PART 1

CHAPTER 2

DRIM

In this deepest of sleeps, a depth of sleep only attainable after victory in combat, after descending into the valley of death and climbing the opposite cliff, the salamander dreamt. It had never before had a dream, and wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but it knew it was seeing things after sleeping, and that this was called dreaming. In this dream, the salamander existed in a vast nothing. Not even the lights of the far earth shone in the distance of this void, no firmament to dictate its bounds. The salamander pondered where this place must be, and why it is here.

Before the salamander could become too lost in this dream-thought, it felt something come into view behind it, where it couldn’t see, so of course it turned to see. It was a cluster of snails. Naturally, the salamander approached the snails to eat them, but saw a second thing come into existence some distance away. The salamander knew its form, and the fires of war roared once more in its heart.

The mantis, not satisfied with violating the salamander’s waking peace, had invaded the salamander’s dreaming world as well. But something brought the salamander pause. The mantis wasn’t stealing snails, or waving its blades at the salamander. Instead, it was simply perched on an ethereal dream-branch, floating in dream-space, arms outstretched. The salamander was transfixed by a sense of odd serenity, watching this great foe which it had only that day vanquished, now here in its dream, standing perfectly still.

With a rapidity such that it could not be seen, the mantis grabbed something from the space in front of it. Some small thing had been plucked from its flight, and the mantis hungrily devoured it. The salamander was awed by the swiftness and lethality of the mantis blades, and by its ability to perch on its four legs. This awe turned quickly to envy.

“What impudence!” the salamander cursed, silently, in its own head, to itself. “Does it not appreciate the gifts it has been blessed with by birth? Legs to walk on, blades to pluck food from the very air, and yet it intrudes into MY creek, and takes MY snails!” The salamander’s envy and insult boiled over. “If you will not appreciate your legs and blades, then I shall take them from you! They will be mine! I will make far greater use than you!” With that, the salamander, in its dream-state, swallowed the dream-mantis in one motion, as if it were a dream-grain of dream-sand, and thus ended the dream.

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Wakefulness came slowly for the salamander. The sun just barely shone past the edges of its firmament, just bright enough to disturb the salamander at the bottom of its pond. It roused, not quite to consciousness, and surfaced at the edge of the pond. The salamander felt terrible. Tired, sore, sick from overeating but also desperately hungry. Again, it wondered if consciousness was worth the costs. With eyes blinking painfully, it swam to the water’s edge, and reached out a leg to...

“A leg?” the salamander was perplexed. It forced one eye open, the morning light too bright to dare endanger both, and tilted its head to take a look at where the leg must surely attach to its body. Sure enough, just as attached as its tail, tongue, and all the teeth it doesn’t have, there was a leg coming from its body. Not, however, the underdeveloped, twisted, useless leg it was familiar with. Gone was the vestigial remnant of a more primitive form, and in its place was a long, green and brown, spindly but rigid, honest-to-god, leg.

“A leg.” again thought the salamander. It wiggled the leg. It bent and folded the leg at its three joints. It waved the leg in front of its face, both eyes now open and alert. It pushed the leg against the mud, and most amazingly of all, the salamander’s whole body lifted opposite the leg.

“A leg!” the salamander rejoiced. It marveled at its leg. It licked its leg. It splashed the water with its leg. It pushed the pointed tip of its leg into the mud. It pulled the pointed tip of its leg out of the mud. It pushed a little piece of mud back and forth with its leg. Every little movement and motion a new and magnificent experience, a new exercising of agency and will. Jubilation overthrew the salamander’s motor functions, and it flopped and rolled in what might charitably be called a dance.

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“Multiple legs!?” The salamander’s celebratory seizure halted. Its excitement looped over into stunned amazement. It trembled, it shook, it vibrated, as it slowly curled and uncurled its new set of 4 legs. This was too much for the salamander’s tiny brain to take in. It went limp. Its face flopped down into the water. Its legs hung to either side. It lay there, eyes buried in the mud, jaw agape, and it breathed, and it thought.

The salamander remembered the dream. It remembered eating the dream-mantis, after having battled, bested, and eaten the not-dream-mantis. It tried to understand. It pulled and stretched the memories and thoughts, it kneaded them like dough. It boiled and chopped them, then rolled them flat and baked them. This continued for a solid half an hour, at least, and the salamander finally came to a decision.

“I will simply accept this. I will accept it in the way I accept that water is wet. If I defeat and eat something in my dream, I will take from it that which I desire.”

The salamander rolled back over onto its stomach. It raised its body out of the shallow water and into the air with its new mantis legs. It turned itself in a full circle, then climbed on top of a nearby stone. It felt the sun on its face and back. It felt the coolness of the mossy stone beneath it. It wiggled its tail, it smelled the air.

“I am amazing.”

With that thought, the salamander jumped off the stone, back into its pond, soaring into a majestic bellyflop, and dove to the bottom to retrieve and eat its two stashed snails.

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For several days more, in between trips of gathering and stockpiling snails into its pond, the salamander practiced with its new legs, slowly building confidence in its para-aquatic ambulation. It was pleased with itself and its new abilities, but for now remained too clumsy to do much on land. Still, there was a nagging, festering annoyance, a nibbling bugbear in the attic of its mind, slowly chewing down through the rafters. One day the ceiling was bound to collapse, under the weight of the bugbear and its assault on structural integrity. And collapse it did.

The salamander had been wronged. Cheated. Robbed. In its dream, it had declared it would take the legs of the mantis, and so it did, but it also had claimed the claws. Yet here the salamander was, without claws. Clawless. Unclawed. It couldn’t even revel in a lust for revenge at having lost its claws, having not ever had them. Only a vague displeasure, with no wrongdoer to bring to task. Every moment of exercising its new legs, it imagined using a third pair to balance. Every snail it crushed in its mouth, it imagined instead slicing the snails with bladed forelimbs, splitting the shell and cutting away the parts not fit for its palate.

Eventually it reached a head. The salamander had stockpiled plenty of extra snails in and around its pond, and it started to hunger for something greater: Power. The power of claws, the power to snatch food from the very air, the power of asserting its will onto the world, and making manifest its desires. It would seek out a new mantis. A brethren of the interloper, to collect the debt owed by its kin.

The salamander began to plot. Surely, if one mantis went after snails, another could as well. So the salamander took up 2 snails in its mouth and set out for the old battlefield. It placed the snails on the same rock, recognizable by the smeared moss, a scar that marked the earth with a site of war. Then, it waited.

And it waited. To pass the time, it practiced balancing on one or two of its legs at a time.

And waited. To pass the time, it swam in tight circles, using one leg as a pivot.

And waited, floating upside down…

And waited, balancing on its head…

Until the sun began to dim behind its firmament, the salamander waited, and watched the bait snails, placed atop the rock as if to beg favor from an unknowable deity. Nothing came. No mantis. No debtor come to make the salamander whole. No gift from on high. Just the wind, noticeably colder now than when the salamander had first begun to Think, surely as a foul portent of the coming winter, with this lack of mantis the first salvo in the coming season of scarcity.

So the salamander went home to its pond. Frustrated, but patient, and remaining confident in the inevitability of victory. It slept, and the next day, it tried again. It once more placed two snails on the rock, and it once more sat in the water, still as it could manage, watching for the mantis that would surely come.

Again, nothing came, and the cold of night rolled over the land to shoo it home.

The salamander was disappointed. Disappointed in not receiving its promised bladed arms. Disappointed in the snails for failing to attract a mantis. But even over the disappointed, and for the first time, it felt longing. It longed for answers, explanation, purpose to this failure, some kind of meaning, and it found none.

So, desperate for reason and explanation to its failures, it turned blame on itself. “Surely, had I only ate more thoroughly, or dreamt more deeply, I’d have the claws I desire.” It found its way to the entrance of its pond, but paused before entering.

“I don’t deserve this palace I have built for myself. I don’t deserve the snails I have stockpiled. This is my fault. I am weak, feeble, undeserving of life. My grandiose visions, my eternal dynasty established over this pond and creek, it is all for naught. The delusions of a weak, desperate fool. Death comes for us all, and swiftly for me.”

It felt the pointless futility of struggling against fate. It felt the despair of falling through the ice, knowing death was imminent. It had risked life and limb to climb the tallest of trees, and look out upon the world from the highest point, only to discover mountains on all sides.

By now the salamander had returned to its pond, to its resting spot at the bottom, where it had pinned its snails under the rocks. It lulled itself to sleep with the bittersweet and thorny blanket of self-pity.

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