Chapter 521
Ariaq shivered inside her parka, a garment that was as much a part of her as her own skin. She tightened the thick cords.
At 39, her face already held the lines from squinting into icy winds, yet still looked as fresh as a berry. Today, she looked older.
The community she was part of lived scattered across the Arctic plains, a loose network of families, many with indigenous roots that connected her to a vast family. Today, all those bonds of family didn't matter much.
Something bad was coming. There were only around five hundred souls on this entire area, making the gathering around the village elder notable, each face turned toward him.
Everyone wanted an answer for the radio communication earlier, or what it could mean. The elders looked like statues of old wood.
"They say all the oceans are poison," he announced, his pronunciation old-fashioned, clipped, his body stiff. No one under his advanced years knew if it was true.
"How do they know," a woman asked. "The south, where people live," the elder answered.
"Their waters turned foul. Fish are dying," he continued. "Fish they found, we didn't even need a translator."
"Dying from what?" she questioned again. "Nobody knows, fishers came into land... people from the shore cities," he said.
"Their skin turned black and their blood boiled," the elder man added with a certain gruff. A wave of whispers rippled through the small crowd.
This place, the north pole had always felt safe. Nothing got to this part of the planet, other than the changing climates.
Ariaq tugged at her sleeves. She felt her heart beat faster. "What can we do?" a man asked.
He sounded defeated, just by speaking out the question he should not have dared to ask. Everyone knew the north wasn't like the rest of the planet.
People survived together. "Survive," the old man answered immediately, not even giving the other person his time to respond.
People from the north, old souls, the young didn't survive long. As days passed, news was limited.
One report claimed people could not eat food either, but nobody here understood how. When the last of the stored whale meat from a community hunt finished, real panic began to crawl up into every home.
Food mattered. Hunting inland proved useless, with only skeletal remains found of every type of mammal.
No one was even seeing tracks. As though some disease that could move between animals, and not remain specific, spread through each type of species on this part of the planet.
"We can melt the snow. Use that for drinking. At least that's safe, I know that's safe," Ariaq muttered to herself.
"We just boil water," she added, as though words on her own would change things. She lit a small fire and got to boiling the ice and snow.
The last source of nutrition on this earth she assumed would last longer for them, they knew how to boil snow. Days passed again.
The once safe space for their people had turned into something darker. Now, people watched one another.
Rumors started spreading that their leader had taken a sled, taken one, and abandoned the community. This would be unusual.
Everything was done with purpose for all, not some, among her people. Everything was shared, but these times changed that.
Another man stepped up, he spoke: "We are out of supplies; everything from the sea has caused people in other places to get sick, so we don't know how long we have here."
Nobody seemed able to add another word to that truth. More and more were sick every day.
No matter how much water, Ariaq made and tried to boil, she kept looking older. More like a person of her age should have looked already.
Even on boiled water, people were changing, aging in days. People began talking, speaking of dark times from years back, old things.
This area, the north pole had felt safe. Now everyone in her community turned scared, eyes on her with hatred or despair.
Food was shared; survival was all. The elder that fled seemed to have gotten an earlier alert than the others.
"We must get supplies," one young man suggested. Nobody looked at him.
He wasn't one to respect. Nobody had food either way, the only things were cans, old, from fishing long back, but no one ate that way, not with fresh sources around.
"They say it was the fish, but now it's the meat as well, something... happened... something happened to make it this way," she said.
"We don't have much time now, but how much time is never easy to see." Her mind whirred, this part of her knew how to survive better than other things.
"People will leave if we let them," someone called from the back of the crowd, the young kid from before spoke out. His eyes wild.
"They can take what is meant for the rest of us. It's not easy being the strong one when times call, you've not heard my name yet," he said.
"It's not a moment I wanted but now I can see it." "You," she paused, "Have never seen difficult times."
"Your parents...protected...you. We do not leave our tribe. But you would not know of this bond," she spoke, hoping her speech mattered.
Her speech would usually make sense to someone his age, a young kid. Days went, and no one said a word again about trying to get help.
But people kept dying and wasting away. Ariaq thought back to an old friend, how many kids they would try for one day, before he married someone else.
One night, the community lit the biggest fire ever seen, throwing into it anything that burned. Flames shot into the air.
Black smoke billowing up and out as people stood silent. Nobody, she thought would see it, the fire they made was simply not high enough.
She looked, the community wanted hope. She tried to drink boiled ice again, watching the fire crackle.
Her mouth felt as though she chewed rocks. People from other places might have simply survived and adjusted.
People from here were made of sterner stuff. The elder was right. "There will be those among you who leave for themselves," said a familiar older woman.
Ariaq glanced back. "Do not waste your time on these thoughts," Ariaq told her.
A strange sense of rage took her. The woman was always there to make Ariaq feel useless, even now, she bothered her.
"I know why it's like this," said another person. This person was covered head to toe in furs.
Ariaq saw what everyone else saw, they saw a fool who did not know, but still wanted to offer their two cents in the mix. "People used the waters... they made our homes sick," the person spoke further.
She listened; maybe he held some part of the reason that made this clear, not much could have brought her people down like this. But no one else lived the way she did.
People from other countries did not appreciate her way of life, they did not try as hard. That, she knew.
They used fuel to go places faster and make life easier. That thought, though, brought her comfort.
They were connected, in some ways she could never grasp fully, they relied on nature more than other parts of the planet. A different kind of understanding between her people.
Even when people kept quiet about things, not wanting to make them true. The days blurred.
People grew thin, faces gaunt, eyes sunk deep into skulls. She had long stopped boiling any water to help them.
A person can only last so long before even the strongest person goes along and becomes too weary. "I remember..." someone said behind her.
The person paused. "Better days." "There are no better days left, friend" said another older woman.
Ariaq smiled. It didn't reach her eyes, didn't fill her up. There was nothing now.
No one tried leaving, most knew. Everyone stuck to their routines for too long.
Now it was easier to keep being what one has always been and see how things ended, than try. In their community, people lived together as one.
No matter their roles, their tasks changed as needed. So her current purpose was nothing now, just watching and waiting, like many.
Her community did not believe in one power above others. It didn't need any such thing to understand the value and the truth.
Some were made for difficult tasks. It was their job to step up when others could not.
That part was real. But so were harder truths about themselves. They had not lived well enough with nature.
One night she dreamt of a strange land full of buildings that touched the clouds. Metal contraptions roared through concrete canyons.
She dreamt she felt something was taken from the waters, used by the men. Something about it felt accurate.
That it could have happened, somewhere she didn't understand, with all the progress on their land. But these images frightened her.
She saw them through someone else's eyes and not her own. Awake again, the fire still smoldered low.
The stench of burnt waste filled the air. Around the fire, she found someone sitting there, as always.
She didn't know his real name, but everyone called him something like Ghost, since he simply was always near others. But today he had no one near him.
Everyone saw it. "There was a time we had food," she heard a whisper, maybe from herself or someone near.
She could not remember if those were the times people knew, or simply something a person thought. The sense that once this community relied too much on what the Earth gave.
That there needed to have been more caution. Or that if people took so much from the sea they had brought this change themselves.
That made more sense now. "Our community lived like... no other place. I have thought and thought it all through..." Ariaq muttered.
"We did it all correctly and tried for longer. Then things were out of our control" she added, finding she, in some last breaths, needed to speak these thoughts.
She felt that same strange, furious energy taking over again; she felt different about dying this time around. That people from other parts of this planet were selfish.
The idea felt clearer and clear every passing day, just not for very long now, no person here could stand. Ghost moved over.
Ariaq sat down with him, neither looking at each other. They didn't need to, they had all the truth on this earth inside each mind.
How else did they even last, without the same thoughts about who mattered, and who did not matter. Their families lived the right way.
So their community had more chance than the others. As the first rays of dawn touched the horizon, they painted the ice a dark crimson.
Just as she always did before the others when younger, when time to hunt was real, when that was what she did most. Today the sky and ground bled.
Everything seemed so quiet, then the person who had told her earlier that he was responsible, for them losing their homes, spoke. She turned around.
She found the young man from before staring at her, daring her, and everyone around the small fire. No one moved.
Even Ghost, remained frozen to his place, but a smirk touched his features and made his body shift over. The man held up a strange box in his right hand.
A tool from their community for helping make fires in difficult times, but older than the lighters. Before Ariaq or Ghost could even raise a fist or an arm in protest.
The person threw the box hard. She saw the elder take the box earlier but not that other thing the man threw after it.
It made a metallic sound. Everything happened in slow motion. It would only take seconds for both the old wood of the box, and what seemed like some other thing to mix in the flames.
The young kid, standing closer than any of them, as they, the two strongest would never be so close to the heat, or each other. A wave of white fire rose high.
All of a sudden her home erupted with flames, taking up her thoughts in an instant. People tried to turn, but the white fire burned on them.
It burned on Ghost who turned to protect her, only to burn down to nothing, too fast. As people collapsed on the ice, trying to push back the wave, it touched each.
It burned and took what made them special away, so very quickly, too soon for Ariaq to say or tell anything about that special quality that lived within them all.