"...all I'm saying is that towards the end, it was a little bit excessive on their part."

They'd been walking in harrowed silence for three days before Tobra started jabbering, and Avikh was, quite frankly, getting damn sick of it. To him, and their dozen-or-so companions, all with the same mortified grief shadowing their faces, it seemed irreverent - minimizing the loss and grief and shame they'd just suffered with just… excuses and blame. It had been an emotional month for them all, starting with that fateful decision of a raid and ending with them all watching the mountain consume the home that had pushed them away for cowardice.

"Shut the fuck up, Tobra," said Fuyo, "nobody wants to hear your pul-shit."

"A little uncalled for," said Tobra.

“No, it really wasn’t,” said Obera. She was perhaps the most surly of the crew.

“Look, I get that we’ve all be haunted but we can’t just not talk about it forever.”

“I would prefer if we did,” said Avikh.

They walked in silence for a little while more, all retreating into the deep recesses of their minds. Avikh relived the catastrophe from the beginning. A thief from the neighboring village came in the night and tried to steal three pulukh, but they made so much noise that Avikh’s father awoke and shot him in the shoulder. A few days later a man from that village said that they shot at their man, and demanded an apology. Their former chief had no nice words for him then.

And then there was a raid against their village, and a few elders – new ones, warriors the lot of them who had had their first grandchildren – we killed. Their chief was furious, and demanded that they raid the rival village in retaliation. An arrow shot where an arrow came. The elders agreed, and the largest war party that their village had ever seen was sent out. Both the chief and the Mekhe had joined.

Perhaps a third returned, and neither the chief nor the mekhe were among them. Their tribe was left leaderless, with most of the elders and the chief gone. Those that were left were bent on revenge, or a brave last stand that they believed they were going to win.

Avikh and his crew were those more timid souls, who believed that they didn’t stand a chance. That a reprisal was coming, and there was no way to avoid it. They plead to their remaining villagers to make peace with the foe.

They were scorned.

They were called cowards. Underlings. Not one among them was above twenty years of age, and so their opinions were discarded. So, in the dead of night they stole three pulukh and two dogs from their own village, and set out in the middle of winter. They abandoned their village, believing it to be doomed.

They didn’t expect that at that very night, an avalanche would bury their former home. That home that their elders settled in. None of the band had ever moved their village before. They thought they may stay there forever.

Foolish thoughts. Childish thoughts.

“I’m cold,” said Dofem, shivering.

“We all are, it’s the dead of winter,” said Avikh, “the festival of the Year-end is four days away.”

“That was three days ago,” said Obera, “tomorrow’s the Year-end.”

“Oh. Well then, a happy new year to us all,” said Avikh. He was too cold to laugh, they all were.

They walked in silence for a little while longer, trudging through snow and slush.

“Look! Look!” said Pafon̄ef, “a cave! A cave! We can take shelter!”

“Just what we need. Getting eaten by a cougar,” said Obera.

“Would you prefer freezing to death?” said Avikh.

“We’ll take shelter in the cave, at least for now.”

After some agreement, they hid in the cave (notably lacking in any cougars – perhaps its previous denizen had already frozen to death). But their temporary shelter soon became temporary shelter for the whole of the winter until the spring melt… and beyond that, it became a permanent shelter as a whole. The Fifteen, as they would become, would become the Grand Elders of their new village, bigger than the last. They sent out who they could on expeditions to the Lake Khayaz, learning their ways and improvement them. Soon enough, their village was doing its own agriculture, doing its own herding. Keeping peace, dealing forgiveness, mending old animosities.

This village was one of the first to have a name: Pozūq. Because out of strife, Kindness was born.

We agrarian bois now.