The Chromatic Chord

The Long Hunger

The span, c. 195,000-c. 160,000 BR, in which the failing high country stopped feeding large bodies, hunger-bands of Ogres turned their strength on others, and the camps that held bound strength to care as hearth-weight. See The Bridge Peoples.

Overview

In a long upland famine, some Ogre camps turned their strength on others, and the first hearth-houses rose against them by making hearth-weight the custom of Ogre camps.

It runs alongside The Withdrawal of the Upland Colossal World, and comes from the same change in the high country.

Burden Households in the High Country

Ogres descend from the threshold elder field described in Proto-Anchor Population Map, and by this span they had long been recognizably themselves: large, cold-hardy burden households living along scree slopes, upland passes, and the rough margins of the upland colossal world, carrying what others could not and trading that labour for food and shelter.

Later tradition remembers the Ogre lines of the high country as the high burden Ogres, the oldest Ogre life that later camps trace themselves to.

The Hunger

As the colossal world thinned, the high country stopped feeding its people. What made a monumental civilization impossible also made large, hungry bodies hard to feed. For generations Ogre households faced failing range, lost trade, and winters no amount of carrying could outlast. Whole camps were found in spring frozen around cold hearths.

Some camps broke. Hunger-bands used their strength to take what they could no longer earn: they raided neighbouring camps and the last colossal stores, left their old and young behind in the snow, and turned the burden that had held them together into a weapon. The danger did not come from outside. It was what a starving Ogre camp could become.

The First Hearth-Houses

Hearth-weight was the Ogre answer to that horror, and it was an answer Ogres made about themselves.

Surviving households bound their strength to plain duties: the weak are fed before the strong, a camp's dependents are its first burden, and strength that takes without carrying loses its place at the fire. Camps that kept these terms called themselves hearth-houses. They swore to one another before the fire, sheltered households that kept the custom, and treated hunger-bands as broken hearths, to be taken back in where they could be and hunted down where they could not. For generations the high country was a war of camp against camp. Ogre war-chants still keep those hunts: kin against kin in the snow, and the hearth-keepers who came home carrying the children of the bands they had killed.

Historical Significance

The Long Hunger gives the Ogres a beginning, their central moral idea, and a first order. It is why Ogre tradition tells its darkest stories from the inside: hearth-weight was built against what hungry strength does, and the medieval fear of Ogre raiders is a fear Ogres knew first.

It also leaves a weakness later powers use. A people whose custom says strength must carry the weak can be made to carry almost anything, as long as someone else holds the food. How that was done is told in The Chain-Camps.

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also