remembered from before, with fields full of purple plants, pastures full of six-legged orange sheep-pig things, red shrubs with blue fruit, and little villages of hexagonal houses sprinkled all around, but the next day, as I got away from the center of the country, things started to get a lot drier and dustier. The fields were nothing but bare stalks and dead plants, and the pastures were filled with dead sheep-pigs and sick-looking maku, which were Waar’s answer to buffalo—big shaggy six-legged bastards with heads like fists with eyes—only these all looked like they had the mange, and I could see their ribs through their hides. Dust devils whirled across the red dirt roads, and a whole lot of farms and villages were just plain empty. Half the time there wasn’t anybody around to be scared of me as I ran through the town square.
And the further I went, the worse it got. By the third day, the fields were full of six-legged skeletons, baking white in the sun, and the villages looked like they’d been abandoned for years. I didn’t understand it. I knew rain was rare in Ora. I knew they had to import a lot of wood from down south because there wasn’t enough rainfall up north to grow forests. Lhan and Sai had told me all about it. But why wasn’t there enough water for farming? Hadn’t I seen a whole aquarium full of water back in the Temple of Ormolu? Why weren’t they irrigating these fields? It made no sense.
On the fourth day the farms disappeared completely, and I was out on the plains—the same kind of area I’d showed up in the first time I came to Waar. That had changed too. The endless carpet of blue-stalked plants with little match-head flowers that I remembered from before had all wilted to a dry charcoal grey, and every now and then I’d see the dried corpse of a wild krae lying on the side of an empty creek bed.
I saw a few live animals too, and ran away from a few more. I surprised a pack of shikes, which are scary, screeching four-armed spider monkeys, tearing apart the corpse of a dead vurlak, which is like a fur-covered econo-van with teeth, and they chased me for a good half mile, and there was a run-in with a live vurlak later that day, but I jumped up on a jumble of rocks and hid from him and he gave up after a while.
At noon on the fourth day, I saw a tribe of Arrurrh, the four-armed cen-tiger guys I’d been captured by once, off in the distance. They were hunting wild krae, and I was tempted to go see if it was Queenie’s tribe. Fortunately, I’m not insane, so I didn’t. If it wasn’t her tribe, they’d have eaten me for lunch or taken me as a slave. If it was her tribe, the bulls woulda probably killed me as soon as they saw me. Her chief had tried to have me killed once before. He’d probably think I was back for revenge. Instead I looped wide around ’em and kept going.
Still made me wonder how Queenie’s daughter Kitten and her sweetheart Handsome were doing. Probably had a litter of little four-armed, tiger-striped kids running around by now. I hoped they were alright. Them and Queenie had been better to me than just about anybody on Waar—except Lhan, of course. I wished ’em well.
Finally, later that day, just as the sun was touching the horizon, I saw through the heat shimmer what I first thought was another giant rocketship temple in the distance, and I wondered what the hell it was doing way out in the middle of East Bumfuck. As I got closer though, I saw that it wasn’t a rocket ship, or a building, or anything man-made. It was a mesa, a wide, straight up shaft of rock, all red and majestic in the setting sun like something out of Monument Valley back home, only way taller, and all by itself. There weren’t any others like it for as far as the eye could see. I also saw that there were ruins on top of it—a bunch of crumbling walls and towers so old they almost blended in with the natural rock.
And I saw one other thing too, an airship, endlessly circling the
And the further I went, the worse it got. By the third day, the fields were full of six-legged skeletons, baking white in the sun, and the villages looked like they’d been abandoned for years. I didn’t understand it. I knew rain was rare in Ora. I knew they had to import a lot of wood from down south because there wasn’t enough rainfall up north to grow forests. Lhan and Sai had told me all about it. But why wasn’t there enough water for farming? Hadn’t I seen a whole aquarium full of water back in the Temple of Ormolu? Why weren’t they irrigating these fields? It made no sense.
On the fourth day the farms disappeared completely, and I was out on the plains—the same kind of area I’d showed up in the first time I came to Waar. That had changed too. The endless carpet of blue-stalked plants with little match-head flowers that I remembered from before had all wilted to a dry charcoal grey, and every now and then I’d see the dried corpse of a wild krae lying on the side of an empty creek bed.
I saw a few live animals too, and ran away from a few more. I surprised a pack of shikes, which are scary, screeching four-armed spider monkeys, tearing apart the corpse of a dead vurlak, which is like a fur-covered econo-van with teeth, and they chased me for a good half mile, and there was a run-in with a live vurlak later that day, but I jumped up on a jumble of rocks and hid from him and he gave up after a while.
At noon on the fourth day, I saw a tribe of Arrurrh, the four-armed cen-tiger guys I’d been captured by once, off in the distance. They were hunting wild krae, and I was tempted to go see if it was Queenie’s tribe. Fortunately, I’m not insane, so I didn’t. If it wasn’t her tribe, they’d have eaten me for lunch or taken me as a slave. If it was her tribe, the bulls woulda probably killed me as soon as they saw me. Her chief had tried to have me killed once before. He’d probably think I was back for revenge. Instead I looped wide around ’em and kept going.
Still made me wonder how Queenie’s daughter Kitten and her sweetheart Handsome were doing. Probably had a litter of little four-armed, tiger-striped kids running around by now. I hoped they were alright. Them and Queenie had been better to me than just about anybody on Waar—except Lhan, of course. I wished ’em well.
Finally, later that day, just as the sun was touching the horizon, I saw through the heat shimmer what I first thought was another giant rocketship temple in the distance, and I wondered what the hell it was doing way out in the middle of East Bumfuck. As I got closer though, I saw that it wasn’t a rocket ship, or a building, or anything man-made. It was a mesa, a wide, straight up shaft of rock, all red and majestic in the setting sun like something out of Monument Valley back home, only way taller, and all by itself. There weren’t any others like it for as far as the eye could see. I also saw that there were ruins on top of it—a bunch of crumbling walls and towers so old they almost blended in with the natural rock.
And I saw one other thing too, an airship, endlessly circling the
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