Ashes

I’d never considered the importance of the woods before it happened. I knew my people found it relevant, but I took it for granted, a place where I’d swing from branches and thank The Green for our home. 

Once The Ironmen arrived, I could only grab my priest’s robes and gardening tools. I never looked back and retreated with the other congregation members.

We hid among thickets of grass and fields of dirt, but the Ironmen still came. We had to dig with a trowel and hide in underground hovels while they walked past us. They’d spoken to us days before about their machines, but we couldn’t agree to harm The Green. But they took it anyway, I understood, cowering underground.

When I returned to where the woods had been, I thought I’d gone mad from lack of sustenance; we’d eaten nothing but three handfuls of bitter berries all this time. I insisted that we were all wrong,  that the woods lay further along. 

The grey ground I stood on couldn’t have been where I’d been raised, not until I understood the reason for its colour. Short piles of grey I’d never seen before surrounded me, no taller than anthills. The wind blew, and flakes of these hills drifted across the air. These flakes brushed my face. The smell followed: smoke. Burning. Ashes. 

Nothing remained of the trees we’d grown up with except the ashes. The Ironmen had reduced them to circles in the ground, flat and even enough to walk on. The church we built with our bare hands no longer stood, an empty patch of scorched earth taking its place. 

My knees buckled and I wept. Around me, this patch of nothing that had once been our home blended into the surrounding landscape, the industrialised perfection of the Ironmen. The whirring of their machines continued in the distance, miles away but deafening to my soul. 

The congregation joined me and we held one another in memoriam of our home. We were all that remained of this place – homeless, no more than ashes, blowing in the wind.