Caravellum

The fields were narrow, barely four oxen wide, and wound in between the protruding landforms that erupted towards the sky. Dusk fell upon the deep valleys between the mesas, lilac blooms twisted to face the memory of the day’s light. A carpet of deep purple foliage, interspersed with the brown hue of mushroom caps stretched across the ground.

In the middle of the narrow fields, a lone worker cleared the mycelium that had amassed within a stretch of dirt. The short blade moved swiftly within her practiced hands, picking and pulling as a master might untangle their puppets. Senda craned her back as she stood, stretching creaky bones out of the hunched arch they had slipped into over the course of her toil. At full stretch, she could just see over the crest of the sloped earth before her. A yellow plain stretching towards the horizon, bifurcated by a gouge of deep blue coursing a long path towards the ocean. She stared out towards the blue, straining on the tips of her toes to follow its line towards the shore. The sound of laughter brought her back. She hooked her blade about her belt loop and headed back to the top of the field with her bucket of collected mycelium in tow. Beneath the leather lean-to, a ring of the elders sat around two young children, each of them sporting a wide grin as they burrowed their faces into cracked pieces of sandmelon. The boy, his hair sheared roughly, gripped his melon with great care, fingertips gripping on the hard skin so as to ensure not a single drop of its juice would sully his hands. His face was painted with the sugar-syrup of the sweet fruit. The old folk watched them, their stony sunworn faces reflecting youthful joy through the unconscious tilting of the corners of their mouths. As the children saw Senda approach, they jumped to their feet, stumbling over the uneven ground as they ran towards her. She wrapped them in a sweaty hug.

She placed the bucket by the elderfolk. They nodded in thanks, and a taller man passed her a parcel. The sun fell further and darkness took the valley in full as she walked home with her children. Her son sighed into a slumber in her arms, his weight numb against her strained muscles. Her daughter stumbled along the path as she gripped her mother’s skirts, doe eyes blinking hard to stave off the sleep that pulled at her. They pushed open the door.

There was no candlelight. Senda stood by the door and watched the shadows. There was a new darkness, unfamiliar to the dusty corner of the shack. She shifted her sleeping son’s weight in her arms, propping him upon her hip. With a free hand, she gripped a short stave, its wood mud-marked from the fields. She held it between herself and the shadow. “Alcen?” She asked. There was a sound, like a bird’s call. It enveloped them.