The Dreampeople- Part 1, Chapter 1

A Note: I am currently writing this story in several parts. I have divided the first part, which is the only part written so far, into two different sections, which I call chapters. However, it was not my design to have these chapters divide the story as a normal book would. The chapters are simply for publishing this story to Young Writer's Society in smaller, more easy-to-read sections. (I decided to call them chapters because I have nothing else to call them.)

The first part of "The Dreampeople" (I'll probably rename it later) is more of an introductory part- the main plot will be exposed in later parts. 

The Dreampeople- Part One, Chapter One

I lie on the ground, my face planted in a sea of tall grass. I lie flat, my arms spread wide and my legs sprawled out carelessly. The earth is alive under me. I can hear it and feel it, and I’m in love with it.

My eyes don’t open when I hear footsteps, as if I can make them go away by ignoring them.

“Did you purposely forget about the meeting again?” my friend, Arden, calls to me.

“Oh, there was a meeting? How did I not hear about it? That’s truly strange,” I murmur sarcastically.

“Shut up. This is the second one in a row you’ve skipped-”

“Yes. They’re boring and unrealistic.”

“You can’t just-” Arden groans. “You’re so frustrating.”

I sit up, sighing. “I’m sorry. I’ll come with you to this one. If it’s still going on.”

“It is.”

“Wonderful,” I stand up.

She rolls her eyes, turns around, and begins walking. I run to catch up to her and walk by her side. “So what’s this one about?” I ask.

“It’s just the usual monthly one.”

I try not to groan when I hear this.

We walk quickly to the center of town. Children play in the dirty streets; not many adults are out. It seems like there’s more children than adults here… I can still remember when some of the younger children were born, four or five years ago. We reach the library, which has unofficially replaced the courthouse of Oroma. When our survivors settled this city, everything was so burned that we could barely even locate the courthouse. The library was less destroyed and less likely to collapse than the other buildings and became a kind of meetinghouse for the leaders of our group.

Arden and I enter the old library. It’s still filled with dust from ten years ago. Our footsteps on the creaking floor are the only sound until we begin to hear voices from the meeting room as we walk. We quickly walk in the room and sit down, receiving a few glances from others.

I sigh, sitting back in my chair. The topic of the meeting is expansion. It’s always about expansion; expanding our area, the population, our strength, city, homes, everything. Rayford, the leader of our group, says that expansion will make us stronger, but we must be careful to not expand so much that King Mardoc of Saedbir, our only neighboring country, notices it. Ten years ago, King Jared Mardoc led the war that caused what we call Destruction in our country. Since then, a small group of about a thousand survivors has been rebuilding in Oroma, including my friend, Arden, and I. We don’t know if Mardoc is still keeping control of the lands of (country), but to be careful, we’ve made sure that Oroma looks as if it’s abandoned. We have plans and drills for hiding if Mardoc were to ever attack again.

The ultimate goal is to not live in fear or hiding; to be a free race that’s not under Mardoc’s wrath. I don’t believe it will happen in my lifetime, or ever in the future. We’ll be stuck in this position of hiding in a destroyed city for the rest of our lives. There’s no chance that the (race) will never rise up proudly again. The thought always discourages me.

A man bursting into the room interrupts my thinking. I realize he’s one of our own soldiers by his sword at his belt and the old armor he wears. Straightening his posture, he begins to speak. “Rayford, sir, I have news of a group of our hunters travelling out west. As they were working, they saw smoke rising from the distance. It appeared to them that there is a smaller city sixty-five miles from here. They think that the city was burning,” the soldier swallows.

Everyone is silent, trying to interpret the news the man brings.

“...Could it have been a city of other survivors from Destruction? Like Oroma?” Rayford wonders aloud.

I sit up straighter when I hear this, thoughts running through my head. If it was a city of survivors, who set the place on fire? Surely not the people there… what if it was Mardoc’s soldiers? If the area was dry, it could have caught fire easily…

Talk bursts around the room; ideas are bounced around. People look at each other in fear and concern.

“Have the hunters returned?” a man asks the soldier.

“They just got back,” he replies.

Rayford yells for attention in the loud room. “The question here is what or who set the city on fire,” he announces. He turns to the soldier. “Do you know if it had rained in that area recently? I know it did here about two days ago.”

“The hunters said that there was some rain on their second day, yes,” the man answers.

“That lessens the possibility of a fire started by dry material,” Rayford sighs. “It must be more likely that someone had to start one,” he pauses to think. “If it is, it could be- I’m not saying that it is- Mardoc’s soldiers. They could have come back into our country somehow and burned the city. I think that Oroma should be under precaution. People must be prepared to hide; I’m going to dismiss you all to notify others. Tell them that it’s just a precaution; nothing is for certain. It’s only a strange situation we’ve never really prepared for. We have sighted no other people in the burned city, correct?” he turns to the soldier, who nods. “We’ve just spotted a small area with smoke rising from it,” Rayford finishes. “I’d like to schedule another meeting for tonight to plan how we will respond to this situation. At seven o’clock this evening, please come back to this same room. Meeting dismissed. Thank you.”

More conversation buzzes around the room, and people begin to leave in a hurry. How did it happen so fast?

“What do you think?” Arden catches up with me as I’m exiting the library.

“I think it’s more probable that someone started the fire in the city than some sort of natural cause. I just want to be open-minded to all the situations it could have been,” I reply. “I wish I had seen the event myself.”

She nods in response. “That’s good, I guess.”

“What about you?”

“I just hope it’s not Mardoc’s soldiers. I can’t imagine anything worse than that,” Arden sighs.

I give a slight shudder at the thought. I can just imagine soldiers raiding through Oroma, burning and destroying the buildings and streets, ruining the place we’ve lived in for nearly ten years… again. Thoughts of Destruction come to my mind. I stop. No. I can’t think of it.

Arden and I walk around, spending the rest of the day notifying the people in the city of the news. When we tell one of our good friends, Filius, he practically forces us stay for dinner with his family. Filius has been training by himself to become the blacksmith of the town, so eventually we can produce our own armor and weapons. He has become much better of the years.

As we sit around the table, we begin to explain the situation to the rest of their family.

“Did you know about this city before?” Gretchen, Filius’s wife asks as she puts some mashed potatoes on her plate.

“The hunters have never gone that far out west before. I think they always have better luck in the south forests,” Filius shrugs. “The city could have been pretty small.”

“What is Rayford planning to do about it?” Filius’s son, Hugo speaks up.

“We’re having another meeting tonight. Right now, I’m thinking he might do the drill for a few days or something,” Arden shrugs.

“Fire could mean someone is there- and someone doesn’t have to be Mardoc’s soldiers. And even if it was his army- why would they burn rubbage? There had to be a reason to start a fire,” Hugo offers.

“Yeah,” I smile, looking up at him. “You’re right. There must be a reason.”

The table is silent for a while, until Filius begins to talk about some new weapons he’s making. Weapons remain the subject of conversation until the meal is over. I keep thinking about what Hugo said. The sad thing is that if there were survivors in that city, they might not be there anymore if Mardoc burned the area. I just wish I knew how the fire started and what purpose it served.

Filius’s family begins to insist that we stay to play a few board games, but Arden and I should still notify other people in the city of the fire before we go to the meeting. We thank them for the meal and leave. After going to a few more houses, we head to the library again.

We start the meaning about five minutes after seven when everyone arrives.

“I can think of no safer way to deal with this situation than to run the drills for a few weeks until we’re completely sure that there is no one in the city. We will just wait until we feel that the time is right to return to our normal lives. It could be a while,” Rayford starts.

My eyebrows knit in confusion. I notice that everyone is nodding in agreement with Rayford. My eyes meet Arden’s across the room. I know she’s thinking the same thing as I am.

Rayford continues, but I don’t hear what he says. Shouldn’t we find out what’s going on in that city? What if it was just a natural fire, and no one’s there at all? Hiding for weeks would be useless.

I swallow, raising my hand. “May I say something?” I ask Rayford.

He stops. I think he’s surprised. “Yes, of course,” he nods.

“I thought that earlier we talked about expansion and how we can make Oroma grow. I’m just confused, because now we’re saying that hiding is better. The fire could be from other survivors in the city. We’re just fearing one possibility out of a lot of other possibilities. I think… this could be our chance. To expand, like you always say we should,” I look down after I speak. I’ve never done something like this before. I’ve always kept quiet, never speaking my thoughts.

Rayford swallows. “So what do you think we should do?”

He leaves me at a loss for words; I hadn’t thought about that. “...We just… can’t hide. We should identify what the fire was caused by.”

“That would mean going to the city,” a man, Urius, speaks up. “It’d be very risky… but ultimately beneficial. I support Avian. It would do us more good than to sit here and hide.”

“We could send a small group of people there to see what’s going on. A couple of soldiers and some people to investigate the fire,” Arden suggests. “The group would be have to be small. We could send enough soldiers so that they could fight against a few of Mardoc’s men, if that was the case, and a few people to collect information about the city and communicate it with each other.”

Rayford nods. “That’s… yes, I like the idea,” he smiles. “We should decide who’s going as soon as we can.”

“I will,” I offer suddenly. “As a soldier, I can…” I swallow.

“Really?” Rayford’s eyes become brighter. “Perhaps, since you’re on the Council, you could be a sort of leader of the other soldiers going?”

I immediately look to Arden. I would need her help if I were to do something like that…

I turn back to Rayford. “I’ll do it, sir, if Arden would be willing to lead the group of soldiers as well.”

My friend looks up, a smile on her face. “I’d love to,” she says.

“Excellent,” Rayford grins. “Could you two arrange a group of about ten to fifteen of our fighters to go along on the journey?”

“Yes, of course,” I nod. I realize I’m smiling. I already have a few ideas about who I’ll pick to go.

“I think that the chosen group should leave tomorrow, or possibly the day after,” Rayford announces this to the entire Council. “I’ll go along as well. We’ll decide who’s going to explore and collect information about the city right now.”

The rest of the meeting goes very well. By the end, we’ve decided on a group consisting of two women who were science teachers before Destruction, two doctors, a professor (also before Destruction,) a cartographer, and a geologist. They’re the closest people to scientists that we can get.

Rayford dismisses the meeting several hours later. Arden and I leave the library with smiles on our faces. As we walk in the cool night air, she bumps her shoulder into mine.

“So. We’re leaders now,” she grins.

“Yes,” I reply by bumping my own shoulder into hers. “We are.”

Arden laughs. “I never expected that you’d do something like this.”

“It’s just… different, you know? It’s a chance to do something new that could help us. It’s always seemed to me like we’re stuck hiding, and we can’t do anything to help ourselves except to wait for our population to grow. I’m sick of waiting,” I sigh.

“Well the whole fire in the city definitely caused some interest around here for once. I guess we’ll find out if the whole thing is good news or bad news,” she replies.

“Speaking of that, which soldiers do you want to take along?” I ask. “I think we need to gather a group of experienced fighters who fought in the war ten years ago.”

“I agree, but I also think we should take some new ones- the fighters that have been training like us in the past years, who have never fought before. We could give them a bare minimum of what it’s like to travel and maybe fight, in case we’d need them in the future…”

“...Yeah,” I say slowly. “You’re right, they need experience, too.”

She studies my face carefully. “Are you alright with that?”

“Yeah,” I nod. “I was just… I don’t know, I guess I was wondering when we’d need the inexperienced soldiers in the future. It’s not like we’ll be forming a real army to fight Mardoc anytime soon… but I like the idea of taking them along.”

“Okay,” Arden smiles. “We just never know what’s going to happen, I suppose, so we might as well prepare for it.”

I nod again. Arden and I spend the rest of the night deciding who should go on the journey with us. I become excited about the entire thing; the soldiers we’re taking along are perfect.

The next day is full of acquiring the correct weapons and collecting the soldiers who are going along. It’s very busy, and I feel like I’m constantly running around every minute until three o’clock in the afternoon, when the entire group as a whole meets together at the outskirts of Oroma.

Rayford stands before us all. “The goal of this journey is to collect information about a city that appeared to have smoke rising from it yesterday. When we come back, we will know what started the fire. That is our purpose. Remember this, and the trip will go smoothly. Let’s begin!” he shouts, climbing on his horse. I smile when a few people from our group cheer in response.

We set out immediately. The trip there will take us roughly two days on horseback.

I feel incredibly uneasy about the entire journey. Should I have suggested the idea? Should we be doing what Rayford said originally- staying back and hiding? I’ve never done something as big as this. Arden and I are the leaders of the soldiers, and if something goes wrong, it will be our fault. Situations spring up in my mind- Mardoc’s army could be in the city, waiting for other survivors like us to come and investigate. Or they could be riding over the lands of our entire country, searching for surviving cities from Destruction. Oroma could be destroyed when we get back. If we ever return.

The two days of travel pass by quickly. We ride through Nightmen Woods, where we are more hidden than if we were riding on the plains. On the night of the second day, our group reaches the city full of ash. The sight of it stops any voices that had been speaking in the group; it makes every stomach turn with an ominous discomfort. I realize how small it is, and my mind still tries to think of situations in which a large fire would be started in a place like this.

“...We should tie up our horses near the forest. Be as silent as you can. We’ll enter the city from there,” Rayford instructs softly.