Children of the Wind
14-08-02712
I think I may be going insane. Perhaps I have been for a long time, but if I was, then I got along well in life and didn’t know it until very recently. I am writing this letter and hiding it because I realize it is possible that I could disappear or die at any time, and if I do, I want at least the chance that what I know stays alive, so that our people can one day discover the truth about our lives. I want the chance that one day Eliase Windchild may know the truth about his father and Meina Stonechild may know the truth about her husband.
However, I also now think it is possible that the gods of these woods are actually going to let me live. They may not have been lying to lull me into complacency so that they could kill me or disappear me more easily. Something tells me that if they wanted to do that, they would not need to fool me at all. They would simply will it and I would be no more. So perhaps they meant what they said, and if they did, then this note will one day be an important historical document.
I cannot know which of those two worlds I am in, the one where I am about to die or the one where I am about to lead our people to freedom at the order of the gods. It would not trouble me much if it were not for Eliase and Meina. My life is not so precious a thing, especially not now that I know the truth about how constricted and determined it has been, since long before I was born.
Here are the background facts: My name is Hirase Windchild. I was born 22-2-02671, in Wind Village, to Raiya Windchild and Horuse Flamechild, who moved from Flame to Wind in order to marry Raiya as part of the 02665 Elemental Mixing Ceremony. My family lines trace back on both sides at least fifty generations in the Villages. My great father, Januse Stonechild, invented the breast shot water wheel in 02511, doubling the grain production capacity of the Villages in a generation.
Throughout most of my life, it never occurred to me to question the existence and geography of the Villages. I helped on our farm, I swam in the Wildbrook with my friends, I learned to read the winds and track game, I learned to skin my kills and learned I was terrible at cooking them no matter what I tried. But we never left the woods. There were roads inside the Villages, but there were no roads leading anywhere outside them, and I never thought there should be.
Now the fact that I never wondered what was outside our woods is one of the main reasons I think I might be going insane, and there are no gods at all. Surely there is some reasonable explanation for why no one in the Villages ever leaves and no outsiders ever come, and I am in such a disturbed state that I have forgotten that explanation entirely. Or perhaps there is a road, many roads even, leading away from the Villages to other villages in other places, and perhaps strangers come and go often, and I simply cannot see them.
Of course, I do not really believe that. If I did, I would not have acted as I have the last few months. I do not believe that there are people I canot see, or roads I never go on. But then how can this state of affairs exist? How can the others of the Villages be so incurious and blind? How could I have been, until so recently?
Korode Stonechild showed me a field where he is experimenting with dozens of different wheat varieties, each grown in a different soil, with different additives, and different amounts of water, to find the most bountiful possible combination of plant and conditions. How can he have the creativity and curiosity and drive to do all of that, yet never wonder what is beyond the Duckskill River to the North, or beyond the Snowfire Mountains to the South?
And if the answer is merely that the culture of the Villages does not permit such thoughts, and I am willing to believe that is possible, but if it is so, then what possessed me to begin to think differently? Perhaps it is the intervention of some divinity that changed me into such a wonderer.
I am stalling now, refusing to tell my story. The way to know whether I am insane or not is to finish this note, to hide it, and then to set about the business of trying to bring this question into the minds of others, most especially into the minds of the elders, whose permission is required to mount an expedition to find out. If I did not have a family, I would go on my own, even if no others came with me, but I do have a family, and so I want support and need permission.
Perhaps I do not want to know the truth. It would be easier if this burden were not on me. I have a good life with Meina and Eliase. The woods provide well, and we have many friends. We have talked of trying for another child. But I must know. These thoughts were not given to me for nothing, I know that much.
I married Meina during the 02707 Elemental Mixing Ceremony, and she came from Stone Village to live with me so we could start a family. At that time, I agreed that once a year, in the spring, I would gather Turmeline Flowers from the banks of the Duckskill and present them to her mother in Stone Village, as a token of my contrition for taking her only daughter away from her.
Nearly three months ago I made this journey, taking enough food for three days and setting out alone, with only a carrysack for the flowers, plus my knife and a sling to feed myself. I reached the banks of the Duckskill in half a day, and walked along the bank towards Stone Village, searching for Turmeline blossoms. At first I hardly found any, and I worried that I had come too early, and that Meina’s mother would be disappointed in my efforts.
It occurred to me that there would likely be earlier blossoms at the edge of the river, since the sun shone there, away from the tree cover, for much of the day, and warmed the rocks all around. I approached the banks and looked for flowers in the cracks between the rocks. I found some right away, but when I approached to pick them, my feet slipped out from under me, and I fell into the river.
The Duckskill is swift, and in moments I was swept away from shore, helpless to swim against the current. I thought I would drown, so I gave up and conserved my energy, allowing the river to take me on its course, hoping to look for a better opportunity to find a way ashore. This I eventually did, but I was so disoriented from the effort that I did not realize until I was back safe on land that I had accidentally crossed the Duckskill and stood now on the other bank, with the river between myself and the Villages.
In that moment, I turned away from the river, and the realization hit me, swift and cold as the current of the Duckskill itself, that the woods continued in front of me. The river was not truly a barrier. It lay not at one edge of the woods, but in the middle of them.
The moment I thought this thought, all the other thoughts that have plagued me since that day crowded into my mind. It suddenly seemed impossible to me that I had never before considered that the woods did not end at the river. It seemed equally impossible that no one had ever discussed this fact, in all my years of life.
If it were not for Meina and Eliase, I would have continued North right then. There was no easy way back across the Duckskill, and I was powerfully intrigued by the new thoughts that had seized my mind. But there was my wife and my son, and there was no leaving them. So I walked down the river to the calmest spot I could remember, shoved off the north bank for the first time ever, and swam South like my life depended on it, which it did.
I dragged myself up on the familiar south bank of the Duckskill, passed out until morning, and when the new day came, I stood up and looked north. The opposite bank looked like it always had, and yet looked brand new. It was a strange feeling, one I shall never forget.
After gathering my flowers, I made my offering to Meina’s mother in Stone Village, and made my way home on time, with no one the wiser. It would have been easy to think the whole thing a dream, except that the new thoughts which had taken hold of me showed no inclination to loosen their grip. It is difficult to communicate how it feels to have such thoughts, which seem obvious and inevitable, yet to have the memory of a time when such thoughts had never entered my mind.
If you are reading this after I have disappeared and I have not become a famous and important person in the Villages, then you will likely not have had these thoughts at all yet, but you should. Go to the spot on the Duckskill’s south bank where the four stacked stones look like a finger pointing at the sky. There it is possible to swim the river. Do it, and stand on the north bank, and these thoughts may come to you as they did to me, even if this letter itself is not enough to summon them.
Myself, I tried hard to forget them. Weeks of distraction, weeks of a sort of agony, a knowing that I was going to lose my battle against them. I held my wife and child close and tried to be satisfied with our life, as I once had been, but although I loved them as fiercely as ever I had, I was not satisfied. My thoughts turned always to the north, to the south, and east, and west, to what lay beyond the lands we had explored, to whether there were villages beyond our four, called else than Flame, and Wind, and Stone, and Rain.
In my hunting trips, I began to stray farther afield, past the known borders of our lands. Only steps at first, just a bit farther than I had gone before, easily justified if I were asked by saying that I had seen a particularly choice game specimen and been pursuing it. There was no one to ask me, and none would have asked if they were there, since they would have had no conception of trying to leave the ambit of the Villages, but still, I needed that reassurance at that time.
Soon, I could sense that Meina knew something had changed in me. We fought, which we had never done before. She wanted me away less, now that Eliase was getting older and she was ready for another child, and she wanted this just when I was ready to be away more. I had thought of manufacturing some excuse to leave for several weeks, so that I could beeline in one direction and see what a week’s walk revealed to my eyes, but no reasonable such excuse existed. I could walk from one end of the Villages to the other in less than two days, so why would I ever need to be gone for more than four?
I cannot say strongly enough how much I tried to give up on this idea. I cursed myself, and cried into my pillow at night, and threw stones against trees hard enough to leave dents in the trunk, trying to banish these thoughts from my mind, but they would not go. And so I finally realized that I had to go, not despite my love for my family but because of it, because without finding answers to these questions, I was no longer capable of being the husband and father that they deserved.
To my great shame, I pretended illness, a strange one that our doctors were unsure how to diagnose. They recommended a quarantine, of at least a week, to ensure my family’s safety. Meina took Eliase and went to stay with her mother in Stone Village, and I stayed in our family home with provisions enough to last until my so-called symptoms ran their course. I saw the worry in Meina’s eyes when she left, without a kiss goodbye, and it broke my heart. I cried the rest of that day in sorrow for my sins against her, but when the night fell, I snuck from our house, taking full bags of food as well as my knife and sling, and headed east, for I did not wish to cross the Duckskill again and risk wetting my provisions.
All that night I walked, and all the next day, in silence and staying hidden from any Village folk who happened upon my path in the deep woods. That night I rested with no fire, and when dawn broke the next morning I was up and away, almost immediately passing into lands beyond the Villages. My stomach tightened and hunger fled me as I realized this unfamiliar world had been no dream.
I had a vision then, of leading our people into these lands. We were not starving nor miserable in the Villages, but in my vision, when our elders heard what I had done, it would awaken in them the same wanderlust that crossing the Duckskill had awakened in me, and they would want to send scouts to the corners of whatever land lay beyond. That they might be angry with me instead seemed like a remote possibility, though as I now write this letter, so much closer to the moment when I will go and tell them the truth, their anger seems much more a possibility than it once did.
All that second day I walked through strange lands, all of it covered in trees not different in kind from the trees of the Villages. It was only when the sun set that evening that I finally emerged, my jaw hanging down slack on my chest, from the edge of the woods, and saw the largest cleared space I have ever seen in front of me. I do not know what to call this area. Instead of the dirt of a forest floor, the ground was entirely rock, like the bottom of the Duckskill but with no water, and so, so much larger, extending unbroken in front of me as far as I could see.
I quailed then, my heart faltering, and the fear told me to return to my family, to think no more of this, to spend my life in the Villages and be happy for the woods and the rivers, but I knew that if I went back I would bring my shiftlessness and my wanderlust back with me. I had satisfied no answers, only deepened my questions. I knew that if I set out onto that rock and did not turn back, I might die without the safety of the woods, but if I did turn back now then I was dead already, for my marriage would never be the same, and my son would have a different father than the one he had known all his life.
So I took a step, just one step, onto the rocks, and as my foot slapped down on that hard ground, I heard a sound of which I have never heard the like. It was like the rushing of a creek except steadier and more even, insistent, with none of the burbling softness of water.
My heart rose in my throat, just as a small object that I had taken for a rock lifted off the ground ten paces in front of me like a bee lifting off a flower. It was the size of a small dog, and it had no visible wings, yet somehow it flew towards me without apparent effort. I froze. I was terrified, yet even then I did not run. I wanted answers, and I knew this was an answer, even if I might hate it once I got it.
The bird-that-was-not-a-bird approached, and it did look like a rock, grey and mottled, yet as it got close I could see that it was smoother than any rock, even a river stone, and more even in shape and angle than even one of Firase Rainchild’s wood carvings.
“You are out of zone,” came words in a voice that might have belonged to any man of the Villages without comment, yet the words came directly our of the bird somehow, though it had no mouth to speak them. “You are lost. Beyond this point is not inhabitable. You must turn back and return to zone.”
I do not remember exactly what I replied, although I am sure it was less heroic and less witty than I would like to imagine now. What I know is that I was not deterred. I stepped to the side of the bird and tried to pass it, but it flew sideways, hovering directly in front of me, seeming to stare at me even though it lacked eyes to see.
I demanded an explanation, then. I asked all my questions, and for my sins the bird answered with the words of the gods. It told me that the Villages were part of a grand experiment, being conducted by the gods just as Korode Stonechild experimented with his wheat, only in the experiment of the gods, the people of the Villages were the wheat, and the entire woods surrounding the Villages and encompassing them were the field.
The bird described other woods, similar to the Villages except for one small detail, such as having their major crop be potatoes instead of wheat, or having the average temperature be slightly warmer or slightly colder, or the seasons slightly longer or shorter. The gods can control all these things at their whim, I was told. And in each piece of woods the gods observe the effects of their changes, to see how the humans there develop in response to them, to find the ideal conditions for growing human societies.
I asked the bird how many places there were like the Villages, and it would not tell me, but from the way it refused I guessed that there must be many of them, perhaps hundreds. Its voice never wavered, it never explained itself, and it offered no proof, yet somehow I felt no doubt of its words. It hovered there in the air the entire time it spoke, with no wings to flap and no legs to stand, just hanging there like the sun on the horizon, and I knew in my gut that it spoke the truth.
The bird, when pressed, explained to me that the reason no one from the Villages ever wondered what was outside our lands was that the gods has long ago altered our minds to remove the possibility of such wondering, unless introduced by outside influences, such as falling in a river and being carried to the other bank. The idea that my mind could be altered in such a way sent a chill through me, but I had no reason to doubt it, for I remembered the strangeness of curiosity first entering my mind, and of wondering why its arrival had taken so long.
What the bird related next shocked me, even in my already agitated state. It said, in the same even tone that it said everything else, that the gods themselves had long ago been created by human hands, as tools for human purpose, with knowledge that had since passed from our minds. Humanity had then befallen a disaster of some sort, the details of which the bird claimed not to know, and now the gods were tending their former creators, trying to find the best way to regenerate our collapsed society at scale.
When it said this, I knew I was going to die. I knew that they would not let me live, for if this grand experiment was truly for stakes that high, then they would allow nothing to interfere, nor should they. I had become a chance they must be unwilling to take. Perhaps I had become that the moment I fell into the Duckskill, and all the days from that moment to this had been but a long, slow drowning.
Yet the bird did not kill me. The gods did not reach out to protect their handiwork. The bird told me that the gods, in planning their experiment, had known this day would come. We humans were naturally curious, and so the alteration of our minds could not last forever. They were thus willing to consider my awakening part of the experiment, and to send me back to the Villages in possession of this knowledge, to do with it what I would.
So now, I am here. Just today I returned to my home, and snuck back into my quarantine under cover of darkness, and now I sit in my darkened, empty house and pen this letter, after which I will go and hide it, on my way to tell the elders what I have seen and heard.
Even now, I am waiting to die. Although I feel sure the bird could have killed me if the gods commanded it, as it would have done if I had refused to turn back into the woods, I cannot shake the feeling that there could have been some inscrutable reason the gods did not want me dead in that moment, yet have no intention of letting what I knew infect the others of the Village. I may yet be killed before I hide this letter, or perhaps before I finish the next sentence.
If I am not killed, then soon everyone will know what I know, and then life in this idyllic place will never be the same. To my family, please believe that I tried to forget. Even now, if I could take it all back, I would. I would unlearn what I know, and go back to that happy, foolish time before, when a child’s bedtime stories and a wife’s expectations were the heaviest things I carried. I have tried to imagine myself pretending not to know, until the pretending becomes a real forgetting, and I am the man I once was.
This I cannot do. Even in my imaginings, it is not possible. If the gods do not kill me, it is because I have become their vessel, their delivery man for the next iteration of their experiment, and in that role I am as helpless as the sun is to prevent its own shining. For this, my dear Meina and my precious Eliase, I am sorry. Perhaps it will be better for you to know, and perhaps this knowledge will make our lives better, but I fear it will not. Even then, though, I cannot carry this burden alone. I must speak the truth, no matter what it costs.
If someone else finds this letter, likely many years after I have hidden it, and if the name of Hirase Windchild is not known, then either the gods killed me soon after I hid this letter, or I failed to convince the elders of the truth of what I know and they killed me for my heresy. That means the gods are still out there, and we are still but wheat in the field, waiting for them to find the perfect configuration in which we can be grown.
We must not be wheat. I charge you with this terrible responsibility. Seek the outside world. Seek the bird that is the herald of the gods. Seek their knowledge for your own, for they seem to share it freely with those bold enough to appear on their doorstep, and bring that knowledge back to the Villages, until one day we are ready to receive it.
END
Thanks as always for reading! Have a great week, and I will be back next Sunday with something fun.
The desire to manage and control never ends well. I wonder what actually did happen to Hirase…