[SEPT 16] [ORIGINAL] [A GRIT, A GRINDSTONE]

[fulselden.livejournal.com]

Title: A Grit, a Grindstone
Day/Theme: September 16: 'you are due to be transformed’
Series: Original
Characters: One OC.
Rating/Warnings: G

Aresa could never have said, afterwards, what prompted him to refuse his turn in the Mill. Very few people from his background ever got within two levels of the upper ring, after all, let alone earned enough credit to qualify for the Mill itself.

When he had been a grey-kneed boy, scrabbling for offworld trinkets dropped by hurrying travellers, taunting the customs officers from behind a delegation of solemn Tann Acolytes, mouthing strange new words to himself as he leant with elaborate ease beside the falafel stands, he had never even imagined the upper ring. Everyone knew just what it was like, after all: it was the star of every telenovela, the setting for every advert and the hook in every feed.

But then they closed the ports and the world became smaller. Selling foreign baubles for their exotic plastics or their cute-pings became a thing of the past. The lower rings got smellier. Things collected: rubbish, street-venders, cults, people. A young man could go a long way, true, but now he could no longer go out, he could only go up.

So Aresa did. A paunchy merchant with a smiling, flitting wife, two sleek-haired daughters, he leant back against his desk in the upper ring, hands cupping a bowl of miso broth, dark particulate clouds curling up and sinking in the bowl, in the traffic outside the window. He felt the presence of the mill-token on the table behind him. He imagined being young again as he had never imagined being rich.

And he remembered how, when he had been young and poor, he had longed to hold new words in his mouth, to leave, to never see the pictures of the upper ring, its fine houses, its beautiful wives, its dutiful daughters, again. He drank his broth. Later, he let the token fall down out of the window, through the circling, soaring crowds.