Warnings: Swearing
Update: 11/20
1 week after the attack
...
Wooden crate debris taughtered and splintered as he walked across. Various sun beams from the sparse shingled roof showed the dust that plumed up from his steps. Eran looked around the abandoned warehouse. Holding onto the built in shelves lining the wall as a steady, he pulled out various drawers that came out empty.
So far he managed to find a couple of glass canning jars and a broken charcoal stick. They were pretty good finds for him, but some leftovers of the edible variety would have been appreciated. The infant strapped comfortably to his chest had her red cheek pressed up against him, head tilted up just below his chin. Her little body tremored rhythmically as he felt her hiccups. The jars would be useful to collect oat and soy milk for his sister. The charcoal he would store away with his writing supplies when he needed to communicate with the villagers to borrow tools in exchange for work.
As he stored his simple finds, he pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper that had a rough geographical area sketched on it. He smudged the charcoal drawing of a box drawing with the number 4. He skipped warehouse 1 because it was too close to the sprawled lower village nearby his home mountain. Warehouse 2 that was a few days walk East was the one he chose to visit first in hopes of finding at least one of his fellow clansmen. 3 was a rotten barnhouse that had long caved in and was flourishing in plant fauna.
5 like 4 was also disserted, he couldnt find anything useful there besides a few torn scraps of paper that had scribbled ledgers on one side. He backtracked to 4 when he followed the scattered foot traffic leading in its direction.
He still hasnt seen a single clansmen, someone had to have made it out. The village held a vast many citizens, and his mother seemed to have a great time wrastling the majority of invaders like an insane whirpool of green. He couldnt fathom how the warehouses he visited so far had nothing in them either. Tabunoki's notes on the map ensured the select locations were to be emergency escape gatherings for disasters.
But they were empty, and almost everyone a week ago had been home celebrating the new heiress. A few stationed descenders that chose to stay should still be left behind to occupy the warehouses.
He stuffed the paper back into his hip satchel after tapping on warehouse 8. He was gonna have to find a way to cross the river.
Rubbing his eyes with his wrists, he decided after one more week of searching he was going to find some fulltime work and settle on his own. Nomadic life alone with a newborn was too difficult and he was going to need help. He also needed to learn more handiwork skills to start making Riko more clothes. He noticed a patch of eczema bark on her legs and needed to get hands on a needle, drop spindle, and plant stalks to spin plant fiber to emroider her clothes.
...
Warehouse 8 ended up being a bust, and he traded his best quality ink stick and brush set with a boatsmen to cross the river.
His face felt itchy and he wanted to rip his skin off. Sweat dripping down his neck making his silk cling to him had him suffocating. He hated this situation he was in. Hot, sweaty, hungry and no direction. Well, he did but didn't know which country he wanted to settle in, but fire country was definitely off his list. He wasn't used to the heat, he missed the high elevation and his breath fogging in the air.
Rock grit stuck in his sandals pinched and tore at his dry feet when he stood up. He crumpled the map in his hands and decided to head towards the direction of Land of Tea. He would scout the farming communities on his way that made imports there.
The most he could do with his clans ability was to enliven and strengthen small plants that didn't bear fruit. So small farming was something he could handle, and there should be some women in whatever village that could feed his sister along with her child if he could offer his labors.
Riko was really small. Still pink and fresh. But he was sure infants usually weigh more than she did. The milk he exchanged or made along the way could not be enough for her needs. The stress of hunger is probably what started her bark to grow.
He needed to gather himself. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath,
and released slowly.
He oriented himself towards Tea and took his first step towards a place that would be his new home.
...
Some days later, starving and tripping over roots and skidding down steep dirt hills, he fell into a lush grass clearing.
A warm thrum on his chest petered in and out. When he looked to his sister, she had her mouth open in an "o" and was looking up at him with her gray eyes. He responded by blowing her hair up in the air with his breath. Her non existent eyebrows pinched at him.
Cotton shirt wrinkled and sticking to him and Riko, he got up and shoved off the caked dirt on his back. He picked up his bag he had thrown down into the field to more carefully navigate the earthen mound not anchored by tree roots. But of course he once again ate shit.
Hauling his bag back on and adjusting Riko's sling, his eyes looked to the little farm acres painted across the hills not too far off. He was almost excited. Of course only for the phantom taste of food on his tongue he wanted to be made real. You can only handle so many days of eating mushrooms and berries. Though he was thankful for the variety of mushrooms in this particular forest, and he was able to drizzle pinecone syrup he had left over to enhance his meals.
After fixing his clothes as much as he could and rubbing some mint onto his wrists and behind his ears, he pulled out the wooden slab he spent on his trip carving.
He carved the borders with detailed twining wreathes and flowers, it outlined a box of writing that had simple patterned grooves. He had wrote out his need for a room and food in exchange for work and a short description of his skills.
He hoped to find work away from the higher public areas. If there wasn't work for him he'll have to figure something else out or travel somewhere else. Things were hard enough not being able to communicate on hearing people's terms, and most work in bustling areas required hearing workers. He'll babysit if he has to. But if this village had some craftsmen, he might as well try to grovel to be let into their apprenticeship. They were generally rightfully stingy about outsiders and not wanting to risk their trademarks being stolen.
He would normally be great for transcribing copies of literature, but some of the script in the alphabet down here was a bit.. off? He could read a majority, but the letters looked a lot more simple than his people's flowing script. He only vaguely studied their alphabet back home, he thought he could pick it up later with time. His plans before didn't demand him knowing it immediately, but now they did.
Looking at his carefully etched board, he knew it would look better with more smoothing out and a nice lacquer. The designs all together were a bit gaudy, but he wanted to showcase what he could do.
He was desperate.
Eran placed his face in the palms of his hands. A grumble vibrated his throat and tightened his chest. A small rumble joined his and he parted his hands to peer at his sister again.
She had the faintest pull of a smile. His chest tickled, and he almost felt awed at her little face, but then he smelled something and squinted at her. She scrunched her face.
He flopped to the ground and was pulling out his prepped moss and clean cloth while plugging his nose.
His mother is who knows how far away if she was even still alive, and her genetics continued to find more ways to make his life difficult...
The trees behind him ever so slowly tilted towards them, the shade of the gathered canopies blocking the light out of Riko's eyes. After she was swaddled again, he had to rip at the grass that was starting to cling to the blankets, the grass was wanting to keep her held down.
Glaring back at the forest over his shoulder, Eran's lip curled into a grimace. His trip was unnecessarily long, he was sure this forest was one of the oldest he traveled through and it was hell bent on keeping his sister. Sometimes when he let her lay too long by herself while he washed up in the river, he would find her with flora curling around her. The roots twining to make a little bed for her.
He would let nature be to babysit her for him, but when he had to take her he had to give more effort to fight her away. It was exhausting every time, so Riko got to spend most of her time curled up against him.
As he started making way towards the farms ahead, putting more distance between him and the forest, he had a progressively harder time pulling his legs out of the grass clinging to his calves like Velcro. Eventually the forests call faded off and he was left sweating and shaking again down the dirt trails.
...
The first farm house he came to was home to an elderly man. His property was growing an assortment of tea leaves and simple herbs. Around the side of the home he also saw a small area where some root vegetables were growing fairly well.
The old man that was at the door was tan, beefy in the arms, and only a head taller than Eran. His hair was dark and scratchy with gray. He squinted down at Eran and grumbled something. But Eran couldn't read his mouth with all the beard in the way.
Tucking his board under his arm Eran pulled out some pre written note cards wrapped in twine. He shuffled through and pulled out the card mentioning his loss of hearing and quickly followed up with his card looking for work. He tried to push the carved board to the elderly man to look at, but he didn't move his arms to take it.
The old man looked Eran down from head to toe. Eran was scrawny, mal nourished, and covered in bruises. His brows furrowed together and his beard quivered with more unheard words. He shook his head and closed the door.
Eran's fingers dug into the board. But he forced himself to shake off his anxiety and took the time to breathe before going to the next house. On his way out he spied a batch of sproutlings growing in the shade under a willow, he recognized them belonging to another region that had more wind and ever changing weather. The old man was wasting his time and money with how he prepared them.
This region had stale air, and was generally less humid. He would need to plant them indoors with a thick fiber mulch and a pebble mix - or if he also wanted to utilize the product from the roots along with the upper leafage - a course sand mix with fiber mulch as a topper. You'd also need to shake the bitch out of the plant every once in awile to mimic wind and splash water at it to get that storm rain. The stem would be too weak to support the growing plant otherwise and just kind of.. flop over.
Maybe he'll stop by again later, he glared at his dwindling stash of scrap paper that was already filled on both sides for most of it.
...
The second house Eran visited, he was greated at the door by a little boy with missing teeth. A another sibling was pulling at his clothes and hitting him with a stick. The boy babbled at him while shoving his siblings face away.
Eran chewed his lip. He was sure the child didn't know how to read, and he didn't know if the parents were even home. He squatted down to the boys level and smiled at him.
The boy got on his toes to peer into his sling and continued to babble. The little boy pulled at the fabric and looked at his sister and smiled. The smaller kid leaned over his brother to look at her too, scratching his head with the stick. They poked at her cheeks, and the older boy kept poking between Eran's forehead and the baby's forehead.
Eran kept bobbing his head once in awhile, only catching a glance at some of what the kid said. His mouth was flying rapidly as he gestured wildly, getting annoyed when Eran kept refusing to answer any of his supposed questions.
Eventually a woman walked into view, she looked exhausted and had an annoyed look pinched on her face. She was flapping her hand at Eran and rubbing her eyes. The kids clung to her legs and pointed excitedly at Eran.
As Eran stood up and was trying to pass her his note cards, she ignored him and continued to close the door, tossing the stick out that her youngest kept wacking her with.
Eran stood their for a bit, scratching at his elbow. His chest felt heavy, and almost lonely as his heart skipped a beat.
He walked past some stray chickens on his way out. He stopped to gather them back into their pen area before he went out the gate.
Behind him a curtain in the window fell back into place.
...
The sun was beginning to set. He had been rejected by six houses now and was taking a break on a stray boulder just outside of the hustling village. He was feeding his sister milk he bought with the last of the money he had. She wasn't keen on goats milk, but she thankfully took it without too much fuss when he encouraged her by letting out a continuous vibrating hum from his chest and stroking her back.
Some people walking by gave him a funny look, but at the moment he couldn't really give a shit. His arms and legs were trembling with fatigue and he might have been crying.
When she finished he fixed the sling so she was upright and patted her back as he walked back towards the direction of the forest. Before continuing off the dirt path into the grassy fields he decided to stop by the first farm one more time.
When the old man opened up the door and saw him, Eran stuck his foot in the space between the door before he could shut it on him again. The old man glared at him, but took the papers Eran thrust at him. He studied Eran's splotchy face and swollen eyes and decided to humor him before he kicked the boy's foot out his door with his cane.
Eran saw a brow rise. He wrote some new note cards with a stub of charcoal explaining to the man the herbs he saw earlier were being wasted with how he planted them, also noting that if the lower leaves were harvested young, they could catch a better price at the pharmacy. Another smaller note mentions leaving the plant intact enough to grow buds, that the hips could be fermented and could make a liquor. He also added little crude drawings in case the man was illiterate.
The man looked at Eran, looked down at his sister, and at the notes again. He pointed a finger at Eran, and gestured a thumb back into his house. The old man pushed the door fully open and Eran was able to see the man was missing a foot.
Eran was led inside the house and was walked up to the door of a room. Eran felt the old man limp away as he toed his way inside.
It was small and had some basic furnishings. There were some sparce decorations on the upper shelves Eran didn't recognize. When he sat on the bed a plume of dust flared up.
Pulling the top blanket back and folding it up, he pulled off the sling and laid Riko down on the clean inner sheet. When he left the room he found a small bucket of water and a rag left right outside the door. Eran turned his head around the corner and saw the old man starting a fire in the Irori* hearth.
He continued outside to beat out the dust on the duvet and feather pillow. When he returned indoors the old man was prepping some fish on some skewers, a squat table had some cut up vegetables and a knife.
Eran used the bucket and rag to wash his sister clean. Swaddling her with a shirt he found in a drawer, he laid her flat on the bed and used the pillow and a rolled up blanket to make a wall around her. He gave her the soothing stick their father made. It was a piece of smooth bone hammered into a wooden carved handle. A loop was at the other end to tie a teething cloth onto when she was older.
When she was settled, he took the bucket and some clothes and went back outside to wash himself.
The old man stuck the vegetable skewers in the sunken hearth and turned the ones holding the fish. He looked up at the boy walking in and his face felt tight.
It had been awhile since he's seen those clothes. But at least it was finding some use now. The boy was lengthy and scrawny in the arms. He didn't think he could do much, but his hands were deft as he remembered seeing the board from earlier.
The boy sat near him. He looked at the boy and uselessly muttered at him, pointing to the leather pouch still strapped around his waist.
He caught his gaze and the boy fished out some folded up paper and a black stub. He reached for just the paper and pulled out a pencil he fetched earlier. He wrote his name on it and pushed it back to the boy along with the pencil.
The boy reached for it, his hand coming up and moving in shapes as he read it before writing something down.
The old man known as Osamu read the name and quirked a brow. He looked up at the boy named Eran and studied his features. He looked like he was vaguely from lightning country, but his eye color was from somewhere else.
He finished reading the other writing and wrote an answer after giving the boy some of the finished cooked fish.
Eran was wondering how Osamu lost his foot and if it still bothered him. When he was working around the fish he received and read the reply. He coughed and choked on the fish flying up his nose, tears springing in his eyes. Eran gave the man a look.
Osamu's eyes were tight in a smile and he clapped the boy hard on the back.
'I traded it for those herbs'