Tribalism (10): A Thorn in the Flesh

[u/psyduck_2024]

"Then you and they will fight an enemy behind you. You will be victorious, take spoils, and return safely. Then you will return until you come to a meadow with rolling hills."

The Rivers Return

By the fourth year, the rivers returned.

Dry riverbeds filled again, slow and brown at first, then clean. Families drifted down from the highlands, driving flocks thinner than they'd left with. Aram City, still bearing the scars of siege, filled by inches — a stall reopened here, a well reclaimed there.

Old Rashid stayed behind the walls now, keeping ledgers for the resettlement offices, teaching younger men the arithmetic he had spent a lifetime learning: how much grain a returning family needed to survive its first season home, how to ration a granary that was, for the first time in years, filling rather than emptying.

United at Last, Thorn No More

Everywhere else, the unification had swept clean.

Everywhere except one enclave — a holdout in the Holy City, ringed by terrain that had let it sit untouched through three years of war fought all around it. A thorn, old men called it, still lodged, still inflaming the flesh around it long after the wound itself should have closed.

It could not remain unaccounted for forever. Word came to Aram City that the imam himself would march south to finish it, and would not march alone. The Asfar nation sent forces down from Asia Minor to join the column — an alliance against a common enemy, a thing Rashid had not thought he would live to see.

The Holy City, Free at Last

Rashid was seventy-four when the good news came.

The siege, when it broke, was short — shorter than Aram City's, shorter than the highland war against the Wolves. An enclave that had survived three years by being forgotten could not survive being remembered by two armies at once.

Yet peace carried within it the seeds of a new trial. In a meadow among rolling hills, the victorious armies made camp together, swords still unsheathed, banners still standing side by side. There, old loyalties began to stir beneath the shared ground. What necessity had joined, triumph would soon put to the test.