Displaced: Chapter 1

Now for something entirely different

A while back I made some sort of commitment to share some of my own creative writing efforts on this blog, and promised to stretch it out over a few days. Obviously that got away with me as other things took ahold and I ended up defaulting to my safe and usual schedule. Well, today is going to be break from that holding pattern as I've bitten the bullet, taken the hemlock, and am posting this blog up today, with the first chapter of one of my short stories. 

Of course, keeping very much with the theme of my blog I've decided to post one that is a fiction based on a favourite gaming property of mine. (Hint: It's 'Fallout') But otherwise the story and most all of the characters are my own. So legal jargon commence: I don't own the Fallout Universe or it's characters, Bethesda does. And I am my own editor, which if you've been around this blog for any amount of time you would know means you should expect some spelling errors here and there. I apologise for everyone and I'm trying to iron them out, but I'm a flawed and fleshy author, this is known.

 With all of that said I really do hope you enjoy chapter one of my own story: Displaced.

Chapter 1

On the fifth sunrise after the Tribes had set up camp in the rock valley gorge, tents lined along the lapping mountain river stream, a visitor came across them. First he appeared as little more than dot on the far horizon more than two days ago, so slight as to go entirely unnoticed had it not been for Catha's keen eye whilst she was gathering fruits upstream on that morning. Carrying the designation of 'Pathfinder', despite his diminutive age and size, it was Lari's job to track that figure's movements across the rocks. Lari fashioned himself a small dugout up some length of the mountain rock with visibility over the dusty tundra plains and across scraggly brush, borrowed the scope from his trusty hunting rifle, and committed his next few days to the watch. 

Of course, Catha would not have needed the scope to do the same job, what with her eyes. Chief Cede used to brag she had the eyes of desert vulture and the nose of a forest wolf, and an appetite large enough to eclipse both, as she happily proved come dinner time. But she was much too young for the task, hardly thirteen years of age. Besides, it would hardly be fitting for a Chief's daughter to spend her nights sleeping rough in the hills. For whatever titles like 'A Chief's Daughter' were even worth anymore. Not that such rules mattered much to the girl, Catha still found time to slip away from lessons and tuck herself into the dugout so she could annoy the young Pathfinder all day.

Together they tracked the stalking shadow as he pushed across the river streams and over the dense weed brush, across rough stone faces and up the bounding hill obscuring their camp's gorge from the common gaze. Once it became evident he would soon be heading directly in their path, Lari warned the sentries, young boys without a single cut to their name, and readied himself for drawing blood. But on the fifth morning the figure drew close enough for him to make them out fully. No facial markings, no black face paint, nothing to easily identify him as a pursuer. Still, the man seemed to be armed to the teeth and demanded extreme prudence.

That fifth day in the simmering morning, the shadow cleared the last hilltop, stood over the precipice and dabbed the accumulated sweat off his brow with the rim of his wide-brim hat. From up there he spotted a curiosity, a gathering of tents tucked away against a stream at the foot of a mountain, hidden in a valley of rock. Not abandoned either, he could see a sizable scurry of Tribals going about their morning duties, washing clothing in the streams, mixing vegetables in smoking pots and children playing over by the rocks. What really caught his eye were the markings on those tents. Black straight arrows on one, white splayed birds on the yellowed canvas of another; that was an oddity worth exploring.

And so he spent the next ten minutes carefully plodding down the rockface, acutely aware of the glint of scope as he did so, and the hidden forms of small bodies stalking around him from the bushes. They seemed innocent enough, or at least they had not yet attacked him outright. They could still be cannibals hoping not to get serve up stray lead inside their next meal. Ugh, what a thought. By the time his feet hit level ground, a smattering of Tribals were poking their heads out from their tents, wary of the outside but not yet outwardly hostile. A wizened old man, head like a dried and dusted peach, was the only one of them with the courage to actually come forth and greet him.

"Greetings, traveller" The old man spoke first, fulfilling his duty as leading Elder as of the pack. "You are not who we expected."

The stranger removed his hat in courtesy, bearing the beating glare of the unforgiving desert sun in favour of good manners. "I'm not? Apologies then, I don't mean to disappoint."

"No, no. That is good, Traveller; for today unexpected is good!"

Not every Tribe of the camp had seen the face of an outsider in their lifetimes, let alone one so clearly from the big cities and for some Tribes even the old folk were new to the experience. They pretended to mind their own business and tend to their duties whilst stealing glances at the newcomer from around their tent cavass or over a partner's shoulder. Lari held no such trepidation, and the moment he saw the stranger led into camp by Seer Pinac for a council, he took his right as Pathfinder to take his sown seat at the proceedings. Some in The Loyals had moved through big cities before, distant monoliths like New Reno and Broken Hills, and even their wild stories of skeletons who talked like men and sickly green giant men seemed weak in the face of an actual, real, completely alien, outsider. 

He wore a long black coat from his shoulders to his knees, and it was littered with pockets and pouches and knick knacks and zips. And beneath the coat, largely hidden, he donned a vest of padded plates not cobbled together by a camp armourer but forged and cut to his fit build. On his back, on his hip, and probably in the heavy satchel he had lugged across the hill to get here by Lari's best guess, were new and dangerous firearms that made the boy's eye socket itch in anticipation. Since he was twelve Lari had learnt to handle all their weapons, the hunting rifle, the Large pistol, the Spear and the Cutting Knife; he did not much like the feeling of not knowing the way a gun will fire when it was less than four feet from him.

The Stranger made no sudden moves to spark the boy's twitchy fingers. He was respectful and cautious, clipping his hat to his sack and carrying that in his arms, checking himself and double checking with each step as Seer Pinac and the other Elders sat down cross-legged at the edge of the dirt-drawn circle. Furthest from the crescent moon of tents that represented each of the Elders from the Tribes. He smiled, he drank the black coffee he was offered and spoke eagerly to satiate his curiosity.

"What do we call you, Stranger?" Seer Pinac asked, taking slow baby-sips of his black coffee. His palette had lost the taste for the brew, but tradition stands.

"Don't have much use for names this way. Hardly any folk ask for it before they try to bash your head in for a slice of Yucca fruit. Truth be told you're the first fair-speaking people I've seen in weeks- and that's including my trip through Reno!" Lari stole a glance at the Seer, even though custom usually demands attention to the speaker, and found he too noticed the stranger brush aside the question.

Seer Pinac took a slightly longer sip.

"And why have you come around this way? The Mountain pass leads on from the otherside of this valley, and the gorge carries up into a dead rock face, unless you have a climbing harness in that bag of yours." The Stranger unconsciously gripped a little tighter on his rucksack. "The game is sparse and if Yucca is your vice, this land is strange to it. So why come here?"

The Stranger thought on that, taking the simple query much deeper to heart than the old man expected. "If I said I was a traveller, that would say that I'm heading someplace. But to say I'm a wanderer suggests I don't care where I end up. Figure I'm just a visitor for now."

"A Visitor." The old man echoed. His eyes left focus in the way that Seer's do, only a second for us but much longer for them. He returned a happier man. "Then welcome, Visitor!"

"Seeing your tents was fortune, good or... otherwise. But I came with a question, I saw it first on your tents and now on you. Your markings. I figure maybe eight-nine different Tribes gathered in this one camp. Right?"

Pinac cupped at the base of his whiskers with an amused zeal ."You have a good eye, Visitor! We have amongst our number no less than twelve distinct Tribes. All carry their insignias, their symbols and their individuality on their backs."

"I have to say that's pretty unusual." A drifting concern darkened the stranger's features" Especially with the way Tribes are typically treated down this way of the West Coast. I wouldn't be too surprised if another stumbled on a camp of land-living Tribals and came away with the wrong idea entirely. Folk can be jittery around these parts."

As the Stranger took another sip, the hem of his sleeve caught and slipped on something bulky beneath the material.  He absentmindedly  rolled back the coat arm, unveiling a curious blinking machine strapped to his wrist. Lari and the young of the tribe who were peeking from behind their tents, were quickly swept up in the mystery of such an alien contraption. 

Seer Pinac nodded slowly "We have heard as much from The Doves, and the Shallow Holes. That is why we keep to the mountains and the woods, why we make our camps in the shadows of mountains and under stars. We are no group of warriors, so we must all do our part to avoid confrontations and misunderstandings."

The old man had touched on another point the Stanger had noticed. Aside from the young boy who had spied on him from a jutting rock on his approach, not a single tribal in this camp was of a fit, fighting shape. There were pot-bellied children in raggedy clothes and old frail men and women, organising and supervising the cleaning and cooking, but no proper protection. A small group of Vipers or some other highway men could turn this whole camp over in a couple of hours.

"Why do you all stick together? A group this size is only going to draw attention, and trouble."

The wise men and women of the circle turned their heads away, or downwards, to his question. The Seer glanced over his trodden and tortured equals with a weighted sadness of his own. Lari, on the otherhand,  glared meaningfully to his old mentor, silently begging him to watch what this Stranger learns "You touch on a sore wound. Our young pathfinder finds you suspect."

"He's not the first." The man tried to offer a comforting smile, but Lari only saw the wicked jowls of a wolf before they closed on the throat of a baby Bighorner. "I meant no offence. I'm just wondering what the heck any of you are even doing all the way out here."

Old Seer Pinac looked upon the curious Stranger, with the deeper eye of his namesake. Lari had observed this process a hundred times before, where the Seer's stiff limps went limp and the black ink in his pupils drifted to the colour of cloud milk, and every time it made his stomach clench. Pinac was gifted with the soul of a wraith, his mother used to say; an essence too substantive and ethereal to be chained to a simple frail frame like his. And so at times it would leave that body, slip into the realm of The Plains, where all secrets and hidden truths came soundly unfurled.

And then the colour returned to his eyes and the Seer came back his body, still sat in the Circle. 

"You want to know why we are together? Then I will tell you, if you will listen; but our stories come in wholes, Stranger. If I tell you the plight of us Displaced, it will start with the history of the Dead Trees. Do you still want to hear our story, then? Knowing we will cover everything?"

The Stranger felt the weight of the offer laid before him, it was a weight he had bore many times before and one he had left with intent. But that damned curiosity of his would never give him rest, even though he knew the urges that would likely follow.

"Tell me." He said once more.

The Old Seer nodded and took to preparing the Circle in the appropriate manner. A frushed mixture of orange petals and ground roots was sprinkled onto the open flame of the campfire, making them spit and spark with colourful yelps, before billowing hazy fumes. The smoke drifted up their noses, curled into their ears and watered their eyes. The ceremony was harmless, but it slipped the attendees into a drowsy state, ripe for the weaving of stories. The Seer spoke in a deep throaty voice that seemed to rise up from the earth and wrestle your jowls as he spoke the history of his people.

"The Dead Trees were born in the reserve of a great Basin far north of here. A craggy bowl carved deep into the earth and scorched from the Great Fire that wrought the sky. In it's wake was left a legacy of death, poison air that hung over the rim of the basin like an evil aura, killing the wildlife, the plants, and the tops of the tree trunks as they peaked above the valley walls. But, miraculously, that invisible cloud of death never fell into the basin itself, so that whilst none could enter the valley, man or bird, that which walked and crawled which was already there at the time of the Great Fire could persist, preserved.

Such as we were. My ancestors, the first of the Dead Trees. Backpackers and horticulturists, all caught in the basin when all the world died. Cut off from the outside, but granted a speck of untouched ecosystem, gifted to be all of their own if only they had the ingenuity and talent to use it. They who would become our Tribe would learn to section safe parcels of soil, keeping it clear of the toxic ash dripping off those black, lifeless, trees which cluttered the basin, and they would plant small roots and eating flowers to keep themselves sustained. They caught and boiled acid rainfalls, burning the death out of it and keeping their tongues from drying. And wisely knowing to plan for the future, they gathered the creatures that had survived the Great Fire, malformed though some were, and penned them safely away to be breed and slaughtered with restraint. Always the ecological health of our Basin proved our most pressing concern, and with careful care and maintenance our ancestors nurtured a new world paradise for their heirs: the Dead Trees as you see them today."

The Old Seer proudly pointed to the large canvass tent behind him. It was painted with a large white splotch and over that, a smattering of sharp black lines of various lengths and thickness. Black, dead trees.

"In time our Tribe started to form, and with it the traditions we kept to this day. A core order of authority to ensure the delicate ecosystem remained forever healthy. One Seer, One Chief, One Foreman; all equal. From that spawned a succession, a family raised to fulfil the jobs to guide our people. For a time I was Chief, my sister the foreman and my Aunt the Seer. Later, I grew... as you see me now, and into the position of Seer. My Sons became the Chief and Foreman. Cede, that gentle, caring child, became Chief, and Ketel, his sharp, brilliant twin, took the Foreman seat. And we ruled well our charge of care, until the impossible happened.

It seems that for the many generations we lived alone in our basin, consigned to the fate that all our world was those valley walls, the poison of the cloud which hung above us has begun to dissipate and fade. Maybe our ancestors knew such a thing to be possible, but we could never imagine such a thing. The first we knew of this was when it's consequences came to confront us, outsiders scaled the lip and clambered down into our basin, tracking mud on grounds that had been untouched for over a hundred years. It was a startling moment, to see a people we never knew existed come barrelling into our home, and our people became frightened soon after that. It was Cede, with a group of his finest scroungers, who took the initiative to ease tensions. He met with the strangers, and came back with their story."

Next to Pinac, a ghostly pale woman with a wispy voice swiftly took over from his point in the telling, as if well rehearsed.

"We of The Doves were scared. Refugees. Survivors of the wrath of the Dread Bull, that had chased us out of Hualapai and across the Mojave. Those hundreds painted blood red, with leather strapped armour, nettle-tipped spears and waving banners to their Golden Bull."

"Caesar's Legion." Breathed the Stranger through the haze.

Pinac nodded solemnly "The Doves were the first to come, but they were not the last. Next came the Little Spears, chased from the Salt Lakes, then the Frosted, driven from the cold north. And so on. Tribes hounded by a ravenous Dread Bull, eager to swallow them whole and assimilate their culture, their history, their individualism into that boiling amalgam. They came to shelter in our Basin, on the outskirts of our land, and soon their number became one with our own. What started as another's plight has become ours. You wonder why we hide here, tucked away from the world; it is to avoid the wrath of the Bull and to give us time to search further still for a new home safe for us to settle."

" 'Further still' ? But we're so far from the Legion here. From Arizona. Why can't your journey end here?"

"The Bull is fanatical." Said Coloumbia, Speaker of the Doves. "It's horns have chased us for two states, and it will not stop."

Old man Pinac continued "Our camp here, nestled in this gorge, makes for a decent grazing ground, a respite from three weeks of running, but we cannot settle. We've been here five days and our pursuers draw close. I can- we know it." The Stranger instinctively glanced over his shoulder, tasting just a drop of the fear that hounded the Displaced Tribes all this way already. "And we are at an impasse."

"Oh?"

"When we left our basin, we did not do it blindly. Coloumbia's Doves found our basin on their journey to find a mythical legend. From their oldest tales, before the Fire, their people hailed from a city behind a grand gate wrought from gold. A haven, perhaps, from even the Dread Bull itself. When the time came that we could not last in our home any longer, it was with the story of that golden city to heart, and with the skilful eye of young Lari here to lead us." 

Pinac smiled warmly to the only tribal in the circle not an octogenarian, a spindly gruff-looking kid no more than sixteen years old. Also, the Stranger noted grimly, the only person in the entire camp to be wielding a gun. A battered, jury-rigged, hunting rifle with a barrel that was losing a fight against two hundred years of rust.

"But even his hardwork can only take us so far. Ahead our path is set to lead us under the mountains, through an old cave system that prospectors who knew our destination pointed us towards. None of the Dead Trees have ever walked without the stars overhead them, Stranger. It is a terrifying prospect to surrender ourselves to the horrors of the deep where none of our tricks and tools can help us. No brush to light aflame and scare off wolves, no deadbush to break-off and fashion over our heads to disguise our shape on the horizon. We are up against the total unknown."

"I can do it, Seer!" Lari cried, almost standing up in his pride and forgetting his place altogether. "It is my duty as Pathfinder to brave the perils of our journey first. I will be the man I am supposed to. I just- need to make sure I am fully ready, first." The boy flushed with embarrassment, regretting speaking up just as quickly as he did.

"The boy is scared. And we are scared for him." Pinac admitted on Lari's behalf. "Our ways have not prepared us for the trials ahead. Neither have the Doves', nor the Little Spears'. Pathfinder Lari is our only defence against the Dread Bull, and he is our dear child. If we send him in to the dark and lose him-"

The old man's words hung, and with them a plea unasked. Or perhaps that was just the Stranger's own imagination, a conjured responsibility burned in his conscious by a lifetime of sticking his nose where it didn't belong.

"You need someone with the skills and knowledge to take you through that cave system, huh?" The Stranger said "Fair enough, I'll do it." 

The elders of the circle looked about one another, confused at this sudden development. Lari's eyes practically bulged out of head at the idea of being unceremoniously replaced, despite his reservations about his task to begin with. Only the Old Seer remained levelled and unphased.

"We have little to offer you." Pinac said.

"I doubt you'd have anything I want." The Stranger said, looking up at the first blinking stars from the purple dusk and breathing deep the clean, wilderness air. 'Everywhere I go-' He mused to himself. "I've been wandering this way without a destination for weeks now, and it just so happens that road has cut right into yours. Getting through that cave is both of our goals now, as luck would have it. (Especially if what you say is behind you really is.)" He added in a murmur, glancing back once more as if expecting to see the silhouettes of a full Legion Phalanx cut across the skyline. "Besides; I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to see this 'gate made out of gold' for myself."