Early Frost
I call sūđan, fyr bryne. An Trogan of the harvest heed me.
As swiftly as the wind, the fire behind the cats suddenly roared. It licked around the three animals, spreading its red-gold flames out like arms and lapping at Thomas’s skin. He was burning. He was cindering to ash. And as he cindered he saw wheat spring up in green shoots from the flames. It grew until the flames were mingling in a huge unburning golden field. He could see the individual grains getting plumper and riper beneath the heat of the sun and the fire. Scythes came slashing across the stalks, cutting into the sweet flesh of the wheat and killing the harvest so that it could be ground into bread and eaten by the hungry. He smelt the sweat of the laborers and felt the terrible sharpness of the scythes. The fire burned brighter, devouring what the reapers cut and he could feel his skin peeling away from the force of the heat, he could feel the fire eating into his flesh. He crumbled before it without a protest. How could he protest? The world had become one big fire, the fire that burned from the south. When it left, snapping back into its place with a crackle of burning wood, Thomas couldn’t remember what it had been. He couldn’t remember where he was, where he had been. He didn’t know what had existed outside of this place.
Requiem
“Tenir la chandelle!” The old argument, Alain thought abstractly, trying to use his logic to counteract the strange quivering at the base of his stomach. “C’est chantage!”
The old hand was claiming innocence all ways to Sunday. Pity his gift of the gab was showing him a master of argot. Not quite the way for an innocent to be talking. Finally, Alain turned the corner and came within view of the disruption.
A grubby, dead-eyed tramp, rags hanging off him in streamers of grime encrusted cloth. Half his teeth were missing, a fact he displayed every time he spoke, baring his barren, swollen gums to the world. His hair was lank, partially grey-ish, partially yellow-ish, and mostly gone. The skin on the man’s face was reddened and raw, and the rest of his skin was a dull scorched tan which Alain had seen too many times to mistake. Only the endless, backbreaking work of the galleys, out at all hours of the day, would burn a man’s skin that shade of brown.
It sent another shudder through him, keeping him in the distance pressed against a wall and out of sight. Why was he suddenly so terrified? What was it about this strange man that frightened him?
His arms ached, and he rubbed them again, wishing he could get away from the never-ending pain. They hadn’t been this bad in weeks, suddenly feeling heavy and sore and hot all at once. A weird sinking sensation attacked his stomach, driving him back. He was frightened.