Back to the summer meeting (Violet)
One of the women has just come back from spying on the summer meeting and said that many of our people are there, and they've started picking up and burying the dead.
So it must be safe to go back.
I hope.
Some stay behind to look after the children, but not me. I get to leave the cave, climb my way through the tree's roots and breath in the sweet, fresh air.
The air isn't fresh at the summer meeting, I can smell smoke and ash, but most of the smell has already gone.
The burnt tents haven't though. And most of them are destroyed.
The leader's tent is, as is the young women's tent. We find that people are camping on the other side of the camp where the raiders didn't go so much, there's a group of them in the young men's tent.
And I find my parents.
They're all right.
They hadn't gone back to our cave to prepare it though.
They'd just decided to take a stroll whilst the sun set.
They're romantic like that.
Always doing things.
I am so happy to see that they are okay.
And they are ecstatic that I am alive.
And not stolen by the raiders.
They hug me when they see me, and not one at a time, no they hug me in a scrum, both parents together, I can barely breathe.
And I don't care.
I am alive.
They are alive.
But many aren't.
Many of the leaders are dead.
Slaughtered outside their tent, or burnt to death inside of it.
Women, men and most horrible of all, children are dead.
Little ones hardly started out in life.
And they're gone.
Their lives stolen from them.
I suspect many more were taken by the raiders.
I'm just glad we managed to keep the children we'd been told to look after safe, but it isn't enough when I see an old man pick up a small child and carry it to the funeral pyre.
