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lowlands and swung east where the land was burnt the color of faded blood and rocks were scorched white as wood ash.
    The land hadn’t always been this way. Everything changed after the temperature began to rise. The fertile prairies turned into arid plains, while the plains turned to dust, all the way west to the Milapske Mountains. The plainspeople, as they were called back then, left their homeland and streamed onto the dry prairies. They squatted on any open property they could find and filled towns with more people than they could ever handle. Most towns were overwhelmed. Militias were formed. Skirmishes broke out.
    All the while, the sun never let up. It pulsed even harder, beating the land, day after day, year after year. Water grew scarce. Ponds and lakes dried up. Many rivers shriveled to streams and then to d ust. Fire swept across abandoned fields. People fled the drying prairie all together. They went into the cities surrounding the Great Lelawala Lakes. Eventually, the caked soil began to lift off into the air and swirl into twisting sheets that spun into thundering dust storms, choking everything in sight. In winter, the cold winds scoured the ground and left it like a hard scab for spring to peel off and summer to tear away. Those who remained—all dirt-eaters now—struggled to hold on. They were bolstered by a few years when rain came and the heat lifted, only to be scorched and scabbed again.  
    The final blow arrived with the dwindling of oil and other fossil fuels. When the prices of oil began to fluctuate wildly, shooting up and down but constantly rising, there were riots all over the Meshica Union as desperate and panicked people fought for limited resources.
    The cities around the Great Lelawala Lakes, like Menominee and Chikowa along Lake Mashenomak, created armies to protect what supplies they had and to fight off the marauders who terrorized and looted them. The Meshica Union became increasingly fractured and cities became isolated from one another. Gas and diesel were finally outlawed. Possession was a capital crime. In the end, the union broke apart completely, and the largest cities along the Great Lelawala Lakes took up the role of managing themselves. They essentially became city-states that were ruled by authoritarian power. They built walls around their perimeters like ancient cities and medieval castles to keep out the undesirables.
    As a result, many people turned to old religions and new. Many dirt-eaters, including Joe and his family, followed the teachings of a former itinerant worker turned prophet, Roy Neolin. A few years after the land dried up, Roy received a vision from the Goddess Virid who had created a new paradise in the heavens. Over the next year, he lived in a dugout and received messages. He wrote down all her words and his own thoughts in a book called the Word of Virid .
    When he first started to create a community, however, the prophet ran into a little problem. The central message of Virid, he said, was “The way to paradise is to live without a trace.” Unfortunately, followers took this too literally. They thought the best way to not leave a trace was to not exist at all. Consequently, there were mass suicides. Prophet Roy had to go back to his dugout and receive a new message. This time the message was more direct. “Heaven waits for the humble.” After that, the suicides stopped. Followers lived simple and humble lives, all in order to conserve resources so they all could survive until Virid’s return.   

 
     
    Chapter 10
     
     
     
    During the following night, the wind kept nudging Joe’s shoulder until he woke up. They were sleeping outside in a gully that felt like a shallow bowl on the flat barren land. Above him the night sky was full of stars. He leaned forward on his elbows and glanced at the pregnant girl to see if she was okay. She was balled up in her blanket like a cocoon, in exactly the same position she was before he fell asleep.
    Despite