Iron in the Heart, Kindness in the Hands

The tunnel was cramped and dark and damp. 

Fortunately it was impossible to get lost in this part of the underground, because though Inessa couldn’t tell the difference between the dirt under her hands and the backs of her eyelids, there was only one way forward. It was both terrifying and reassuring. The air was musty and stale. This passageway wasn’t built for frequent travel, and the ventilation was laughable at best. This was no safe place to linger in. 

The tunnel began to slope upwards. Inessa instinctively tried to duck her head further down in anticipation of a lower roof, but the dimensions of the tunnel remained steady. The tunnel came to an end in front of her as she bumped into the sudden dirt wall. Inessa stood up on her knees. There was a wooden door above her, knocking into her shoulders before she could stretch out to her full height. 

The woman pawed around the door’s frame until she had a good sense of where she was facing. She grabbed onto the metal latch and twisted, pushing up on the door to force it to swing aside. The board didn’t move. Inessa pushed harder and shook the latch, but it remained stuck. She slammed against it, and the wood didn’t respond other than a dull thud. 

Inessa punched it vindictively. 

She should have made Scarecrow go first, he was more stubborn than rock when he was fulfilling a Task. Then again, he wasn’t as sturdy as rock. Maybe he would just break before he could get the hatch open, and that wasn’t something Inessa could afford to risk. 

The woman cursed to herself under her breath and dug around at the edge of the door, on the side closest to the latch and furthest from the hinges. Finding the space where wood met the ground, Inessa reached to a cloth sack hanging from her side and withdrew a metal tool that was sort-of-a-knife and sort-of-a-trowel, depending on what she needed it to be. 

Inessa dug the blade into the side of the tunnel’s end and started loosening up the packed-in soil, hoping there was a way she could get around the stubborn door. 

In one uncontrolled terrifying rush, dry chunks of earth and dirt and gravel slid down in a crumble and Inessa gasped, horrified, as thoughts of darkness without light and breathing with no air flooded her thoughts faster than the dirt pouring into the small space. 

She thought of a tomb before death, roots curling around her bones, and then all at once the collapse stopped a moment after it had begun. 

A sliver of light cut through the slit in the ground, casting a beam of suspended particles into the dark underground. Inessa didn’t move, too afraid that if she moved, the earth would too, and then she would be buried alive. This tunnel wasn’t fully reinforced, it was just small. 

The only stability it promised was about as trustworthy as water tension keeping a light rock chip afloat on a lake. It was all a force of nature, reliable only in a measure of unpredictability. 

Inessa breathed deeply in the gritty air that now smelled a little bit like the wind passing over the keyhole opening she had made. The wind smelled a little like ash. 

Steeling herself, Inessa went back to the gap in the tunnel and began digging out more of a space. She tried to push the dirt out and away from the hole, but more and more of it kept falling in, the growing pool at her feet turning gray, brittle, and sooty. She tried not to cough. 

With another sweep of her arm shoving the earth away from her, Inessa slithered out of the cracked ground, covered in the substance of the tunnel wall she had clawed through. After another five clicks, Scarecrow crawled out behind her, gangly and silent. 

Inessa found that the wooden hatch wouldn’t move because there was a rock partially on top of it. It was a rolling-rock, one of the big ones around the Khenyth protectorate that moved overnight, or sometimes during thunderstorms. Most people hadn’t heard of them, or thought that they only existed in the folk stories that the uneducated westerners believed in.

The rolling-rocks used to stick around at the edges of this house. Sometimes they would end up in the front yard, but never in the garden, except for the one time when Inessa woke up to a crushed track of tomatoes and fence posts with no rock in sight. The path had been so straight and clean that Samser had suggested that perhaps the rock simply couldn’t bother itself to go around the garden.

Inessa had thought it was a pain to clean up. 

The rocks had never broken into the house though, except for the fact that one was now in the middle of the pantry. At least, it was in the middle of where the pantry used to be. There wasn’t really a house for the rocks to break into anymore, Inessa thought sadly, as she looked around at the sootstained footprint of the old floor plan. The small building had been completely razed to the ground but that, she supposed, was what greenfire was supposed to do. 

Inessa walked through the crunching green-flecked ash piles and heard Scarecrow’s gentle footfalls as he followed behind her. 

There wasn't anything left for her, in the skeleton of this house. The artificial fire hadn’t spread far beyond the man-made structure, and a part of Inessa was oddly thankful for the fact that the arsons were determined to make the message of her personal exile clear. Only Inessa was meant to leave this place, and the verdant-charred remains of the cabin were evidence of that. The intent of the message at least meant that the nearby cottonwood trees were still intact, if not her livelihood.  

In events like this, it was important to think of the burned things from an optimistic perspective. 

Inessa was walking to the river. It had changed a bit, during the last winter. The water was still a sluggish clay-brown churning at the banks, but the winter had changed something in how the shore behaved. 

Heaping masses of silt-laden ice had carved through the mud and roots of the bank and then had gotten stranded when the snow melted, leaving obsidian-like masses of winter lumped up where trees and fence posts used to be. There was only one way forward for a river, and if that way walked over her fences then there wasn’t anything Inessa could do about it. 

A wind came and brushed at her hair, and the new leaves above her shuffled. It wasn’t a promising sight to look at, when she surveyed the alien terrain. The shoreline had turned near unrecognizable, but she knew this place well, and was able to orient herself by the taller cliffs rising up on the far side of the river. Even so, it was likely that the thing she searched for wouldn’t be where she had last left it. 

“Scarecrow,” she said at last, breaking the silence with a commanding tone. “There is a black wood box somewhere by the shore. Within this area from the north border to the way the river flows. I want you to find it.”

He didn’t nod, because that’s not what golems did, but he did turn and begin walking on his own. 

No one wanted to make golems out of scarecrows. Scarecrows were supposed to be field dummies, flimsy, easy to make and easy to replace. Why would anyone install a golem’s delicate and complicated wiring in a vessel so easily broken or burnt? Samser did, apparently. And Inessa, once she started really listening to his arguments. There was something softer about scarecrows that couldn’t be found in stonetrolls or irongiants. ‘The magic’s in the material,’ is what Samser would say. That’s what all golem makers said, actually, but when Sam said it, it sounded different. 

Softness wasn’t something a Wilder was supposed to value. If you were dumb, or crazy, or tough enough to build a homestead and call yourself a World Wilder, then you couldn’t afford to value softness unless it was in your winter coat. 

Inessa was glad for Scarecrow’s company, anyway. When he pulled up the weeds from the summer garden, he would keep them for a little before putting them to compost, laying the wild blossoms on the open window sills with little puddles of dirt and blind bugs clinging to the roots. It was messy, but the petals were bright. 

It was the wildflowers she remembered most vividly whenever she thought of this place. They bloomed throughout June and July, but even in the brown-white-and-slate backdrop of middle winter she could still imagine the mountain’s perfume clogging the hot breezes with its golden pollen. 

Inessa wasn’t from here. None of the World Wilders were. But sometimes, she still wondered about the difference between where you were from and where you belonged. 

Scarecrow belonged with her, because she had helped create him; but, she supposed, this land had also played a hand in creating him as well. Here was the wild grass that she had packed in around Scarecrow’s plastic skeleton, as a way to add boning to the burlap and rags and dry plant fluff that gave the golem flesh. Here were the animals, too small to be eaten, that Scarecrow would watch over when they were injured. Here was the place where he first opened his eyes. 

Well, golems didn’t have any eyes, really. It was just a nice sentiment.

Scarecrow was a part of this place. Inessa liked to believe that it was also a part of her, in a way. Or perhaps it worked the other way around. Maybe she wasn’t as much of an invader as the World Wilders were said to be. Maybe her house had been more of a wandering boulder rolled onto new turf, and less of a blight on a once-green leaf. 

Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

Inessa’s boots sank with every other step as she trudged across the warped river bank. She began looking where she had buried the box, and was unsurprised to find the hole open, and empty. There was no path of a dragged box for her to follow, because every inch of the earth looked like something had been dragged across it. Maybe it was rocks, or branches, or just ice. Anything could have expertly mimicked the path of a box, at this point. 

The woman’s back ached from bending over the same image. Inessa stretched her spine backwards and looked around the churned earth as if it could offer her better answers from a distant perspective. 

All she saw was Scarecrow, not searching, but standing up and staring outwards as if watching something. She carefully picked her way over to him, wondering if he had somehow gotten distracted, though that wasn’t something golems were supposed to do. 

Scarecrow was holding his gloved hand level with his shoulder, perfectly still, as only things that didn’t breathe could be. On the tips of his artificial fingers, a whickerbug fanned its serrated wings in the strengthening sunlight. As she came up next to him, his head turned to look at her in a way that would be more significant if he had a real face and not an embroidered one. 

Inessa didn’t say anything to him. There was something about being around Scarecrow that urged Inessa towards silence, where a better Wilder would be berating a golem for failing its command. Even so, they couldn’t afford to stay here a minute more than necessary. She didn’t know if there were eyes on this place. 

“Scarecrow, have you found the box?” she asked him, more as a way to remind him of his Task than anything else. 

The golem pointed down to his feet. Of course. He had found it, but Inessa had never specified that he should come tell her when he did. The woman shook her head and knelt down to see.

The box had been broken open. At first Inessa thought that the journals were gone, but then she realized the books were a part of the earthly mess that had seeped into the cracks of the damaged box. They were still there, but that may not mean anything, if they were too destroyed to be read. 

Inessa had always thought Samser was paranoid for choosing to bury his books once he had used up the last plastic-sheathed page. Maybe he just thought it was funny, like burying treasure for later. Either way, if Sam had kept his journals in the house, like Inessa did, they would have burned. 

The woman picked up the stack of journals like they were an injured bird. Flecks of mud and gravel fell away from the pages and leather covers like water droplets. More than anything, Inessa longed to open them and see what records had survived the winter, but she didn’t. She only slid the books into her bag with care and promised herself that she would try to salvage them later. 

“Scarecrow, follow me,” she said. And he did, even though it scared the whickerbug into leaping from his hand with an uproarious chatter of flapping wings. 

It was harder to walk back towards the house than it had been to walk away from it. There was a hole in the picture where her livelihood used to be. It was more of an abrupt reminder, looking at it from a distance instead of standing inside it. Because when she was inside, it was so unrecognizable that she could almost pretend it wasn't the remains of her house, but something else entirely.

But Inessa had walked home on this exact path more times than she could ever count, and it was glaringly obvious that something about the act had changed in an irrevocable way. The woman felt the loss of the house like a missing tooth, with the gums still soft and red underneath the gap.

Now, it hit her, how much had been taken from her by the greenfire. She had made so much progress in learning how this place worked. Where the hawks hunted, and how many chicks they had that year. If the old puma was still keeping up her territory in the mountains. Where the rabbits ran. Where the sagebrush grew. But now she had to leave, and all she had learned would mean nothing. 

That was part of why she had wanted to find Samser’s journals. They weren’t anything awfully poetic, but they were descriptive records of this place and how it moved like slightly off-tempo clockwork. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t taken them when he left, because if he no longer lived here then he no longer needed to know how to live here. The journals were records of what plants bloomed at what times in the spring, and when the earth first started to crack in midsummer, and when the first snow fell. Little things, to remind her of this little place she had claimed for seven summers. 

Many others who did what she did could say she was unsuccessful. She didn’t harvest as much, didn’t hunt as much, wasted too many resources on things that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, return her kindness. But Inessa thought she was successful. She wasn’t dead. Not after all this time. Not after all these bone-cracking winters or well-emptying summers. 

World Wilders were few and far between, but many were able to get a lot out of a wild place, lots of ores, furs, and food. A good World Wilder knew how to wring out a place like a wet rag. Inessa had wanted to do that too, at first, but now she knew she just wanted to be a decent neighbor. And when you lived alone out here, anything, and everything, was your neighbor. 

And so she did her best to be a good neighbor, until the Khenyth grant commission got disappointed by her lack of progress. Until they requested she retreat from her settlement, and she didn’t. Until Samser got commissioned elsewhere to work on different golems. 

Until her house went up in green smoke. 

The minty looking ash crunched under her feet again as she walked through her house for the last time. When she came upon the pantry, she found that the rolling-rock had somehow rolled itself off of the trapdoor. 

Inessa didn’t thank it, or touch it, because while it was odd it was still just a rock, but she looked at it, acknowledged it, for four or five ticks longer than she probably needed to. And then Inessa crawled back into the hole in the floor, feeling a bit like she was wriggling into her own grave. 

No, she thought, feeling the dirt and ash compress under her palms, and her hot breath puff in the stale air of the tunnel. I’m still alive.

If she paid attention, she could even feel the rhythmic thumping of her heart pounding iron and oxygen through her flesh. The arsonists haven’t taken that from her. Her end goal as a Wilder was supposed to be success. But Inessa knew, after all these years, that survival was success. 

If she was still fiercely, brutally alive, then, she thought, I still have a reason to crawl forward. 

Quiet as a ghost, Scarecrow followed her into the dark.