Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

It was so far away that it seemed tiny. The smudge of dust against the deep blue of the sky where it met the horizon seemed to hang in the air, motionless, but she knew that it was just a trick of the distance that made it look tiny and still. Even from this far, she was able to tell that it was spread across a broad swath. It was still so far away that it was hard to see much of its cause. Had it not been for Lokey, Jillian likely wouldn't have spotted it for some time.

Even though she couldn't yet see what was causing the dust, she knew that she had never before seen such a sight.

Her first thought was that it had to be a whirlwind or a dust storm. But as she watched it she realized that it was too broad to be a whirlwind and a dust storm didn't stream up into the sky the way this did. A dust storm, even if it did extend high up, still had at the base what looked like huge, billowing, brown clouds running along the ground that was actually where the gusty winds were churning up the dust.

This wasn't at all like that. This was dust rising up from something coming-from people coming on horses.

Strangers.

More strangers than she could fathom. Strangers in such numbers that it was like something in her grandfather's stories.

Jillian's knees began to tremble. Fear welled up through her, coming to lodge in her throat where screams were born.

This was them. The strangers her grandfather always said would come. They were coming now.

People never doubted her grandfather-to his face, anyway-but she didn't think they really worried about the things in his tellings. After all, their lives were peaceful; no one ever came to disturb them or their homeland.

Jillian, though, had always believed her grandfather and so she'd always known that the strangers would eventually come, but, like other people, she'd always thought it would be sometime in the dim future, maybe when she was old, or, maybe even, if they were lucky, generations in the future.

It was only in her infrequent nightmares that the strangers arrived in the present, rather than the far future.

Seeing those columns of dust rising, she knew without a doubt that this was them and they were coming now.

In her whole life she had never seen strangers. No one but Jillian's people ever wandered the inhospitable barrens of the vast and forbidding place known as the Deep Nothing.

She stood trembling in terror, staring at the smudge of dust at the horizon. She was about to see a great many outsiders — the ones from the stories.

But it was too soon. She hadn't had a life yet, hadn't had a chance to live and love and have children. Tears brimmed in her eyes, giving everything a watery appearance. She looked over her shoulder and up into the ruins. Was this what they had faced, like in Grandfather's tellings?

Tears began to run down through the dust on her cheeks. She knew, she knew without a hint of doubt, that her life was about to change, and that her dreams would no longer be happy.

Jillian scrambled down off the top of the rubble she had been standing on and ran down the hill, past the wall, the crumbled empty squares of brick buildings, the pits where once buildings had risen up. Her racing feet raised their own cloud of dust as she ran through the ruins of what once had been outposts of an ancient city. She ran down roads that no longer had life around them, no longer were lined with standing buildings.

She had often tried to imagine what it would have been like when people had lived in the houses, when people had walked the streets, cooked in the homes, hung the wash outside their brick houses, traded goods in the squares. No more. They were all long dead. The whole city was long dead, except for the few of Jillian's people who sometimes stayed in the most remote of the old buildings.

As she got closer to those ancient buildings of the outposts that they used when they lived in this area for the summer, Jillian saw people hurrying about, yelling to one another. She saw that they were gathering up their things and collecting the animals. It appeared they were going to move on, maybe back into the shelter of the mountains, or out onto the barrens. She had seen her people do such a thing only a few times before. The threat had always turned out to be imaginary. Jillian knew that this time it was real.

She wasn't sure, though, if they would have enough time to flee the approaching strangers and hide. But her people were strong and swift. They were used to moving around on the empty land. Grandfather said that no one else but her people could survive so well in this forsaken place. They knew the mountain passes and places of water, as well as the hidden passages through what seemed like impassable canyons. They could vanish into the inhospitable land in short order and survive.

Most of them could, anyway. Some, like her grandfather, were no longer swift.