fiction | The Broomstick Brief

A whitewashed hill village in golden late-afternoon light. An old woman in black, leaning on a crook beside a stone well with a postcard pinned to it, watches a group of beaming visitors unroll a painted banner reading SAVE THE HILLS OF ARKOS, with a crest of a pink hippopotamus holding a goat. One visitor holds up a brass box with an imp leaning out of it, painting. Goats stand by the well. Up the hill are survey stakes and a site office signed Ankh-Morpork Clean Light Company, and above it a sphinx rests in a cave mouth.

Wish you were here

GNU Terry Pratchett The village of Arkos sits in the hills behind Ephebe, where the land goes up in steps and the goats go up faster. It has forty-one houses, a well, a shrine to a small god of small mercies[1], and one of everything else. For four hundred years nobody outside the hills held any opinion about it. Then …