---Monsters---
---Viig’s perspective---
“Aaaaand… I can see the fire through the bottom airholes… Time to seal it up!” I say to Gred, pointing at the charcoal mound she’s working on.
She takes a large lump of wet clay in both hands and begins stopping up the holes.
I give her a playful tickle on the side of the neck with a tailbrush as I walk away.
She giggles.
I walk past the sedimentation pits Keor and Mif are working on just in time to see them letting the muddy water out of the top pit and into the bottom, leaving all of the stones and other impurities behind.
“Good work, you two!” I grin, baring teeth all the way up to the canine roots.
Mif pauses to raise a fist from the stirring stick he’s using.
Keor grunts a recognition.
I pass by Ruy, burnishing a pot, and Weg, closing the top of a brick kiln with old tiles.
Then I smile as I come up behind Pod.
Leaning behind him and looking over at the work he’s doing, I chuckle “They’re too wide, Pod! You need to score closer together than that or the sluice won’t catch as much iron sand as it could!” tickling him with a tailbrush.
“I know what I’m doing, Viig(!)” grins the man who’s put at least one baby in me… I’m fairly sure…
I gesture at the wet clay with a hand and answer “Clearly not(!)” flapping an ear against the side of a cheek.
He giggles and pushes me away playfully.
“I know you’re the cleverest, Viig… Doesn’t mean you know everything(!)” grins Pod, turning to me, still in the same squat he was working on the sluice in, tail flicking from side to side behind him and hands on the ground.
“Doesn’t it now(?)” I grin back, matching the stance he’s in while backing away from him to avoid ruining the work he’s done in the playfight I can see coming.
He lunges at me, tackling me to the ground.
I laugh as the two of us tussle together, each fighting to hold the upper hand over the other.
I manage to pin him and smile down before extending a tongue to lick him.
“You… erm… you want to…?”
“Later, Poddy… back at the Village… when the work is done!” I grin back.
He sighs contentedly.
Then, we hear a sound that makes me freeze and the blood run cold through me.
A blaring horn sounds from about three and a half village lengths away, down the hill.
Immediately, I’m stood back up and shouting “THE GREEDIES ARE COMING! THE BREAKERS ARE COMING! THE MONSTERS ARE COMING! LEAVE BIG THINGS AND TAKE ONLY LITTLES! SCATTER TO THE UNDERGROWTH! GROUPS NOT LARGER THAN 4! DO NOT GO DIRECTLY BACK TO THE VILLAGE! DO NOT LET THEM FOLLOW YOU!”
All the Folk are already scrambling to take the small, valuable things and get to the fern underbrush that surrounds the worksite.
“Too big!” I say to Ruy, knocking down the half burnished pot she holds, smashing it on the ground “It will slow you down too much! Life is more valuable!”
I make it to the far side of the forest clearing and stop to look behind me.
I see the Monsters walking over the ground where moments ago Pod and I were wrestling.
Each one is easily the height of three of the Folk and the weight of fifty, bodies covered in black armour and red spikes of their bloodmetal, they wield spears tipped with blades made from the feet of the greedies who died before them.
Bloodmetal tusks poke through the front of each face and black, conical horns top each head.
The leader is the largest most terrifying Monster I’ve ever seen!
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The one beside her has an ironwood arrow nocked to a bow that’s longer than I am…
She’s drawing it back.
I see where she aims.
“POD!!!” I shriek as she lets the arrow fly.
I’m running to try and tackle him out of the way… but I’m just too late…
The sharpened wood pierces him in the neck the moment before I reach him.
He falls forward and strikes the ground like a rock, red blood staining the green head hair.
I hesitate for an instant but, seeing the Monster load a second arrow to the bow, I dive for the relative safety of the ferns.
The horrifically large woman strides into the centre of the clearing and shouts in a rasping, guttural Monster voice “Kort’aan dukh Khawekhhor Wakh bisht ess!… Aamveourgh wahsh ess IKHEHN antrokh!… Ainh, Khr’kowan, Khawekhhor Wakh Vishhanx, thugh Aamveourgh ke’shkhen ungh kli’idth, dukh mainh WOARDHAN!”
She was not addressing the other Monsters.
The raised voice she speaks in and the fact that she was looking all around the clearing mean that whatever she said, it was meant for us!
None of us speak that tongue but the message is clear; ‘leave this land or we will kill you’.
I can still see Pod from where I’m hiding, lying still.
I choke on silent sobs.
“Dukh moalh ke’doagh!” she shouts, this time to the other Monsters, gesturing around the worksite.
They set to work, destroying all of the things we worked so hard to make!
They push over the brick kilns.
They break the pottery, both fired and drying.
They smash the charcoal mounds and trample the half done wood into the dirt, tossing the larger pieces into the sedimentation pools.
The ear twitches as I hear one approaching the spot I hide.
A long, red knifefoot stabs into the ground between me and Pod.
I look up through the ferns and recognise her as the one who shot him.
The monstrous face swivels as she hunts around, passing straight over where I hide.
She turns to Pod and leans down.
She casually pulls the arrow from where it struck him in the neck.
Blood boils inside me…
There’s an iron knife in hand…
I’m running forward with it.
I aim the edge right at the joint between the bloodmetal knifefoot and the black shin armour.
The strength that I hold and the knife that I wield with it would never be able to pierce any kind of Monster armour… thankfully though, there is only flesh in the gap.
I scream as I sever the joint and roll under the murderer, collecting the foot from where it stood in the mud as I do.
The woman shrieks as blue blood pours from the amputated limb!
I’m not done yet!
Turning the liberated bloodmetal upwards, I stab her five times in the soft underbelly!
She comes down on top of me, hoping to crush me beneath her, but I’m too fast!
I roll out between the legs and dive back into the bushes, cursing only that those wounds probably won’t kill her!
Sharpened wooden arrows hiss through the air past me as I sprint through the brush away from the Monsters, soaked in blue blood and hearing them roar in fury behind me.
---Grriv’s perspective---
“Mek…?” I ask the old man (who probably put me into the belly I was born from) as we recline together in a newly built Earthen shelter, sharing a pipe.
“What is it Grriv?” he asks turning a grey bearded face to me and staring with one green, slitpupiled eye and one blind milky one.
“Do you ever think about… whether there could be… other kinds of people out there?”
He frowns, crinkling the scar that blinded him “What do you mean?”
“Out there…” I wave vaguely at the door, including the whole world in the gesture “…we know there are Folk… we know there are Monsters… Do you think there could be others?”
He laughs, heartily, and answers “I think that’s the pipe talking more than you, boy!… Give me another puff so I can match you!” beckoning for it.
I hand it to him and he takes a looong drag…
He holds the breath for a lot longer than I could without coughing before opening up to let the smoke pour out between four fangs.
“You’ll give where we are away to the Monsters with so much smoke(!)” I laugh.
He waves a hand dismissively before looking upwards with a pensive expression.
“I’ve… never… heard… of any other kinds of people… What makes you ask, Grriv?” he manages eventually.
“Well… you know…It’s just that… the world is so large and… the part of it we know is… so small… It just feels like there could be all kinds of things over the horizon that we’d know nothing about!… Maybe there’s a people who look nothing like the Folk and nothing like the Monsters, out there somewhere!… Maybe there’s a land where Folk and Monsters live together as friends! Maybe there’re folk out there who live completely differently to how we do!”
Mek gives a shrug of the shoulders and answers “Maybe there are… but I think over the horizon affairs are best left to those over the horizon… until they make it here or we make it there(!)… Fun to think about, though!”
“It’s just…” I start.
“Grriv!” interrupts Mor (one of the Or triplets along with Yor and Lor) bursting through the doorway curtain.
Sensing the urgency in the voice she speaks in, I stand and slap myself in the face to help myself sober up.
“What is it, Mor?” I ask, looking down at her.
“The new worksite!… Monsters attacked it!… We lost everything!” she says, on the verge of sobbing.
I turn to the elder and say “Stay here, Mek!” before running from the sodhouse, grabbing the best spear in the village as I leave.
I come outside to see all the Folk who were at the worksite returning now, faces dejected.
Then, I see her…
Sat astride a [stallionhound] and covered in thick, blue blood, rides Viig.
She holds the freshest bloodmetal blade I’ve ever seen…
She must have cut it directly from the leg of a Monster!
The expression she wears is dire!
The mount approaches me and the bloody woman hops down from him.
“They killed Pod.” is the first thing she says to me, arm around the neck of the [hound], holding it against herself, voice flat, yellow eyes burning!
The news hits me like a charging [beetleoceros]!
I sigh and say “Damnit all to shit!… Alright… we obviously can’t stay here… I’ll put the word out to start packing…”
“No!” she snarls, baring teeth at me “We’re done running!”
Backing off of the furious woman, I ask “What… what are you suggesting?”
“We’re putting the word out to all the villages… This is war!”