Angel Isle

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A woman led a lame horse across an unpeopled landscape. For much of the way all seemed peaceful, but then she would come to an area where buildings were shattered or gutted with fire, young crops trampled flat, and bodies, both human and animal, sprawling in their blood and now rotting unburied. Ahead of her lay the heavy line of the forest, and close beneath it the remains of one last farm. So Saranja came home to Woodbourne.

Six years ago she had left, swearing to herself she would never return. For five of those years she had been the house slave of one of the warlords beyond the Great Desert, until he and the two children she had borne him had died when his keep was stormed by his brother’s army. In the chaos she had escaped, and continued to stagger on through the darkness. When dawn had broken she had found herself already in the desert.

Six years ago she had almost died, crossing it, though then she had carried food and water. Now she had nothing. But she did not turn back. Death would be better than the life she had been living. This time, though, the desert seemed to let her through as if it had chosen to do so. It provided her with two freak thunderstorms and a waterhole large enough to support a colony of birds which, having no predators, laid their eggs on the ground. With those, and things that she had learned from her first crossing to recognize as food, she had come through.

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