The Filcher's Forge

The lights in the distance bothered him.  Their fulgent pollution had corrupted the perfect beauty of the dusking sky, replacing the natural magnificence of the descending sun upon the horizon.  As eve passed into night, the more the sinister lights’ taint invaded the heavens, reflecting off the snow-blanketed ground and the nauseous sea beside it.  And the closer he neared, the more the light filched away his view of the celestial bodies he had used to guide himself.  It bothered him, for it meant civilization was near.

He had fought with the notion of traveling to the city the moment his senses had identified it.  He knew no good would come to entering its streets, breathing its air, and interacting with its citizens.  No good ever did.  But he had been wandering the wasteland for an innumerable amount of moons, and both his fatigue and his hunger were at their limits.  For the first time in his life, the thought of indulging in a comfortable bed and a warm meal not only appealed to him, but harassed his otherwise fortuitous discipline into decadence.

As the boundaries of the city sprawled before him in a wide river valley, he hoisted his leather pack over his shoulder, his other arm cradling a crudely-made bow.  Dark brown eyes squinted as the sharp features of his face fell with disappointment.  This was the first view he’d gotten of the city since its initial detection, and it was somewhat larger than he had hoped.  It began with an enormous walled fortification that stained the side of the river closest to him.  And on the opposite bank was the city, wrapped in a similar defensive barricade, with a town continuing to stretch beyond its borders.

The wind picked up, flattening his wild, calico hair, and bringing a fresh snowfall with it.  Although he was scarcely dressed, in little else than a loin cloth of weathered animal hides, he did not wince as the cold began to bite at his bronze coloured skin.  In spite of his stoic reaction, he did feel it, and it reminded him of how truly tired he was of the elements.  That was a blasphemy, but he rationalized that any of his people would think the same if they had just suffered his path.

He found himself yearning to be wrapped slumbering in a warm blanket – to liberate himself from the torment of having to awaken every few moments to maintain vigil over the denizens of the wasteland, lest one manage to sneak up and…  He wished to put that fate behind him, and he entered the river valley.

Soon, he was close enough to distinguish where the blemish of civilization met the sea.  Tendrils of construction reached out from the city to mar its majestic elegance and tame its elemental ferocity.  Between these claws of wood and steel sat things he had never seen before, but was aware of.  He could not recollect what they were called, but they appeared to him as upside-down houses of human fabrication.

Humans.  Must they spread their filth to every corner of the world?  Even the seas were not safe from their contamination.  It confused him why such creatures, who could barely swim in the first place, would want to create domiciles that floated upon the water.  And what was even more perplexing was why some of these constructs possessed giant mock-trees adorned with branches wrapped in cloth.  What was the point?

He dismissed his thoughts as he neared the fortress gates and the stench of civilization assaulted his senses.  The instinct to return to the wilderness sparked within him, extinguished only by the anguish deep in his gut.  He hadn’t had a full meal since his venture through the wasteland, for nothing alive existed in that realm anymore.