Title: I'm pretending not to see them
Fandom: Earth's Children
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 322
Summary: Death continues on, much like life. Ayla is practiced at both.


She secures the fibers with a final sharp twist, then runs her fingers testingly over the dip and curve of the finished product. It is well woven, tight and nigh waterproof. This basket, Ayla decides, she will use for medicine plant collecting. Uba would like it. Her own container has grown worn, and with clan and child to attend to she has not replaced it.

Still, it is not a gift she could accept from a ghost, though the offerings of small animals go unremarked, so long as Ayla is not in sight when they are discovered. Hunters can not make the usual trek to the steppes, not when the entire clan is on the move and needs the protection of their spears, and even a little meat to pad the stores for the coming winter is better than none. Ayla may be dead, but she is still a mother, still a sister.

Wet and grey, the weather outside her small cave continues. When it ends, she will go to where the Clan is sheltering beneath a slightly larger outcropping. Though they had burned what things she had not taken with her, as is done when a person is death cursed, she had not left but had lingered long enough nearby that even Broud had accepted they could not drive her away. And perhaps that brings bad luck, but she thinks - to herself only, for who else is listening? - that spirits have always rather favoured her, though her existence breaks with tradition often enough. She will, eventually, seek out the Others, as she had promised, but not now. Not this season, when her son and her sister and the only people she has ever known are facing into a winter without the shelter of a proper cave, the protection of their totems tethered to them only by daily intercession of their Mog-ur, who is not and never will be Creb.