A CENTURY OF CLIMATE SICKNESS.

         The Glacial Century, was a geologically brief (130 ± 40 years) period of torrential storms and cold climatic conditions which occurred on the corners of West Eos.  It is believed to have been caused by the disintegration of one or several ice sheets separating the earth and sky, although rival theories have been proposed.
          While debate remains concerning the scope and origin of the Glacial Century, there is notable consensus regarding its role in the collapse of cloud agriculture.  Previous to the Glacial Century, numerous and varied forms of atmospheric cultivation were well recorded, including convective lifting, cyclonic circulation and condensation dispersal.  Through the implementation of these and similar sustenance strategies a lasting surplus of nutrients and nourishment was established on nearly every continent.  By the later years of the Glacial Century, evidence of these processes is almost entirely non-existent, rapidly and noticeably abandoned by cave settlers, hunter gatherers,  and tribal villages alike.
          A further consequence of the Glacier Century of which there exists no dispute was the spread and transmission of an assortment of maladies and infections collectively known as climate sickness.  Primarily carried by viral precipitation (or less commonly rainmaking bacteria) and spread to humans via cloud and vapor carcasses, the diseases were notorious throughout Eos, due to the countless settlements they contaminated, corrupted or completely destroyed.  

          It was our century of climate sickness.  The cold was youngest inside the cave, it came without warning and then it colored through the rest.  I wore two layers of skin, one fur side in, the other facing out.  Jillison used stone tools to soften her touch, her own way of wearing the glaciers down.  We watched for warring states and waited for an animal king to call our own.  
          The sky was small and starved of steam.  Jillison said her ancestors lived inside there, but I never saw what she meant. We were alone and outliving the continent I had come to know.  Jillison huddled next to me and we hunted for ropes to hold the thunder down.
          When the weather was hollow the harvests had fallen around us.  It wasn't work, we rotated crops in every cloud and each season gave us more than enough.  Since the sickness started it was just the least of everything, sometimes less.
          We were children but I knew Jillison would take care of me.  She covered me in clay, careful recitations, crash remains.  Her hands were white blooded and unblinded by the ice.  She gave me a handful of raptor talons and said they would protect us.

          We were living in the same cave that gave the sickness a name.  When the fire was full, I sharpened arrowheads against my skeleton.  Every escape started at the spine and shone d0wn from there.   In the overhang, Jillison stamped her handprints on the cave walls.  They were almost as thin as those of a new born.  Half were worn over and half glowed orange if I looked at them right. 
          When the dark was too strong to see I unwrapped my skin and Jillison whispered to me.  The story was always the same.  An animal king with halos with in its eyelids, a cloud garden with crops that never gave in, a season where the ice was see through and still breathing. 
          The glaciation was growing inside of us in ways I couldn't always understand.  I could speak it as a kind of language and lose my words inside of it.  Sometimes my mouth was useless for weeks. 

          The weaker we got, the more work we had to do, the climate kept cornering the clouds, the ice was in my eyes and then it was a scar between me and the sky.  My skin shook on and off like the switch had been severed in two.  The sickness had done this to me before.  Jillison taught me a to do list and how to blackout right through it.
          Extinctions were early and often.  Elk, bears, cats, mice, migratory birds, deer.  Some went north of the sky and couldn't be found anymore.  Some stayed under the ice and tried to get a revenge on us.  We never knew which ones the sickness would let live. 
          We searched for paper and bark and rootstalks and starch.  I woke up kill pits and planted warning flags.  We took turns guarding the cave from below.  Jillison prepared a cremation for a pack of clouds that never came. 

          I wanted to ask her how many animal kings had lived too slow for the sky to keep?  How many had chose their cave and come already?  It had been a century since the climate left us.  I knew how to fill the sled and carry the wood and drag the rope away.  When my hands were weak, I got under the cloth with Jillison and we counted backwards from the cave. 
          We asked the ancestors for a tar pit, a trap, a crate and grains.  The ornaments couldn't keep the weather down.   We pulled the ground open and searched for clouds to swallow.  We undressed our eyes and pulled the permafrost out of their place.  Jillison said when the king came we could take the hide and heal the sickness with it.  We could chew the marrow and be made strong.  She said it was coming.
          Every breath built a blister inside of me.  I wasn't old enough to know how afraid to be.  I watched Jillison remove the skulls and stretch out the spines of our smallest prey.  Back in the cave the cold cut us out of our only clothes.  When they were gone, we were there still, scrubbed together and shivering.
          I held tightly to the talons Jillison gave me.  I prayed for the wind to whisper the plague away.   There wasn't another choice. I promised I wouldn't mistake a cured sky for the reoccuring kind.