Stardust dreams

Stripes was missing when Runt awoke. He looked behind the stone piles and in the shadows of the serpent-like roots that snaked out in all directions from the trunk. The pup was in neither of those places, nor was he splashing in the shallows looking for a frog to eat. Runt realised, with a jolt, that he was essentially stuck on the island without his dog to carry him across.

“Stripes? Stripes!” Runt yelled, and then whistled, while cold fingers of doubt twisted his insides. What if the pup found a friend out in the Wilds and wasn’t coming back? What if he’d got lost, or injured, or worse? He continued to panic, and call out, and whistle, before hearing the crash of scrub. The wolf-pup appeared on the other bank wagging his tail furiously.

“That’s twice now you’ve run off on me! I bet you’re chasing rabbits over there, aren’t you, boy?” Runt yelled. Stripes barked in return with his ears pricked up. “Off you go, then,” Runt said, pretending to be grumpy, and waved his hand away. With another crash, Stripes disappeared into the scrub.

Runt’s stomach grumbled, too. Finding his pouch empty of fruit, he began to climb. Runt paused again by a tiny glow hole in the trunk, now dark, to listen and marvel at the grating noise coming from somewhere beneath the bark. Resting his hand on the trunk, he felt the regular rumbling rhythm of the sound. The sound reminded him, just a little, of how his spear’s claw sounded as it scraped over the wood of the cottage walls and doors that now bore Wolf-ghost scars.

“It’s gotta be those glow grubs eating,” Runt decided, and his own stomach reminded him again that it was his turn to eat.

His pouch and tummy were finally full as Runt leaned up against the trunk. He dozed a little and woke again to the sound of a kingfisher laughing somewhere off in the distance. The fey-tree itself was eerily quiet during the middle of the day.

“Nothing like at night,” Runt thought, “it’s like a different tree altogether in the day time. You wouldn’t even know the harpies were in there. Apart from the teacher, I suppose. The teacher doesn’t seem to sleep at all.”

Runt sighed and pulled a flake of sharp stone from his pouch. He started carving marks onto the wood of his spear. Each swirl represented a wolf skin reclaimed. He grinned in satisfaction, but not pleasure, at the number. He was making a difference.

Runt put his ear near one of the entrances to the hollow and listened to the sound of snoring echo from inside. He hesitated. The teacher told him not to enter during the daytime. The teacher would almost certainly be in there, though. Runt wanted to know the truth about the gorgons but every time he mentioned them the old harpy got angry. In the end, his curiosity got the better of him. He poked his head into the hollow and crawled in.

The chamber was much like yesterday, quiet, serene, with harpies cuddled up and sleeping in every available nook and cranny. The teacher, though, was nowhere to be seen.

“I bet they’re trying to avoid me,” Runt grumped, and kicked at a small pot that was discarded by his foot. As it rolled away, he saw a flash of blue pollen. Runt picked up the container for a closer look. There was barely a smudge of it left, smeared against the lip of the seed pod container. He sniffed at it gingerly. It smelled sickly sweet, a bit like honey, but more fruity, too. Runt ran his finger across the blue smear and marvelled at the colour on his skin. He licked it off and, indeed, fruity honey was his first impression of its taste.

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Runt only learned, much later, how lucky he was not to die after that seemingly simple act. The pollen was deadly poisonous to humans. If Runt had carried that blue smeared seed pod back to the city and asked someone else to taste it, they would have been dead within minutes. Harpies, of course, were immune to the poison. They ate pollen each and every day of their lives. But Runt was not a harpy.

It was only a stroke of luck that he had eaten a good deal of the antidote five minutes before. The forbidden fruit contained an enzyme that immediately began metabolising the poison into something slightly less deadly. Unfortunately for Runt, it still felt quite a lot like he was about to die.

His first sensation was of tingling. His tongue felt like tiny fleas danced around on it, before racing down his throat. The tingle spread across the insides of his mouth, and up his cheeks, and, moments later, his whole body was vibrating. Runt could remember very little of the next few hours apart from sensations. That is to say, he remembered feeling things, without thinking much at all.

The circles of sunlight beaming through the hollows into the chamber seemed to change colour slowly, much like the colours in the cauldron of pollen changed. The light also looked… puffy. Like clouds. He didn’t know how else to describe it. Runt tried to stand up and peer outside to find out why the sunlight looked a different colour and realised that he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t listen to his head.

“Am I dying?” he thought, panicking slightly, and it was the last proper sentence his head knew for the next few hours. Runt shut his eyes but realised the puffy glow of light was still there, in the dark of his mind. Sounds became louder, somehow. The gentle snoring of the harpies became louder, more intense, and yet also soothing. It was like sitting inside a dry shelter during a thunderstorm.

Runt felt his ears stretch outwards. He heard, now, the grubs munching the wood beneath the bark. He felt them, for a minute, felt their simple life, cozied up inside the safety of a tree, surrounded by food. Warm, dry and forever hungry. He could almost taste the wood as the munching continued.

His ears stretched further outwards. He heard, now, the birds singing and flitting from branch to branch. He could feel himself fly, for a moment, and knew the freedom of flying. As the birds sang, and boasted of their beautiful feathers, he felt himself swell with pride.

His ears stretched further outwards and he heard Stripes prancing around a rabbit hole. Every now and then he stopped to snuffle it, then bark, then prance around it again. It was a game, but it was also a deadly hunt. Runt felt the hunger and knew the excitement of feeling hungry, and healthy, and agile, and ready to pounce.

His ears stretched wider, now, and he suddenly heard the tiniest sounds. Leaves whispered secrets. Clouds hummed overhead. Tadpoles plopped and gummed at the slime that grew on the roots beneath the water line.

Then, Runt was the roots, and the tree. He felt his arms become branches, spreading wide. He swayed in the breeze, and tasted the air, and gleefully soaked up the rays of the sun like a delicious, sweet drink. He felt his toes dig down, deep down into the mud and dirt and rock, and into the glowing salts far below the surface of the earth and knew, suddenly, it was this glowing salt that made the fey-trees so special. Runt could feel the tips of his toes warmed by the yellow glow of this salt that glittered even in the absolute darkness.

He stayed like this for hours, with his toes dipped in the bones of the earth, warmed by some kind of yellow sparkling metallic diamond ichor that hummed in a voice so deep it could only be felt, not heard.

Slowly, at first, his mind began the long journey back up into the light and the safety of the hollow. His ears still stretched outwards and he became aware of the massive stomping, crashing, and grumbling of a creature blundering through the scrub. Runt somehow knew without knowing that this noise was made by the teacher returning on the back of a mammoth. The skins were taken to the remembering place. Runt knew this because the tree knew and, rather than being worried by that, he felt reassured.

And then, the noise of padding and splashing. “Stripes returning”, Runt thought in this dream state, but then he felt the mind crossing the lake and it was closed to him. He poked at the mind and recoiled. It was closed like the steel door of a hot furnace was closed. Any attempt to open and look inside only led to scorched fingers and singed hair. The mind was too hot to touch. A mind of flame and anger and death. And then Runt understood. A drop-bear was crossing the lake.