Cause A Scene - 26 June 2026

Prompts: 

• Character Dimension - Senior, Witty, Uneducated, Stubborn

• Time - Ancient History

• Place - Foreign Country

• Theme - Hope

• POV - Antagonist

• Conflict - vs Technology

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The stylus slipped again. Maren discreetly flexed her hand and cursed in three languages, which was three more than she could read.

"Move your elbow," said the young man behind her. He smelled of cedar oil and fresh papyrus and the particular arrogance of someone who had spent his whole life indoors.

"My elbow," Maren said, "has been drawing maps since before your father lost his first tooth."

"You're smearing the ink."

"I'm breathing on the ink. There's a difference." She straightened up, pressing both fists into the small of her back until something popped. Sixty-one years of bending over tables, and the tables never once bent back. "In Alexandria they smear ink. Here in Babylon we call it blending."

The young man — Darius, he was called, though she privately called him Darius-Who-Would-Learn-If-He-Would-Only-Stop-Talking — leaned forward and tapped the brass instrument clamped to the edge of the drawing table.  It was a Greek thing, all articulated arms and tiny calibrated gears, and the Governor had paid an amount for it that Maren preferred not to think about. Maren had refused to use it yet.

"If you simply set the arm here," Darius said, "and align the pin to the meridian mark—"

"I know where Mesopotamia is."

"The instrument doesn't require you to know where it is. That's the point. It calculates."

"It calculates." She scoffed and the word tasted like a piece of spoiled fish. "An instrument that calculates. Who taught it? Who sat with it and said, this river bends west in spring and then east when the rains come? Who told it that the road north of Nippur looks like a three days' walk but runs long because of the grief. Because you're walking away from something?"

Darius opened his mouth.

"Don't," she grumbled, cutting him off.

She picked up her stylus and surveyed the wet clay. The Euphrates curved where she'd put it. Where it went. Not where the Greek instrument said it went.

Outside, through the high narrow window, Babylon was conducting its noisy business. The oddly comforting din of donkeys, merchants, a priest singing something tuneless toward the ziggurat filled the air. She had walked into this city thirty years ago with her first husband's sandals on her feet because hers had worn through on the road from Susa, and she had thought then here is where the world is made. Tablets going out in every direction. Knowledge moving like water through channels. She was amused now to remember the largeness of the feeling. Of the wonder and possibility.

The instrument gleamed from its affixed perch.

She hated it with a focused and specific hatred she usually reserved for border disputes and raw onions.

"The Governor wants the survey completed before the spring delegation arrives," Darius said, carefully, in the tone of a man who has recently learned what it feels like to bear the full weight of a stern look from Maren.

"The Governor," she said, still eyeing the topography of the map, "wants many things."

"He was very specific. He, he said that accuracy was the most important –"

"Darius." She picked up a cloth to wipe her hand and turned to look at him fully, which she didn't often do to spare the poor boy. "I have made accurate maps. I have made maps that moved armies and fed cities and found water under ground that no one living remembered was there. I have made a map that a blind merchant followed by tracing it with his thumbs." She gestured at the instrument. "This thing. What has it done?"

Darius frowned. "That's not,” he sighed and Maren raised a dark brow.  “It's a tool. It doesn't do anything."

She returned to the clay and draped the soiled cloth on the Greek contraption. "That's right. It doesn't."

She set the stylus to the river's edge and drew the bend from memory, from the thirty-year-old feeling of red dirt under borrowed sandals, from the way the light had come off the water in the early morning. Without saying another word, Darius retreated in defeat, but Maren knew that was only a battle, and it was only a matter of time before someone else won the war.