Penumbra (10)

He had never been afraid himself, was always simply told that it was dangerous and that he must move to avoid being caught. He remembered distinctly the first time he had seen the watchtowers of the Frontier, thatarbitrary territory the lightsiders had staked out for themselves. He had found a small cranny in the side of a cliff, and had settled in to watch the sun rise, knowing that his tribe would search high and low for him, hoping they would not find him, but not feeling particularly guilty about putting them in danger. He had always been somewhatdetached in that way, feeling himself distinct from his fellow tribesmen, never really understanding when they refused to move on without him. It was the way of his people, but never his way. He would have been content to watch the sun rise, to contemplate those colours that the night lacked, if they had let him.

He was roused from this state of reverie by noises below the cliff, and looking down he saw an astonishing sight- a line of watchtowers, travelling single-file through a ravine that worried its way through the mountains below. He had been told that the Frontier was usually spread in a great line, encompassing a large space, but he presumed that when the only way forward was a narrow ravine, they formed up into a chain and moved along in a line, as he was seeing now. The first tower was not far from him, and for the first time he also saw the lightsiders, dark-skinned, with arms and legs like those of a horse. They wore much less clothing than his own people, and had what seemed to him tiny eyes. He found them very interesting to lookupon, and started sketching them in his mind. Kerron had a very visual memory, and often ideas would come to him as fully-formed pictures, whereupon he would suddenly start speaking about them, often surprising his fellows. He could hold images in his mind in perfect clarity and then bring them back even years later, just as they were, whereas for others he noticed that they faded in their minds. Others of his people wrote or carved writing and images on paper or wood- he would write them in his mind. Words drifted up from the chasm, and while he did not recognize their meaning, he filed them away, too.

Around the foot of the leading tower, more lightsiders riding strange-looking horses patrolled in front of the tower, looking about the cavernous heights about them. In these same cliffs, Kerron's people searched for him, and it was not long before the dark riders saw some of them, and chased them down, running them through with long spears and little mercy. Kerron watched this with both fascination and horror, realized he was the reason for the death of his fellow tribesmen, and returned to his tribe's encampment. He reported what he had seen, and while no-one confronted him directly, he knew that many of his peers blamed him, at least indirectly, for the deaths of those who searched for him. It was at this time that he went to his tribesfather to announce his intention to leave the tribe. Nightsiders did not have a family structure similar to our own- while Kerron was aware that there were people in his tribe to whom he was directly related, they did not hold any particular significance to him over other tribe members, and it was only to the tribesfather that Kerron had to explain himself.

"Where will you go?" The tribesfather asked.

"I will go to the leading edge of the penumbra." he replied simply.

"Why?"

"I'd like to see the sun set."

This was an odd announcement, but going to the other side of the night was not unheard of. While Kerron's tribe had always travelled on the trailing edge of the penumbra, where the climate was cooler and the presence of the lightsiders less pronounced, there had been tales of souls brave enough to cross the great wastes that separated the two nightside societies, and, more often, settlers who occasionally stayed through the long cold night to arrive blinking into the trailing edge. But a winter crossing was not for the foolhardy, and while the tribesfather said nothing, he secretly harboured doubts that Kerron had either the stamina or drive to make the crossing by himself. Still, with Kerron's reputation in the tribe causing trouble for him, the tribesfather did not try particularly hard to dissuade him from his course, and arranged for him to be equipped with a wolf-drawn cart and a generous load of supplies. He left his tribe quietly, in the night, with little word of farewell to others. Do not be saddened by this thought, for Kerron was not. Even though he had spent his life there, he had never truly belonged, and if he did have an overall feeling as he left his people behind, it was that it felt very much like the right thing to do.

Needless to say, it was took much longer for Kerron to cross the distance between the two twilight's than it did for me to travel from Cardinal City to the Frontier. For starters, he was chasing a moving target, and every time he stopped for rest or shelter, it moved further away. Even worse was the climate he had to travel through. Vast peaks of ice dictated almost constant changes to his direction of travel, while at the same time huge snowdrifts formed and reformed under the endless barrage of howling wind and snow. Navigation would have been nearly impossible if Kerron had not always possessed an excellent sense of direction, and he steadfastly travelled west, sometimes through darkness so pitched that it was like moving about in a lightless cave. He never became bored or depressed, always able to take some interest from whatever new experience his journey presented to him. When he needed to take shelter, he did. When he needed to hunt for food, he did. He was in no rush, and so long as he made a little headway towards the periphery each day, he was satisfied.

While little happened on a day-to-day basis, this is not to say there were not incidents on the way, just that none of them have much bearing on the tale I tell today. He encountered other on his travels, some friendly, some unfriendly. He lost some of his wolves, but persevered without them. Occasionally he went hungry. Sometimes he saw strange lights in the sky that he could not explain but spent a great deal of time examining, sometimes he came to an ocean and realized he would have to go about it. Once he saw the great ruins of a long-past civilization, lost in the snow, and marvelled at it. But most days were simply moving, moving. I don't know how long he travelled, and nor does he recall, at least nine or ten moons to be certain, before he finally broke through the winter night and began to move into the warmer climes that heralded the leading edge of the penumbra.

It was not long before he began to encounter other tribes, moving along with the night, foraging for food in the plants and animals left in the wake of the twilight. The nightsiders were not a centralized society, mainly consisting of loosely allied tribes that looked after themselves. He was greeted cordially enough- they spoke another dialect but Kerron had an uncanny facility for language and learned to speak it quickly- but tribes were close-knit and he was not invited to join for more than a few days of travel. One thing he soon noticed was that while tribes from his own part of the night were generally autonomous and did not maintain strong affiliations with other tribes, on the leading edge there was a much more martial atmosphere to the tribes he encountered, and while they did not seem to be under any particularly strong rule, they did all work towards a common goal of arming themselves against the lightsiders, where Kerron's own kind tended to merely avoid the Other, keep out of their way. Apparently the lightsiders on this side of the evening were pushing the Frontier back on an almost monthly basis, expanding their territory and denying the foragers of the night. As a consequence of this, the nightsiders here had been forced to become much more aggressive, and more organized, in order to combat the encroaching threat and maintain healthy supply lines to the various tribe factions.

Kerron travelled from tribe to tribe, inching ever closer to the glow on the horizon that belied the direction in which the sun lay. Although his people's eyes were very sensitive to the light, the fact that it only increased incrementally over a long space of time made it easier to adjust to theincreasing light, and Kerron enjoyed the increased visibility and clarity that the light provided, even though it did occasionally caused the space behind his eyes to hurt, forcing him to spend more time than he would have like simply sitting, or sometimes walking, with his eyes closed.

As he got closer and closer to the umbra, more and more tribespeople wished to know what his intentions were, and why he wanted to get to close to the inherently dangerous frontier. At first people simply found him an oddity and let him pass, but eventually suspicions were raised, and he was forcibly conscripted into one of the local militias, and with little else to do he put up no resistance to it. They saw that he clearly was not a warrior, so at first he was merely told to gather food, deliver messages, and other menial tasks. However his intellect was soon noted and he was assigned to one of the teams constructing the great was machine his people intended to use to break the frontier: the catapult. Kerron's sharp instinct for math and analytical mind was soon put to good use on this project, and before long his ideas and rigorous practices were being put to use across multiple tribes, good ideas spreading quickly as they are wont to do. Kerron actually won some small level of acclaim amongst his erstwhile captors for the rapid progress he helped to promote, and he had to admit to himself that he enjoyed being able to use his mind toachieve clear goals, a sense of purpose he found he had lacked in his previous life beyond the hinterlands. He never really gave much thought to what the catapult would be used for, simply that he appreciated a well-crafted device, particularly if he had had a hand in creating it.

It was clear that the tribes were building up to a massed push on the Frontier, to punch a hole through it and attempt to push the lightsiders back into their own terrain, to let them know that they were not welcome over the penumbra, and not free to take the food an animals of the night side. Kerron would sometimes absentmindedly suggest that the best way to achieve this goal would be to actually establish contact with the lightsiders, to see if some kind of arrangement could be come to, but these thoughts were always met with universal disapproval, and he soon learned to keep them to himself. As a rule the tribespeople held nothing but contempt, and even hatred, towards the people of the sun.

Before long, the day of the great push backwards came, and Kerron did not participate. To see his beloved machines taken into battle to destroy, or be destroyed, did not sit well with him, he had always thought of them as experiments, or tests, and he did not wish to see them in use. However with his captor-tribe's attention fully devoted to the battle ahead -indeed, for the first time in Kerron's experience, multiple tribes came together for a common purpose- Kerron took the opportunity to break away quietly, and continue his quest to see the rise of the sun.

He scouted along the umbra for days, occasionally watching the great towers of the Frontier as they rolled back steadily. He had the odd brush with lightside scouts who had crossed the line looking for enemies, but he was as nimble as most of his kind and avoided them easily in the darkness his seekers were not used to seeing in. He knew he would have to get close to the towers, possibly even beyond them, if he wanted to see the sun setting properly, so one fog-swept night he slipped over the line, leaving his world for the first time. It was anexhilarating experience, he saw colours he had never seen for the first time, their vibrancy so bright it almost wounded him to look on. He found a copse of trees and quickly scaled the tallest of them, and there is was, just about to dip below the horizon- the sun. He had circled the world to see it from the other side, and his quest was complete. Slowly, quietly, over the space of several dozen hours, he watched the fading colours as it dipped once again over the edge of the world, and the umbra passed over him, and he was once again home. It was mere moments later that the invasion of the Frontier began, and Kerron witness the battle unfolding from the top of his tree, watched with fascination and disgust, and yes, excitement, when he saw his weapons being used against the towers, saw the shattering of wood and bone, saw the battle tide wax and wane, then saw the lightsiders overrun.

He also saw a girl of the light, bold and beautiful, and his eyes could not stop watching her. He watched her fall from the tower. Watched her kill a man. Watched her find her horse, watched her defending her fellow men to no avail, watched her overrun and killed. Watched as they lay her body and the bodies of her fellows, watched as the night fell over her like death. Was amazed when, many hours later, she came back to life and started running towards where he hid, pursued by two body burners. He was not a superstitious man, but was a great believer in serendipity, and immediately took this coincidence to be some sort of sign. He certainly did not intend to watch this girl die again, no matter where she came from. He climbed down from his tree, greeted her with a smile, then did his best impression of a tribeson to order his former allies away. It took some doing, but he knew the names of some powerful tribeswarriors, enough to strike fear into the hearts of the two peons he was up against.

When he returned to the girl, he wasn't really sure what he intended to do or say, but tried his best to convey his peaceful intentions, by smiling and holding out his hand to me. I didn't realize it at the time, but the strange noise he made as he did so was his native tongue, and he was saying: "My name is Kerron, let me help."

His name was Kerron, and this is the story of how we changed the world.