By Montrose

Word Count: 435

Rating:

Summary: A flash fiction piece where the Albed tribe arrives in the city of Queros 

Thousands of Albed were moving through the newly fashioned gates of Bleeding Bay. Most were dressed in rural styles, but dotted about here and there were blacksmiths, scholars, merchants and other city-dwellers who had survived the slaughter of the year before.

Children ran and played along the column, or rode on top of the hand-drawn carts piled high with food and treasured possessions. The sun was setting, bathing the city in pale gold, and the Albed gaped at its unique skyline of overgrown pyramids – covered in places by sprawling Queros and Ubayime shanties like some fungal growth – jaggedly punctuated by an obelisk and the looming presence of the Monolith.

At the gates, a dwarf soldier in officer’s dress conversed with a harassed-looking Queros official. As their aides swapped paperwork and compared notes, the dwarf offered a gauntleted hand, which the fishman took and, wincing, shook. “Perhaps in your care, our people will find shelter from the wrath of the beastkind”, the officer said, looking grim. “We do not want to risk the King’s subjects in this war we find ourselves in.”

The Queros official said nothing, turning to look again at this latest troop of five thousand refugees from the abandoned cities in the northern mountains. On the clearest days, from the top of the tallest of the shattered Tlatalan temples, you could just see them from here, suggestions of great peaks in the blue haze of the distance. That leant them an uncomfortable sense of proximity now, as he imagined the frustrated armies of the Ulfrand and the Shadows crawling over them, under them, seeking the people who now sheltered behind the earthen wall of the city.

He’d received no reports of any conflict between those races and the Leviathans, he thought, but the docks were crawling with mercenaries and their horror stories from their invasion of the Shadowlands. It was hard to judge their accuracy, given the tendency towards competitive creative embellishment amongst Queros storytellers and a sense that some of the things in there had been agreed, unconsciously but unanimously, not to be spoken of, but it was enough to give him a tiny sense of the same fear he now saw reflected, in some fashion, on the faces of the refugees.

Bowing to the officer, he turned and joined his staff to follow the last of the dwarves through his gates. As he followed them back to the properly inhabited portions of the city, his gaze returned again and again to the black, silent Monolith. It was, he decided, a very reassuring addition to the city skyline.