Lore

He sank to his knees on the sandy ground, the earth beneath him stained red by the spilling of so much blood. His final breath was not one of glory, conquest, or fulfilment, despite the victory. It was one of emptiness and sorrow. The last man standing from the victorious army now knelt alone, succumbing to a fate he could no longer escape. The greatest of wars had brought the world to the brink of extinction, wiping out most of its creatures and leaving behind little more than ruin, silence, and the memory of what had once been.

Then the rains began. They fell without pause for many, many days, long enough for those who remained to search for an explanation.

Some said the gods had watched the world destroy itself and, at last, begun to weep. Others believed the storms were nothing more than another consequence of a world thrown violently out of balance. No one knew. The rain simply kept falling.

Yet even while the land remained scarred by war, small leaves began to emerge from the soil. They pushed through the blood-soaked earth as though the world itself refused to surrender. Despite everything that had happened, nature had not forgotten how to regenerate.

The relentless rains flooded the land before draining into rivers, oceans, and deep into the subsoil. For weeks, then months, the world remained soaked beneath those strange rains. When the waters finally began to settle, it became increasingly difficult to see the history of violence that had so recently covered the ground. New lakes had appeared where none had existed before. Rivers had changed course. Grass began to grow again.

There was a new calmness in the air, and nature, indifferent to the ambitions that had nearly destroyed it, attempted to resume its course.

The few Hominids who had survived slowly began to feel something they had almost forgotten: hope. They returned to the remains of their settlements and started rebuilding the marks of civilization that their own rivalries and disputes had torn down. Walls were raised again, wells were cleared, roofs repaired, and abandoned fields planted once more. Among those survivors was an old woman who lived with her three grandchildren. The children had lost both of their parents and their grandfather during the wars, leaving the grandmother as the only family they had left.

Their survival depended almost entirely on her, and every day was spent stretching what little food remained, repairing what could still be repaired, and trying to keep the four of them alive long enough to see another morning.

One day, their well ran dry. The old woman lowered the bucket again and again, but each time it returned with nothing but dust and damp earth. Without water, the children would not last long. She took an empty barrel and began walking, following the low ground in the hope that somewhere the rains had left something behind.

She walked for miles beneath the pale sky, stopping only when exhaustion forced her to. Eventually, she came across a small lake nestled between two stretches of ruined land. She knew the area well enough to know that the lake had never been there before.

Before the great rains, there had been nothing there but dry soil and scattered stones. She hesitated at the edge of the water, but only for a moment. Whatever its origin, it was water, and her grandchildren were thirsty. She filled the barrel and carried it home.

The four of them drank cautiously at first. The water tasted clean, almost unusually clean, and after only a few small sips they began to notice something strange. Their tiredness seemed to lift. Their bodies felt lighter, stronger. The dull heaviness they had carried since the war loosened in a way that felt impossible to explain. There was more than relief from thirst in the water. There was a greater sense of existence in it, as though every breath had become sharper and every sound clearer. Their thoughts came more quickly.

Their limbs felt more responsive.

Even the grandmother, whose body had been worn down by years of hunger and grief, felt young again for a few precious minutes. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the feeling faded.

That evening, the grandmother prepared dinner. She took the carcass of an old Avian she had raised in their garden, a bird that had stopped laying eggs and, in a household where every mouthful mattered, had stopped being useful.

She placed it in a large cauldron with some of the lake water, then added a handful of herbs and whatever ingredients she could find to give the soup some flavour. As the pot began to boil, the pieces of meat softened and slowly broke apart.

The bones occasionally rose to the surface with the movement of the water, and after some time the grandmother noticed something she could not explain. Each time one of the bones resurfaced, it seemed smaller.

At first she thought the heat was playing tricks on her. She leaned closer and watched carefully.

A long bone appeared near the surface, sank again, then rose a few minutes later noticeably thinner than before. Another followed. Then another. The meat had already dissolved into the broth, but now the bones themselves seemed to be disappearing. She stopped stirring. Something was wrong. Before long, there was almost nothing left inside the cauldron. The meat was gone. The bones were gone. The herbs had vanished. Even the thicker pieces of vegetable she had added could no longer be found.

What remained was a thin, bluish liquid, strange in colour and almost perfectly smooth.

It had none of the richness of a proper soup. Its consistency was more like water. But the family was hungry, so they drank it.

The children drank from their bowls quickly and went to bed. The grandmother remained in the kitchen, cleaning what little there was to clean before finally allowing herself a moment of rest. She sat at the table and lowered her aching arms onto the wooden surface. She had barely stopped moving all day. For a few seconds she simply breathed. Then the nausea came. Her hands began to shake.

A strange weakness passed through her body, followed by an uncomfortable alertness that made every sound in the house seem unnaturally loud. She closed her eyes and rested her head on the table.

And she saw a man.

He was riding toward her on a black horse, dressed in an overall, the animal galloping hard beneath him. The image was impossibly vivid. She knew her eyes were closed. She knew she was sitting in her kitchen. Yet the man seemed to be only a few metres away, coming closer with every beat of the horse's hooves.

He raised a sword above his head. His expression was fierce, but there was something hollow about it, something empty behind his eyes. It was not anger she saw there. It was destruction without passion, violence stripped of purpose. For a moment, she thought she was becoming delirious. Perhaps the water had poisoned her. Perhaps the soup had. Perhaps exhaustion had finally broken her mind. She told herself it could not be real. It was exhaustion, or sickness, or something in the water. It had to be.

Her eyes opened and she ran to the children's room.

The window was open. The beds were empty. For a second, her heart stopped.

Then she saw the man. He stood with his back to her beside the children's beds, lifting the blankets and searching beneath them. He turned slowly when he heard her enter. The same face she had seen with her eyes closed now stared directly at her. The same empty expression. The same sword. He began walking toward her. She did not scream. She did not run. There was nowhere to go.

The man raised the sword, and the grandmother closed her eyes, accepting the fate that had somehow already been shown to her. But the blade never touched her.

There was a sudden wet sound, followed by a sharp metallic scrape. She opened her eyes. A huge iron spike protruded from the man's chest.

For a moment he remained standing, his sword still raised, as though his body had not yet understood what had happened. Then his arm weakened and the weapon slipped from his hand. Behind him stood the grandmother's oldest grandson, both hands gripping the other end of the spike. The man dropped to his knees. The boy released the iron bar. The body collapsed onto the floor.

The other two children emerged from their hiding places.

No one moved. The grandmother stared at the children, and they stared back at her. For several long seconds, there was complete silence. None of them needed to explain what had happened. The children had known the man was coming. The grandmother had known too. They had all seen him before he arrived. The only difference was that the children had acted on what they saw faster than she had.

Once they were certain the man was dead, the grandmother decided they could not leave his body inside the house. They wrapped him in an old blanket and, with considerable effort, dragged him beyond the last ruined homes of the settlement. A few minutes away, they pushed the body deep beneath a thick patch of bushes at the foot of a hill and covered it with branches and loose vegetation. None of them wanted to explain how a dead stranger had ended up in their home.

When they returned, the youngest granddaughter looked toward the kitchen and then up at her grandmother.

“Grandma,” she said quietly. “Can I have some more soup?”

In the days that followed, the grandmother and her grandchildren returned to the lake again and again. Each morning she left with the two youngest children, carrying buckets, clay jars, old cooking pots, and anything else that could hold water. The journey was long enough to tire them, especially on the way home when every container was full, but the strange water had become too valuable to leave behind.

The oldest grandson remained in the settlement. He spent his days knocking on doors and asking for the remains of Avians. Food was still scarce, so nobody offered him meat, but that was not what he wanted. He asked only for the carcasses after the useful parts had been taken: ribs, wings, legs, and bones with little more than skin or tendon left on them. People knew the children had lost their parents during the war and often pitied him enough to give away what they would otherwise have discarded. Before long, he rarely returned home empty-handed.

Every evening the family met around the cauldron. The grandmother no longer experimented with what went into it. Instead, she tried to reproduce the first preparation as closely as she could, using the same kind of Avian remains and the same herbs and other ingredients she remembered adding that night. The proportions were never exact, but the result remained consistent. The meat dissolved, the bones became thinner, and almost everything vanished into the same smooth bluish liquid.

The children began calling it Brone, a name made from broth and bone. What began as a joke soon became the only word they used for it. Their days settled into a simple routine: gather water, gather carcasses, prepare Brone, drink it, sleep, and begin again the following morning.

The effects were not always as powerful as they had been on the night the man entered their home. Sometimes they noticed nothing. On other evenings they saw brief fragments of things that had not yet happened: a cup falling from a table, a knock at the door, rain beginning before the first clouds appeared. The visions were small, but they happened often enough that the family stopped doubting the Brone was responsible.

They were not the only ones who had noticed the lake. Rumours spread quickly through the recovering settlements, and more strangers began appearing along the shore. Some came with jars and buckets. Others brought carts and barrels. People claimed the strange water restored strength, sharpened the senses, eased pain, or made exhaustion disappear for a time. Nobody knew exactly why it was different, but fewer people were willing to ignore the stories.

It was around then that people began calling such waters Godtears. The explanation travelled almost as quickly as the rumours. The gods, people said, had watched Hominids destroy one another during the greatest war until the world was nearly empty, and when the fighting finally ended, they had wept. Their tears had fallen as the relentless rains that followed. Most had mixed with rivers, oceans, soil, and ordinary groundwater, but some had gathered in lakes, caves, and deep places beneath the earth without losing whatever made them different.

The grandmother had no way of knowing whether the story was true. She only knew what happened when she drank the lake water, and what happened when she boiled it with the remains of an Avian.

One evening, after another day spent gathering water and carcasses, the family drank their Brone and prepared for bed. Then, almost at the same moment, all four of them stopped. The feeling was stronger than the small visions of the previous days. It carried the same weight as the warning that had come before the man on the black horse entered their home. There was no clear image this time, only certainty. They needed to go to the lake.

They left without discussing it. None of them carried the containers they usually took during the day. They walked through the hills in silence, beneath trees that seemed darker and closer together at night, yet they moved as though each already knew where the others intended to go. When one slowed, the others slowed. When one changed direction, the rest followed.

Near the lake, the family left the path and climbed higher through the trees until they reached the upper edge of a hill overlooking the water. They stayed hidden between the trunks and thick vegetation, well above the shore and beyond the torchlight. From there they could see everything below without revealing their presence.

Dozens of flames moved beneath them, but nobody looked toward the dark hillside. Several dozen Hominids were working along the shore with horses, carts, wagons, and large wooden structures built to move water quickly into barrels. Hundreds of containers waited to be filled. Some people collected the water, others sealed the barrels, and others loaded them onto wagons. The grandmother understood immediately that these were not families taking enough to survive. They were taking as much of the lake as they could.

Without speaking, the grandmother and children moved higher along the hillside. Large rounded stones rested near the top, some half buried and others held in place by smaller rocks. They stopped beside the largest one they could reach and pushed. At first it did not move. They tried again. The Brone was still strong in their bodies, sharpening their movements and giving them strength beyond what they normally possessed. The stone shifted, the soil beneath it broke away, and together they forced it over the edge.

The rock gathered speed as it rolled. It struck another stone and knocked it loose, then another. Within seconds the hillside began to move. Huge dark-grey rocks tore through bushes and trees before crashing into the operation below. Hominids looked up when they heard the noise, but there was little time to run. One rock destroyed a wooden structure. Another overturned a wagon. A falling torch landed among the broken timber, and the dry wood caught fire.

People were crushed or thrown into the lake. Some disappeared beneath the water with stones trapping them against the mud. Horses screamed and pulled against their restraints until two broke free, followed by a third. Barrels rolled into the water while flames spread through the remaining wagons. When the last rocks finally stopped, the screams became fewer and then almost disappeared.

The family watched from above until one Hominid climbed from between the wreckage. He stood among the bodies and burning wood, apparently the only survivor, then raised his head and looked directly toward the hill. His eyes found them at once. The grandmother turned, but the children were already running.

They fled through the forest with the same strange coordination that had brought them to the lake. They crossed a narrow stream, passed between two large rocks, and found a small cave hidden behind thick vegetation. The four of them moved into the darkness and waited. For a while there was nothing but silence. Then footsteps approached through the trees.

The Brone was beginning to fade. The certainty that had guided them disappeared with it, and fear returned. The footsteps stopped outside. The man moved slowly around the entrance, then inhaled deeply through his nose. He did it again. The grandmother understood with growing horror that he was smelling them.

Two red eyes appeared in the darkness. The man stepped into the cave far enough for the moonlight to reveal his face, and the grandmother recognized him immediately. It was the man who had entered their home on the black horse, the man whose chest had been pierced by the iron spike and whose corpse they had dragged beyond the settlement and hidden beneath the bushes. Yet he was standing before them again. He looked younger, stronger, and healthier than before, with sharper teeth and red eyes that seemed to shine in the darkness.

He carried no sword. Beneath one arm were four wooden buckets fitted inside one another. He placed them on the cave floor, separated them, and removed a small knife from the smallest. By then the Brone had almost completely left the family's bodies. The grandmother opened her mouth, but the man moved before she could make a sound. He cut their throats one after another and positioned a bucket beneath each neck. Blood struck the wood in heavy drops and then in steady streams. Within moments, the cave was silent.

The man waited until the buckets held what he needed, then carried them back to the burning shore. Among the wreckage he found a cauldron, filled it with water from the lake, and poured in the blood.

As the mixture boiled, its heaviness disappeared until the liquid moved almost like water again, now deep red. Without waiting for it to cool, he filled a drinking horn and drank. His red eyes brightened before he turned toward the forest and disappeared into the darkness.

By sunrise, smoke still rose from the broken wagons and empty barrels drifted near the shore. A few miles away, the grandmother's house stood empty. At the bottom of the cauldron in her kitchen, a faint blue residue remained where the last Brone had been prepared. Beside the lake, another cauldron had dried red around its rim.

Both had begun with the same clear water.