Wolves and ants

Travelling the Wilds at night brought its own set of challenges but, for the most part, they made decent progress. Runt jogged alongside Stripes until his legs got tired then jumped on his back and rode. They stumbled across another fey-tree after an hour or so of travel, and another one half an hour after that. Each time it was roughly the same layout with the clearings, the large nests of broken branches, and the horrible statues. The statues looked even worse in the dark. They stopped to rest at the next clearing. Runt emptied out his soot pouch (Stripes’ fur gradually returned to his original colour and it didn’t seem important anymore) and filled it with fruit. They clambered into the nearest nest and curled up together. It was this second meal, after once again falling asleep, that Runt realised the sleepy side-effects of the fruit. He made sure to eat fruit only in the nests after that. At least that way, they were hidden, and there was no chance of falling.

Most of the creatures in the Wilds were asleep at night but this didn’t make them less dangerous. As they brushed past a small shrub Runt realised it was actually a kiddner curled up, asleep. A set of large boulders they saw from a distance turned out to be a family of mammoths all snoring gently. They tiptoed past them (well, Stripes padded past quietly, anyhow) before jogging on.

Not long after that they encountered their first wolf.

It stood on the crest of a hill, watching silently. Stripes spotted it and bounded over, wagging his tail and barking excitedly. The wolf crouched, raised its hackles, and growled. The pup skidded to a halt, tilted its head, and cocked an ear. It was the dog equivalent of “Sorry, did I hear you correctly?”

The wolf growled again, more menacingly, then barked three short, coughing barks. Stripes turned tail and raced back to Runt. The boy gripped his spear and wondered if he had the courage to use it. He didn’t need to find out, not today, anyway. The wolf melted into the shadows and was gone.

Stripes whined and dropped his head.

“It’s ok, boy,” Runt said, scratching behind his ears, “I’m sure at least some of them are friendly?” but even as he spoke those words a tiny whisper of doubt emerged. A little voice, but somehow deep and booming, bubbled up from somewhere down below. It was Tyron’s voice, Runt realised, and it spoke in gloating tones the secret fear that Stripes would never belong. Not out here, in the Wilds, just as he hadn’t been accepted by the dogs back at the kennels. Maybe, just maybe, there was no place for either of them, anywhere. Maybe they were cursed to be outcasts, forever, wandering the Wilds like a pair of ghosts.

The next fey-tree Runt saw was torn apart and lying in pieces over the clearing.

The hour approached dawn when he found it. He knew because the birds knew. Their songs changed in the build up towards dawn. Or, rather, the night birds began to quiet down, and daytime birds began to perk up. Runt rode across Stripes’ shoulders, so they were covering a lot of distance quickly.

He heard it first. Or, rather, what he heard first was an unnatural silence. It reminded Runt of the wolf attack on the booze cart. Right before the attack it felt like a blanket of silence had been laid over everything. It was an expectant silence. A silence of waiting. This time, something was different. This was a terrified silence. A silence of hiding, of holding breath, of hoping not to be found and hurt… or worse.

The silence was broken by the noise of a tree falling. In the dark, and the quiet, the sound was amplified and horrible. To Runt, who had never heard a whole tree being felled, the sound was the stuff of nightmares. There was a long, drawn-out groan, followed by several sharp cracks and, finally, an enormous crashing thud. His imagination painted pictures of giant creatures at war. Enormous insects, perhaps, hacking and clawing at each other, one of them snapping the other in two. The nest makers and tree gougers, perhaps? Something giant and terrible. A monster, as tall as the sky, able to rip trees out the ground like a farmer plucking weeds from his vegetable garden.

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It was only after the thud, when he heard cheers and clapping, that his imagination put the monster back into its proper shape. The shape of people.

He dismounted and crept towards the clearing. What he saw was carnage.

Runt loved to watch nature at work. He would sit for hours and watch a spider spinning its web, methodically attaching the silk one strand at a time. He would cheer for it (silently) as a fly or moth hit the web, and then lean closer to watch the spider leap onto its prey, bite it, and wrap it in sticky strands of silk. Sometimes, if he felt like the spider was going hungry, he would even find a moth for it, and launch it into the trap.

Ants were equally fascinating. Runt remembered watching a cricket which had landed in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Ants swarmed all over it, nipping and dragging at it. Runt imagined himself, the size of an ant, and at this size the cricket must have appeared as a giant beast to him and his tribe. The cricket tried to escape but the strength of numbers outweighed the cricket’s superior size, and it was doomed. Piece by piece, the ants picked the cricket apart. He imagined the ants cheering as another leg, or a wing, or a piece of shell was torn off the beast and carried back to feed their young. It would take hours but, by the end, the cricket would be completely dismantled and dragged away.

Runt was strongly reminded of the ants tearing a cricket apart as he sat on the edge of the clearing. The fey-tree was lying horizontally and already being methodically torn into pieces by a swarm of people. Every part of the tree was crawling with them. Some of the upper branches were already bitten off and being carried away. Yes, bitten off. With every branch dismembered, the attackers gave another cheer, and the other workers redoubled their frenzied efforts.

They were clearly people because they yelled, cheered, clapped, and moved like people. But they were not human. Runt realised, with a jolt, that they were the same creatures as the statues, but alive. Gorgons. They had round stomachs, stumpy legs, pointy ears, long arms and were covered in hair. They were maybe four or five feet tall. Taller than Runt but shorter than most people from the city. Against the tree they used their teeth to bite, and strong arms to bend, until a branch would break away from the main trunk. A few of them would then snarl their approval before forming up, heaving the branch over their heads, and dragging it away.

Like ants, they formed a long line of workers carrying away the spoils of their victory into the scrub. Runt saw that the statues, too, were being dragged off. Desperate to learn more, Runt sneaked around the side of the clearing.

The creatures marched past in single file on either side of the long branches that were hoisted on their shoulders. Their long arms wrapped over the branch to steady it. Hiding in a nearby bush, Runt noticed that their eyes glowed a sickly shade of yellow. They rarely spoke, but when they did it was only simple phrases, and mostly complaints.

“Slow down up front!”

“Hold ‘er steady!

“Lift more in the middle! More!”

“Get a move on!”

Their voices sounded like gravel rattling in a can. But mostly they just huffed, puffed, and swore as they tramped through the scrub. If a tree or bush got in the way, they barged over it. If an animal got in the way, they kicked at it. If a boulder lay across their path, one of the gorgons would drop out of line, jog up, and heave it aside. Runt watched one boulder being moved. It must have weighed at least a ton, but the creature rolled it out the way like it was an empty barrel.

They marched on in a near-perfect straight line. Runt sat, in wonder and fear, as hundreds of these glow-eyed creatures passed him by. The size of the tree branches being carried gradually got thicker as they pulled apart the remaining sections of tree. Finally, following in the rear, a large group of them slowly made their way past heaving the central trunk up the path.

They were headed towards the mountains.

Runt hesitated as the sounds of the bush slowly returned. His curiosity got the better of him. He followed.