[hider=Monsoon on Maradûn]
[b]Monsoon on Maradûn[/b]

The last days of summer are a tragedy, for those who live in the hills of Maradûn. The region is often arid for long periods of time, and it seldom rains there. The record high for the largest amount of precipitation in Maradûn in an entire year is only about six centimetres. And most of that six centimetres? It falls on Maradûn in the last days of summer, when the skies turn a brilliant greenish blue and the clouds blow in on eastern winds. Why then, is this time a tragedy? Because as much as the people who live there might wish it, Maradûn receives this blessed deluge of rainfall one in every seventeen summers.

It is for this reason that on this particular summer’s day, with the cold breeze blowing over the gently waving tufts of grass that topped Maradûn’s sand hills, that Meldie paid no mind to the skies, even in the lovely shade of cool emerald they now displayed. Meldie was much more preoccupied with the contents of the ground under her feet than what lay above in the heavens. She had recently been appointed as the Head Excarchiver, which was about as prestigious a position as the young woman could hope for. It was a task awarded to those whom could serve the tribe in no other means, but who were also ineligible for exile. This effectively, could only be Meldie, who had the collective misfortune of both being the daughter of the Patriarch, but also of being unmarriageable. This, on account of her “inhospitable” and “unreasonable” attitude.

Meldie scoffed at that, at she thrust the shovel deep into the earth. She was a gem, and anybody who couldn’t see that was blind. And much more to the point, she had no interest in kowtowing to any stupid old man her father picked out for her to marry. In the end, it was simple enough to incense every eligible man her father threw at her until there were none left. Of course, every person in the clan had to do their part, which meant that she was relegated to excarchivation. The menial task consisted of what was in essence busy work. Meldie would dig holes, ostensibly looking for treasures, despite the fact that she had never found any. The elders in the clan insisted that excarchivers had unearthed some of the most valuable secrets and lost artifacts in the clan’s possession.

“That’s a load of rubbish,” Meldie grumbled, her face locked into a petulant pouting expression.

“I love it when you look like that,” Caraw said, his voice filled with amusement. He had been walking up this particular sand hill in search of solitude and found something better. The Patriarch’s daughter, playing at being an exarchiver and digging around in the dirt.

“Go sit on an aurochs’ horn, Caraw.” Meldie hissed, stabbing down more angrily at the shovel. The last thing she wanted was for this creep to see her toiling in her exarchiver’s robes, which were far too loose in the front to keep the wearer cool during the hottest part of the day.

“I would do as you ask, your Ladyship, if only the comfortable perch you suggest wouldn’t startle our poor beasts of burden to death. You of all people must know how much we need them in these dry spells of ours. How else would we find groundwater, if not by their guidance?” Caraw said, his voice dripping with condescension. It was true, he was enjoying the view that Meldie’s loose robes afforded him, but a better part of his bitterness came from having genuinely wished for a place to be alone. None of the clan were allowed to wander very far away from the central pavilion, lest they fall afoul of Maradûn’s many perilous environmental features.

Meldie spat in his direction and continued on with digging her hole. Caraw sniffed at her, and walked to the edge of the sand hill, taking a seat on his perch to look out over the clan’s living grounds. The sand hills formed over long periods of time, the direction of the winds curling the hills over to form large crests atop which grasses often grew sparsely. To look eastward in Maradûn was to face a vast horizon of frozen waves, not dissimilar to the great seas of water that some of the eldest clansmen swore lay far to the west and the north.

Caraw, despite trying to focus on counting the pointy tips of the tents, found himself turning back towards Meldie’s hunched form. She was struggling to dig now that she had gotten below the initial layer of sand and topsoil. Meldie was breathing heavily despite herself and she squeaked in terror when she felt rough hands reach around her to grab the shovel.

“Here, see. You have to kick the edge of it down into the earth with the bottom of your foot, to break through.” Caraw muttered, his voice quietly terse. Meldie felt herself shaking between his arms like one of the flags her father flew from his pavilion tent. Battered and quivering in a strong wind, or in her case, the strong arms of Caraw as he pressed down on the shovel to lift up a chunk of earth. Just as suddenly, Caraw let go of the shovel and turned back away. He scanned the skies, and opened his mouth to say something when-

“Thank you, Caraw.” Meldie’s voice sounded so soft that Caraw had to swallow before he could face her. When he turned around to meet her gaze, she had already turned away to her hole, employing the technique he had shown her. The man, only a year older than Meldie, threw his hands in the air and sat back on the edge of the sand hill. 
His hair was tousled by a light wind, that tasted of sharp cold, of the kind that bit into his cheek. The soft thumps, and shearing tugs of the shovel into the earth were all that he heard, aside from Meldie’s shortness of breath. She could feel her lungs burning, with the lifting and the stomping giving her some sense that she could stomp and wrench her problems out of her life.

[i]Clang![/i]

Caraw and Meldie both flinched at the same time, their thoughts broken up by the discordant noise which broke the silence they had surrendered to. The pair of them forgot their squabbles, and both bent down into the hole to peer at what the excarchiver had uncovered. A small dull grey surface was poking out of the very bottom of the hole. Dirt-filled lines in the metal seemed to hint at a kind of written language, though the symbols meant nothing to either Meldie or Caraw, and soon enough the young man had leapt out of the hole.

“Get out of there and give me the shovel!”

“No! Why would I give you the shovel? It’s my find! I’ll dig it out myself.”

“You stupid…” Caraw pressed both palms to his face, screwing them into his eyes in frustration. “I’ll get it out of there in half the time, easily.” Meldie shook her head, and offered him no response. It didn’t matter that her bones ached, and her arms and back were on fire. She had picked this spot to dig, and it had been her shovel that had clanged so beautifully on a find. She would [i]not[/i] allow somebody else to claim this prize in her stead.

When no response was forthcoming, Caraw took a deep breath and stretched. His back cracked satisfyingly as he did so, and without realizing immediately he saw how dark the sky had grown. The heavens were full to bursting with clouds, and these bore the  dark shades of gray and black that Caraw had never seen in his life. He stood and stared for a time, dumbfounded.

“Meldie…” Caraw’s voice called, his tone serious to his own mind, but Meldie heard only a pleading whine.
“No, you stupid boy. I will not allow you to take this from me!”

“Meldie!” She shook her head. That boy sure was a better pretender than she had given him credit f- “LOOK UP!”

She looked up, Caraw’s scream demonstrating a sincerity she doubted he could fake. Meldie raised her eyes skyward and when she did, the first raindrops in Maradûn fell upon her upturned face. The first raindrops that Maradûn had received in twenty-six years. Caraw meanwhile, was looking down on the clan’s pavilion grounds. Dozens of people were rushing about to and fro, bringing out any containers they could find to use. People had their water skins attached to funnels, and all their cutlery, and several people had even taken the waste troughs of the aurochs and emptied them in haste, though Caraw cringed to think of how they were meant to make use of water tainted by such filthy means of acquisition.

Meldie’s face was a blend of freshwater and salt, her tears tasting strong on her lips where she licked them. It had been so long that both of her parents believed the rains had finally abandoned Maradûn for good and all. She had never thought to see the rains, especially after her seventeenth birthday had come and gone three summers ago. Now though, the heavens burst open with all the pent-up flood of water that had seemed to have been gathered up in the quarter century since their last visit. 

The sand hills turned to mud and soon the whole of Maradûn had turned darker than a moonless night. Thunder and lightning echoed and flashed high above, while the open air felt akin to swimming in a river, such was the power and amount of rain pounding the ground. Caraw stumbled away from the edge of the sandhill, turning as he did to see a glowing light, incongruous in the suffocating wetness. Meldie was seated on the edge of her whole, and she too seemed hunched over the water that had pooled there in mere seconds. Of course when the rain had begun to really fall, she could not possibly keep her face turned to the sky, but the glowing piece of metal which remained partially buried was mesmerizing.

Caraw joined her in sitting on the edge of the pool, but the glow itself merely served to accentuate the sheen of Meldie’s skin and the very revealing nature her robes took on, even accounting for their cut, by way of being soaked through. His eyes wandered over her, and as they did, Caraw shivered in the warm rain. He sucked in a breath and coughed wetly, his lungs taking in some water as well as air. A cold kind of fear took over him then. He couldn’t see the rest of the clan now, through the impenetrable walls of water surrounding their little light in the darkness. They were utterly alone.
None of the stories either of them had heard described the summer rains as they now appeared, where they seemed fit to drown the world and everything in it. Meldie felt the same unease growing sense of horror at the sheer power of the forces of nature working against them. Before she could object, Caraw had rounded the edge of the hole and inched close to her side, wrapping her again in his arms. There was none of the tension and fear she had felt before when he showed her how to dig. Now he was a shelter to hide in to keep the fear away, and she gladly did so, resting against his chest while he tried to see through the rain.

The glow grew in its brightness, and Meldie turned her face into Caraw’s chest. It didn’t help, somehow the light found its way into her eyes. Caraw was having a similar problem, and he couldn’t find a way to shield his vision from the glow. A loudness filled their ears and their skin tingled. The clanging sound of the shovel on the metal artifact rang and rang and rung one last time. The two young people were whisked away from Maradûn, to a place distant in space and time. Clan Ruthlû paid no mind to the disappearance of these two, as they had to deal with the worst blow to the clan in generations. Thus it was that nobody was present to watch the shining artifact slowly obscure itself under layer upon layer of wet topsoil and mud. 

The real tragedy of those last days of summer, was that nobody ever noticed how frequently excarchivers went missing in Maradûn, and that none ever came back. The rain stole them up and away from the homeland in the hills, and cast them into new worlds, always alone and without anybody to guide them. Until now.

[hr]

Caraw landed with a thump on his chest, soaked through and coughing up copious amounts of water. His eyes were still burning and he pawed around blindly for something to gain his bearings. His hand slapped wetly against something soft and round, that was also profoundly wet but also seemed vaguely familiar. Meldie screamed when she felt something grab her breast and began flailing her arms in every direction, just as blind as Caraw was, and she slammed her fist into Caraw’s ear when she did so.
Caraw yelped, rolling over in a panic, and clutching his throbbing ear. The two of them continued to roll about, trying the understand what had just happened while they waited for their vision to clear. Caraw cleared his throat hesitantly.

“Meldie? That was uh, I mean, did I just…” The young man waited for a reply, and found the silence to be worse than if she were screaming at him. Meldie, for her part, had turned redder than a rûthfruit, and was sincerely hoping Caraw was a blind as she was. She felt gingerly in front of her, her fingers brushing through what felt like a shorter variety of the rough grass that topped the sand hills, until her fingers brushed against another hand, which was Caraw’s, at which point they both recovered 
their sense of sight.

Immediately, Meldie wished that she’d never regained her senses, because the both of them were naked as the day they had been born. She screwed her eyes shut, but then cracked one open to see that Caraw was plainly staring at her. That made her face blush even more fiercely, but she opened both of her eyes and glared at the man.

“You stupid pervert!”

“Don’t act like you’re not curious as well!” Caraw retorted, knowing full well that they had both never exactly seen somebody else so exposed. In Clan Ruthlû, in Maradûn, one had to cover oneself in many layers of fabric to protect from the elements, the raging suns, and of course to preserve modesty for marriage. Caraw knew that some of the other men his age had already been married, or otherwise stolen glances of women while they were bathing. Meldie assumed that Caraw had naturally been one of those who had peeked, and she couldn’t possibly know how protective his mother was.

“So what if I am curious, idiot? Look around!” Meldie pointed out their surroundings, as they were sitting in a grove of trees covered in broad leaves, many of which spanned the breadth of a man’s torso. Meldie got up, and shoving down her shyness, tore a few leaves down and began to tear in specific places, her face knit in concentration.

“What are you doing?” Caraw asked.

“I’m making clothes, idiot. Didn’t they ever teach you how to do that, idiot?”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Make me.” Meldie snapped, working the threads of grass she could tear from the ground into the makeshift slots she had made. 

“There we are,” she murmured, throwing on the leaf-dress she had made. It wasn’t terribly comfortable, practical, or modest, but it covered the important parts. Caraw examined her handiwork with interest, and he had a question in his eyes. He wanted to ask her to make him something to cover himself, but he was reticent after noting her behaviour just before. Instead of opening his mouth, Caraw sat down with crossed legs and set to making a basic grass rope. It took him several attempts to get the thread going, but eventually he got the hang of it. Fairly soon he had a very limited loincloth in the form of a bound leaf for both his front and his back, leaving him bare chested. 

Meldie left him to his foolish fumbling with foliage while she began scouting the area around the grove. She had no idea how they had gotten where they were, or where it was that they were. Hopelessly lost in a forest with nobody to help them, it appeared she would have to rely on the pervert despite her wishes. She was returning to the grove when something tapped her shoulder. Meldie screamed and jumped simultaneously, scrambling back into the clearing with a crash. 

Caraw leapt up to Meldie’s side, and saw a broken tree branch swinging gently in the brush just beyond the grove. He stood over his female companion and smirked widely, looking down on her where she lay, panting. 

“Fearless Meldie, enemy of twigs! Who’s the idiot now?” 

“You, idiot. I don’t want to see all of that.” Caraw promptly stepped back a few paces, examining his loin-leaf with consternation.

“Come on idiot, we have work to do.” Meldie told Caraw, fighting to suppress a grin as she said so. They had to prepare a fire soon, if they wanted to at least make it through the night without being eaten by whatever monstrous things might be lurking 
nearby.

[hr]
The fire they prepared was a meagre thing, but in the gloomy haze of evening, the two young people huddled close to one another, and despite what came before in the dusty hills of their youth, an entire world lay before them alien and unknown. Left to what little they had left, in each other, Caraw and Meldie clung together. There in the shadows of the grove, the beginnings of a bond had begun to take shape. Even as foreign eyes were drawn from miles around to the light of an unshielded campfire, and a reign of a much different and more deadly kind, was on the cusp of falling...

Word Count: 3074
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