Porcupine Ridge you look down from your temple

qiao traveled north along the great black spine of the world. it rose and it rose and it rose until it reached peaks of snow and then dipped low into a floodplain valley.

here she camped for weeks, gathering strength.

back in the flooded halls of akashingo she'd found a girl and her totem-skull. only the skull stayed with her now, its blackened orbit bones drawn in a perpetual scowl of disapproval.

she laughed and carried on.

when qiao was a young girl she'd camped in steppes like these. they followed the march of an imperial army. the dead were routed and cleansed and freed of their worldly possessions. oh, to be young again and to taste the clean spring air on the wind and to move with a body supple and whole!

she and her sisters grew fat. 

now she was old and lean and her sisters dead countless years. just her and kalgir -- or what was left of him, anyway.

the world had been different then. civilizations had only just started their long march towards industrial progress; kingdoms rose and fell at the click of an army's hungry teeth: endless kings, endless despots, endless graves to fill.

now the noise of that distant past circled round her, ghosts of a eon that could not be put to bed. which was she: relic, itinerant, remnant? she worked at a bundle of greenwort, stripping its dropping leaves from stem. the skull watched, set on a bed of tired deerpelt.

oh, kalgir. if only you hadn't been so stupid.