After the Dancing comes the Haymaking Month, the Harvest Month, and the Slaughter Month.

With each passing month, as we get closer to the Storms, the golden joy of the Feasting and Dancing months fades steadily, until it is just a candlelight of warmth in our memories.

The first rains begin in the Month of the Earth, a cold warning to retreat inside, to bar our doors, to patch our walls and windows, lest the toxic liquid seep in and corrode our skin, stripping it bare, exposing bone to likewise be pockmarked and then washed away.

The skies stay grey, no sun lends even cold comfort, but there is still some time outside, hours here or there where the rains stop briefly, just long enough to take care of our livestock, to visit the silos, to get water from the cisterns.

You cannot count on those moments though — some years the Storms have descended from the mountains like Gods of old, ravaging our village, knocking down homes and burying people beneath mud and stone.

They tear through our streets, wailing like the souls of the Exiled, winds strong enough to flay skin from bone.

In those times, people who are ill prepared face the choice of starving to death in hopes of a break in the ceaseless thunder — a long, painful death — or they go willingly into the streets, dragging their emaciated bodies into the path of the Storm, where at least they will go quickly.

As Keeper, I cannot save either. Those souls are lost to me and our village forever; if I am not there when they pass, or soon enough after that I can still hear their soulsong, then I cannot guide them home.

The last month of our year is the Month of the Crone — a cold, lonely month where the Storms are at their fiercest, where you cannot leave your home, even a footstep outside, or you will be ripped limb from limb and flung to the four corners of the bone walls.

There is no help and no hope in the Month of the Crone.

It is the turning of the year, when the days are at their shortest and darkest, the death of what has been and the birth of what is to come, all at once.

And we are locked inside for the whole of it, wondering if life still exists somewhere outside of the walls of our homes, wondering if anyone is there, if we have somehow descended into hell without knowing.

The minutes are hours and hours are days in the Month of the Crone, and the only ceasing from the howling winds and relentless downpour is every night, in the midnight hour, when there is a sudden and hollow silence which echoes through the village Streets.

Long enough that your pulse becomes a drum beat, that your shallow breaths become shuddering noises, long enough, every single time, that you allow yourself a moment of hope, of maybe .

Maybe it has stopped. Maybe we’ve been forgiven.

Maybe I can go outside, replenish our stores…

maybe, maybe, maybe. But it is never true; inevitably, a slow drip-drip-drip starts, and the winds increase, and we are swallowed again by the Storms.

Every year, during the Crone’s Month, we lose people to the Storm.

People who fall prey to the promise of maybe, people who are driven mad by the constant sound, or whose despair is so great that they walk into the streets, seeking relief.

Every year there are souls, gone forever, that I cannot save.

And every year I relive, over and over again, my worst memory, my living nightmare, from the last Storm season I spent with my mother.

I was nine.

Nine.

Still a child.

Too young to hear flesh melting from bone.

But gifts are a strange thing in our world.

And my gift came too soon.

Help me! Please Keeper, help me! Keeper! The scream is a plume of smoke in my memory, curling around me, ash-thick on my tongue.

Please Keeper !

Please Keeper, the bones around me whisper, vibrating deep in my marrow, eerily overlaying the shrieking in my mind. Come back now. The Council is searching. Curl closer to us. We will shield you.

I jerk my head up and look from my shadow to see Raek and his followers scanning the crowd, and fold my body tighter into the bend in the wall.

Raek’s face darkens with each passing second, and Nickolas steps up beside him, hand playing tellingly with the small knife tucked in at his side.

It is clear they are looking for someone.

Perhaps they catch a glint of my hair on the black stone wall, because Raek’s eyes narrow unerringly in my direction, but before he can move forward, the Father’s thunderstorm voice calls them to attention, and, after an agonizingly long moment, both Raek and Nickolas turn away.

The Hunters reluctantly pull away from their families arms and also follow, leaving a field of smiling faces behind them.

There is cheery chatter amongst the women and children left in the courtyard, a joyful cacophony, like spring birds in the fallow fields.

But there is an edge to it, a sharpness of lemongrass and rosemary.

It is flavored happiness; so much depends on what happened in the hunt.

So many lives are poised on the cliff’s edge, waiting to see if they will make it through the Storms. The women in their practiced way are taking comfort where they find it, smiling at the children and caressing their small heads with tender hands, but when they meet each other’s eyes, the edges fray into a frenetic mask.

What will happen? They seem to say. And will it be enough?

From my corner, though, I can see the lightness of the bags tied around the men’s shoulders, and know I did not hear the wagon wheels creaking with weight.

So no.

No.

It will not be enough.

And the Storms are coming.