Ashken awoke to a loud banging. He was disoriented for a few moments. His room was very dark and the bed felt different. He was surrounded by large and small hard shapes. He started pushing them away from him, trying to clear space and find the top of whatever he was buried under. He felt trapped, trapped as if he was stuck in his room. And then it came back to him: the Moderns’ door was not working. He had to escape. The Moderns’ door was still closed, and he had tried everything to get out. He tried to think of what he had not thrown against the door yet: perhaps these hard shapes, the Moderns’ other machines that he had been scattered around his room. There must be something, some way to open the door. His heart started racing at the thought of being trapped in the room forever, trapped by the very machines that his father had defended for so long. And then it all came flooding back, the remainder of the previous day that sleep had mercifully stolen from his brain. He remembered. His father would no longer be there to defend those machines from the enclave. His father was dead. Ashken longed to return to the terror he had experienced upon waking. The fear of being trapped in his room suddenly felt safer to him, a better reality than where he found himself. The terror of not seeing Tenos again was much worse a punishment than anything else he could think of, anything to do with the world or the Modern’s house or their machines, or even the words his father had left him. He decided then and there, in Jessica’s bed, he would fulfill his father’s final wishes.

The banging had not stopped after he lived through the memories of his father’s death again. The banging seemed only a few rooms away. It was a methodical thumping, four bangs in a row, a brief pause, and then four more bangs. The wooden walls shook with each bang. Otherwise there was silence in the Friar’s house. Ashken did not hear anyone walking around or talking, and he did not hear anyone moving to answer or investigate the knocking sound. It was strange. There was no reason that the Friar’s or Moses or that abominable giant should not be at in the house. Why would they leave without waking him?

Ashken felt his way along the bed and past the nightstand to where he had seen Jessica close the window shade. He felt along the wall and banged his knee into something hard and wooden. He finally felt the leather-like material of the shade. He found the hook at the bottom of the shade, and the shade opened smoothly. The Moderns’ shades were wonderful machines. When closed, the shades suctioned themselves to the very edges of the opening, creating a seal that did not allow light or noise into the room. There was a time in his own house where he could open the shades by just speaking. The voice machines had failed some years ago, and like in the Friar’s house, Ashken had to use the small knob at the bottom of the shade to open the shades scattered about his living room.

As the shade opened, light flooded into the room. The day was one of those strange days where the sun shone, and yet Ashken clearly saw light rain hitting the puddles outside the window. The glass on the window had not been blown properly, and because of the imperfections in its construction, it bulged and bent in the light, creating a strange view of the wet streets and causing the houses to appear distorted and distended. When Ashken looked around the room, he could not help but shake his head. Jessica was a wonderful person, but she was not the most organized of people. Looking back at the path to the bed, he was not sure how he had arrived at the window with only one bump to his knee.

Ashken left the room and walked into the kitchen. “Hello, anyone there,” he said, quieter than he had planned. Something felt wrong. The house was empty, and the knocking continued. At the kitchen table, Ashken found his father’s cane, and grabbed it before walking to the front door. “Hello?” he asked again. He pulled the door open and was greeted to Joseph’s huge back. Joseph was drumming the doorframe with his large fingers, a staccato four-piece pattern. Ashken resisted swinging the cane at Joseph’s back, and instead used it to nudge him to move and see what he was looking at. Joseph turned around and stepped aside.

“We’ve come for him,” a woman was saying. Ashken blinked in the sudden light of the sun. A light drizzle fell on him and when he looked to the sky he could see blue patches surrounded by ominous black clouds. It was a strange day indeed. Ashken saw Moses standing on the other side of Joseph. He was watching Jeremiah talk to a woman who was flanked by militiamen. Jessica and Samantha stood next to and a few paces back from Jeremiah. Jessica was holding Samantha’s hands, standing slightly behind her, as if Samantha was trying to protect her daughter with her own body.

“Ah, there is his son,” the woman said. “And now you’re going to tell me that his father is not in there as well, I suppose?”

The woman was Deidre Diamond. Her voice was deep and rough but with a strong feminine, almost snake-like, quality. She was a large woman. The three militiamen that flanked her on all sides barely came up to her shoulders. She wore a simple black robe, which reminded Ashken of the robe Moses wore, except that it was made of a thinner material. Around her neck she wore a thick iron necklace with a large circle inside a second circle hanging from its end.

Ashken stepped forward before Jeremiah could respond. “My father is dead,” he said. He waited for a reaction from Deidre, but she stood there glaring at him. Ashken expected disbelief or excitement, but Deidre’s reaction took him by surprise. She looked concerned.

“What do you mean he’s dead?” Deidre asked, seemingly confused.

“We were attacked on the road travelling to the Friar’s house yesterday,” Ashken said. He was surprised that the word had not reached them yet. The enclave was large and travel was difficult, but for all its difficulties, rumors and evil deeds flew fastest between the different parts of the enclave. Ashken had assumed he would not be delivering word of his father’s death to many people. He actually did not know why he should have expected it. “He was killed by a sword strike.”

Nobody spoke. Deidre looked to Jeremiah, who had taken a step back and away from Deidre and the militiamen. Moses moved to Ashken’s other side. Ashken wished Moses would stand between him and Joseph, who to Ashken was a bigger threat than the scores of militiamen, but Moses thought otherwise, and pulled Ashken back a bit more towards the house. Ashken did not understand what was going on. The militiamen squeezed the hilts of their batons eagerly, looking like they were chomping at the bit to see action or exact revenge for something.

There were more militiamen than Ashken had first noticed. At least twenty-five men with batons stood arrayed behind Deidre. Dispersed amongst the militiamen were shooters. They held long metal objects of Moderns make that fired metal ammunition. Ashken had never seen shooters except on the walls guarding Washen’s Enclave from outsiders. The enclave’s governing council kept the shooters under strict control. There had never been a need to bring the shooters off the wall and threaten the people within the enclave. While there were petty theft and revenge murders, there had never been organized violence within the enclave’s borders. Ashken realized the foolishness of his statement when he thought back to the highwayman that accosted and killed his father the previous day. Things were changing in Washen’s Enclave, things he did not understand and could not explain. There was a violent air to the confrontation that he had not realized before. Deidre and the militiamen looked like they were looking for revenge. Ashken saw that Jeremiah was not comfortable where he stood. His canvas shirt was covered with sweat and he kept eyeing the militiamen and the shooters. He looked ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

“What is going on here?” Ashken asked. “What are you looking for, Deidre?” Ashken had never met Deidre before. He had been to some of her rallies in the center of the enclave, mostly because it angered his father when he attended the rallies. She was a very good and powerful speaker, and she had some reasonable ideas. She wanted to open up trade with the world outside of the enclave, which made a lot of sense to Ashken. For too long the enclave had relied solely on what it could produce. The enclave traded only for necessities it could not produce within its walls, like citrus fruit and metals that could be worked into farming tools. But Deidre also advocated for the destruction of all Moderns’ machinery, which made the fact that she walked ahead of militiamen carrying Moderns’ shooters in the middle of the enclave seem rather hypocritical. Deidre was on the governing council, but she was not a powerful figure, at least within the government. She did not come from an old family, and few people knew exactly what family she did come from. In a place where one’s identity was tied in to one’s family, to be without a known family was to be almost not part of society, or, even worse in the enclave, an outsider who had breached the walls.

Ashken had never seen Deidre up close. Her rallies usually brought in hundreds of people, and Ashken would hang out near the back of the rallies. While he wanted to rebel against his father, he never wanted to cause him any public embarrassment, and being spotted at one of Deidre Diamond’s rallies was an easy way for rumors to start about his loyalty to his family and father. Deidre’s wore a lot of makeup on her face. From a distance, the makeup made her look young. Now that he saw her up close, Ashken could not determine whether she was young or old. All he could say was that she wore a lot of makeup to either cover up age or flaws. There was not much makeup left in the enclave. The farmers and prospectors did not produce or find the proper plants or minerals to grind into coloring. Deidre must have been using Moderns’ paintings for color, another hypocritical aspect of her stance on the Moderns’ machines.

It was Deidre’s hands that drew Ashken’s eyes, however. She wore tight-fitting black gloves, but there was a bit of skin peeking out between her gloves and her dress’s sleeves. The skin was very light colored, much lighter than her face. It reminded him of the color of Joseph and Moses’s skin.

He looked first at Moses and then at Joseph. Moses concentrated on the militiamen. His eyes moved rapidly across the crowd. Ashken figured he was determining the best way to handle this situation if things became bad. Moses had taught Ashken that the most important part of any fight was what occurred before the fight began. It was never about planning what would happen during the fight since fights could never be planned before they occurred: What happened would happen, and you a combatant had to react to each happening. Instead the planning was about measuring the strengths, weaknesses, positions, and possible attitudes of all the participants. If you knew at least the starting points and places, then a combatant could react with more confidence when he had to make a split decision during the fight.

Joseph, on the other hand, did not look like he was preparing for anything. He kept drumming his fingers against the door post. If anything, he looked bored and disinterested in what was happening across from him. Ashken wondered what had even brought him outside of the house. He was not even carrying his pole arm, which to Ashken was a good thing. It gave Moses a better chance to cut him down before he could get his huge hands around Ashken or the Friar’s.

Word count: 2,091

Words remaining: 27,481 (words so far: 22,519)

Thoughts: Today did not flow as well as yesterday, at least in the beginning. I kept starting and stopping, and the siren’s call of the internet was, well, siren-y. But things happened, and they happened of their own volition. It’s not necessarily what I had planned, but when the drumming starts, what am I supposed to do? March forward, of course. I did start figuring things out toward the end, though. It's weird how things start becoming clear after I've written them--like some of the foreshadowing that I had no idea what it meant until now. Strange things are afoot in Washen's Enclave. Strange things.