By the time they had loaded the carriage for their overnight stay, the sun was well on its way toward the horizon. Moses had driven the carriage to the front of the house. Attached to the front of the carriage was what had once been a regal and powerful horse. The horse had seen better days. Its white mane had grayed and yellowed over the years. Its shoulders and chest, while still large and powerful, had grown knotted with the veins standing out prominently. The horse waited patiently under Moses’ care.

There were not many horses left in Washen’s Enclave. His father liked to tell the story of when people moved effortless in the enclave on the Moderns’ machines. He claimed to have ridden one when he was a child. They were rounded carriages, large enough to hold four people, and they did not need a horse to pull them. They floated above the ground and zipped along a preset path. By the time Tenos Liebowitz was of age, the horseless carriages had been long gone. Ashken heard only the stories of the carriages. As the Moderns’ machines did when they no longer worked, all remnants of the horseless carriages had long since disappeared, turning to white dust, which would have blown away in the wind. Ashken dreamed of the machines, but like most of the content of his dreams, he was not sure he could ever believe what he saw.

The Liebowitz’s house was the largest home in the area. It had a garden area that was three times the size of the house itself, leaving lots of space between it and its nearest neighbors. The garden had not been kept up, and the overgrowth threatened to overtake the land around the house. The farmers in the area have eyed the land surrounding the house for many years. They respected Tenos’s position enough to stay away from developing the land. The only clear path leading away from the house was the one the carriage took. Moses spent a day each week with his sword breaking the path to ensure the carriage would have a way to leave from the house to the main road that led through Washen’s Enclave.

The house itself was a large gray box with no visible windows or doors from the outside. This was an illusion. The house had many second story windows and three doors. The doors and windows were only visible near the house. From a short distance away, the house looked smoothly uniform, and flat gray. On cloudy days, the house seemed to disappear into the clouds.

The house’s two stories towered over the neighbor’s wooden homes. When Ashken was young, his house was only one of many Moderns’ buildings in the neighborhood. Now, when Ashken looked around, he realized that the Liebowitz’s house was the only remaining Moderns’ house. He had watched the neighboring Moderns’ houses go abandon and fall into disarray, as if by nobody living there, the house lost its desire to fix itself and exist. The houses, like the door before it, broke themselves down once they fell into disarray, leaving only white powder, which the first rains would wash away. Now, the surrounding houses were made of wood, stable if not large, and surrounded by farmland and mud. And in every way, Ashken knew, dead as the wood used to build them.

Much of the clearing around the houses had once been made of concrete roads. At first trees and then sharp tools broke up the concrete and the townspeople carted the concrete away to form the foundation and floors of the newer wooden structures. Farmland pushed toward the Liebowitz’s house. Ashken had witnessed Moses scaring away landless farmers who eyed the large acreage with their farming tools and hungry eyes.

Only one road remained that led away from the Liebowitz’s house. Once Tenos and Ashken were seated in the back of the carriage, Moses climbed on top of the carriage and slapped the reins. The carriage jerked forward with a jingle. Ashken watched the farms pass out through the window. The neighbors living close by did not give the carriage a second look, having seen it many times pass. But as they went further, more people came out to see the carriage pass. No horseless carriages remained in the enclave, and only a handful of horses. Animals were hard to come by in Washen’s Enclave. The few traders who did offer horses at the enclave’s gates required excessive amounts of goods to trade for the livestock. Ashken was not sure how valuable the animals were outside the enclave, but that his father even had a horse, the other townspeople saw him as wealthy beyond measure.

The carriage did not move quickly through town. Many of the roads they traveled did not see more than a handful of horses or carriages during a year. Transportation was one of the first casualties of relying on the Moderns’ machines. The roads, however, were still kept up by the neighborhoods. Much of the trader’s goods had to pass over these roads, and the farmers and townspeople knew that once the roads grew impassable, all their luxury goods would vanish with them.

“This is why we need more animal husbandry,” Tenos said. He was always discussing the improvements he wanted to see in the enclave. He knew better than to completely rely on the Moderns’ machines. What he mostly discussed was not the use of their machines, but the discovering of their secrets. Ashken had doubts about whether those secrets were discoverable. Perhaps the Moderns’ had access to stuff that the people left today could never know about.

“Do you think having more horses will help the Washen’s Enclave grow?” Ashken asked. He was not much interested in politics, but he was interested in hearing his father talk. They had a long journey ahead of them to the Friar’s house, and Ashken thought a lengthy lecture would be the perfect background noise to ease him into a quick nap. While riveting to most people, Ashken had heard his father’s theories and storytelling many times, and while he still enjoyed listening to them, he had learned the knack of turning the words off, letting the musical notes of his father’s voice wash over him without listening to the content.

His father obliged and began talking about the future of Washen’s Enclave, and his hopes that the people would embrace animal husbandry as a way of sustaining the farming with less work, which would leave the people more time to learn about the Moderns’ machines. The excitement of the morning had long since worn off for Ashken, and he knew there would be nothing like a nap on the carriage to leave him refreshed for his meeting with Jessica later. The regular jiggling of the chains, and Moses’ sure hand with the whip and reins, fed in nicely with his father’s cadenced talk. He did not think his father or anyone know about his feelings toward Jessica. He did not even think Jessica knew—but he did go out of his way to see her at the lessons. Ashken himself was not sure of his feelings towards Jessica. She was much different from the other girls she met. And no matter what the other children thought, he could not hold against her her fascination with the Moderns’ machines. Outside of Tenos, she had the largest collection of their machines in the entire town.

Ashken woke with a jolt to the sounds of the carriage skidding to a stop. Ashken found himself on his father’s bench, with his father on the ground in the carriage, trying to pull himself up. Ashken was not sure how long he had been asleep, but he did not think it had been long. He heard voices outside the carriage. He reached down and pulled his father off the ground and to the seat next to him, positioning his father so Ashken was closer to the door in case someone tried to get in. He did not think Moses would have made such a sudden stop unless something was wrong outside.

Washen’s Enclave was not the safest place to travel anymore. There was little travel between the different parts, and when strangers appeared, some of the locals became anxious, particularly the younger men, the ones who found farming not satisfying and their prospects of leaving their families’ farms not likely.

“We don’t want any trouble.” Ashken heard Moses say. His voice was calm but there was a sharp edge to it. It was the same edge he heard when Moses gave instructions in fighting to the local militia. The carriage bent forward as he felt Moses stand on the driver’s seat. Knowing Moses, Ashken was sure that he would not have drawn his sword yet. It was rare that something violent did not happen when he drew his sword, and Ashken did not think Moses enjoyed the violence. At least, Ashken hoped that Moses did not enjoy the violence.

“Wait here,” Ashken said to his father, patting him on the arm. His father tried to grab Ashken, but Ashken pulled away from his father’s weak grasp. He heard his father suppress a coughing fit. For once, Ashken did not need an excuse to put the fit out of his mind. He grabbed his father’s cane from the floor of the carriage, and opened the door to the carriage.

“Stay there,” Moses said to Ashken when he saw him. Ashken stepped out of the carriage and closed the door, holding the cane in front of his body, and between the carriage’s door and the men encircling the carriage. Ashken held the cane in two hands. He had carried the cane for his father many times, and it was well weighted. He had fantasized about using the cane as a weapon. In his fantasies, he was always wielding it as Moses wielded his sword, with expert touch and quick motions. He had not realized how slipper y the cane would become in his palms when he faced real people with it. He was barely able to keep hold of the cane as he looked out and around the carriage to see whom they faced.

Night had come while Ashken had slept in the carriage. The moon was mostly full and it lit the road well. Ashken was able to see the men surrounding the carriage. They did not have the look of farm boys as he had supposed in the carriage. He did not think the three men who stood across from him were even from Washen’s Enclave. They wore leather vests and held metal pipes, banging the pipes against their open hands. Not the farming types, at least not the farming types he had since in the enclave. They grinned but did not approach the carriage.

Moses was not paying any attention to the men near Ashken and the carriage. His focus was instead on the two figures in front of the carriage. One held a large pole with a curved sword attached to the top. A dark banner hung from the side of the pole. In the moonlight, it was difficult for Ashken to make out what the banner said. A small man stood next to the pole bearer.

Ashken was still standing on the step to the carriage. He rose on his tiptoes and looked closer at the two men in front of the carriage. If Moses was concerned only about those men, then there must be a reason. Upon closer look, he realized that the second man was not short. Instead, the man with the pole was huge. The pole itself must be over ten feet tall, and it seemed thin in his gargantuan hands.

“It’s us who are looking for the trouble,” the shorter man said, as if reading from an announcement. He pulled a rope up from the mud, and as the length of the rope pulled free of the mud, it revealed a blackened log in the middle of the road, a few feet behind where the carriage had come to a halt. It was then that Ashken realized why the carriage stopped where it did. The horse had caught its legs under the blackened log and had fallen. If it had not been for Moses’ quick thinking, the carriage would have been pulled up and over the fallen horse. The carriage had turned perpendicular to the horse, probably with the help of its hand brake.

“Who are you?” Moses asked.

“It’s us who will ask the questions,” the man responded. The men around the carriage laughed. Ashken could not see where they had stopped the carriage. Like most of the roads in Washen’s Enclave, mud and weeds had overrun it, and in the dim light, he could not see any houses or Moderns’ guideposts in the immediate area.

“It’s only that I need to know who to call on to collect your bodies when I’m done with you. I would hate to have the people around here take responsibility for your bodies. For a strange reason, they don’t seem to respect the corpses of robbers in these parts, and I’d hate to have desecrated corpses on my conscience.” Ashken had never heard Moses talk like this before. His bravado sounded almost beside the point, as if he was going through the motions but did not expect or care if much came of it. Ashken did not think the men would take his talk seriously.

“I guess we’ll see how the people of the enclave treat the corpses of their dead leader and his foolish bodyguard,” the man said. He waited a moment before issuing the order Ashken was dreading: “Kill them!”

Word count: 2,298

Words remaining: 41,497 (8,503 total words written)

Thoughts: I don’t know how many times I had to remind myself that this is only a first draft today. It wasn’t that I edited—I’ve outgrown that nuisance. It’s just that I can’t stand how terrible my writing is. I know it’s bad when I’m writing, but I keep putting one word in front of the next, taking the steps that I know bring me closer to my Marathon goal if not my real goal. I spend most of my fantasies on imaging rewriting my old stories, turning them into something they’re not. Okay, enough procrastinating. I’ve found the secret to word output: write on a computer with flaky internet access.