Grim Symphony
Grim Symphony
The joy had gone from the world.
Yemmen could remember a time when the world was glorious. Back then smiling farmers strolled down from their hilltop terraces, past gleaming new industrial buildings, alongside carts groaning under towering heaps of produce. Grizzled veterans brought back tales of a war against a wild-eyed pirate king and traders from far off lands just strolled right into towns. The biggest problem anyone could name was young men getting a little too excited. Hardly a problem now.
When The Cough tore the world asunder and drowned it in blood, the Ymaryn survived. They did so by being obsessed with detail and organization, paying impossibly close attention to health and cleanliness, demanding total obedience from the people at a moment's notice, and enforcing the harshest of quarantines. And with each passing year those measures grew more absolute as Ymaryn grew more desperate to stand as the last bastions of civilization in a sea of sickness and chaos.
No farmers walked the streets now. Those of them who still labored instead of dying or scrabbling at the city walls stopped a respectable distance away from the gates and left their produce to be picked up, occasionally leaving with a shipment of manufactured goods left for them in a similar manner. The government didn't want rural and urban people mixing. Pretty soon it didn't want people from different districts mixing. Or people mixing at all if at all possible. Public gathering were banned. Taverns were shuttered. The use of the baths was strictly regimented to minimize contact between patrons, and all the pretty attendants were gone. The boundaries between districts were marked out with token walls, and trying to cross those walls outside the checkpoints was deemed a grave crime. In the evening grim faced men and women walked the streets, ringing hand bells to signal the beginning of curfew. A place for everything and everyone in their place, each man doing his part so together they might form a powerful whole, working not for glory but for mere survival.
It seemed like the bell ringers were the only ones who still walked the streets with impunity. Them and the crow-masked Carrion Eaters, briskly walking between grisly tasks. But at least the grim healers represented a kind of hope for the future. True, right now their presence was a constant reminder of the sickness walking in the people's midst, but at least they were looking for a solution. The sound of the bells represented all the harsh measures that needed to be taken just to keep things the same. All the good things in the world needed to be put on hold, all gatherings broken up, all intimacy banished in the name of purity and public order. And still people got sick and died and with each month there was less food and Yemmen could swear the sun and the moon themselves were dimmer and harsher than when he was a boy. It was enough to make him weep with impotent fury.
Then one day Yemmen heard a rumor of a nomad army that lived for the sole purpose of burning down anything that raised men above beasts. And suddenly he could no longer stand it. It was as if something broke inside of him and he knew that he couldn't stand living in this grim world. And he wasn't going to.
Then something happened. If his life was on line Yemmen himself couldn't account for what exactly it was, for what he did in the next two weeks. He knew that he climbed through and under the district walls, that he went to places he shouldn't, that his precious stash of silver coins was empty. But looking at what lay in the corner of his room, he smiled for the first time in forever.
Come morning he would don a crow mask, but one painted with the colors of the rainbow and festooned with rooster feathers. He would take two bells in his hands. And he would ring them, not to drive people away but to call them to him so they might all dance and laugh and have a joyous time together. And maybe the people would follow, or maybe he would be ignored and taken away as a troublemaker. But if he didn't at least try then this was the way the world was now, ruled by disease, starvation, conflict, and death. And Yemmen wasn't going to live in that world any longer.
