"Too late for what?" Ismene asks.
"I... I should start from the beginning," the woman says, sitting up so she can face her listeners.
"My name is Ekris. Until... a month ago, I was a slave in the Hzakan Empire. I was a house slave and relatively well-treated, for they did not think of me as a threat. I could have stayed there and lived out my days without fear, if also without freedom, and I intended to do so. There were house slaves who escaped. They would show us their bodies when they were caught. Those that were returned alive only stayed in the house briefly, so that we could see them sold and taken away to the mines. It was not a risk I was willing to take for myself.
"Then I overheard something that made me reconsider, and I ran. Somehow I made my way southwards through the hills. I found my way to the first village, and intended to keep moving, but I found myself walking not to freedom, but into a different kind of slavery, for I was captured by a group of gigantic ants. They took me to their nest. There were other people there--prisoners too--I tried to speak to them, but they stared blankly at me. I was taken before the queen of the ants and she... she spoke to me in my mind and then... the next two weeks were like a dream. I remember fragments of it. I remember moving about, carrying things, but it was like I was watching, not acting. I think my body was not my own. I remember a bridge, and then I remember seeing a cart, and I don't remember anything else before waking up just now."
"Those ants again," Ismene grumbles. "We really should do something about them. But what was it you overheard that made you run?"
"I overheard plans for an expedition southward. An ambitious warlord is moving south, bent on expanding the empire, and gaining importance that way. I was not willing to escape for my own sake, but I knew there were villages here, and people who would suffer my fate and worse. For them I could escape."
