In Honor of Ray Bradbury: Going Home

...in honor of Ray Bradbury, one of the parents of American science-fiction and tales of the strange and wonderful.

Fluted red pillars stood beneath a sky the color of hammered bronze. Ovas lingered between them, loathe to stray far from the pool they bounded. Water had become precious long ago; wars had been fought over it. Now, there weren't enough people left to fight wars over anything.

Ovas had been waiting all morning. The Elders were meant to come, to wander down through the burnished landscape of baked stone to the great reflecting pool. Sometimes they came early and sometimes late, but it was unlike them not to come at all.

In one hand Ovas held a long silver scepter, made from twining strands of metal. It marked his office as the First of Almath, the one most suited to treat with the Elders out of all the citizens. He was old, Ovas was, and getting older every day. He should have been an Elder himself, had not politics prevented it. He was tired of meeting with them, tired of bowing and scraping before them at the Pool of Mirth. There was no mirth left on all Envea. It had dried up with the water.