《The Pack》Chapter 45

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Sometimes you just did what had to be done.

Tala tried to ignore the cries calling up the walls from below, the pleading and shouts for mercy. A small group of five or six by the sounds of it, clearly exhausted from wherever they had journeyed, expending their last reserves of energy in a desperate bid for survival. She couldn’t help them; the sun was already down.

She could remember the day, suns ago, when the council had decreed that the city gates would no longer open for those arriving after sundown. Those gathered to hear the announcement showed no shock, no horror at the thought of leaving others to the terrors of the dark outside. Instead, there was a chorus of murmured assent, a multitude of sombre, resigned nods. Too much moved beyond the walls at night. Too many times the gates had been thrown open for mere tens of seconds, for the brief instant it took to usher survivors in, yet the beasts had forced their way through, the grakar and khol-wings and strange new monsters no-one had seen before, often carving their way through the same survivors the city had sought to save.

Those stranded alone in the night were left that way.

Hell, they rarely took in those who made it to the boundaries of the walls during daylight anymore. Too many suspicious groups, too many bands of bandits and murderers who survived on sheer brutality. Too little trust. Ruen’s group had only been allowed in because they had been so clearly beaten and savaged by the elements that they posed no threat to anyone. Most hadn’t made it through the next five-day despite their rescue, succumbing to disease or injuries or plain exhaustion.

No-one knew any longer why the walls, solid banks of smooth black stone, had been built around the city far in the distant past, yet their existence had saved those within from the harshest of conditions outside. They had kept the creeping red moss that covered swathes of land from entering, and they had fostered a unity and sense of shelter that kept those within working together. It had been years before hunger and disease hit the city as it had the rest of the world, as trade routes collapsed and ingredients for both food and medicines ran dry. Tala had been only an infant then, but she still remembered the faces of those around that fell season by season, the hopes that were crushed with every neighbour who succumbed to disease or… worse. She didn't like to think about those times. People had been very hungry.

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Still, the walls stood, and once the city had reached its new equilibrium, one based on a perpetual guard and scouting parties who trekked the lands past the blasted wastes to supply the now substantially-reduced population, life was far more pleasant than outside. For that reason and others, the towers and walls of the city yet attracted those searching for shelter.

The cries below turned to screams as a vicious, inhuman snarl resounded across the plains. A grakar, perhaps, but it sounded bigger than even they usually reached and there was a curious rattle to it. A kei-lion? She had heard one had been spotted in the area, even though they apparently came from far, far to the south. She wandered if this was what they sounded like.

It came closer with incredible speed.

She was thankful the moon was hidden in cloud tonight, so she could not see what was happening below. The sounds she could not block, however.

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