flitting
fruit flies
That
summer in Tammardathayad would be recorded as one of the worst in memory. Since
the departure of the High King’s mysterious guests, word spread that things,
having been bad, would continue to worsen; and in the minds of many citizens the
connection would have been already drawn, clearly enough to foster distrust in
whatever business the strangers were about.
And the whisper would pass, from person to person, in the taverns and
backstreets, and in the markets, that ever since the Field God’s Fair a kind
of malaise had come to the city, and let it be unspoken what the cause of that
was.
The
heat was close to unbearable: thick, wet, oppressive. Citizens skirted the factory districts if they could at all,
sometimes making circuits of many miles. Vehicles
halted, sputtering, in the streets, and refused to work again.
Fever and sickness spread nearly as fast as rumor, leaving many districts
thick with infection and flesh-rot; soon bodies were left where they lay,
unhallowed and torn by scavengers. A
terrible stillness began to mark the days of the High King’s city, and those
who watch for such things began to feel that misrule was only a matter of time.
Worst
of all were the fruit flies. They
descended on the markets in great clouds, hissing and buzzing, falling on any
sort of food or people and crawling in thick droves, bringing the sick-sweet
stench of summer rot. The air was
choked with them, until they could not be discerned from the smoke.
Anyone that the heat had not already driven indoors at midday soon fled
for shelter and shade, and even there they were inescapable, aimlessly flitting
and buzzing, the city’s decay and dust come alive.
People began to whisper that the Eldritch had already come, and were
walking the streets of Tammardathayad with the hordes of putrescence in their
wake.
And, in the high chamber of the East Tower at Wonderstone, Runa brooded in his shirtsleeves, watching the Orb of Thrall for some sign, waiting with the rest of his kingdom for the heat to come to its terrible, inevitable conclusion. But the darkness of the Orb was quiet and still, and the High King grew restless, hoping that the memory of the horrors of rebellion was fresh enough in the populace’s mind to still them until some other power could move on his behalf. None showed signs of stirring. And so Runa, feeling old and weary and tired for the first time in many centuries, began to spend most of his days in his great chair by the tower window, filling his silvered ashtray with thick gray medallions from his smoldering cigar, wishing with a kind of petulant exasperation that a Nuncion would come in fire and glory and force the Succession, order him to yield the throne. But God in Her great wisdom remained Unrevealed, and none of Her servants appeared at Wonderstone’s battlements. And still the glittering Orb was silent, and still unrest and sickness spread with the heat and the flies.