Women Of Steel | ✔

XXIX

There is a restless hunger in the evening air.

The village of Ile Wura is mourning. The repugnant scent of grief clogs the clouds and the air. With every breath, they choke on it and die again and again and are forced to rise from the never ending ashes.

Like a Phoenix doomed to continual death. They blame it on a certain woman, blinded by the king's lies and deceits and preyed upon by their ignorance.

Still, they go about their days and their work, they pray and toil until they sweat. Blood, tears and sweat watering the soil that brings forth fruits as black as the night, and the gods boast their powers and turn their eyes away.

The gods are dead, they do not see the deep bitterness and pain in the faces of their worshipers.

The gods are deaf, their ears are blocked with cotton wool dripping with red oil, they cannot phantom and understand the moving lips of cries.

The sun sets, painting the sky a deep red, like the river from which they set their tongues on. The farmers pack their tools and pile them in baskets, still they send a prayer to the god and goddess of fertility. They hope when there is nothing to hope for.

The fishermen set aside their half empty nets, raising them from the blood red rivers. The fish is dead, still they hope and send a prayer to the heavens for a better tomorrow. They hope when there is nothing but death.

The women return from the market, carrying bad and rotten crops in their baskets, they return home to cook meals that have no value. They light fire woods and tears fall into the flames. Still they hope.

The children and youths trudge the familiar dirt path home, there is no excited chatter amongst them and they do not laugh. They return to their family compounds with that glimmer of hope in their eyes.

The village is lit up with lanterns and flickers of embers from firewood. Families sit outside their huts, ignoring the buzzing insects and mosquitoes. They talk grudgingly about their day and discuss the inflated prices of food in the market, they snarl when matters of the palace is mentioned.

Wives fill their husbands on the latest deaths from the plague, in return, their husbands grudgingly reveal the nature of the farmlands and the polluted rivers. The air is somber.

To an outsider, it appears like a mundane evening. Nobody smells the foreboding doom.

It is a nameless child that first notices it, at first, it looks like the gathering of clouds then it draws closer, spreading across the sky like a disease.

The caws intensify, drowning the buzzing of mosquitoes and draw closer, the little boy cries the alarm. All eyes turn to the sky.

Hundreds, no, thousands of black birds swoop in the sky together like an evil cloud.

It sounds like a war cry.

Cries circulate the village but it is too late, they swoop down, a cacophony of a thousand deaths and descend on the people like bloodthirsty monsters.