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Sun and wind screamed round about tethered
leather wraps hedging Lehhre stolid in his stance atop New Cliff. Sun and wind, and
screams too long since mattered. Won and abraded in body, much as sands and water ware
stone or rock left bare, scarred deep faults, yet polished; Lehhre believed. Bare,
scarred, but still, like the rock or stone polished by sand, cleansed by water, and enduring;
this was his heart, his depth; Lehhre believed. Lehhre believed. And finally, so did
the People. The People. The People who, when poised without hope, so utterly
poised, frozen without hope before, now believed.
To the horizon spread once familiar lands appearing now insipid in their brown. Curving with
the globe to the brackish sky so laden, a relative display from his perch on the heights of New
Cliff his ancestors never knew, there below, below the young cliffs so jagged and new, there below,
where puffs of blinding white against fields of green brush spread meadow low should warm his
barbate countenance from brilliant woolen backs, there below where nothing grazed. Nothing
grazed, but Lehhre's memories on high; Lehhre remembered.
And Lehhre remembered a familiar squawk high overhead should bring flushed jubilense to his pate on
a morning such as this; bird awing aloft, but the avian of his world long ago it seems had foregone
the wing in the thinning air, and their frail, porous bones had left them crippled feed as they
scavenged the steppe. Evolutions epochal pace had cheated those birds, but Lehhre remembered
their royal place, the smiles they brought his youth, and he smiled, and would always
remember. These were small things he would sadly remember; they were old things now, they
were memories. But Lehhre would carry with him for a thousand generations, and with all his
being he would teach his kind his memories, he would teach the ships his memories, he would teach
the worlds his memories; the past, and his memories of flush cheer, and sun, and wind, and sand,
and water flowing so tomorrow should be a trail of prosperity and hope into the future, and
memories the past.
So Lehhre cupped his respirator to his chaffed face, drew deeply of pressurized
gases, turned from New Cliff with his memories, his tradition, his smiles, and not to look
back, he moved swiftly now to join the People who now believed; he joined the People to leave
this world.
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