Is the dirt on the edge that she see first, all around and uneven like somebody just dig a grave. The light shift, or her eyes shift, and they look like a range of mountains far off. It take her a few blinks to see that she is spinning slow, turning around and around to see piles of dirt on the edge of a pristine circle. The edge far above her, a height she cannot measure, so she follow the dirt down until her eyes reach her feet. Gods must have done this, she think. Gods must have heard her screaming and send the moon to smite the fight and crush the ground, then with divine fingers pull her back out of the earth and fix her back in the sky. For there be no other way to explain what she see. What she is in the middle of, this crater wider than a lake, this smooth bowl that she will have to climb out of.
Slippery, the dirt and rock keep rolling down and taking her back down with it. Sogolon grab clumps of rock but they come loose and roll down with her. The second time she hit a rock with her knee and draw blood. This hole so wide that the sun is leaving it behind even though the sky is still clear blue. Sogolon finally make it to the rim of the crater and almost slip back down when see them floating, first the top half of the razor finger boy, his entrails dangling, his eyes gazing into nothing, and his legs nowhere to be seen. Slabs of loose white rock and cut white stone—the big man shattered in a multitude of pieces. She climb out and walk past the red and blue girl with the lizard tongue, her hands and legs swaying as if underwater, her face sleepy, the back of her head exploded with all of her shooting out. Perplexing it be, all three floating in air like they underwater, but everything stuck as if whatever happen don’t finish. All of the lizard girl bursting through the back of her head, but it stay there, not going farther, not falling to the ground. Just there. As be the pieces of the boy that had two heads. And rocks, and trees, and two wagon wheels but no wagon, and bodies in white robes, and food, and dead horses, dead donkeys, dead mules, even dead birds. And the legs of the razor boy sticking out of a tree trunk as if it is how trees grow. Nothing rising higher, nothing falling, and Sogolon running to what is the front of the caravan, then all the way to the back, and seeing that everything that prove who they were and what happened is broken to pieces and floating in sky. Even flame. Even some of the rock leading up to the mountain look gone. She can’t tell for sure, can’t tell anything other than that her head hurt and her legs going to buckle. They buckle.
Cawing set off and wake her up. She doesn’t know how long she was asleep, but she wake and all that float in the air fall to the ground. The caws rise to a din. Crows. They swarm like bees, crows all over the trail, picking on the remains of the caravans, on dead bodies, and also this—pecking corpse and carcass to make sure dead is dead. More land, and her legs are sticking out. Sogolon panic, then catch herself. Near her is the body of a sister with her legs missing. No use in crying, girl, say the voice that sound like her. Crying will only draw them. See them close. Hopping at their pace, the crows. They shuffle past her head and the corpse at her feet. Her eyes open a crack just as a crow peck the sister’s chest. Another hop onto Sogolon’s head. Sogolon shut her eyes tight and hold her breath. A jab first, the point of a nail on her forehead. Sogolon dig her fingernails into her skin but don’t move. Another jab. Another. Another. One more and tears will break her. Then just so, the crows fly away in one monstrous flutter. All of them, in the quick, gone. She don’t dare open her eyes until she can hear wind rustle weed.
* * *
—
Sogolon wake again. She find the dagger lodged between rocks. Evening come around soft and cool and she wake under two wagon wheels leaning against each other. Mantha must be only a day away, she hope. A day by horse, something else by foot. But if it was only a day, for sure somebody from Mantha would have come looking for their lost sisters. Somebody must be expected. Somebody must be missed. Somebody must need them found. This from the girl who is going to run, the girl who say to herself that where you run to don’t matter as long as you run. Now here it is that you have nothing to run from, and must.
Cold air drop down on the trail and she start to tremble. The later it get the colder it become, and then a wind rise and cause a shudder so hard that she can hear her teeth. Air so bitter that it feel like her skin is burning. She dash from wheel to wheel, wreck to wreck, until she come across the white-wearing bodies of two divine sisters. Their cloaks as ripped as their bodies, but still white fur. Sogolon try to pull one off half a body, but the corpse appear to hold on, refusing to let go. She scream as she yank the half cloak away, now white and brown and splotchy from dry blood. Don’t think, just wrap it around you, wrap yourself into a ball, she is thinking. She is a cocoon until morning. Stars and moon spin away into the dawn but Sogolon don’t sleep none, only walk, past shapes and forms and pieces that might be person, beast, or something she can’t imagine. The trail look like what she think after a war would look like, a place with no peace even in quiet. The only quiet she find is at the bottom of the crater, and is at the bottom of the crater that wisdom come to her that all of this she did do. Or maybe the gods, or the moon, or that wind, which refuse to be her servant or master. Her mind run over those thoughts, but only one feel like when a key unlock a door—that it is done by her. But when it is coming up from her hands, the last thing she remember, it don’t feel like wind leaving her skin, but like something on the boil and bubbling up. A mighty thing that knock everything out of its way, not a wind that blow everything down. Like two attracting pieces of iron, when you turn them around, push them together and they scatter. Her mind wrapping itself around this, not the metals, but the scatter.