Cracking the Windtraps

[Unseelie]

There had been time to re-dig the tunnels, against the storms. The mirror of the village paths above, carved into the ground. She dug them out by hand, without the aid of automation. Her ship had died, engines and filters clogged by the fine sand on the wind.

The machines she had brought had all succumbed, first the objects from other worlds, with open cracks and plastic oyster-shell cases. Such things, here, filled with sand. The sand got into the crevices, filled the buttons and packed itself into the layers of capacitive screens. The wind blew it lazily across the world, and even re-painted buildings, with fresh seals along their doors, unlived in, they collected dust as well. They filled up, and filled up...and after a while...

Catalina's dedication to her family's ruins turned to despair, and she fled underground. The houses sat on one side of the dunes, on another side of dead places..and things which had been planted in hope withered and died.

The oranges never grew.

And she turned to the tunnels, and dug them out with a dumb shovel, nothing else working. She lived off of long stockpiles of packed materials, and above her, on the edges of her system of tunnels turned crypts, she sqatted in a land once wet, once engineered to alluvial, dried under the sun as the wind wicked moisture away and parched it dead.

And again, the windtraps were bent back against the wind...for it would take more than one, lonesome girl, to fight the march of wind and sand.

But in the tunnels, things grew.

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