PART 1
CHAPTER 3
LANGOSTINO
For about a week, the salamander lay in its pond, utterly despondent, slowly eating through its supply of snails. Grief, regret, disappointment, dejection, no words could give the faintest measure of the salamander’s misery. Unknown to the salamander, this was entirely normal with winter settling in. The dropping temperature of the air and water triggered a cascade of hormonal changes, making the salamander lethargic, morose, and enervated. As a wild salamander, this keeps it holed up, mostly sleeping in a burrow or the bottom of still water, conserving calories through the cold season.
But as a thinking salamander, this makes it depressed. It feels terrible in general, and particularly about itself. To this winterized salamander, to live was an affront against all things good, an irredeemable sin from which there can be no redemption. A quiet world free of the complexities and convolutions of life would be far preferable. And so the salamander approached as closely as it could do this, by simply sleeping at the bottom of its pond. Not that any salamander would be different, apart from the melodrama.
But even in the salamander’s blackest night, the world went on. The suns glowed. The firmaments spun. Winds blew. Waters of the ponds, creeks, rivers, lakes, and seas all flowed. Worms burrowed. Snails snailed. Fish swam. Birds flew. Snakes slithered. Takin grazed. Horned millipedes rooted for tubers. And as would soon be very relevant to the salamander, the langostinos of the region were beginning their winter migration upriver.
Far down the creek, it feeds into a mighty river. This river eventually fans out into a floodplain delta where it meets a sea. In this delta, among many other forms of life, there is a type of small, lobster-crab creature, with a stubby tail and long, skinny claws. These are called langostinos by the people of the delta, and in summer they are so numerous as to choke some rivulets. When winter begins to set in, the langostinos start a march against the current, to their seasonal spawning grounds in the upland mudfields. The upper crust of dried mud protects the eggs and traps in water, and with the spring rains the hatchlings are washed downriver back to the delta.
The langostino vanguard has reached the salamander’s creek.
=========================================================================
The salamander sensed that something was coming. Something substantial, something meaningful. Something big. The salamander tried to ignore it. It preferred the cold embrace of woe which it had immersed itself in. It sought not to move at all. But a buzzing in its forehead only grew stronger with every moment it was ignored. Wishing to return to its sad slumber, the salamander sought the source of this buzzing, and surfaced for the first time in days. Its legs were stiff from disuse, and it struggled to leave the water.
It looked out as far as its underdeveloped salamander eyes could see, and it saw nothing. It smelled the air, and it smelled nothing. It listened to the wind, and it heard nothing Yet the buzzing continued. The salamander was at this point growing angry, and it quite liked it. “Anger feels much better than sadness” the salamander thought. “I can go after something other than myself.”
It kept looking around, raising up on the tippie-toes of its toeless mantid legs. It rotated slowly around, searching for anything to quiet or explain the buzzing. It rotated faster, it spun in place on top of the rock, and the buzzing throbbed. The salamander became dizzy and slipped, falling back into the water. But it noticed something. The throbbing had stopped after it fell. It tried again, climbing back onto the rock, and initiated rotation. The throbbing returned, ever so slowly rising and falling in intensity.
“What a curious phenomenon” the salamander thought, rotating slowly in place. “And what sweet sensation! The misery of failure melts away under the scouring pain.” The salamander kept rotating, feeling the buzzing throb cyclically. It would grow to a peak, and as the salamander kept turning, it would taper. It passed the peak, then rotated back, and waved its head back and forth through the peak.
“Wait… I can feel something.” The salamander slowly waved its head back and forth, feeling the buzzing grow and fade. It raised its head up and down, feeling it fade as it pointed up or down away from the horizon. And it finally clicked. “Something is coming, from that direction. From the… West.” The buzzing was most intense when looking in the direction of the firmament’s rotation, the direction that the light of day fled to as night overtook it. And with this revelation, the buzzing lessened to a whisper
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Still though, it was there. The danger was not gone. Something approached, and the salamander was afraid. But not the kind of fear from the eagle swooping to snatch it. That is an acute fear, a clear and present danger. This fear was vague, but pressing. It shook in the salamander’s chest like faraway thunder, or a sea of drums. Whatever was coming was something great and terrible.
=========================================================================
The buzzing ceased, its message delivered, and the salamander knew whatever it heralded had arrived. It looked downriver into the creek, the direction it now knew was West, and it saw the bearer of doom. A creature, maybe a fifth the size of the salamander, was slowly scuttling in the creek, against the current. It did not swim, but appeared to crawl upon the rocks and pebbles that floored the creek, as if it were on land. The salamander was confused, but cautious.
“Surely this is not the death that the buzzing trumpeted.” The salamander thought. “Yet as I gaze upon it, I ever so faintly feel something… alarming.” The salamander swam towards the stranger from the west, close enough to take a careful look, but keeping a safe distance. The creature indeed did crawl along the creek floor, on six long legs and dozens of tiny ones under its rear half. The salamander was reminded of a tiny red creature it once saw, smaller than the salamander’s beady little eyeballs, which walked in great caravans just outside the water, carrying leaves far larger than the creature itself.
This new creature appeared almost as a comparatively gigantic version of that infinitesimally small creature. Its body was wider than its length, apart from the long two-pronged claws that extended forward from its face. If not for the claws, the salamander could easily swallow the rest of its body. A mess of tiny tentacles and antennae twitched and curled from its face, like a handful of twigs and worms. When the salamander drew closer, entranced with curiosity by this unknown critter, the thing snapped its front to the salamander, and raised its open claws.
“You come unannounced to my lands and raise your weapons at me?” the salamander thought, silently, in its own head, at the creature.
The langostino, as should be expected of the creatures the salamander turns its ire towards, said nothing. It did advance towards the salamander, with claws outstretched and antennae flared to the sides.
Had the salamander any lips, it would have grinned. “If you seek death, I will oblige you, invader from downriver!” After being in depression, after having been cheated out of its bladed mantis claws, after being so thoroughly wronged and cast aside to die (or so it imagined), the salamander was eager to conduct violence. It coiled up its tail, it held its legs close to its body, and it opened its mouth wide. It shouted, mentally, at the langostino, “I put into this attack all my woes and sorrows!”
The salamander released the tension in its tail, launching its body and mouth forward in a powerful thrust at the langostino. The langostino was prepared to receive, and with its long pointed claws, it caught the salamander by the lower jaw and was pushed back with its momentum. The salamander was shocked, and retreated, preparing a second thrust. The langostino again was prepared to receive.
Once more, the salamander thrust true at the langostino, but the langostino parried and swam aside. The salamander was enraged, and instead of retreating for a third thrust, kept up the attack, swinging its head to grab at the langostino’s side. The langostino had already turned its front again to the salamander, and this time grabbed the salamander’s lower jaw. The serrated pincers of the langostino cut into the salamander’s soft mouth, and drew blood.
The salamander had never bled before. This was a new experience for it. The pain and novelty of the wounding counter cut through the last of the salamander’s malaise. It clamped its mouth shut, preventing the langostino from letting go, and shook its head with all its power. It flexed and twisted, it slammed the langostino against the rocky creekbed, and something happened.
The body of the langostino swam away, but the pain of its pincers continued. The salamander could see the stumps of the langostino’s arms sticking out of its mouth, at the same time as the langostino’s body repeatedly curled and uncurled, propelling itself away, back downcreek from whence it came. The salamander wiggled its mouth, and after a few seconds the claws came loose, and the salamander greedily swallowed them.
The salamander was confused, to say the least.
“What was this strange new animal?”
“Why did it only now come to this place?”
“Why did the my head buzz with pain and danger over this?”
And most baffling of all, “By the firmaments and all their lights, why did its arms detach?”
The salamander gently licked the wounds over its lower lip, its new scars of battle, two marks left by a wicked coward without the dignity to die honorably. But still, the salamander was victorious, and expected to dream of the foul creature in sleep. Its mood notably improved by the invigoration of combat and pain, the salamander decided to spend some time gathering snails before returning to its pond to sleep.
=========================================================================