A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,18

an entry with a question of her sanity. 'Could it be I am losing my mind?' 'Have I gone mad?' 'Are these things some sort of trick I am playing on myself because I am disturbed so?'

My heart went out to her as she struggled through these early stages of mischief. I knew that many – most – had lost their lives, but how many had lost their minds as well? I was lucky, I realized for perhaps the second time. Lucky to be surviving in the dark age that I was. Bleak as it was, I had been essentially born into it and raised to cope. None of this buckling under the unfathomable trauma in the early stages. I was crafted for this. I was a child of it. I did not mind being forsaken. It made me independent. It made me sturdy.

But Lady Sebastian... She had been born into order. She had been born into a world that had a way about it, and a society that bent to that way. There were rules, and manners, and clockwork. The most unpredictable beast of the earth's ways was mother nature. The elements.

Nothing that walls could not bar. Nothing that roofs could not defy. Nothing that blankets, and fire, and shelter could not starve out.

Until things changed. And no one could put a name to the mischief.

They would have been hard-pressed to cope, I granted. For they would not have even known how to survive.

I closed the diary, my thoughts churning for the night. I tucked the volume absently away as I rose from the crack of moonlight at the window and quietly treaded to my pallet. My thoughts were tumbling through a realm of destruction and intrigue, lost in the history of a time of fascinating paved roads, and the devastating prick of impending destiny that paved the broken road to my decade. A time when childhood walls began to drive people mad.

*

My wounds were beginning to heal. They itched and stung at times, maddeningly so, but Letta kept me in check about bothering them. If she caught me fussing, she promptly smeared root salve all over me again, and then the only potential result of my fussing was the threat of gooing up my fingers.

I kept up with the rest of them despite my injuries. A tribute to that 'sturdy stuff' we of recent times had been melded into. As a child I had been like metal to a blacksmith. Hammered, pummeled, pounded, melted, smelted, beaten and bruised – but refined into a great chunk of masterpiece. Something staunch. Something purposeful. And, yes, even something beautiful. It was odd, but true – even as a forsaken figure in this lawless, classless, decayed time, I was proud of who I was.

I paused in my work on the garden to look out across the countryside. It was sunny today, the air crisp on my cheeks but warm on my back. Something stirred in the distance. A heat wave. We had heard or seen nothing of the Wardog since evidence of it first rang out.

I wiped a smear of dirt from my cheek with the back of my arm. A rock clucked under my boot as I shifted. Even that echoed.

“Tell me of Serbae,” I prompted Letta. I loved hearing of her country.

“There is not much you have not heard.”

“I should like to visit it, if I ever have the chance.”

“Well, alas, minda, for it is not ours anymore.” She sat back, thinking. “Let's see. I have told you of the great cats, with their manes like fire. I have told you of the beasts of the water that lurk beneath the lily pads – the fat gray hippohs, graceful one moment and ready to maul and crush you into the mud the next, and the terrors that are the armored, fanged lizards with snouts like splintered logs, the ghators. I have told you of the teeming herds of spotted and striped horses. Have I told you how the horses can fight off the water beasts?”

I shook my head.

“One sees beauty and elegance when they look at the horse – strength, yes, but fragility. They are great creatures, but prey. They spook. They run. And they can run like the wind, but have you considered their legs? So slight. So spindly. Little more than bone ready to snap, it seems, under all that wild, prancing, rippling muscle.

“But those hooves can crush. Those bones can strike. I saw it, once – a