Etched in Bone

Dear Douglas,

I hope this finds you well. Brittania survived the recent storms, which only gave our island a glancing blow on their way to Cel-Romano. The savage retaliation against the Cel-Romano Alliance of Nations for the deaths of so many shifters and the attempt to seize some of the wild country and bring it under human control has caused plenty of sleepless nights for everyone here in Brittania—especially government officials and those of us in law enforcement. It has made me grateful that I was able to spend a little time in the Lakeside Courtyard when I visited you in Juin. Having some knowledge of how to work with the Others has been a tremendous help.

Everything we’ve heard about Cel-Romano is just scraps of information coming from people who live in fishing and farming settlements in the wild country and have traded goods with Brittania for generations. And their information comes from rumors from border villages that were spared the full force of the attacks.

According to the rumors, every factory that built the weapons that were used against the shifters was destroyed. In that, the Others were merciless, and in some cases, an entire city was laid to waste. There is rumored to be a wealth of salvage in those places—metals, tires, tools, even money; it’s also rumored that few who go in to grab whatever they can carry survive the predators who have staked out those broken cities as their hunting grounds. Salvagers who enter as healthy men come out dying of some kind of plague, if they come out at all.

Many villages and towns were left untouched. There is limited fuel for motor vehicles because fuel depots are now surrounded by wild country, and only humans who have dealt fairly with the Others in the past have any chance of being allowed access to the fuel.

Cel-Romano used to be the largest area of unbroken human-controlled land in the world, encompassing all the land around the Mediterran Sea as well as the land around the western and southern shores of the Black Sea. Now each nation is divided from the rest by broad veins of wild country. It’s said the land doesn’t look different—there are still roads and human farms and villages—but it feels different. Dangerous. The people who live on the farms and in the villages claim they are safe enough during the day, but strangers trying to cross that land rarely survive. And no one is safe in the dark.

Electronic communication in Cel-Romano is limited or nonexistent. In fact, smaller villages are more likely to have working telephones than what’s left of the industrial cities. But service is erratic since many of the telephone lines running through the new veins of wild country were torn down and can’t be repaired.

That is the information that has reached us. Best guess from what I can piece together? Veins of the wild country will continue to spread throughout Cel-Romano, isolating people on smaller and smaller pieces of land. Some communities will survive, may even thrive, while other places will wither until they, and the people who lived there, are nothing more than a memory or cautionary tale.

Take care, Douglas. I hope Lakeside is one of the places in your part of the world that continues to survive and thrive. I’ll stay in touch as best I can.

—Shady