The Legends of old Lies

10 - Since Yesterday

The carriage rattled steadily along a road covered with pebbles and solid earth. A spring breeze drifted through trees. It rustled in whispers while crooked branches sighed softly and a multitude of birds accompanied the singsong of life between their crowns.

One hundred years...

In a way, Ioanne had already sensed that something strange, something inexplicable was going on. Death still sat in her bones like the winter chill that did not always disappear immediately even after resting in front of a crackling fire. But here she was. Breathing, feeling, seeing. Alive.

A hundred years...

It buzzed through her head like an endless echo. An reverberating, throbbing roar that seemed to roll around inside her skull like a bullet. Pounding and banging over and over again, she could feel it in the roots of her hair. She hadn't quite believed it at first and had been sure she still had the river sitting in her ears that had first wanted to drown her and was now probably dragging her mind into unknowable depths. But to the farmer's wife, the request to repeat the words had only seemed peculiar. Already she had said it again. As if it was normal. A knowledge of banal ordinariness that no one needed to have confirmed repeatedly.

But it couldn't be true. It had been late autumn at that time. Now the blossoms of spring were pushing their way out of the ground.

"Take me there!" she had demanded, leaping onto still swaying legs to express her desire.

"Where?"

"The capital, Lutejan... I... I have to see it."

Now she sat behind on the soft sacks, filled with unwashed wool smelling of sheep and fat. The shepherd drove in front of her. Occasionally he glanced over his shoulder at the passenger he had so unexpectedly pulled from the crumbling ground and brought into his home. Dressed in his wife's festive dress, which was a little too big and slipped over her shoulders. They had wanted to give her nothing else, for fear that they would be accused of their inadequacy in front of a witch.

One hundred years...

For her, a day had passed and the family's tales of a legend that was only a few generations old, had made her nauseous. Now it brought her back to the place from which she had staggeringly fleed. Ioanne remembered how she had run. A hand pressed to her side. Hot blood oozing from between her fingers. The other hand raised to fight the tumbling rain of ash. Grey flakes that fell from the sky, flickering and mixed with orange-red glow. Whirled up by a wind that had also accompanied them through the forest and the trees.

Lutejan was the last place she wanted to return to. And yet it was the only place she was drawn to. An invisible force that would probably have moved her legs too, had her nervous hosts not heeded the call.

Time had wrapped her in a cocoon, hiding her and spitting her out, reeling in dark memories. What remained was the taste of smoke on her tongue. The smell of burnt flesh in her nose. The glimmer of flames in her eyes. And the screaming of the dying in her ears.

A loud whirring drowned out the echo in her mind, even though she thought it was part of it at first. Only then did it become clearer and as she raised her head, all of a sudden a strange vehicle jolted across the opposite side of the road towards them. A man who seemed to be bouncing up and down on his seat and clinging to a wheel in front of him, raised his hand briefly to greet the shepherd before rattling past them. Big, chunky wheels and a driver's cab sat behind a hissing, wobbling box. No horses, not even a goat moved it forward. Instead, dark little clouds puffed out of a pipe on the front of the box and a stench like burnt oil accompanied its path.

Magic? But Ioanne had never seen anything like this.

Irritated, she straightened up. She leaned on the bags to let her gaze wander and look around for more similar devices. She did not see any more of the same kind. Instead, she noticed for the first time that they had left the idyllic countryside of the small village. Block-like buildings made of reddish and grey rock had been rammed into the landscape. Dark clouds rose from high chimneys similar to those from the vehicle that had just jolted past them.

People moved about in the stone-paved yards in front of the buildings. Plain, dirty clothes covered hastily hurrying figures. In through high gates or out. Sounds hummed through the air like the buzzing of numerous bees.

One hundred years...

For her, barely a day had passed. The sun was slipping towards noon and the past night was as close as if the moon had not quite fallen over the horizon. Yesterday the world had been on fire and today new buildings rose into the sky. New things, new rules, new laws, new people... new witches. They had become a council that determined the events of this realm instead of being overrun by it.

Had the world become a better place? Yet not destroyed and ruined by the things she had set in motion? Had her disappearance, her dying, been the relieving calm that steered everything into better ways?

"We are here," the shepherd's voice drilled into the rushing halls of her thoughts.

Ioanne turned, as if under a spell, to follow his words and fix her gaze on the gate of the city.

She remembered a wall of grey, solid stone collapsing under the cannonballs hurled at it. A crashing and rumbling that now still echoed in her ears. There was no wall now. The entrance to the city was free on all sides. Nothing reminded her of what she had passed a day before, in seething rage.

Heat rose in her head, moved through her body and rolled through her stomach. Her fingers clung to the wood of the backrest behind the coach seat until her nails left eternal marks in it.

They trudged ahead, lined up between other carriages and few more ofe these peculiar vehicles. Fluttering banners rustled on tall pillars at the side of the road and figures in uniforms flanked the street. A crest stood out to her. A filigree symbol.

Ioanne remembered the day Keelie had come to hand her, cheeks flushed with excitement, a sketch on the back of an old letter.

"What's this?" she had asked, holding it up in confusion.

"A sign," Keelie had explained. "For us! For us and our freedom. Because we deserve our own flag too."

A hundred years had passed and the sign her sister had once created adorned the crests of a city that had risen from ashes.

A hand in the middle of which a purple rose raised its blossoms.