Omen

The oracles say the light that streaked across the sky was an omen, and a terrible, terrible omen. That our children will sicken and our herds go mad and our crops fail, that storms will drive the sea up around our houses and flatten down our trees with hail. We cringe at every south-winging bird, fearing omens yet greater, though no one knows quite what greater condemnation could be visited on us. Not that it would make any difference if we did. Two already have wandered into the forest, hollow-eyed, leaving families and fields to grow fallow.

No one speaks of them.

The harvest approaches, and men oil their plows, slow and distant, wondering whether their work will ever prove fruitful. They meet together and speak in whispers, watching the sky as if to read its tells, as if they don't know it always holds the highest Hand.

Old women watch the sea breathe, dire tongues that think often of death and will find it no great hardship. To them the young women retire and hear of past omens that have come to fruition and omens ill-understood leading heavens know where. They watch the sea together.

It is weeks gone since the sky lit up in prophecy, and no new light comes to us. Still, we wait for ruin.

Wheat rots in the fields while the men oil and sharpen, and the sea gives forth nothing while the women tell their tales, and children play quiet in the hen yards.

We find one of the oracles dead, washed up and shriveled on the beach.

It is a month gone since the omen, and the young men swing scythes in vain against the ruined wheat, despairing of their fathers, and the young women milk until their hands are raw, but they are too few, and the heifers cry out against their swollen udders. Children cry to their mothers and instead find the red hands of their sisters, empty.

We are dying, and no fire has come upon us.

-Nor will, some say, and never return.

Some will not take food and waste away. Others see the dawn and will not rise.

The sun rises red and wroth in their place. I watch it spill out across the water, melting the fog as it surges forward, its wavering beams a line of startled chestnut mares, blood bay stallions, charging toward us. We are still asleep, every dying man and woman.

I am old in my body of few winters, and I do not flee as the sky-fires return, legion now and hanging in their multitudes among the fading stars.

Nor flee I as the fires rain down, molten, glowing, breaking upon the shore to leave pits that hiss and smoke as the sea rushes into them.

The meteors rain down closer upon my right and my left; the sky is lit red, falling. Falling upon our empty houses and shriveled fields, our sleeping people and our fast-awakening children, huddled together and shrinking from the sky.

The sky clouds over, and the fires smoke out, and we are swallowed up by rain.