Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond. 

On the Quality of the Smoke in the Sky

The sun was a red orb gazing down upon a shrouded planet. Particles from the fires burning uncontrolled and uncontained across the northern latitudes drifted through the high atmosphere, carried by planetary winds, descending on population centres below.  

The sun glared through the haze, a sickly red. A poisoned wound that wouldn’t heal. The smoke created a layer of grime that hung above, washing out the blue of the sky and casting everything below in a dissipated light. A new world would be born from the ruins of this one, some claimed, but in the meantime, they would be left to inhabit what was left. 

The smoke had a palpable ethereality. It sat above, a strange formless cloud that never moved. The blue of the sky was still present, but faded. Marred by a layer of grime that wouldn’t wash clean. 

The smoke clung to the upper reaches of the sky, mixing with the clouds, darkening them, so that it looked like rain might be coming. Yet no rain fell, only an invisible ash fall. The light was no longer true, the days felt faded and obscure, like some lost past they couldn’t find their way back from.  

In midsummer the smoke appeared from some far distant fire, settling throughout the river valley. An ominous warning. The world felt smaller, the sky far away. They were trapped in a room with a ceiling that was slowly falling in. Compressed and seething.   

Drought and heat and locusts, the seasons seeming out of joint. Now, a cloud of miasma they were forced to breath as they went about their days. Oh, this broken world.