“Trees may lean on each other until they make a ring.”
-Whiteshore folk tree eight
“I’ve asked it before, I’ll ask it again. What precisely is happening to us, and what does it mean?”
Rurd made the small noises of a child trying to hide in a bush. Her hackles remained calm. Her tone of voice did not.
“We are bringing one of the Destroyers along on a hike,” said Grenfooner, painfully at ease.
Barnarr said nothing.
The being that followed behind them made a tremendous amount of noise, none of it speech. She – for the figure had a great deal more similarity to that of Rurd than the men’s outlines – carried a great deal of freight without evident effort. Her flat face rippled and flexed. Surely self-smell had to fill such a nose to the brim, but she didn’t seem inconvenienced by such a disability. Long fingers held an object made of something hard and smooth, similar to the backing of the mirror under jealous Whiteshore guard.
“Why, exactly, is this Destroyer agreeing… consenting… why is our guest remaining our guest?”
Rurd crept a few steps farther from their path, enough to rise a narrow stony crest. She cast her gaze long ahead, long behind, right to the tall large-footed creature keeping pace.
Barnarr said nothing.
Rurd’s eyes met his, then snapped toward Grenfooner. Even though nobody voiced the thought, that idea that they’d sometime soon stumble on a workaround, or a simple expedient, or just do the work of somehow learning each other’s means of expression, it floated around their heads in a wobbly intoxicated swoop. It was measurably likely. It was impossible. Talking with a Destroyer. Talking with a Destroyer.
Every hundred heartbeats or so, Barnarr had to turn and confirm he was still awake.
Yes, she still tromped along with her heavy wide pacing. Everything with ears would flee before her. Presently he didn’t much care about such things.
“I feel like we’re in a tale fit for Kakab Bentfoot,” Barnarr muttered.
“Yes, well, our flockfolk companion seems to have grown quite a bit larger,” said Rurd.
“I’m wondering if we should part ways with our flockfolk companion.”
Barnarr had entertained the idea more than once, at alternating levels of severity. Living mysteries and creatures of myth posed potential benefits, yes. Perhaps a peek into the stuff of creation. However, when looking at a trapjaw, one didn’t have to wonder whence came the name, or whether it was suitable to the creature.
He didn’t look straight at Grenfooner. Instead, his faraway voice balanced between argument and support.
“It doesn’t feel like we’re suddenly in mortal danger, does it? I’m fairly sure our guest has means of self-defence we can’t identify, and the fact that we aren’t clearly walking at spearpoint is… comforting? A good thing in any case. But my biggest worry is this.”
He watched the entity, and after a heartbeat she turned to watch him right back.
“She’s following us. If we tried to leave her behind, though, would it end better or worse than our current arrangement?”
Neither of the other packfolk stood ready to gainsay him. Grenfooner obviously struggled. Out of one of his eyes looked a man plotting a method to fight Barnarr’s hypothetical, while through the other stared a soul of cautious courteousness. Rurd planted her feet, gave the Destroyer her full attention for a heartbeat, then slid sunfall and not-sunfocus. Not a grass whisper gave signal to her exit.
In the middling distance a well-stuffed belly of dirt and splintery rock lolled. The day sneaked toward dark. As the Whiteshore folk had hoped, the perch atop the bluff made a decent vantage, as well as a good spot to stock stomachs. More supplies would be needed before long, but the separation between their forage and their feeding had a long gap still to close. A chance to take their ease, all agreed, was a good prospect.
The small cloud of non-flockfolk taking to the air as they climbed the hump felt like an omen. What sort of omen, though, Barnarr couldn’t guess.
“We could head farther in and along the edge of that forest,” Rurd said not much later.
The hand not used for feeding dried meat through her champing teeth pointed almost straight sunfall. A sprawling swollen woody infection discouraged dedicated searching too far inland. The horde of trees’ thickness held off any attempt to pierce the darkness, whether by travel or sight. On its near very edge, the forest had a few bulging stone arms hugging the earth, the sort of mountain-children that might rise up a little with hard seasons of rain just as easily as they might subside, dormant once more under blankets of soil and shifting dirt. They might provide shelter, at least from gales and floods. The cup of rock acted as a sight shield. For what? Nothing, probably, but maybe a spring and fertile ground.
“Those woods might have a few worthwhile stretches for hunting. They might only be a day or two’s travel in length, but that would still provide small game and decent regular log harvests. Add some well-placed land, and a stream?”
Rurd pointed not-sunfocus – it wasn’t easy to pick out the creek flowing past the bluff to the sea, but the stripe of green groundcover following its curve gave all the scent-trail the eyes needed.
“Let’s check it out, hmmm?”
Relaxing on a flat ribbed stone slab, Barnarr streeeeetched with a small whine. He glanced footward, where the soft dirt dropped off to showcase the dimming horizon. He braced himself with an arm and considered the other face of their high perch, surveying the tall stone teeth on the steep yet navigable grade to his right. The not-quite pattern of thick rocks thinned out as they hopped to the base of the mound. On the firmer ground below, they broke right toward the verdant skin outlining the creek, and drew up short, afraid of getting wet or tripping in the thick weedy grass and grassy weeds. The rocks looked… vaguely sweet, somehow.
A brief foray up the stream would at least give them another place to add to their report. Barnarr really hoped that Ardnap would be able to sift through the braves’ many points of interest to find answers.
Then, of course, he looked at the fourth member of their gathering, and almost told Rurd not to bother.
Assuming they could achieve dialogue, how many lessons could they trade? How many secrets could they learn about the world, and how many ways could they turn those secrets to the benefit of Whiteshore – the benefit of all packfolk, for that matter?
“Yes, it ought to take us only a little out of our way from returning home,” Grenfooner agreed, and Barnarr felt a tad ashamed.
“Yes. The time remaining before we should arrive back with the tribe is… a bit long still, maybe. A day or two in the area should allow both plenty of time to return and a chance to learn, though. If we find something good…”
Barnarr shut up as the others looked his way. His words didn’t die, though they shrank down.
“We’re living complicated lives right now,” he said a few moments later instead of apologizing.
“You mean we might have stumbled onto a reason worth returning home this very heartbeat, and we might find something useful to the tribe if we wait around a bit to investigate, and deciding if we should just strike out following the shore back will not be an easy choice.”
A glance at Rurd.
“It just… perhaps we need to bend the rules,” Barnarr replied.
“Perhaps many things,” she answered in turn, neither happily nor angrily.
Well, I’m tripping over failures left and right today.
Barnarr sighed.
Grenfooner sighed.
Rurd sighed.
The Destroyer threw out a quick barking sound, scratching (but not clawing) the ears in a faintly positive way, then she sighed.
Down in the sparse cover and past the rock fangs to their right, a yodeling roar arose.
Tails stilled, ears turned, growls boiled in silent readiness. The Whiteshore contingent hadn’t practiced synchronicity, but they all readied themselves within the same heartbeat.
“Thin-hunter!” shouted nobody.
As the Destroyer rose, slower to her feet and looking around with small distress noises, Barnarr strained the air. Nothing, and nothing, and… there. A thread. Then more nothing, and a thin ribbon that suggested orientation. Rank, fat-heavy.
Upwind. It was quickly ceasing to be upwind.
The day went from beautiful to hard and bleak, a hackle-bristling bad dream where passivity was the norm and activity pushed through a rigid waist-deep sea. Barnarr’s body did what he needed it to do, but at the far end of a snare pole, moved by another soul, dropping low and snarling fit to scour moss from old stone. His spear rose not in challenge, but statement. His nose pointed him in the right direction. The heavy yet faint stink chased out fatigue.
Amid tangled terrain, a humping back lunged ahead, whipping around to overcorrect its angle. Air didn’t so much huff from a wide throat as creak out under leathery strain.
For just a moment, he entertained the idea of flight… but no; they could fend off the beast, or they could die.
When the thin-hunter showed its ugly face, Grenfooner came within a half pace of gouging out an eye with his hurled spear. Instead, it sank into the creature’s muscled shoulder and pried free a surprisingly quiet snarling moan. It bragged of its size, rearing up and flinching away in spasms, pressing against a dirt-and-stone shelf. A crack told Barnarr that the weapon snapped, and the chuff of wood hitting ground alerted him to where he hoped the damaged shaft could be collected later.
Far more concerning than the spear, though, was the second galloping shape downhill from the wounded thin-hunter.
“Two!” he shouted, pointing past the rocks that gave the hill teeth. “Two! A mated pair!”
Grenfooner’s spear passed close enough to taste, missing his elbow and striking the wounded thin-hunter’s flank. Rurd held off from hurling her own weapon long enough to confirm where Barnarr’s hand pointed. She hopped to the plateau’s rocky edge and glared along the incline, picking out the oncoming creature. She measured the angle and let fly. The spear entered the second creature’s leg near the hock. All that did was make it mad, unfortunately.
Then the Destroyer surprised everybody with a long hooting howl, brought up her whatever-it-was while she clambered over past Rurd, and aimed it at the new thin-hunter as it stood high to try swiping them off the rock.
And the entire world exploded.
Nobody but nobody wanted to tempt the rage of a storm from a mountaintop, yet even so a few people here and there held stories close to their heart, about the crack of the forked sky missing by a stone’s throw or less. A Longback youth several seasons ago even told a tale of a friend he made in the Wendpath community, this friend evidently having small scars on the abdomen where the shattering force pierced and exited him, sparing flesh where it sometimes chose to rend and ignite. A capricious thing, a storm, as well as loud.
Whatever the Destroyer had done was louder.
When four heartbeats had passed, Barnarr still couldn’t hear, but at least he’d regained some ability to act in more ways than “suffer” and “vegetate.” The pain kept his right eye shut. That was a bit funny, the calamity had happened on his left, but his head’s right half was the one trying to drum up the momentum to break out and fly away. Despite the pain, his left hand automatically prepared another spear, reared back, curled, and loosed.
As the crease of the spearhead’s binding met the roof of its new flesh-home, the thin-hunter’s full weight blundered into him, a deaf boulder striking a deaf sapling. The numbing distance didn’t close exactly when a raking ice ran down his side, then ignited. It rather felt like ugliness first glimpsed through grass curtains, then with the unhidden eye, then sharpening heavily under perfect noon sunlight.
Barnarr hit the ground. The world blinked and rolled at least two times. Part of his brain began accounting for his injuries as soon as his leg twisted backward under him, part went running for the hills, and part warned that only getting up would keep him uneaten and moving. When his eyeballs stopped clattering, he blinked and groaned to see the departing slope of the big dirt bluff.
That rolling tumble… probably wouldn’t have ended him.
Another concussion behind him. Another. Distance and deafness together protected him a bit but each still punched him straight through the skull. The blunted voices and snarls swelled just a tad louder as he turned his head. Primitive colored shadows fought, and it would take serious effort to bring the world into focus. Pain wanted all of his attention, from the sizzling cut down his ribs on the left to his obviously sprained foot and back up to his ringing head – oh, his head. They wept loudly, all those places that connected him from him to him.
A surge of impetus.
No. NO. I came this far to help my people: I will do that if it kills me.
Thus, he reached into himself, and heaved.
Instantly the pain swarmed up each limb and over each bone, but he stood, and hoisted another spear, and balanced it just enough, and hurled it with a truly heroic effort. It found its mark, but he wasn’t aware of that when everything went black.
He wouldn’t know that the spear stole Grenfooner’s life back at the instant his comrade had lost his grappling contest, threading an eye’s orbit and downing the gape-jawed thin-hunter on the spot. He wouldn’t hear the beast fall on his fellow packfolk’s body and break a rib. He wouldn’t feel the new spot where a simple fall against angular rock gashed a handsome new scar up Rurd’s cheek. He wouldn’t taste the new celebrant breeze that sprang up the runty mountain. So many wouldn’ts – at least for a few hours.
He fell back into the darkness, a burial which closed him away for a time… but he closed the pain away, too.