A Barren Valley
Guests in another strange place
The following is the thirteenth installment of my serial novel, ALO & WYOME. If you missed chapter twelve, you can read it here, or if you’re just starting out, you can read the first installment of ALO & WYOME here.
ALO AND WYOME CAME TO A NEW TOTEM ON THE PATH. The carved image depicted a man and a woman embracing. The figures were wholly entwined except for an empty space roughly bored between them where their navels should be. A swallow had built a muddy nest in the hole.
“What do you think that means?” Wyome asked. “Do you think there’s another small village nearby? Like the widows?”
“Maybe.” No one was around, and they could not see a settlement ahead.
“Should we stay here?”
“Let’s keep walking a bit longer. I don’t like the look of that.” Wyome pointed to the totem in their path and shivered. The image was not grotesque, but—like the carving outside the Widows’ Hollow—something about it unsettled her.
The path curved behind a copse of sturdy hardwoods a hundred strides beyond the totem. After the turn, Alo and Wyome saw the settlement. was larger than the widows’ hollow, with a proper palisade like the southern village. A handful of men and women worked a field cleared of trees, hunched over rows of sprouting plants.
