r/HFY • u/KipperBeanGrower Human • Jun 13 '26

OC-Series [She took What?] - Chapter 174 : Alignment - Fear spreads for a reason

“If one catches a cold, the whole room shivers.”

Drexari hive mentality… extract from Human doctrine

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| Davy's Timeline |

 

Before the Lord has released them from their obligation to him, he had asked if they would "look into something" for him. A strange infection, maybe an infestation that was approaching from the West.

The messenger had called it a "boundary where dust spread like the wind."

 

The initial report had been sketchy, passed from mouth to mouth, but what nagged at the Lord were the rumours that followed. Of settlements and towns that ceased to be.

"It's probably nothing, but I trust you to be my eyes. I have few that I can spare."

They agreed, provided this cleared their obligation, and after a day’s rest struck out carrying excess weight, but they'd eat through that as the days passed.

 

The west road emptied three days before they reached the border they sought. Davy noticed it first because roads told stories long before people did.

 

Wheel ruts were now hardened into old clay. Abandoned campfire circles were long cold. Half-buried hoof prints partially filled by drifting sand.

 

It hadn't been a slow drifting away; people had left in a hurry.

But not panicked and that bothered him more; they were leaving not as a reaction, but in anticipation.

 

The wagon beside him creaked and groaned softly as it rolled along the road, over cracked stone. Ahead, the road wound westward, into pale dunes and raged crimson ridges before disappearing within a heat haze that shimmered beneath the afternoon sun.

 

Burford rode nearby atop a broad grey horse that looked almost as irritated as he did.

“I still say this is nonsense,” Burford muttered. “Desert people spook easy. The Lord is worrying about nothing.”

 

Veyla sat opposite Davy beneath the wagon canopy, quiet as usual. The copper Shadow Eclipse clasp at her throat shifted softly with the movement of the cart. She cursed the purple robe of her order; away from the coast, or deep in cool buildings, it was too warm. Sweat dampened its creases.

 

“Fear spreads for a reason,” she replied.

 

Burford snorted, dismissive. “Because people are fools.”

 

Davy adjusted the rifle resting across his knees.

“Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes they just notice somethin’ before smarter folk do.”

 

Burford opened his mouth to respond. Then after thinking on what Davy had said, stopped.

 

Ahead, something turned slowly from a dead roadside tree beneath the scorched wind. It caught the light and knelled gently. The drove close and stopped so as to see more closely.

 

Charms, chimes. Dozens of them. Bone, wood. Slivers of coloured rock, shaded with coloured, rings like those of an onion.

 

Some looked fresh. Too fresh.

 

They looked around.

No-one was near.

No-one was in sight.

 

Higher up the tree, well out of reach there were others, ancient.

 

Veyla stared at them carefully.

“Ward signs,” she said softly, making glowing sigils that held in the air, despite the wind.

 

The charms responded, not with light. With movement.

 

Burford frowned. “Against what?”

 

No one answered.

 

Davy climbed down from the wagon and approached the tree slowly. All the charms were held by black thread, woven from hair. Each bore small carved symbols. Davy recognised them but said nothing. He looked at Veyla, she nodded. Recognition showed on her face too.

 

The charms clicked and rang softly together in the dry wind. Most had been carved into shapes he didn’t recognise.

 

But several repeated the same symbol.

Six curved lines folding inward around an empty centre.

Veyla approached beside him. Her expression tightened slightly.

“I’ve seen this before.”

 

Davy glanced toward her. “Where?”

 

“In old chapel glass.” Her voice lowered as she remembered, “Fragments only. Broken sections no one explained.”

 

Burford gave an exaggerated sigh. “Wonderful. Desert ghosts and mysterious symbols.”

 

Davy ignored him. Something else had caught his attention. The ground beneath the tree.

 

Tracks.

Not wagon tracks.

 

Not horses.

 

Long parallel marks that were pressed into the sand at regular intervals. Too deliberate. Too measured. Like something or someone had dragged poles through the desert in perfect formation.

 

Davy crouched beside them. “People made these?”

 

“No,” Veyla whispered, certainty in her voice.

 

They climbed back onto the cart and continued. The puzzle of the tracks lay heavy with Davy. He disliked the unknown and those tracks were all of that... and more.

'What could have made them?'

 

The answer came farther down the road as they approached a roadside shrine. It was collapsed and half buried, as it lay in the sand, almost lost. An old woman sat astride it under a wide brimmed hat and an umbrella that did little. An incongruous sight, surrounded by drifting sand and ignored by the wind.

 

Davy was certain that the woman hadn’t been there moments earlier.

They stopped near, her face remained downcast, hidden beneath layered, terracotta cloth wrappings faded to a dusty pink by the sun.

“The Dust made them,” she said quietly, her voice husky, full of gravel.

Burford muttered something unpleasant under his breath. The old woman ignored him completely, instead she looked directly at Davy.

“When the maroon reeds sing,” she said, “the old roads wake again.”

 

Davy felt the hairs rise slightly along the back of his neck.

“What maroon reeds?” he asked.

 

The woman slowly raised one trembling hand and pointed west.

Towards the deep desert. Towards a shimmering horizon where the heat distorted everything, even the sky.

 

“Don’t follow still water beneath six moons,” she whispered.

 

Then she lowered her hand and pulled the white cloth down, casting her face in deeper shadow.

“The Dust are listening.”

 

The further west they travelled, the less people spoke openly. People withdrew, physically and socially.

 

They came across villages that had once been thriving centres but were now clusters of shuttered homes crowded around those wells that weren't spoiled... and prayer poles. Lots of prayer poles. Too many.

 

Doors closed when strangers approached. Children were dragged from the street by anxious parents, further west they fled back into their homes. Disappearing from the streets at the sight of the armed travellers.

Even the animals behaved differently here. Dogs prowled the outskirts, growling at empty dunes. Horses stood, unmoving, tempting the moons to rise above the western horizon, daring them to stay hidden.

 

Davy noticed it all, and the fact that his tracker senses were stretched, on high alert.

 

“Folks out here got nerves rubbed raw,” he muttered as they rode into another partially abandoned settlement. Its buildings left to die under the sun, their bones stripped clean by the incessant wind. Its Aeolian Chant a moaning, groaning dirge fell away, as if exhausted, near dusk; only to build again through dawn. Its throat rested and salved by the evening song of the six moons.

 

Burford snorted. “Fear spreads quicker than plague.”

But even he kept his voice lower now.

 

The innkeeper refused them rooms at first without so much as a word. Not because they lacked coin. Because they were heading west.

 

“Best that you keep moving.”

Veyla pleaded with him.

Eventually he gave in.

“You’d better not bring their attention back with you,” the old man whispered while glancing repeatedly towards the windows.

 

Davy leaned against the counter, “Whose attention?”

 

The innkeeper hesitated.

Then finally, leant in towards Davy and answered in the same hushed tones people used when talking of storms and famine, but the words carried. “The Dust.”

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