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Unto the Ages: Chapter 137
🕑 Added 2024-11-20 15:04:10 +0000 UTCA month and a half from when Mita received the vision from the ancient wisp, Grud’s household, holdings, wives, children, and extended family were all secured or well on the way to being so. It was time for the big reveal.
That day, Mita did as she usually does, got an extra hard morning romp with Grud for good luck, had breakfast with the harem and children, went to attend to some of the sick and wounded, and finally moved to the center of the large shaman’s hut where many other shamans from in and out of the tribe were.
After sitting down to commune with the spirits, or in other words, the surrounding wisps, Mita confirmed the ancient wisp was nearby and pretended to go into a trance. After a few minutes of pretending, she released an exaggerated pained gasp loud enough to draw the attention of the shamans around as she leaned forward and supported herself against the ground.
Soon she was surrounded by shamans, the women shamans shooing the men away to give Mita space. “Great Seer! Are you ok? What happened?” an older woman shaman asked as she knelt down beside Mita while stroking her back.
Mita pretended to catch her breath and stammer out, “Vision… from the spirits… great calamity comes… a winter that will last many years.”
What Mita said got the surrounding shamans very worried, and they started talking among themselves while they waited for Mita to say anything else. When nothing but more panting came forth, they did the next best thing, they had to see the vision for themselves.
Most of the surrounding shamans went back to try to contact the spirits to reveal more of what Mita had just said.
As the shamans got into their trance to beseech the spirits to give them visions of the coming calamity, they all connected to the younger wisps. In contrast, the ancient wisp ignored the shamans' attempt to contact it. Still, after a while of the shamans requesting information about a great calamity or long winter to come, all of the younger wisps were clueless about what the shamans were talking about and started asking around between wisps.
Eventually, one of the younger wisps queried the ancient wisp, and seeing that it was its kin that was asking, it freely showed them what it showed Mita, and these visions eventually made their way back to the shamans.
But of course, their human minds were not like Mita’s and they could only comprehend different small fractions of what the wisps showed them. But there was power in numbers, and when all the shamans broke out of their trance, they got together to start filling in the blanks for each other.
The shamans sent out their apprentices to gather as many drawing charcoal and planks as they could, and when the assistants got back, they started drawing or writing out what they saw in their vision, and when they all recorded their visions, they started shifting their visions around to create the vision’s timeline. With a little help from Mita giving a few helpful suggestions, they got close enough to the answer. In short, within one to two years, a ten-year or more winter was coming, and they needed to prepare.
Shamans from other tribes literally dashed out of the shaman’s hut toward the stable and tossed money to the stable hands to get a horse so they could ride back to warn their tribe, or they sent their apprentices to do so.
While the shamans who stayed behind were still in an uproar about the vision they put together, Mita excused herself with the excuse that she needed to warn her husband, the chieftain.
When Mita made it back to Grud’s office, she waved his assistant, Zuka, out of the room so she could have some personal time with Grud.
“Is it done? How did it go?” Grud asked.
“It went off perfectly, they all bought it and our guest shamans are already on the way back home to warn their tribes.” Mita said as sauntered over to Grud and pulled out his dick before straddling and riding his dick for a morning quicky.
***
It did not even take an hour before the news spread like wildfire throughout the Rock Claw Chiefdom, and everyone was out on the streets borderline mobbing anyone who was selling preserved foods or warm clothes.
This meant that all the traveling traders were cleared out of all their stock in short order and they quickly returned back to their tribes with news of the impending calamity.
As the citizens of Grud’s tribe were in a frenzy trying to stock up and horde as many supplies as they could afford. Grud’s family businesses came in clutch with an abundance of stock for anything needed, cured meats, dried fish, Uchi’s new feather-stuffed quilted clothes and blankets, and anything his family could think up that could be used in winter.
To make it easier on the people of his tribe, Grud instructed his family to sell barely above cost and made sure to keep the traveling traders from bulk-purchasing supplies meant for his tribe.
From that moment on, the atmosphere of the tribe turned into one that concentrated on gathering and production of supplies, even the young and old were kept busy with less strenuous work while every able-body was put to work, there was much to do and only a few months before the first snow comes.
As the news of the impending disaster spread far and wide, even to the Newlands, trade suffered as no tribe was willing to export anything that could be eaten, keep a person warm, or be used in winter. Now, the only things that made it between tribes and villages were purely raw materials and luxury goods, everything else was for readying themselves for the coming winter.
A few months later, Grud’s sons who turned to the sea for their livelihood, managed to rope in a few more of their younger siblings and friends to expand their fishing enterprise and had now expanded their fleet of phishing boats to a total of ten, and with each boat that came out, the builders and carpenters who were commissioned for the first boat could be considered fulltime shipwrights, made small incremental improvements with each boat built.
Seeing Grud’s sons' success, other families within the tribe also started turning to the sea. It did not take long for the shipwrights to be inundated with more commissions than they could handle, which in turn, opened more job opportunities for those who wanted to get into building boats.
***
As the saying “Time passes quickly when you're occupied” goes, before anyone knew it, autumn came to an end, and the first flakes of snow fell. All over both continents, everyone felt a sense of dread as they hunkered down, not knowing if they would see spring come.
To everyone's relief, the season changed and spring came, but everyone noticed that this winter was more than a month longer than it was in previous years, which did not bode well for the following year if the trend continued.
Seeing that they had another year to prepare, Grud took the opportunity to make more preparations. He managed to convince most of the farming families to let their sons split off and start their own farms, promising that he will lease their sons’ land and clear it for them. In exchange they will concentrate on cultivating cereal crops, and he will get 80% of the harvest to keep as emergency rations for the tribe. if they were lucky they could get two harvests before the first snow falls.
The families readily took the deal and Grud immediately got to work. With his spear, Grud felled threes for a full week as an army of men and horses followed in his wake, hauling off the logs and uprooting the stumps to allow the farmers to come and prepare the land for farming.
As for all those felled threes, they were used to build a few warehouses to store the future grains.
With this second year of his tribe in full production mode, the Rock Claw Chiefdom actually had supplus of preserved foodstuff, especially because the fishing boats was able to bring in fresh fish throughout winter.
They had to fish closer to the coral reef drop off due to the fish moving to deeper waters to get away from the cold, but it did little to decrease their yield.
This meant, unlike the inland tribes who had to send their hunters to hunt what scarce amount of prey they could find for fresh meat, coastal tribes like Grud's had access to fresh seafood and the tribe as a whole barely touched their preserved foods.
So Ida took this as a business opportunity and brought up the preserves from the tribe and sold said preserves to nearby tribes, making her a tidy profit.
***
The next winter caught everyone by surprise when it started snowing in early autumn, which was unfortunate for Grud's farmers because they were forced to harvest the second batch of cereal crops before they were fully ripe. However, they were still edible, so it was not a total loss.
All the tribes once again hunkered down for winter and hoped that they would survive to see another spring, even if it was many years away.
***
Three years passed by, and it was pretty much confirmed that they were experiencing the long winter, as the snow had not melted in three years.
Quite a few things happened in these few years, the first of which was that Grud’s tribe was now exporting frozen fish to nearby tribes, all they needed to do was catch them and leave them out in the open on a rack for nature to freeze it.
This course of action also made Sonu very happy because the horses now had a use for making deliveries and clearing the nearby trade routes of snow, so they earned their keep and did not need to be sold to reduce the number of mouths to feed.
During this time, the fishing boats also found a new source of food from the sea, it was sea kelp. From time to time, people would find some washed up on the beach and when they tasted it, it turned out to be delicious, but they could never find where it came from, that was until two years ago.
When one of the fishing boats decided to explore for better fishing spots along the coast, and when they cast their nets, the only thing they dredged up was delicious sea kelp, so they requested Grud to come along to take a look, seeing that he was the only one who could see underwater without saltwater stinking their eyes, and what Grud saw down there, was a whole underwater forest of kelp.
So Grud used this opportunity to dive and harvest kelp until the boat was full. When the rest of the tribe heard of the new discovery they were ecstatic that they had a new variety of food, and some of the fishing families decided to pivot their profession from fishing to harvesting kelp. It took a whilebut eventually, they managed to tolerate the stinking sensation of seawater in their eyes long enough for them to harvest the kelp.
Even in this harsh never-ending winter, the Rock Claw Chiefdom trived.
***
It was the fourth year of the long winter, and it was business as usual, that was until a rider rushed to the gates saying he had a message for the chieftain.
As the rider left Grud’s office, Nita came into Grud’s office with a hot cup of tea and noticed Grud’s deathly serious face, she placed the hop down and sat beside Grud, “What's wrong dear?”
Grud placed his hand on Nita’s and said, “One of our sons, Zogor, is dead. They were attacked, and his wife and child managed to escape to a nearby friendly tribe to send a warning.”
Comments
Hildisvini
Damn ! Nice chapter
