They Did Depart Read online

They Did Depart

  A LAND THE OLD GODS ABANDONED

  Brett P. S.

  Copyright © 2016 Brett P. S.

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1 – FALL OF MAN

  CHAPTER 2 – TOMB OF THE GODS

  CHAPTER 3 – MEAGER SCRAPS

  CHAPTER 4 – FACING THE WILDS

  Chapter 1

  Fall of Man

  Amala of Ich’tal leapt over a fallen tree trunk as she raced through dying woods with aching old trees and fluttering orange leaves. The miasma had wrinkled their twisting branches and gnarled forms until they leaked their green putrid stained souls into the soil, contaminating the waters that flowed below the ground. She ducked as a stray branch swiped through her auburn hair and scratched past her already irritated reddened neck. She pulled her collar up over the reddened portion.

  Three months out of the year, the woods looked as it did in the old library pictures, but this was not one of those months. Summer had drawn to a close and what few leaves remained attached to the winding structures had grown into a muck filled yellow to match the color of the miasma that flowed around her like a curling serpent with no head. Amala wore a mask with a specialized filter, one that she took off only briefly to eat and drink food that her ancestors had blessed, and even then, there was a risk to it.

  A branch snapped some distance away, and Amala froze, ducking behind a tree. She cautiously crept up over the shrubbery and drew her knife. She stared out into the midday sun for a minute, heaving a heavy sigh as she sheathed her knife. Wildlings wouldn’t stray this far from their camps. She paused in thought. Unless there was an encampment her people hadn’t yet observed. Wildlings were if nothing else, predictable. They stalked full-blooded humans for food but not sport, and the poor creatures knew no such thing as deceit.

  The crash echoed through the woods and clear across to her settlement, Ich’tal, hours ago. The noise alone would have frightened off what little wildlife still lingered around for a day or two, wildlings included. She brushed a branch to her side and proceeded with a less hurried pace. She’d almost reached the spot. Amala had a good sense of distance and direction, though it didn’t take a sage charting the heavens to hear something like that.

  She pushed ahead and dodged winding branches as she continued, climbing across the odd log, covered with moss and milky green rot. The air around her stung her face and made her eyes water, but she’d grown accustomed to it. Unlike the settlement dwellers, who might complain at the slightest whiff of the miasma, she’d practically been born in it. Raised in a climate that put forth every ounce of its energy to reject her body, to say she did not belong in this world. At times, she might have believed it, but with the Old Gods in her sights, she pushed back her doubt and climbed into the aftermath.

  Amala stepped into a woodland clearing made manifest by the towering structure of black steel and glass that carved a crater through the soil and snapped two rows of trees in half. She glanced around the created ravine, noting that the area stretched some two hundred meters across in either direction. Near the edge of the ravine, she spotted the spire, the metal construct that stretched up past the miasma.

  “Throne of the old Gods,” she said. “It fell to earth.” She paused, biting her lip. “Does that mean one died?”

  Amala shook her head and clutched her knife. Gods did not die, but a fallen throne might mean something else. She eyed the structure, rectangular and the size of one of the living quarters in her settlement, except much more finely furnished and not covered with rust like the sparse buildings in Ich’tal.

  Through the glass, she spotted some more intricate decorations, ancient tools she hardly recognized. Maybe she could salvage something, if she even understood how to operate the tools. Should she in the first place though? A lifetime of reinforcement told her to turn away and let it be. It may have been trash, but it was a God’s trash, too good for her or her people. Common sense told her to forget it. Amala paused briefly and turned to head back. She parted a shrub and took a step into it before a striking thought sneakily crawled its way into her mind.

  “What if this is a gift?”