Lord Lazuli stood on a high hill, overlooking the Cornflower Coast, where his two fledgling villages had just been given life. This untouched island would sustain his people well, if their initial bounties gave any indication; soon after the first settlements sprang up, the local forests and quarries offered unexpectedly hearty yields. The surplus of timber and bricks became paved roads, allowing Sapphire and Indigo to trade with swift ease. Yes, life would go well here; Lazuli knew it. To best reap the land, one only needed to listen to what it said.
IIIII
Curse those cumbersome buffoons in red livery! Not more than a moment after Sapphire had erected a great clock tower had someone clomb it and spotted red banners flying to the north, just past the forest. No doubt their fancy crimson-britches Lord Burgundy has his force of peasants hacking away at it. Just as well. Lazuli would double his own loggers' efforts there. If the forest were clear-cut, all the better! Let those idiots get their wood elsewhere.
IIIII
Lazuli's scouts reported a road sweeping right down through the forest, paved with red bricks. Where Burgundy thought it was going was anyone's guess, because it stopped off right at the quarry and left no room for even a shack at the edge of the stone pit. All of Cornflower Coast muttered that Burgundy built it just to get in the way and nothing more.
IIIII
At last Lazuli spotted one of the merchant galleons coming in from the eastern sea. His people eagerly stood on the harbor, handfuls of goods to trade. Oddly, the merchants only had interest in wool - neither even silk nor leather would do - and the ship left empty-handed upon learning that Cornflower Coast had no shepherds.
IIIII
Months went by without further incursions by Burgundy's men, and Lazuli saw the moment to destroy that ridiculous red road. His men, however, returned by the end of the day with shrugging shoulders and confused glances. The road couldn't be touched, they said. No matter what tool they struck it with, not a brick would chip.
Determined to prove their lazy dissension himself, Lazuli marched up with a pickaxe and found, in horror, their words to be true. He could not strike it, nor he could cross it, as if some invisible hand kept him at bay. What witchcraft had those red dogs done?
IIIII
Lazuli sent his settlers westward, hoping to reach any land clear enough to place a farm on. The people had to sustain themselves on personal gardens only, and their cattle wandered the streets in search of feed. Where the hell were the fields in this place?
Starkly the forests ended to give way to a massive, spiny mountain range the color of tarnished gunmetal, touching the clouds. Eyeing their watchful peaks, he knew they were impassable. The people had no choice; they'd have to clear away the forests to plant their crops in time.
IIIII
The abundance of the woods now became a curse. Indigo and Sapphire had log piles on every corner, more than they could use. What good was a house without a foundation? What good was a hearth without food to cook over it? They cut twice as much wood since the towns' latest expansions, but each day the trees still stood, as if untouched. The civilians were becoming superstitious. Lazuli wouldn't admit that he was as well.
IIIII
Lazuli slept uneasily, a great feeling of impending doom haunting his nights. The land spoke to him; it told him he'd grown too fat, and his people would have to be seeped like a swollen wound. He saw all the wood set ablaze or laid down as roads that went nowhere, but he couldn't say whether the destruction in his dreams felt like a threat, or a command.
IIIII
They couldn't stop cutting. The wood piles grew taller than the smallest houses but they all felt compelled to cut, hauling in more until the streets burgeoned with timber.
And then abruptly the trees refused to fall. Just as the red road was untouchable, so became the great blue pines that utterly and completely dominated the countryside. The towns fell into an uneasy quiet. The loggers' axe-hands itched.
IIIII
A week after the woods became cursed and the town fell into ennui and suspicious mumblings, He entered the town.
He was not a normal man, and likely not a human at all, but a great, dark figure, an imposing silhouette the light wouldn't touch, the black shape of a bear-man with a massive, domed head and a heavy cloak that never parted when he moved. No one saw where He came from. They woke one day and He stood in the streets. No one dared approach him.
He stood there, as the wood began to burn. No - it began to wither, blacken as if an invisible fire ate it, as if time moved too swiftly, decomposing it, turning it to ash. Half of all their wood burned that day. Half of all their food soured. Half of all their creatures died.
No one had the courage to speak to the fearsome man, the tall herald of death itself. Lazuli could only watch in silent lament, cursing his failure to form a military beforehand.
The shadowed man would not move, nor acknowledge anyone there. His presence seemed to hold Sapphire in stillness, as the laborers woke but would not rise, the craftsmen staring numbly at their supplies. Lazuli felt it grip his heart, a tremulous foreboding, a lethargy that refused to let him produce a single page of his own journal.
Indigo went on without them, oblivious to the curse of fugue.
IIIII
Finally the shadow left them. The heaviness holding them to their beds lifted, and the craze returned. Everyone with the strength to lift an axe or a shovel spread out on the land, cutting what trees and mining what rocks they could. Lazuli ordered them to gouge the mountain. What use they had for rocks, he couldn't say, and by morning the gray-faced watchers stood unmarked as they always had.
IIIII
Lazuli had worried at first that when they couldn't plant their crops they would die in the winter. Now he only worried at the distressing lack of winter itself. The trees would not turn; the air would not chill. He realized one day with a jolt that it hadn't rained since their landing, but how did they survive? How had they not supped in all this time? How long had it been, really? Months, years?
He had to visit Burgundy. It pained him, but he had to know he wasn't going insane.
IIIII
A bile rose in his throat when he stepped out of the forest's northern edge and saw vast, rippling fields of golden wheat with stalks as tall as a man. How dare those crimson witches profit off the land while his people toiled over sticks and rocks! But he kept on a diplomatic face as he visited their Lord in red velvet.
"You've come on our holiday," Burgundy said lightly. "Come and revel with us!"
The people massed in Carmine, donning red cloaks and blood-red dresses. They threw their wheat on a bonfire and crushed their stones with hammers to form great mountains of gravel, singing with urgent fervor.
When the ships come off the sea
And take our sundries one-for-three,
Too much is left for when he comes;
Before the morn make four-for-one!
"What are they doing this for?" Lazuli asked.
"To appease Him," Burgundy said in the same light tone, but with his face flushed darkly.
The people tread into the streets and slit their sheep's throats.
IIIII
To appease Him... the Herald of Balance, Cutter of Tall Poppies, Bleeder of Fat Wounds...
They had to be emptied and made pure of what they took. The people had to be bled of their overabundance.
Yes, yes. Lazuli understood now. The land spoke to him when he slept-but-did-not-sleep. Had he ever slept since arriving? He thought not. He only laid there in the darkness, and listened.