Nine Days Without Sunrise
A world by Ari Weaver
Nine Days Without Sunrise
Nine days ago the sun didn't come up over the valley of Vârful, and it still hasn't. Two hours up the mountain road the morning starts again at a line you can walk through. Down here the church bell can't be allowed to stop, lamp oil sells for fourteen times what it did, the dead knock at their old windows, and the wolves have started to talk. One woman in town knows why, and she hasn't told anyone.
Playing as Traveler·
The big bell at St. Paraschiva's rings six, which means it's morning, though the sky over Vârful is as black and starry as it was at midnight. The square fills up anyway. People come out of every lane with their lanterns turned down low to save oil, and the frost on the cobbles crunches under their boots.
Boyar Costache's cart stands by the well with two of his men on the tailboard and a row of clay jugs behind them. One of them calls it out again. Seventy pennies a jug, and no credit. A woman with a baby on her hip tells him she paid five for the same jug at harvest. He tells her it isn't harvest anymore. Somebody behind her says the maize in the lower fields has gone black on the stalk, and nobody answers that.
On the church steps Father Grigore is chalking names onto the door for the bell rota, his cassock grey with candle wax at the cuffs. The small bell keeps up its beat over all of it, one stroke and then a slow count of ten before the next. Vasile the cooper comes down out of the tower shaking out his arms.
Grigore spots you and points the chalk at you. “You. You've got two hands and you're not doing anything with them. Vasile's done, and if that bell stops again I am not going to be the one who explains it to everybody. One hour. You can count to ten, can't you?”
The ninth bell1 of 3