Do not wander into the Wastes. No one will come after you.

Eida existed with her feet perpetually between two different spaces. She would be one of the last to remember the time before, and the time after. There wasn’t a name for it yet, not like there was for when the sky fell a thousand years before she was born. The new cataclysm was many different things to many different people, and was remembered mostly through the smoked glass of what they had each lost. They all delineated the end of their previous lives by too many measures for her to know, but the one thing agreed upon was that there was a time before and, eventually, a time after.

The new world, the thing that had once been Puckworld, was a broken thing. It was not as bad as some made it out to be, she thought. The fire that had come down on them had scoured the planet, but as the ash blew away nature still grew green. The ground was still under their feet, the wind still blew, and the wild things still grew on the edge of sight.

The new world was a harsher thing than what she could recall of before. It lacked polish and safety. It had fewer friendly faces. It was smaller and more afraid. The nights and days were too warm.

She was told, once, by a group of important looking people traveling north up the dusty road, that it would never get properly cold again. They could not explain to her why, not in a way she understood. They were of the older generation, and used words that no one had bothered to teach her, because that vocabulary had no place in a broken world. After their shadows disappeared over the horizon, she had asked Tild to explain, because the old woman must have known those old words, but the headmistress had little interest. Old words were not safety and were not food, so she did not care to dwell on them.

The walls closed at sunset, and did not open until sunrise.

This is what all travelers were told as they came through. The settlement was small, sat on what might have once been an important thoroughfare, but was now mostly broken tech and dirt. When the wind blew—which was always—it kicked up dust that stung the eyes, and sometimes made great plumes of brown cloud that whipped down the valley. The dry gulch that had once been a river, one that Eida had never seen flow, followed along the roadside as a dark cut that ran north to south.

She did not wander close to the gulch, when she could help it.

The settlement did not see many outside people. Most survivors kept to the south, in the remains of the cities that had been, trying to build it all back up. Eida didn’t like those places, with everything so far over her head. It had all toppled down around her once before, and she did not want to be there if it ever happened again. It stole the air from her to recall it. Seeing it happen, that part wasn’t so bad. It was after, when everything became smoke, dust and fire, when you could no longer see the skyscrapers hitting the ground, but you could hear it.

She lived now at the very edge of what the broken planet had left to give, but the ground still grew a bit of food, and the distance from everything else kept away the trouble.

Most of the trouble.

There were those who wanted to go further north, deep into the northern dust, for whatever reason. Perhaps they were even more afraid of the cities than she was. They could not go west, as the valley gave way to the mountain range. There was no more snow and ice where there should have been. The mountains were a craggy mess of loose and rotten rock, untouched by air for a thousand years and now crumbling away in the wind. On calmer days you could hear the land scrabbling down the mountainside, booming and rushing as if it were the missing river. Trying to traverse them would have been broken bones, at best.

No one ever came back from the north.

Eida didn’t know what lay to the south. Perhaps the dry river went somewhere, maybe it became full again. Maybe rain still fell. Maybe there was still a proper field of green, somewhere. Or snow. Something other than dust.

It was the east, though, that everyone kept a wary eye on, traveler and settler alike. The land had dried completely, turning into nothing but barren ground and rock. It was a ruined place, but more than that, the wastes belonged to the infested. They seemed to come up from the ground itself, and took claim to the places that no one else wanted.

Eida had explained this one night, to a traveler that strayed just a little bit further from the road than was advisable. She pointed over the walls, into the night, at the distant lights in the east, moving in the dark. They were an eerie glow that was not a sharp electric light, but also did not flicker like fire. The lights were miles away, always stayed far from the settlement and the road and fields, on the other side of the wide, dry riverbed. But they were always there at night.

The traveler gave a half smile, watching the lights move slowly, and shook his head. “They’re not dangerous.”

Tild must have overheard their conversation, because she gave them both a sharp look from her seat, curled against the wall of her home in a pile of old blankets.

Tild was the voice of caution and reason, who had not given a second thought to giving Eida a place to exist, as well as anyone else who came to her door. She had been worn hard and bent by years of exhaustion, but she came through. There was always enough food, and a warm bed at the end of the day. That was more than a lot of people could provide. Eida trusted the headwoman’s guidance with her life.

But Eida had known the traveler for far longer. There were very few faces that she had seen, in the time after, that had come from the time before. He was one of them. He didn’t use a name anymore, would not respond to it if she called him, as if he had entirely forgotten it. He had used the end of the world as an opportunity to remake himself, as many people had. She didn’t quite know what he was supposed to be. The best words she could use to describe him were ‘traveling storyteller’. He was older than her, though not by much, and had a lot of the old words in him, as well as several new ones she had never heard before. He had the same ancient, forlorn look of everyone else who had survived the invasion. The life had been sucked out of the land, but it had been sucked from its people just as clearly.

Time was a thing that had lost most meaning, after. There were still those—like the ‘important’ group that had come through—that tried to track it, but what they tracked wasn’t right. Something that had previously been constant and unchanging had slipped, and now it could not be agreed upon. Any date that was given was a guess.

Eida did not know how old she was anymore. She thought she knew, but the day that was supposed to mark it had gotten lost along with everything else. The years were easier, marked by warm and not-as-warm, and the sun and moon moved, and that was all she could see. She thought she might be twenty-four now, but there was no one left that could tell her for sure. Not even her traveler companion knew anymore, but what else could she have expected from someone that couldn’t even remember his own name.

“You met one, once.” The traveler said, interrupting her thoughts, still peering out at the lights.

Eida considered for a moment, and had to admit it was true enough. The traveler had come through this place many times. But the first time, the first time he had brought companions with him. She thought, this evening, his stories would be about that. The children in the settlement liked stories of the infested, would spend the days after playing in the shadows of buildings, pretending to creep and scare each other.

But the traveler chose not to, and instead changed the subject entirely.

“I’m going to meet a bigger beast,” he said.

She had no idea what this meant, and had a hard time imagining a bigger beast than the infested. The Saurians, perhaps, though they were gone again, now. It might have been a metaphor, because he did not seem in any shape to confront an actual beast, and was so scrawny it was likely would he barely be up to the conflict of a hearty meal. She didn’t argue, because the children would like a monster story just as much.

“It’s an old creature, so old that most people have forgotten about it. It likes to sleep, now, more than it likes to do anything else,” He said. “It lives at the center of the sky, and catches stars instead of animals. Huge, golden, with too many eyes and too many legs, weaving strings and snatching anything that touches the threads.”

He went on like this, well after the last light of the sun had gone, and the only light outside the settlement was the glow of the eastern horizon. He brought at least one very young, impressionable girl to tears as he described his creature devouring a world. It was a horrible story, but it was perfect for telling around a fire, and his theatrics made it enjoyable.

He told it for anyone that would listen, but Eida got the impression, several times, that he watched for her reaction, as if concerned that she was not paying attention. She tried her best to listen politely, though the idleness made her fidget.

He finished the tale, and she wondered if he had come up with it himself, or if it had been retold and rehearsed. The small crowd dispersed into the evening, leaving a few adults to their own side conversations. Someone was kind enough to hand him some sweets, as a thanks, which he accepted with a nod.

“You’re going to go meet this thing?” Eida asked him when they were alone again. “Won’t it just eat you, too?” She didn’t quite believe such a monster could exist, and had never heard of such a thing before, but the firelight somehow made it seem possible. She would feel foolish in the morning, but now, now she found herself willing to dabble in the fantasy.

He grinned. “I’m an excellent showman.”

Fair enough, he was a storyteller by trade. There was exaggeration of movement, of timbre in voice, of suspense and resolution, all designed to enthrall. She wondered where the center of the sky even was, or perhaps this was another metaphor that she didn’t understand.

“Why would you even want to?” She asked.

“Imagine the stories you would have, if you had so many eyes that you could see everything, everywhere.”

“You’re going to ask it for more tales?”

“I’m going to ask it for an explanation.”