Modulo Chapter 8

Cross casts his mind back to growing up on Simuria and to meeting the mentor who became a father figure to him.

When the government razed the village shared by Cross and Maru, their parents perished in the fighting, pinned under their own caving home. In his final moment, their father cradled a plain rock as though it held great worth, a gesture Cross could not make sense of. Imprisonment for theft followed for the orphaned twins, until a Simurian named Dura, prodded into it by an elder, grudgingly took charge of them. The boys lunged at Dura on meeting him and were swatted aside without effort, but their fighting spirit entertained him enough to set them to labor on a canal. He tasked them with packing cages full of dug-up stones at the site and cautioned them never to lift any rock above the pit, orders the pair carried out keenly out of awe for his might. Dura told Maru, who asked, that the canal aimed to ease shipping between Deskunte and Shaama, which set Cross off, demanding to know why Rumelians ought to build anything to help the Deskuntes who had expelled them and slain their parents.

The canal had been on the table for ages, Dura replied, but Kalyan attacks kept halting it, sacred beasts that prey solely on Simurians of other tribes, which left the Rumelians as the only people who could raise it without danger. Cross dismissed the reply as a dodge, reminding Dura that the Deskuntes had banished his folk to the wastes, yet Dura made clear the canal would aid the Rumelians too, standing as a peace offering while channeling the Rumel River to enrich their soil and clean their water. Still unmoved, Cross quit showing up for work, and before long Dura and Maru came upon smashed cages and stones tossed into the canal. Reading the wreckage as sabotage by Rumelians who scorned his vision, Dura simply kept on. Cross then barged into the saboteurs' tent and went after their leader Osuki, and he was later found, battered, clearing the canal himself, having chosen to pitch in. Their joint toil carried on until Jabaloma brought word that the elders' council had blessed the project, throwing it open to everyone. Watching Osuki and his crew lend a hand, Cross stepped over to apologize and offer thanks, and they answered warmly, showing him that coexistence in peace was within reach given goodwill and time on both sides. A decade later the canal stood complete, and a Deskunte vessel passed through it. The Deskuntes' request for a midway port met wary villagers, but Dura swayed them by pointing to the payment and the trade it would revive, and the Rumelians celebrated, sure their fortunes were finally turning. Then, one day, a Kalyan tore the Deskunte chieftain's daughter to death.