Page Turners - Chapter 7 [Page 34] - The Hollow-grass
Wading through the hollow-grass for over a year was surreal, especially for the girl, who had no experience traversing mystical environments for long stretches of time. For her, the hollow-grass became her entire world. It was hard for her to even imagine things existing outside of it after a while. Charlize was completely unfazed, having been trained as a Bookwyrm to have a profound sense of self and attachment to reality. Turning Pages and hopping between worlds was not as easy as it seemed to most. The majority of people who turned the Page would become unsettled by their new reality, too paralyzed to move forward to the next Page, inevitably letting their lifespan tick away as they struggled to comprehend the new world they found themselves in. Simply turning to a world with even 5% increased gravity could cause someone physical strain that was too hard to bear, especially for an adult who had spent their whole life adapting to their original environment.
Od was not formally trained as a Bookwyrm, but had legit experience as a Page Turner, which served him well. Though not formally educated on the techniques required to tether oneself to their current reality, the best Page Turners intuit something similar on their own. Typically, this was done through the use of dreams. Everyone accepts their reality by default—the idea is embedded since birth. Dreams are also accepted as unreal, not reality, simply fabricated imaginings. By beginning to accept the dream as not unreal, but simply a different reality in and of itself, one can then train their mind to transition between two separate realities, the waking and the dreaming, without disorientation. Of course, it needs to be understood that a dream is just a dream, not another reality, and that it is simply a technique to be practiced, not a truth to be acknowledged. Only those belonging to the Church of the Soft Singing Bird, the so-called Soporifics, truly believed that dreams were literally the seeds that Pages sprouted from. Neither Od nor Charlize believed such nonsense.
Over the past year, Charlize had tried her best to stay close to the girl, making sure to keep herself between her and Od. They had become more familiar over that time, and the girl was starting to become accustomed to Charlize's cold and calculated nature. She had even taught her a few things. A year wasn’t nearly long enough to smooth out Charlize’s sharp edges, but the girl did manage to squeeze a smile or two out of her over that time—a feat more impressive than she likely realized.
“Is it just me, or have we been insanely lucky?” asked Od as he pushed a piece of hollow-grass matching his height aside.
“How so?” answered Charlize, her eyes never leaving the girl as she skipped a few feet ahead.
“We’ve been going for, what, a year now? And we ain’t seen a single butterfly? You think the girl’s got something to do with it? Like, maybe Page 5 is infested with bugs and the inhabitants evolved to have built-in bug repellent. That makes sense, right?”
“Only to you, Od. We’ve encountered 21 butterflies so far. That’s roughly 1.75 butterflies per month.”
“Wait, what? No. I ain’t seen a thing!”
“Yes, well, unfortunately that doesn't seem to mean much. I killed them all before they got within 10 feet. Even a sub-5% String is enough to slice them in half without resistance. At least we are on track for now. We should be through the hollow-grass in another 7-8 months. Luckily, we have yet to stumble on a breeding area, so the density of crystal caterpillars has been low so far. But, we are likely to come across one before we leave. Remain vigilant.”
“Bit weird we haven’t stumbled into one yet. The villagers used to tell me this place was a death trap—made it sound like you couldn’t move an inch without encountering flocks of butterflies searching for a meal. Any ideas?”
“Yes. Hopefully I am wrong.”
The three of them continued on for several days, sticking to the militaristic schedule Charlize had laid out. She was unrelenting with the pace they had to keep, and anytime one of them complained about sleep deprivation, she would simply answer, “sleep faster.”
Suddenly Charlize threw up a fist, stopping the other two in their tracks at the prearranged signal to hold. She placed her right hand out in front, palm down. The girl recognized her movements from before, when she first saw her step into the sky. She was checking for something—another String.
“Dammit!” Charlize growled. “We have a problem.” As if I didn’t have enough already, she thought.
“Lemme guess, the problem is that we’ve already come to the end of the field, and now we have so much time on our hands, you don’t know what to do with it?” Od joked.
“It’s poachers.”
“Of course it is.”
“This String was made with a Seamshot. Must be the 34 Skins. I guess not much has changed since I was last here.”
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“How have I never run into these guys before? Are the butterflies actually worth something?”
“Not the butterflies—the crystal caterpillars. About 1 in 1,000 caterpillars fail to break from their cocoons. When that happens, they fuse together to create a hyper-dense crystal. They sell the crystals on Page 35 and then turn Pages until they are gifted enough access to use a Bookmark.”
“That’s the only way to go back through the Page, right?” the girl asked confidently.
“Good. You've been listening. So that’s Contracts and Bookmarks—you’re doing well.”
“And after we turn the Page, you’ll tell me about the Seam, like you promised?”
“As promised. Now focus. This String is connected to three others, forming a square. It’s creating a 19,000-kilometer square territory. We cannot let any part of our body go above the height of this String while we're in that territory.” Charlize made a side chop with her hand and stopped it where the String was. “If we go above that height, a silent alarm goes off and the Seamshot owners who made the Strings will be alerted to our position. For obvious reasons, we can’t let that happen.”
“Are you going to have to kill people again?” asked the girl as she clasped her hands behind her back.
“That doesn’t need to happen. We simply need to crawl. 19,000 km is a big area. As long as we don’t ping the sensor, the odds of us running into one of them is extremely low.”
But the odds are much higher with these two around, she thought. Od's senses aren't the sharpest, and the girl is likely to panic if we get swarmed. I could slip through here like a ghost if I were alone. I just need to get through this. Once I'm off the clock, I can finally think. Just one last push. Prioritize and execute.
“OK. We're going to be crawling on our bellies for months, so make it your new normal. Remember the rule: do not, under any circumstances, go above that line. Understood?”
Od clapped his feet together and saluted with one hand, bag in the other, “Yes ma'am!”
The girl mimicked him exactly. They both laughed and shared a secret look when they caught Charlize holding back a smile.
“You and I will crawl side by side. Od, you follow up the rear.”
“No worries. I got your backs,” he replied, offering a thumbs up.
“Oh, and Od, you remember what I told you?”
“That you were always watching?”
“Yes. Keep remembering.”
“When did you tell him that?” the girl asked, her tone peaking with curiosity.
“Never you mind. Let's go.”
They were completely hidden as they crawled in a triangle formation. Charlize and the girl led the front, while Od struggled along with his bag in hand, covering the rear. The density of caterpillars was clearly increasing. Their silhouettes created dark spots in the glass-like tubes as they passed, sapping away some of the jade light that illuminated them.
It was becoming clear to both Charlize and Od that the 34 Skins weren't just guarding their territory, they were farming it. Crystal caterpillars were starting to appear in every other tube of jade grass; the theory made too much sense. They both knew that a flock of butterflies was inevitable. With this many caterpillars, the odds were stacked against them.
Charlize snaked a String behind her and onto Od's shoulder. He didn't resist as she fed it into his ear, so they could speak via thought.
“The air tastes wrong—bitter. I think they've dosed it with something. Likely a butterfly repellent or calming agent. It makes sense if they are actively patrolling,” she thought, her String carrying her words.
“Yeah, makes sense they wouldn't want to get eaten alive by a flock of butterflies while they work. We're still not in the clear—I’ve had to take out a couple back here,” Od responded with his mind.
“So you have been useful back there? I've also taken some out. They're definitely increasing in number. Just keep pushing forward. We'll eventually get to the other side of this dense patch. It just might get worse before it gets better. Just protect the girl. I'll protect you.”
“Absolutely.”
As predicted, things got worse. Butterflies started flying out from hollow-grass, one after the other. Some flitted about, wobbling as they tried to fly. Others simply fell straight out of the glassy tube and stumbled on the ground. The girl accurately pointed out that they seemed drunk—a fact that she found quite funny. She didn't realize how funny it really was, the dark joke she was a part of. If it wasn't for the butterflies' haze, they'd be consuming her right there and then.
What Charlize and Od decided to omit was that freshly born butterflies needed to consume nutrients—and they weren't picky. Any human in the vicinity shot to the top of the menu, with plenty to go around. By pressing their wings against any surface, they could use their microscopic suckers to pull in anything. For a human, that meant having their flesh ripped off piece by piece, through raw suction. Truly a death by a thousand sucks.
“I don't like this, you need to stop,” the girl cried out.
“We can't—we have to keep going. It won't be much longer,” Charlize replied.
“You keep saying that!”
Invisible String sliced through the never-ending pitter-patter of butterflies surrounding them. To the girl, they seemed to suddenly pop in half, their separated wings caught in the rustling wind. The wings continued to fall, and before long, they were indistinguishable from petals falling from a tree until it was bare.
Not knowing the threat they posed, the girl could barely handle the massacre playing out around her. She wanted to scream out again, but out of nowhere, the weird itch returned. This time felt different—not like she was discovering something, but that she was being discovered.
“Charlize, Charlize,” she cried out, tugging at her coat.
“Not now, girl. I know it's difficult. Just bear with it.”
“No, not that! I think someone is watching us.”