(Fic) Statesman: Chapter 5 - Deep thoughts
Finally got around to writing more of this setting (for some reason, this chapter seemed to a) take forever, and b) need so much editing). We find out a bit more about what’s going on amongst the Crag’s ward population, and what Cesar has been up to since he arrived. Also on Wattpad.
Title: Deep thoughts Setting: Fairco ‘verse (In The Past compared to current AJCO plot) Warnings: (Mentioned) Drug use, sexual slurs Summary: Kdub adapts her plans, and Cesar is finding out more about what life on the Crag is like. Characters: Kdub; Jheete; Cesar Castell. Words: 3353
-
The Crag had veins. Tunnels and caverns which ran in webwork pathways deep beneath the thin soil of the island’s skin, pulsing with the roar and thunder of subterranean equipment. There were big furnaces at the heart of the mines, tearing apart the ores and rock that had been hauled up from the depths on chain-drawn carts. Kdub was no metalworker, and it seemed to her that it took a hell of a lot of raw stone – crushed, and sieved and smelted down repeatedly – to make the little grey-green ingots that Jericho demanded; each no bigger than a fist and oddly heavy for their size.
The furnaces dealt in proper metal as well: the iron and brass and more exotic things hauled out of the surf, or picked from the scrap that came on Supply Day – although there’d been less and less of that in recent years. So it meant ever more wreckage was needed, as Mother’s generosity failed. More dangerous Reclamation forays out from the shore, picking deeper still into those half-sunken husks still wedged in the Crag’s jaws.
More losses. More pale bodies sliding away into the depths, and Kdub felt old now. Not just from the years building up on her shoulders, but from the echo of all those that never would be on others’, swallowed by the waves. Rec had always been a young Ward’s game and she knew her own team was gaining a strange, elder reverence amongst some of the freshest faces, who had never really known a time without them. The knowledge of it was an intrusive weight against her thoughts; loud, and heavy and hot and –
Sometimes she wondered if Old Grey felt like this.
Keep reading
