A single, lone hill jutted from the ground, the only rise across the flat plains around the river Luzum. Was it a hill or a glorified mound? Either way, looking south it was the only place to get a view of the plains, of the river. Of the greater city on its banks. Ibandr.

On the hill sat a man on the bare back of a horse. A breeze from the south, coming a long way from the river at the edge of his vision, whipped his matting of hair in a gentle flicking. His beard, short but shaggy, stood firm on his face, smooth save for the occasional scar or burned mark. The man wore hemp coverings around his shoulders, his waist, down his legs, wrapped loosely with gaps where the wind billowed them to life. He frowned as the wind picked up, hair whipping in the breeze, and reached into a bundle across his shoulder. He pulled out a long cloth and wrapped his hair in a practiced fashion, wiping sweat from his brow once he was done.

“Barnam,” the man turned as another on horseback rode up to him, “we shall be ready soon.”

The man, Barnam, nodded. “At sunset, then.”

“At sunset,” and the other man turned his horse to trot back down the hill. By the hillside, around a hundred horses and men stood, wiping their horses, smoothing stone blades, copper scythes, or long wooden spears. They talked, some joking and laughing, others grave and serious, trading old stories of war or raiding or famine. Barnam looked at them, an absent smile on his face. His family.

“Your father is dead,” his mother had said. Her hand was on his shoulder, other hand on his cheek. He stood on bare, loose dirt, his toes wriggled in the crumbled land. Above him the sky had been cloudy but the sun, when it broke through, was strong and piercing, threatening to push any man or woman who stood against it back into the ground.

Barnam the boy had felt all these things. Yet his soul was in free fall. Down, down, down he fell, screaming a silent scream at the top of his lungs, the word echoing around him, his mother's voice, his father's voice, his voice clanging in a cacophony as he fell ever forward, ever down, into a great abyss of being. The one word over and over, louder and louder, until it was the only thing he could hear and could ever hear: dead.

Not ‘out along the river.’ Not ‘in the outer world.’ Not ‘passed to the ancestors.’ Dead. Your father is dead.

Barnam the man remembered how Barnam the boy felt that day, and he shuddered on his horse as if his soul was back in that free fall, weightless in terror and sorrow and grief. It had been shortly after they crossed the river Duf, into the lands and tribe of the Albayet, that they learned of his father’s death. Barnam remembered little but knew someone had come to them to tell them. One of Hadr’s friends who owed him some debt, chasing after the mother and son to bring them nothing but news of death. The Albayet welcomed them, his mother had always had a silver tongue. She told them of Ibandr, of their troubles with the Zivold, of Hadr and his insistence we come to them, to find Artanr, Harald, and Pulti, to find shelter. To find refuge. To find a home. Yes, the Albayet had welcomed them with open arms. Pulti, especially, had taken to Barnam as if he was his own son.

The horse bellow him snorted, shaking its head at a buzzing fly. Harald became Zivold of the Albayet, his wife Adari the Linezold. Barnam found it odd that both were venerated at an equal status. He barely even remembered who the Linezold of Ibandr was, the wife of the Zivold seldom making grand or luxurious appearances like he did. Once or twice he noticed her at one of Hadr’s festivals but never more. Barnam sighed. He traced his face with a free hand, the other holding onto his horse’s mane. One scar traced his cheek. The first time he had taken a life, the man who threatened him and his mother when he had just reached his thirteenth year. A burn on his cheekbone, one that never healed when they were set upon by another Anug tribe on horseback, wielding fire as well as blade. Many others, some healed, some not, from his years and years with the Albayet. Life was harder on the eastern end of his known world than it had ever been in Ibandr. They farmed as his father and mother had in the city, yes, but the harvests were never trustworthy, forcing him and the Albayet to rely on horsemeat and raiding other villages as much as they relied on the grains of the earth. No Sinnamit guided their festivals, their worship, their healing, their scholarship, only the Zivold and the Linezold, husband and wife of the peoples, were the way forward.

These easterners were much more at home on horseback the city residents. In Ibandr, men only ever rode when guiding their horse herds through the city or out to the river to graze. Here it was an every day occurrence. Hunting or traveling was done on horseback. Times of leisure or work were done on horseback. Even when farming, a horse was typically nearby, with some strange folk ever tying hoes to their horses and walking them along the field. Silliness of the east. The Albayet never were too far from their horses.

Twenty-four summers passed since he and his mother, fatigued and starved and parched, had wandered into the Albayet village and placed their lives into their hands. Here they were sheltered, his mother taken care of and remarried, Barnam raised and trained in the ways of the easterners. They spoke the same and yet different. Some words felt as though he stuffed cotton in his mouth, his tongue working this way or that, making sounds he’d never heard before and hearing the locals laughing at him. Other times he’d feel like he was stretching his jaw out, long and thin. Some j’s sounded like y’s, some words pressed together, some cut in half. But his mother insisted that, when alone, they only spoke as they did at their home. “Our grandmothers are all around us. They follow us on our journey through the darkness. If you forget to speak as they did, how will you speak to them? Only then will they truly go to the Outer World.” She always insisted to hold on to their language, but embrace the Albayet and become as their own.

Through the years Barnam had made some journeys back to his home city. “Your life was stolen from you,” Pulti had told him, long after he had married his mother, “your father’s life was stolen from you. Let me help you, my son, let me help you right your wrong. There is a blood debt here, the worst debt of a father's murder, that can only be paid in one way.” Pulti urged him to think about returning to Ibandr, not as a visitor but to reclaim what was owed to him. The life of Ibandr’s Zivold.” He thought about those words, that mentality, the feeling of a wrong needing to be righted, as he moved through the town posing as a traveler from afar. He’d shake his head when the citizens asked him questions. Where are you from? Who are you with? What are you doing here? He bartered for fish and stone in exchange for horse meat and milk, but all the while he watched and he listened. Three times he made the journey to Ibandr, and each time he learned more.

The Zivold had relegated the Sinnamit to the role of speaker. When the Zivold emerged from the great storehouse of Ibandr, Hadr was there, older than ever, announcing his presence and what would be done in the city that day. Hadr called him not just the Zivold, but the Lord guided by Kutenr, the Paroxl of good harvests and lifesaving flooding. He would here Hadr bellow, "And here is Attarnap, Zivold of Ibandr, Lord guided by Kutenr, Savior of the World, Chosen by Anakinr and blessed by Samvastatn. Life be given to Attarnap, who stands before you in front of the Temple of Kutenr. Life be given to Attarnap, bow to his presence." All around Barnam, the citizens of Ibandr lowered themselves on the ground, kneeling and touching their faces to the ground. He learned quickly to do the same, gritting his teeth to bowing to his father's murdered.

But he couldn't help but think how the Temple of Kutenr had come to be. If the storehouse had been great before, it was grand now. The circular building flanked by long stretches of rectangular rooms was gone. A long, rectangular building, big and empty for the storage of an unbelievable amounts of grain stood in the middle of the city. At the end of it sat a great mound of a building, what Barnam came to learn was the new temple. It was slowly being built with mud-bricks by a group of laborers, a great big pile with four sides pointing to the sky carved on one side with majestic images from Hortens lore and painted on another side with images of what Barnam came to understand as the Paroxl. Along the edge of the great storehouse were circular, two-story buildings with openings in the middle. Barnam made his way into one, empty at the time, and saw stairs leading up to a second floor and an open window to a small, central courtyard. A great amount of room inside and furnished so as to seem like it was the living quarters of the Sinnamit, the Zivold, or those he preferred most.

The buildings around the city center had transformed as well. Gone were the small clumps of buildings, one-storied in varying cascading heights. Now the houses had been replaced and were all similar in size and shape: two-storied, rectangular houses longer than they were wide, built at regular intervals with space in the middle. Some homes had shades built out of mud or wood - rare as it was - or simple hangings of hemp in between the houses, where the citizens sat and worked in the outdoors, speaking to one another or calling out to workers on the roofs. He had made his way back to his old home, finding it gone and replaced with these larger buildings, larger homes to fit the growing city. When Barnam had been a child, the channels they carved only extended as far as his home. But the last time Barnam visited Ibandr, maybe one summer before today, the channels went out twice as far, home going further and further than Barnam could have ever dreamed.

Even now, as Barnam stood on his hill, he saw what appeared to be a piece of the river sitting outside of the city. It shimmered in the sun, a large pool of water where only one summer ago there had been none. Had that been the Zivold’s doing as well? What wonders were being built by that murderer’s fist? What was the purpose of this reservoir of water? He shook his head. He would have to ask the Zivold when he met him, before he got what he was owed.

The sky rumbled in the far distance. The boy who became a man looked left to the east, seeing a darkness of clouds emerging where once there had been little. To the west the sun was low, grazing the far reaches of the river, going low to light the lands of the Outer World for the night. Barnam took his horse and turned it around, back down the hill to the others. It was time to set out.

Context: Don't mind me just doing some internal conflict. Barnam was raised by the Anug and grew to be one of them. But his mother and adoptive father urge him to take revenge on the Zivold and the city. Ibandr has grown in the mean time, swelling in size and population. The Zivold continues to maintain his hold on the city and has been able to organize the structure of the inner city, while the outer grows further and further beyond the river. A, large to them, pyramid-shaped mound has been erected and is called a temple, though it's solid through and more of a landmark than anything else.