The colourful covered wagon and its eccentric driver should be a familiar sight to long-time residents of Northcliff Pass; Tuo nearly always pays a visit to the village during the festival season, though this year he is a bit early due to renewed tension at the border between Cliffside and Black Rock. (Will there be war again? Who even knows.)
It took him exactly one sleepless night plagued by vivid nightmares and the appearance of a ghostly phantasm above his hammock to understand why the everyone he’s bumped into so far looks as though all of life’s joy has been sapped from their eyes.
Now, as the late autumn sun hangs perilously low on the horizon, Tuo is at work affixing small charms and wards to the perimeter of his camp; small clusters of herb and animal bone and some church iconography bound together by twine, which he fastens both to shallow posts in the earth, and to the entrance to his wagon. On a nearby perch, his magpie Alvi sits preening his flight feathers.
[open] late afternoon on the outskirts of the town near Sands Creek
It took him exactly one sleepless night plagued by vivid nightmares and the appearance of a ghostly phantasm above his hammock to understand why the everyone he’s bumped into so far looks as though all of life’s joy has been sapped from their eyes.
Now, as the late autumn sun hangs perilously low on the horizon, Tuo is at work affixing small charms and wards to the perimeter of his camp; small clusters of herb and animal bone and some church iconography bound together by twine, which he fastens both to shallow posts in the earth, and to the entrance to his wagon. On a nearby perch, his magpie Alvi sits preening his flight feathers.