good considering it was made up of foods the higher castes refused, helped by the spicy catbriar.

The other pots were devoted to preserving the clam meat itself for long storage times. The boiling water was filled with salt, and clams cooked there would be edible for weeks afterwards.

On the other end of the room was several messy work stations and a plethora of storage containers. At two of the work stations, people separated the meat from the shell, being given clams by a person standing near a box, and giving the shelled clams to a different person. At another, the clamshells were being grinded with mortar and pestles, into white powder. At yet another station, cooks with knives chopped vegetables to go in the ever-boiling soup. Workers hauled ingredients to the soup, and occasionally took ladlefulls of the soup out of the pots and placed them in ceramic jars for tonight’s dinner.

The sisters moved towards the shelling station and dumped their baskets of clams in the shelling containers. The head cook, Ianellard, nodded at them. Since he didn’t have any work for Eri to do, she moved out of the kitchen and into the hall. Sye stayed behind, probably waiting for a job to pop up.

Eri wandered throughout the halls. For the first time since the previous Stormday, she had true freedom to use as she pleased. The clams had all been harvested, and more wouldn’t come until tomorrow. But having this choice puzzled her. Did she want to play some chess with old Lormienda? She whooped Eri’s ass every time in the game of lords. Did she just want to sit around the fire with her comrades drinking mossbeer and joking? Eri didn’t like how happymoss dulled the senses and made her prone to speaking out of turn.

Her choice was made for her as Thomarnivel, a middle-aged villager with a prominent birthmark on his cheek in the likeness of a turtle, walked up to her.

“Hey, kid,” he said in his ragged, weary voice. “I have a bunch of empty boxes that need hauling. Care to help?”

“Sure thing,” Eri responded.

“Idle hands are the sun’s domain,” Thom said. “We must work hard to get closer to the God of Rain.” He had always been incredibly devout, going to church every sun-cursed Stormday. Eri was no heathen, but she had always thought of God as just a force of the universe, not some narcissistic ruler who demanded constant praise.

The two walked along the corridor, then arrived in the cavernous underground storage chamber a minute later. The room was shaped somewhat like a dome, with several tiers connected by stairs surrounding a central circular area. Every surface was packed with… stuff. Food, clothes, medicine, raw materials, everything people could ever possibly need was strewn in boxes, crates, jars, barrels and other vessels haphazardly across the room. In the central floor were four cubic crates, each half as tall as a person.

“Yup, there they are,” Thom said, gesturing to the aforementioned crates. “We should each take two, haul them up to the aboveground storage chamber.”

Eri and Thom each picked up a crate, then stacked it on top of another. The crates were surprisingly light considering their size. Then again, they were empty. As Eri moved out of the room, she thought ahead towards dinner. Then, surprisingly, she thought about just how… limited her world was. In her twenty years on this mortal coil, she had never gone beyond sight of the upper structure of Mossflower, beyond the reach of that bastard Dale. It was visible from anywhere in the clam fields, and beyond them was just endless marsh until you got to the ocean or rainfields. Of course, there were hundreds of other villages, towns and cities making up the Holy Kingdom. They were just out of reach for a lowly farmer like Eri.