The Broken Hourglass Weekly Update
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Autumn light is always slanting light, when not even the noonday sun can hold shade perfectly beneath it. Somehow the shadows always slip away, sideways. It was the dusty saffron of an afternoon, when the weather should have cooled with the approach of winter, but had not. Annika stood in the doorway of a house not her own and listened to the sound of women weeping.
The boy was dying. That was all. The women had waited too long, cared too little, or been too poor, none of which mattered now. Anikka only half-listened to the women's lament, though. Her new shoes pinched her feet and she was absorbed in trying, unobtrusively, to flex first one foot, then the other. Nevertheless, when her mentor spoke, all thoughts of grieving women and cramped feet fled as she lifted her head trying to see what he wanted before he named it. Catching her eye, he gestured curtly to the bowl that sat by the boy's head, and then wordlessly turned his attention back to the women.
