Simon Jimenez

The country shivered.

It was as though a finger had been run down the spine of the land of the moonless night. From the western mountains this shiver ran, all the way to the eastern shore. Not one of us escaped its chill. It was a collective feeling, come over by all, from the farmers of the Yinn terrace lands to the dock workers in the Divine City. When it reached us, we woke up with a startle, thinking that the world was ending; that our bodies had finished their time on this Earth, and this shiver was the release of our spirit to the Sleeping Sea. The cry of woken babies scored this night of change. The gambling games in the pleasure barges put on pause as the old men and women playing dice now rubbed their arms, warming the small hairs that pricked up from some unknown fright. The fishermen of the Thousand Rivers peered out their boarded windows to perhaps catch sight of the culprit of this bodily premonition, a nightmare spirit perhaps, come to visit them from the water and sated only by the fresh salt tears of the young. But we saw nothing and no one. We had no explanation for the trembling of our body, which lasted for but one soul-freezing moment. [...]

The world had changed. The apes sojourning through the dark forest beyond the torchlight of man held one another as the shiver came and went; their eyes shining in the dark as they understood this portent; the days of great upheaval that lay ahead of them.