4128.61 · March 1, 1808 AD
Ask Me Again in Seven Years
The road out of Sydney is not a road at all—just an ambition carved through bush that wants to swallow it back. Thirty men in chains march westward beneath a sun that has opinions. Their feet bleed into red dust. A brown snake crosses their path without hurry. And somewhere in the column walks Jeremiah Flint, who built a life in this colony once, lost everything to drought and fire and grief, and now begins again at sixty. He has wisdom to share. Whether it will be enough remains to be seen.
The bush is trying to kill him. William understands this now.
Not with malice—the land has none—but with the simple indifference of a thing that existed for millennia before men arrived and will exist for millennia after they're gone. The sun hammers down. The dust coats his tongue. His feet leave bloody prints on the track. A snake long enough to measure a grave slides across their path without acknowledging their existence.
And Jeremiah Flint walks beside him, speaking truths that no official voice would ever share.
Learn the land. That's the first thing. Everything else follows from that.
Flint knows this country. Fifteen years ago, he walked this same road in chains. He served his time, earned his freedom, built a farm with his own hands. Then drought took the crops, fire took the house, and the flames took his wife when she went back for something she couldn't bear to lose. Now he's starting over, sixty years old, with nothing but knowledge he's willing to share.
Find the line between defiance and submission. Walk it like a rope across a gorge.
Two days of marching. Two nights beneath alien stars. And at the end—Parramatta, where seven years of labour wait to begin.
William crosses the threshold without looking back.
