Mara - The Lady Grief (Completed)

31 Starving Locusts

2651 B.C.E., City of Tmari-on-the-Euphrates

Early Winter, Month of Kissilimu, One Year and Nine Months after Mara's Rebirth

Mara

The Mother District has closed their gates. It's hours later that I reach them, gaping at the solid wooden doors more than two males high. Closed, barred, and guarded with soldiers wearing the green insignia of the mother armed with spears. Closer to the gates I see the milling crowd, panic on many faces. I examine them and shudder.

They are from the First and Fifth districts. The poor are flooding into the Second district, or trying to. Fleeing the violence that has suddenly overtaken their homes.

As Poppy and I get closer I can hear some of the individual cries over the tumult of the crowd.

We will starve!

Why are the gates barred?

Where is the food!

More cries, of war and starvation, fear racing through the city's most desperate citizens.

I share in their desperation, but only because I don't want to turn back to the Fifth district in order to get home. The mother gates lie just over the main artery of the city, and the road is packed in both directions.

I hear screams and the jostling crowd knocks me around a bit before my shadows form a protective barrier and Mishu pulls me into a small crevice between crates stacked against the walls.

"Mama?" Poppy whispers, "I'm hungry and tired."

"Shh, Poppy. We'll be home soon," I promise her. I check the saffron sash, making sure it's tightly knotted so that my daughter doesn't slip into this mess. The idea of being trampled underneath the feet of a mass of frantic shifters is suddenly much too real.

I glance over my shoulder and feel my heart plummet to my feet. First House soldiers are coming to their side of the road, guarding it and keeping the shifters from re-entering their district. The frenzied mob are now all destitute beggars, stuck in between gates on a road leading to the desert at both ends.

Poppy and I are turned around by the crowd, most of them now heading for Death and War. For the second time today I am racing along, the wave of desperate shifters carrying us like the tide on the river.

The river. Maybe I should try to turn around and make it to the river? I can possibly come up that way, to the temple through the cemetery. But, the water is cold in Winter and without the cover of the harvest, I will be spotted trying to cross the empty mother fields long before I reach the graves of the dead.

I don't know who will side with my father in this war, if anyone. But, right now, this entire city is filled with my enemies. I concentrate on holding Poppy, on keeping my feet as my shadows gather closer and closer to me, trying to keep the press of bodies away, but even they are helpless in the face of the mob. My gargoyles steer clear, scampering along on walls with their claws sunk deep into the crevices between stone.

Those with claws and wings and fangs are not part of this crowd, I realize, looking around. This is a mass of Acera, of non-shifters like me, like Poppy.

I see the black stone heralding the temple of death and gasp in relief. It doesn't last long, however. Of all the six districts, Death has no warriors. We are completely dependent on the Recondites.

The Recondites, who have just lost their Captain, I think. I doubt they even know about Thelios, yet. Whatever is happening with them, they are not here. Death is alone.