[FICTION] Tales from Port Astor | Fires Along the Marches

     You can see them from the inner banks of the Athabaskan, a million small flames that shimmer like dying stars just beyond the water. They exist apart from the angry red-lit city of Port Astor, and still in its shadow. They are campfires of the great diaspora that clings to the edges of civilization, holding onto the last vestiges of the world they know. Beyond them, the unyielding wilds holding the unknown. The tents do not move on, and may never do so, forever in a stasis. Decaying tents, ever-expanding middens, and debris of their humanity for them to stew in. They camp alone, together. Not a single force, but a patch-work quilt of desperate vignettes; unable to afford proper housing, lost jobs and futures, those fleeing abuse only to find more over the horizon, and those suffering form their own abuses. They are drawn here, to this place, like they heed an unheard call. A dread horn that calls to those who have known misery in their heart, and cannot dream of better tomorrows. This vast encampment is merely a stopping point for some before they eventually become disseminated into the city proper, but for many more, this place is their end. Unknowable lifetimes consumed in the mass, and unknowable still are the lives on the verge of being lost.

    People from the city have tried, and sometimes try again, to penetrate the walls of nylon, tarp, and debris, but never make it very far. They are repelled, like foreigners interfacing with a culture that speaks an unknown language. They do not belong in the land they interject themselves into, and are treated as such. Sometimes, murmurs and whispers escape the camps; of beasts hidden in the forms of men, hidden warrens that dig far into the earth, unseen from the gaze of the Sun, of curious courts judging those found wanting, and those offering a way out for prices too high to be entertained by anyone but those who live within.

    All of these things, and maybe none of them, are true. Words endlessly circulated in the long nights of Port Astor by those who have never known the world across the Channel. Still, day-by-day, the encampment grows like a feudal army gathering at their lords call. For what reason they gather it is not known, by gathering they are.