1.2 Farthest From Nowhere

*ckldoooooooo!*

Qastael blinked on hearing the rooster, blurry dawnlights enough for her to reach and scratch the sand out of her eyes. Her throat was dry and her side ached fierce, but altogether she no longer scorched with infectious fever. Weak and hungry, the memories of where and what happened returned, lending a soft smile that tasted of hope for a future she had given up on.

“Maybe we’ll be able to get you enough thaum to hatch soon, Little Mouse,” Qastael said, rocking the egg in her arms while lifting her neck out of the hay to look around. What she found gave her pause and turned hope into ash.

Plone lay propped against her shoulder, seated as if to take a nap. The lantern lay smoldering next to him with his cane in easy reach, his head slumped as both thin hands rested atop the leather ledger. Another person might have thought him simply sleeping, but Qastael heard no breathing nor feel any heat, an emptied shell that only yesterday inspired new reason for Qastael to live.

It didn’t take long to find the small garden behind the main home, eight unmarked stones designating graves. One had wild flowers gently laid on the dirt from yesterday. The space next to it held a shallow incomplete hole and discarded shovel. Even injured, it took little time for the giant woman to claw out the rest of the grave and lay Plone next to his wife. Tears fell down Qastael’s face and onto packed dirt as she bent her head close.

“What grace I still retain, pass to him that he may safely dwell with those waiting.” Qastael Breathed lightly over the graves and invoked the Pantheons, will o wisps dancing in stretched shadows of the dawns. This spot was sanctified now, protected from all. It was the last of that particular Breath she possessed, horded since the day she left Kuri’vlaat’mehn behind forever. It was supposed to have been used on the golden egg resting next to her as a last resort. The effort caused the giant woman to stumbled onto weary haunches, which in turn shot pain up through her side and she roared, a mix of grief and regret and loss, all cascading through the valley. Primal, it spoke of ancient times before the land was born, stampeding across the land and beyond into the wastes.

Eventually echoes faded, will o wisps dissipated, animals in the barn calmed down and tears dried. Pain remained, but the realization that she would keep on living settled onto Qastael’s shoulders. A cold breeze picked up and she turned her neck to gaze over the valley with fields and barns and the harsh wilderness surrounding all sides.

“What now, Little Mouse?” Qastael asked her egg, searching buildings and fields to see if they yielded answers. Only empty wind replied, reminding her of an empty stomach. “Need to eat if I’m going to make this work. I think I remember Plone saying he had a storage of some kind.”

The search took a few hours, as she lacked reference knowledge for Falussan buildings. Really any buildings of the common races. She understood they lived inside and kept…things in them? She knew the large building was called a barn and animals resided there, but that was as far as experience garnered. Qastael was more used to flying over cities and leveling aerial bombardment than understanding how tiny people slept. Poking her snout into all the buildings discovered a large library mostly filled with notes and numbers in the home, other builds including a smoke house, a unfinished bath house, a tool shed, a minimalistic smithy and workshop, a second smaller barn, the massive barn and finally an empty dilapidated building. At each juncture she was delicately careful not to damage anything, only peaking in and using the tips of her claws to open latches before trudging in exhausting hobbles to the next structure, the wound in her side seeping despite the care she took. Qastael preferred walking on all fours like a normal person, but her wound made that impossible, affecting an upright lopsided gait because otherwise the would would tear open, two of her wings limply dragging in the dirt while tucking the other four behind her back.

When she found the food, she almost stepped on the raised mound of grass and twisted in time when she noticed the sunken door. The angle of the depression and the size of her snout prevented seeing inside and the portal was too stooped to get her hand through. Hunger urged her to rip the ground apart and purloin the food, but the cellar appeared large enough for significant storage and she didn’t want what might feed her for months exposed to the elements. Spinning around and looping her neck for an upside down perspective, she slithered her serpentine tail inside the tight hole and fished carefully around by feel. Apparently well stocked, with some blind effort she brought out three barrels of grain and a smoked lamb.

Recent years had been lean: difficult to keep to a diet when six hundred pounds (273 kg) a day was a nutritional minimum. Never mind any time she fought or used a Breath she consumed double or triple. Being on the run limited her hunting options so most meals for longer than she cared to remember had been trees and grass. Not an exciting victual selection, and not at all satisfactory. A hundred and eighty tons (164 mt) sounds like a large and terrifying monster to the common races, but among others hatched with her clutch she was emaciated, stunted from famine.

“Three hundred pounds (182 kg) of these little yellow grains per barrel,” Qastael said as she hefted a barrel in the air, gently popping the casking open and dipping a dainty tongue to taste. “Crunchy. Less weight minus the barrels, which do not look appetizing. Been ages since I had lamb, and this is a large specimen. Even smoked I’d guess two hundred pounds (91 kg).”

Talking to herself helped her think, trying to wrap her head around how long she could make this food last. She needed more data, steering towards the large farm and reverently picked up the leather notebook before limping back to the graves and Little Mouse. A stream looped nearby, allowing Qastael to wash and drink her fill before easing her tired bulk to the ground and eating the best meal she’d had in decades.

“Little Mouse, you are going to love meat,” Qastael said, crunching and tearing the lamb in half, her mouth bursting with flavor as she sighed and finished the carcass off. “Fresh is fine, but I’ve become a deviant so far from home and I like to have a meal instead of just eat food.” After a stream of water to drink, three barrels of grain and delicious smoked lamb, Qastael felt full and flopped heavily to the grass around the garden, drooping eyes fixed on midbell suns and squinting beyond towards heaven. Her thoughts drifted, the persistent cries of battles fading from inside memories as she lazily worked through the next steps.

Lifting up the leather bound parchment, she unfolded it and carefully held a sheet on the end of her snout, straining to read teensy text. She could only make out one of every third word or equation, her eyes not designed for minuscule script. Qastael was patient, though, struggling to interpret his words and figures, gaining a new appreciation for the meticulous work Plone recorded. As far as she could tell, pinching page after page between her claws, the old farmer tracked and predicted every seed, every pound of food livestock ate, actuating yields into time and cost tables to determine net based on previous harvest trends. A small novel’s worth of data, all blastedly too small for large hunter eyes to read proper!

“Gah! Why’d you have to be so tiny, Plone?!” she asked the grave, wanting to toss the pages in frustration but instead huffing a breath and rebound them into leather. “You are really flipping my ears, you know that, right? Whatever, I’ll find out what binoculars cost in my size at that town you mentioned.” She paused, finished with her siesta and nibbling her tongue with fangs, flexing wings and not getting movement from the lame two, a hard fact of life rearing up. “Not flying any time soon. I came from the south and didn’t see any town. I don’t think I can even climb any of those plateaus right now to gain higher perspective. Which direction do I travel to get to town?”

This was important. With her injury she could wander in wastelands for weeks or lose her way entirely. The livestock would expire in that time, the crops possibly destroyed. If she stayed and did nothing, the animals and crops would still wither and die as she ignorantly killed her only chance at a life here. All the information she needed and more to turn this farm into a place for herself and Little Mouse was on scraps of paper she couldn’t read. Even something as simple as determining how much food was in the root cellar was all dependent on how quickly she could reach this supposed frontier settlement and return with a magnifier of glass!

A memory wormed out of her head, causing her to roll up on her haunches with a painful groan. Slower, she slithered her head up to the window of the second floor of the house, just an opening with small shutters and lacking glass like all the windows did in the farm. She peered into the library again, now realizing most of the books were dozens of these leathered collections of notes. An amazing wealth of knowledge, Plone’s life broken down into tracking the successes and failures on this farm for decades. However, more immediate, on a raised table to one corner were two large sheets of paper resting in a place of honor: two maps.

Extracting the maps proved challenging. The windows were too restrictive for either Qastael’s hands or much tail. Breaking the house was also something she was unwilling to do. Not just because she felt obligated to preserve it for Plone’s sake, but for the practical reason that the house protected the library. Those hundreds of pages were likely the most valuable treasure on the farm, and Qastael instinctively wanted to horde that treasure. She could learn in days what it took a dedicated farmer to learn in a lifetime. So breaking the home was out of the question, which is when she got inventive.

Afternoon suns were getting closing towards dusk when she smoothed both maps onto a patch of smooth sand. The interior of the library was a mess but the windows were mostly undamaged. Taking two young and straight maples, uprooting them and using her teeth to saw smooth the branches until she had two sticks proved more time consuming than she wanted. Fiddling them in her paw like she remembered seeing common races eat food in the Potentate was even more difficult. Hours manipulating her sticks extracted the maps from the room, teasing out some elation at her success. She planned on fixing the table sometime later, somehow.

“This one shows the farm, which I guess Plone named Nowhere,” Qastael said, the placement of buildings and the fields made it clear this was how he tracked the whole valley. “This will be more important when I need to organize crops. Found gold with this other one, though. Details for hundreds of miles, clearly shows the farm, a bunch of other settlements and an outline for a town. Almost a straight shot north east. Ha! Bet I can make it there in a day…” her wings twitched with a sharp spasm in her side, “…two days. Four days away from the farm, five at most.”

Lowing animals reminded her they probably needed food, which reminded her crops needed water. Grimacing at the setting suns, Qastael girded herself for a long night of caretaking and an even longer journey ahead. Her first day as a farmer proved more complicated than she originally thought it to be.