“The land either changes or is changed.”
-Whiteshore folk tree sixty
Grenfooner’s slight wheeze raised the hackles of the braves.
It wasn’t a matter of creating noise where none existed. It was the invasion of a not-quite-right, a magnificent example of “creepy” at its most pared-down. After days in company with each other, the sounds they each owned had grown familiar. The effect of his having landed badly on a rock following a nasty trip… well.
Fortunately, a supplement of meat seemed to be helping. He no longer cradled his side as they walked, and his stance was more balanced. The shallower inhale-exhale diminished into a ticklish rasp against the ear, and Barnarr was a bit worried the injury might have some sort of unanticipated long term effects, but the truth of that would only be clear as the long term actually paddled downriver toward them. For now, they’d keep on heading generally sunfocus, taking note of what was creepy and what was joyful and holding them both.
The blade sharp crease where two hills met carried a small stream. Barnarr’s toes got a bit wet. Rurd managed to keep dry completely, somehow. They almost found themselves pulled into the water when they struggled to help Grenfooner hop the gap, but he just fell in instead. Barnarr felt terrible for laughing and he laughed anyway. In exchange the larger packfolk dredged a handful of grassy muddy sludge and slung it into his face, without even rising from a dirty supine rest.
Barnarr’s vision revolted in terrible foggy dimness; he fell flat. Some rolling around wiped away the worst of the stuff. A little assistance with washing his eyeballs later, he felt functional again – if dirty around the eyes. Climbing the next hill, he play-snapped at Grenfooner’s shoulder.
“You couldn’t be the only injured one here, is that it?” he teased.
They kept treading.
Amazing how much a slight change in diet could help. Despite the reasons for unease, they all had higher morale than two days prior by a considerable margin. One old fat springer, an arrow through the lung, and a long stretch of day cleaning. Each of the trio now had a foot in their possession, and the last lay buried by the original site of the kill.
Barnarr’s happy spirits only dipped when he crested a rise, glanced toward the endless water, then lifted his eyes.
To judge by the moon, they had some time yet before turning back became necessary. He wanted so very badly to succeed.
The place they’d left behind not too long ago had better potential than the rest of the land they’d covered thus far; good large fields cleared by fire in recent seasons. Rurd knew a bit about agriculture, and said the soil suited their needs decently well. The spare groundcover meant a lack of forage for game, though, and the area’s trees slowly became stunted creatures, not terribly well-off. It could be remedied with a separate camp at or frequent trips to an inland forest down the coast and up a river, and the fields also lay a single day’s walk from healthy stone cliffs, the sort that very lethargically bred good stone for knives and hard tools.
If worst came to worst, they’d agreed to favor it as a recommendation. Preferable to have a famously flawed solution to none at all.
Up and down and up again, the three of them assessed the land, watching for terrible creatures and finding none. They found plenty of grassy pleasant terrain, though.
“Well, that’s something,” grunted Rurd after they scraped their way onto a little irregularly-shaped earthen shelf, hunching back into a crouch away from a scar in the earth. She held out a hand to stop the others.
The braves found themselves looking down into the rounded side of a tunnel of some kind. Skin-cracked earth bared a descending curve that either came from very specific natural origins or very specific artificial origins. Given the material describing the curve, it had to be from the Destroyers’ day.
Not for the first time, the mysteries of that people reached out probing fingers from eaten seasons.
“So, here’s a question,” Barnarr said.
He knelt and rubbed the ground as though trying to brush away a mantle of invisible dirt. Rurd and Grenfooner traded a look.
“Would… could we, if need be, consider a ruin or remnant of this sort as a place for shelter or growing food?” he asked, looking over a shoulder.
“That’s less than wise.”
His ears crept back a bit as he looked at Grenfooner.
“Ill creatures lying in wait, shifts in the ground hoping to claim us when the place is explored or getting settled, probably things we wouldn’t know about until we ran into them.”
The larger packfolk paused and ordered his thoughts.
“There are a few benefits, of course. It’s not like every Destroyer settlement or building is a trap in waiting, but staking such a claim would show that we’re reckless and strong-willed. Spending time more closely interacting with the place might lead to insightful discoveries as well.”
Before he could go on, Barnarr made a shaky limb-splaying interruption, sweeping with one arm and invisibly spear-waving with the other.
“I’m aware! I’m not saying we should all move underground on a whim. I’m asking if you – in your more-worldly-than-mine perspectives – think it’s acceptable in the absence of any alternatives.”
“It’s a question worth asking, I suppose,” said Rurd.
“Here’s another thought,” Grenfooner said. “Maybe this explains the Destroyers deciding to put so much of what they made underground, but other than the peak of a hill, is there a more secure place than a burrow?”
“Maybe not,” Barnarr said. “For that matter, a strong arm and sharp aim could do even more damage to defenders on a hill than in a bolt-hole or burrow.”
Hardly a puzzle for the ages, but it still felt like the thought didn’t quite fit squarely into the box of his brain. The difference between the last time that Whiteshore folk had needed to repel a concerted opposition, and the tales the Longbacks brought of other tribes’ teeth meeting in each others’ throats… it was the difference between grass under snow, and grass cradling your head under the brazen midmorning sun.
All three heard rustling up a short distance sunfall of their conference. Very common for windy weather conditions… except that there was no wind. Some creatures busily pursuing their own interests might be so incautious, especially if they had the size or speed to discourage hungry things from taking advantage.
The three Whiteshore travelers directed their attention at the disturbance, by individuated degrees. Barnarr’s focus was almost accidental, while Rurd went through a tiny agony of reflex. In silent consensus, they stalked low and quietly toward the projected path of the disturbance, past wiry trees and over dubiously fertile ground. Blood jogged up and down in veins.
It jogged faster when they beheld a being that was difficult to comfortably comprehend.
Each member of the trio held fast to some type of weapon as the being approached them, tightening when a high-voiced bugle tingled its way into their ears, down their backs, across their hackles and tails.
“What?” squawked Grenfooner, and Barnarr totally agreed.
Crossing behind a small hedge-bearded stand of trees, the figure stood notably taller than any of the trio, walking on two feet. A mouth butterfly-fluttered open, making that high-voiced bugle again. A waving limb held something, hooking the attention of the packfolk. Each step the figure made was hesitant, seemingly not because it was hard to walk the terrain but because of… them.
The being, whoever and whatever the creature’s identity, was positively drowning in clothing articles. These made it hard to divine an exact outline or volume. Naked hairless skin, however, showed itself plainly.
Among their fruit of abandonment, a few scraps of information had survived the Destroyers. A healthy family of these idea-tidbits got tossed around between different tribes’ ponderers and adventurers as speculation around the curious subject: what DID the Destroyers look like? Some images and small idols found through the seasons suggested they might have packfolk blood of some kind. Others – well, others depicted almost exactly what Barnarr and Grenfooner and Rurd saw now.
It was hard to reconcile the vagaries of shining feral entities – laying waste to themselves in times past and leaving such a mark on the world that civilized people prayed any lingering dread ghosts would pass on by without notice – with the sight of a mud-shinned creature about half again as tall as Barnarr with a flat freakish looking face. Clearly, though, these were the times in which he lived.
The Destroyer approached them with hesitance. Such circumstance had enough not-right stuffed into it that Barnarr reeled in his own head; them, Destroyer, hesitance. The creature clearly saw their spears, and clearly noted their posture, and even so came to well within throwing range before stopping. That hand waved again, empty. Five probing digits. With the wave came a thick padding of smells, some the familiar range of stone and forest and water; others sticky, porous.
Barnarr wasn’t sure which of the trio first began to calm down, but when a good number of heartbeats curled and died without either side going ballistic, his hackles began to settle again. He felt like the world’s largest fish had fallen from the sky and knocked him prone. Through the many yarns spun through the Whiteshore folk’s history, nobody had even pretended to have encountered a Destroyer in the flesh. He was sliding across a tilting table between utter confoundment and numbness and fearful ferocity, and for now found himself stuck at the first of those reactions.
Funnily enough, the Destroyer gave the sense of the exact same quandary.
The creature’s eyes did a little dance between the three of them, and then the legs bent – bent in reverse – and raised Barnarr’s alarm again. No lunge or offensive came, though; the object in the creature’s hand was placed on the ground with care. Then, moving with a measured pace, other items accumulated into a small collection. It posed no great challenge to see the bag as a carrying vessel for other goods, but whether the long string-wrapped object with the shining smoothness fixed in its end was a gewgaw or a deadly weapon was anybody’s guess. Beside it sat a smaller round tool that Barnarr felt an unexpected compulsion to pick up, a circle with a center part that swiveled to fill some unknown purpose.
After investing the dirt with all worldly possessions except clothing, the Destroyer scanned the trio again.
After assessing and pondering, the Destroyer relaxed the half hunched posture into an easier stance away from most of the dropped goods.
After the guard was lowered, the Destroyer tenderly fell into a backward-legged sitting position.
Still tense, but nobody seemed in danger of dying in the next three heartbeats… probably.
The Destroyer said something, aiming the words at Grenfooner. Maybe it was his bulk, maybe it was that he was ever so slightly closer than the other two, maybe his face had some more vaguely pleasing cast. Irrespective of reason, the words came out flowing down a chilled river current, jounced and untidy.
Some syllables had familiarity – it sounded like the speech included the word “the” once or twice, but that could only be accidental. Other sounds… Barnarr had to reach for ill-suited analogy. Clicking, hissing, taps of noise conjured from some side dimension he hadn’t been aware words could colonize. The important part was that the packfolk and their visitor had a barrier thrown aslant their linguistics.
“You can’t speak our language, can you?” asked Rurd, talking slowly and enunciating with care. “Can you understand it, perhaps? If you can, could you… let’s see, pat the ground three times?”
Within a few moments of nothing-much, a naked hand pressed into the grass. However, the natal enrichment of excitement ended when the hand simply remained there, supporting and not moving. The Destroyer did not bring palm to earth in a consistent pattern.
For the first time, Barnarr looked away from the creature and tried to meet Grenfooner’s eyes. The eyes weren’t available for meeting.
They all almost shed themselves when the Destroyer adjusted to a different sitting-crouching pose and reached over to the bag. A thin growling came from the bag, as the hands grabbed a tab on its side and then pulled the tab rapidly across the fabric. It tore open with ragged teeth. From inside came more smells. A small shiny parcel emerged also, and the parcel opened to the ministrations of the being’s fingers.
More packages finished their pupating in this shiny bulk and spilled forth as it came unseamed, the smaller bundles bulging with some substances the nose couldn’t quite resolve into foodstuffs. At least, until the smaller flat packages were opened up.
Barnarr’s mouth almost tore off the bottom of his skull, and he began aggressively salivating.
The Destroyer’s flat mouth opened with a fishy searching, showing a pandemonium of madly organized teeth. An end of one of the smaller packages prodded into the cavity, then dispensed an odd pasty substance that positively radiated an intriguing food-smell.
All the Whiteshore braves watched as the mouth remained open, and the package held up to it withdrew. The Destroyer’s free hand pointed as the flat-faced eyes met with Barnarr’s, and Rurd’s, and Grenfooner’s, a digit showing how the plump tongue inside now bore a decoration of that muddy-textured substance. In and out wavered the hand, making sure attention flowed to the oral display.
“Ahhh!” said the Destroyer, before closing and reopening the mouth’s flat lips to show a lack of points-of-interest.
Rather, to show the substance’s disappearance.
“Is that a way of showing that this stuff is food?” Barnarr quietly asked Rurd, watching the Destroyer watch them.
“If you want to reassure somebody that something isn’t poisonous, then I guess it’s a good start to swallow it yourself,” said Grenfooner.
As though following the thread of their discussion, that five-digit hand reached forward with the package. Muddy paste peeked free. An offering.
“Is it supposed to be a… gesture of friendship?” Barnarr asked.
He reflected that he’d possibly asked more questions since leaving the tribe’s grounds than during his entire life before then.
“How should I know?” croaked Rurd.
“It could be,” Grenfooner murmured. “It could also be a ritual of killing – maybe this… this Destroyer wants us dead, and would willingly share our fate so long as we died.”
Barnarr almost vomited in his agitation.
“You were just talking about reassuring us that this isn’t poison! Make up your mind!”
“I’m saying that either could be true,” Grenfooner replied, surprisingly calm. “We don’t know anything about how this person in front of us thinks, or how the Destroyers as a whole thought… think…”
He stopped, breeding words. Everyone looked at him.
“We could be dealing with an entity whose motivations are completely different from ours. Maybe they think of any being that does not resemble them as an enemy of their whole people. Maybe they mislike us so much they’ll willingly sacrifice one of their own to remove one of us.”
When the other packfolk continued staring with faces just as befuddled as the Destroyer appeared to be, Grenfooner made a strangled sort of noise and waved.
“My point is that maybe we need to stop expecting that events will remain what we’d call reasonable.”
They sowed looks between themselves, and as the seeds began to bear mature fruit those looks got turned on the Destroyer.
Whatever else might be the case, the entity obviously wasn’t freaking out the way Barnarr would if he’d knowingly ingested poison.
“You’re not wrong,” he said at Grenfooner as those flat-faced eyes blinked and the food-bearing hand lowered somewhat. “If we’re that different, though, is there truly any chance that something horrible won’t happen eventually?”
Before giving himself the chance to consider all the reasons he should do something else, anything else, he trotted over and took the strange gift and dispensed clayish stuff into his mouth and swallowed.
Fractured paradise.
“Sensory dissonance” wasn’t a self-contained thought which Barnarr had ever articulated. He understood when an event or object was wrong, capable of recognizing things that were rotten or spoiled or deceptions. Never before, though, had he encountered a completely new and pleasurable taste and a completely new and pleasurable texture, and immediately concluded that they were wonderful but unilaterally at odds with one another.
Dropping the package, he felt air trying to come up his throat as the morsel went down. He didn’t gag, exactly. Instead, his ears tweaked, and he stopped breathing, and once his throat’s peristalsis finished – a heartbeat, or a lifetime? – he snatched a ripping gasp. Wobbly legs set him down on the ground as Rurd picked up the package. Wobbly eyes focused on her as she contemplated her fellow traveler and the package.
“More, please,” he rasped, holding out a hand toward her.
“You want more poison,” Rurd observed, exactly in the tone she’d use to say that he had a massive splinter poking out of his eye.
“It’s not bad, it just caught me by surprise.”
She did not give Barnarr the package immediately.