Dawning of an Age

I have just begun this, and hope that you enjoy it. There will be more, much more, and I will do my best to keep it coming at a regular pace. If life gets in the way, I do apologize, and know that I haven't forgotten what I'm doing.

*****

One

My Grandfather's mother spoke of a time before, when gardens rolled of their own accord and the world lived through glowing screens and voices cast invisibly across the air. A sort-of, not-quite magic that pulled people together while it drove them apart. It was a time before the Shift, as she called it. When man drove through life by the power of his own ingenuity, and the ingenuity of others drove each man to new heights.

She called it Technology, and spoke of its power with quiet awe. She said mankind had once spoken of the difference between magic and technology with scorn. There was once a saying, she said, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They were wrong. Magic is magic, and it killed technology completely.

There came a day, she told me, when the screens went fritzy, then fuzzy, and then dark. Voices in the air slowed, and wandered, and were lost; cast no further than the power of man's lungs could throw them. The great flying machines plunged from the sky, ripping great furrows in the earth, plowing through the great dead cities and drawing streaks of fire across the world.

The world shifted, she said. It became a place of magic, of will. When magic came, technology failed and disappeared. Seasons changed, the air thickened and grew with power.

Magic changed everything. Power flowed from nothing, and could be bent and twisted to the will of men. Not all men, but some.

Wars came and went, men fighting amongst themselves to carve out their place in this strange, mad new world. My grandfather fell, and my father. My mother was lost not long after, and my raising fell to the oldest woman I'd ever known. The oldest woman anyone had ever known, called Baba by all.

She knew war well, and had fought her own and those of other fools before the Shift. She was ancient, crooked, and her eyes had gone blurry long before my birth. Baba had known steel all her life, worked with it, molded, poured and beat it into shapes both beautiful and useful. Even as her eyes went cloudy, her hands, so rough and thick and overlarge for her bent body, could feel the shape of hot forge steel and direct a hammer where it needed to go. Her life, when not at war, had been spent at the forge and in the forest. She hunted, fished, and foraged for food even before the Shift, learning when she was a child to live off the land in case she ever needed to.

My education came entirely from Baba, and she insisted I learn to read and write even as she taught me woodcraft and to work steel. As a teacher, she was hard, unforgiving, and unafraid to use a well-aimed backhand to drive a point home. As a child, I hated her every day for at least a few minutes at a time. The work was backbreaking, and my body was sore every night from pumping bellows, hammering steel, and learning to use what we made, my mind exhausted from hours of slogging through books that she hoarded and guarded and hid from the world like they were bars of gold.

Baba insisted that I know as much as she could teach me, that I learn not only how to forge plow and pitchfork, but also sword and axe and knife. It was important, she said, to learn to use each thing I made, to know the purpose for which every item I learned to produce would be used. She taught me to fight and to shoot, to ride and to farm. Everything of which she knew, she made me learn. What she could not teach me, her books could. I hated it, then, but as I grew older I came to have a fondness for what Baba and her books taught me, and what I could glean from the world for myself.

When I was twelve, she began to let me spend a full day and then some once per week away from the tiny stone house and forge to do whatever I wanted. From sunrise of one day to sunset of the next, I was free to do or go anywhere. I wandered into the forest, further every week, until I found my place.

It was a grotto, set in the bottom of a small ravine and hidden by thick brambles and ivy from every angle. The vegetation surrounded a small pond of fresh, clean water, fed by a hot spring, that made a perfect little circle that disappeared into the low, wide mouth of a small stone cave. The ceiling was also low, once I had grown I had to bend my head a bit to stand upright, but it was perfect.

Cool in the summer, warm from the water of the hot spring in the winter. I brought many small things to my grotto; blankets and the few books that Ma had gifted to me, a pan, a flint, some charcoal. I always brought some food with me, namely bread and cheese. Game I would find on my way.

It wasn't until my eighteenth year that the grotto was discovered by anyone else, and even then it was my own doing.

Winter came with a powerful vengeance that year, lahing away the last vestiges of fall as though it were angry that it had ever been denied its right to fury, the temperature dropping so low that a cup of water thrown into the air would turn to mist and sleet before it ever reached the ground. A blizzard howled across the world, blowing onto us two feet of clean, frozen powder. The forge stayed hot enough, but even to walk from the house to the forge required bundling, lest our sweat freeze to our skin.

When my day came, I wrapped myself in the warmest furs I could find and packed a bearskin to lay over the blankets already in the grotto. I brought milk and cheese and half a loaf of decent bread, setting off at sunrise.

Half a mile from my grotto, I saw the tracks. A lone person, foraging for moss and anything else that survived under the deep snow. Whoever it was hadn't even tried to cover their tracks, and was probably desperately lost. We were in a part of the forest where I had only ever seen signs of game and my own passing. The tracks were an hour old, maybe a bit longer, the frigid but somewhat lazy wind just starting to blow them away.

They curved gently away from my grotto, angling toward easier passing along the edge of the little ravine. I followed them anyway, my curiosity getting the better of me. The knife I had made under Baba's watchful hands found its way into my fingers, a precaution I took by instinct. Most of those who lived close enough to us to survive a trek this far from anything were decent folk, but some were not.

Halfway along the ravine lay a bundle in the snow. A somewhat ratty blanket wrapped tightly around a small, still frame. The forager had pushed on as far as possible and fallen in the snow, likely never intending to rise again, so cold that the snow seemed a warm blanket in which to nestle and finally end the awful stabbing pain of the air itself.

I approached slowly, quietly, so as not to startle the forager, if they yet lived. I needn't have bothered. When I pulled back the blanket I was greeted by a shock of blonde hair, and a porcelain face turned nearly blue with the cold. When I put my fingers to her soft, long neck, I felt the pulse of blood through her veins as a frighteningly weak flutter. It was too cold to tell if she was still breathing.

I lifted her over my shoulder, thanking both the years of hard labor that Baba had put me through and the girl's small frame for the ease with which this was done, and carried her back along her own tracks to the mouth of the ravine. I had to unwrap her from her blanket, which revealed a wool dress that would have kept her warm enough next to a fire but was useless in the frozen forest, and put it back around her in a sort of cocoon so that I could crawl ahead of her under the brambles surrounding the grotto and drag her behind me.

I did not know exactly how long she had been wandering the forest, or how long she had lain in the snow, but Baba's books had told me that minutes were important when a person was freezing. Despite the horrible cold, there was no ice across the little pond, and I knew the water would be warm to the edge, increasingly so until it was quite hot toward the middle.

Once through the brambles, I ran to the mouth of the cave and lay her gently on the floor, dropping the bearskin and food wrapped inside and peeling off my furs down to nothing. I pulled her blanket from around her and tugged the dress off, pulling away her flimsy boots and tossing it all into a pile near where I would build a fire later on.

She was blue all over. Her skin was smooth, and I guessed quite pale even when she was warm, but the cold had given it a concerning, patchy undertone, like the sky peeking through a blanket of white cloud. I scooped her into my arms, feeling her against warm skin for the first time and starting at how truly chilled she was. There was no warmth left in her. We moved into the water, my toes finding the edge lukewarm, turning to a gentle, calming warmth as it passed my knees, until it was finally a steady, comfortable heat around my waist. I hunkered down, lowering her into the water, supporting her head and knees with my arms, cradling her against me and watching for signs of warmth to return.

We stayed that way for hours. Her breathing began to deepen, finally, and she was more or less bouyant on her own. I floated beside her, keeping her face just above the surface. Everything else I made sure stayed in the warmth. As the blue began to fade, I let us drift closer to the center, into warmer, deeper water where I could stretch my legs a bit.

The midday sun was high overhead when she finally stirred in my arms. I gently cradled her head in my hand and moved my other arm into the crooks of her knees, giving her a little more support and hoping she wouldn't panic as she woke. Her eyes fluttered and finally opened, revealing themselves to be a clear, warm blue as she looked up into the branches above and took in the edges of the grotto before finally widening a bit and darting to my face.

She immediately attempted to sit up. Given that she was in water and being held up by my arms, this only sort of worked and she mostly wound up just managing to pull her head and shoulders out of the water to the very tops of her breasts before her ass sank into the water and she flailed her arms out, spraying warm water everywhere.

I managed to catch one of her arms and pull her closer while backing up a bit into somewhat more shallow water, where I let go of her legs. I kept hold of her arm, steadying her as her feet sank to the bottom and she was able to stand, the water coming high enough to give her some sense of modesty, though its clarity did little to hide anything once the surface settled again.

"Who are you?" she asked. her voice was clear and strong, though tinged with a little fear, a lot of nervousness, and a healthy measure of defiance. "Where the hell am I, and why am I naked?"

Her eyes darted down to the water, widened, and darted back up.

"Why the hell are YOU naked?" Now there was anger there as well. I raised both arms out of the water, hands open, palms facing her, hoping to placate her and assuage her fears as quickly as possible.

"I'm Seth, and you're in my grotto. I found you in the forest, half-dead from the cold in a pile of snow. I brought you back here to warm you up, and the fastest way I could think of at the time was to bring you into the water. If I'd left the blanket and your dress on, you would've been much heavier and not had anything to wear once you warmed up. If I'd left my furs on, we both would've drowned. Since you're feeling better now, I'll bring your clothes to you and give you something to eat, if that's alright?"

As I spoke, her face softened from anger and defiance to realization and memory. She remembered being in the forest and being cold. She probably didn't remember falling into the snow.

"Thank you," she whispered. "And clothes and food sound wonderful." I caught her eyes dart back down as she mentioned clothes and I managed not to smile.

Without hesitation, I turned and slogged out of the water, feeling her eyes on me as I walked and grabbed one of the several blankets I kept at the grotto. I turned and walked back to the water, holding out the blanket and facing away from her.

"Use this to dry off, and I'll start a fire," I said. I heard her move through the water and tried very hard to concentrate on how cold I was becoming rather than think about what I would see if I turned my head.

"Thank you," she whispered again, from much closer than I expected. I was glad my face was turned away, and that she couldn't see the color that rose to my cheeks.

"You're welcome," I managed, and moved away to work on the fire.

Firewood was easy to come by during most months, and a simple thing to stockpile in a cave that no one else ever goes to, so with a little charcoal, some dry moss that I kept just for the purpose, and some quick work with the flint against my knife, I was able to get a small fire going that drove the worst of the cold away from me. Years of working the forge allowed me to build it quickly to a respectable size that would burn for hours and cast glorious heat all through the cave. As I finished, the girl cleared her throat and I felt the slightly damp blanket touch my shoulder.

"You can use it now, if you'd like," she said quietly.

When I turned, I discovered that she had found the rest of the blankets and wrapped one around herself, exposing a tantalizing glimpse of pale, lithe hip and leg as she held the other out to me. I averted my eyes quickly, looking to her face. She looked at me with a gentle smile that played in her eyes and just barely turned up the corners of her mouth.

"My dress is full of melting snow," she explained, "and your furs are in the same shape. I'll get you another blanket to wrap up with." As she spoke, I took the blanket and colored slightly as I watched her eyes sweep quickly over my body, taking in as much as she could in the short moment, stopping between my legs for an extra second and widening slightly.

"Thank you," I said, and took the blanket. After wiping away what remained of the water, I looked up to see her watching me from a few paces away, her eyes growing wide and her pale cheeks blushing a bright red as she realized that I had caught her looking. She looked away as she held out another blanket and I tried not to laugh.

"Are you hungry?" I asked once I had wrapped the blanket around my waist and secured it fairly well.

"Oh, holy shit, yes!" she blurted, then gasped and quickly covered her mouth. This caused the blanket to fall open and display her entire left side from shoulder to foot, her arm covering her breast and the blanket coming over just far enough to cover her womanhood. "Oh, damn it," she swore, and pulled the blanket back into place.

I laughed. She shot me a sharp glance that dissolved into a giggle.

"I think I'm just going to sit down, now," she said.

"I'll get some food," I replied, the last of my laughter coloring the statement.

"Thank you," she said again, this time smiling as she looked me in the eye.

"So, who are you?" I asked as I unwrapped the food from the bear skin. "And why were you foraging so far out?"

"My name is Lila," she said. "And I got lost with all this snow. My father sent me out to find something to eat. I told him-"

She stopped, her voice breaking as she began to cry, quietly. I wouldn't even have known if I hadn't looked up at her. Her shoulders shook as she wept, the only sound the occasional sharp, gulping intake of breath. I abandoned the food and went to her, crouching beside her and wrapping my arms around her. The angle was awkward, my arms around her shoulders, my knees in front and behind her body.

It didn't matter. She clutched at me, one arm wrapping under my leg, her face burying into my chest, her other arm wrapping around my neck as she sobbed. It was louder now, emotion finally breaking down her desire for restraint. I whispered to her, reassurances that she was safe and warm, and nothing would hurt her here.

Her blanket fell away, revealing bruises that I knew well from a short lifetime of learning slowly around Baba. Her father, whoever he was, deserved a reckoning.

The sobs died down after long minutes, and I held on, letting her feel some form of support, closeness. Soon she simply breathed deeply against my skin, my chest wet with her tears, her hair sticking in the dampness. She relaxed slowly, her body unclenching a little at a time.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. I laughed.

"There's nothing to apologize for," I said. And there wasn't. She had nearly died, and that would be enough to break most anyone.

"No," she said. "Not for the crying, I think I earned that, actually. I meant for my arm."

I looked down, startled, as I realized that her arm was wrapped under my thigh, below the blanket, her bicep resting against my manhood.

"Oh!" I blurted. "Um... I didn't..." I moved back a bit, pulling myself away from her arm , embarrassed that I hadn't noticed, and far more embarrassed as I began to swell.

She laughed, light and clear and wonderful, and I somehow felt less embarrassed and more embarrassed all at the same time. I had no experience with women, and didn't know what I was feeling, but I knew that it was not unpleasant.

I stood and moved back to the food, hoping that it would distract me enough to bring my loins back under control. I retrieved my little pan, pouring about half the milk I'd brought into it and placed it on a flat stone beside the fire to warm. I halved the bread, then halved it again, sliced off two thick slices of cheese, and lay them over the bread, which I placed by the fire.

"So what is this place?" Lila asked. "I don't know if I've ever been to this part of the forest, but I do know I've never seen this."

"This is my grotto. Or, I guess a grotto. I found when I was little, and I've been coming here on the days when Baba lets me go ever since."

"Who's Baba?"

"She is the oldest woman in the world, and she's a smith. We make tools, horseshoes, sometimes weapons. She's my grandfather's mother, and she's raised me since I was too young to remember. She taught me about fire and the forge, and how to warm you up."

"I'll have to come by and say thank you sometime, then," she whispered. I smiled and blushed again, wondering in my mind how in the world this small girl could make my cheeks color so easily.

The cheese had melted, and the milk was warm, so I pulled a small cup from within the blankets and poured, handing her the pieces of bread and the milk.

"No, you need to eat too," she protested, trying to push the bread back into my hands.

"I will," I said. "But your day has been much harder than mine, and I can wait a few minutes. Now, eat, before it gets cold." I smiled to reassure her, and gently pushed her hands away. It didn't take long for her to tear into the bread and cheese, pulling off big mouthfuls that were hastily chewed. I watched her sidelong as she ate and I prepared my own.

I began to talk, telling her of my home, of Baba, and of the work. I spoke of the grotto, of how I would come to relax and ease the sore muscles of working at the forge. She listened, I think, as she ate, either food or politeness stopping her from interrupting. When my cheese had melted, I ate, and she spoke.

She told me of home, her voice stronger this time. Lila's father was a farmer, and not a very good one. She did most of the work, while he took most of the money. She foraged for food, hoping to find enough to feed them both while he drank away what they earned. There was little left over for things like furs and good boots, so foraging was a cold experience. He made her do it anyway.

Her father spent many days at a time away from the farm, trading away the livestock and crops that came from their fields and garden for drink. He always came back drunk and broke, rarely even remembering to buy the seeds they needed. Through years of hunger, Lila had learned to keep and cultivate her own seeds, pollinating the strongest with each other and keeping the stock strong despite her father's failures. She learned to do the same with the livestock, keeping track of offspring and which belonged to which parents to prevent defects.