Old Times and Old Gods
A story by Leland. Not unlike this, but less saccharine and more anthrocentric.
When the ancient gods roamed the world we humans were harvested.
Every bear with teeth and fur and claws could rip us apart and eat our soft meaty insides. The creatures of the wild were so big back then. Monstrous. All with terrible magics far greater than our soft skin.
But the thing that truly hunted us was the Wendigo. It roamed in the forests at night, riding the winds, riding the cold. It cultivated us as a crop. The weakest were culled every season by that creature that sang in the dark. We humans fought within ourselves to avoid weakness, undermining our neighbors to save our children from the horrible screams. We humans developed emotions and manipulations to survive this thousand year torture.
Then came the Bird, the Turtle, the Fox and humans received protection. A sweet gift of safety beneath the mountains of fur and feather they offered. Sitting atop the shell of the island Turtle we humans were not hunted for flesh, but these gods still had hunger.
The gargantuan animals with their beautiful magics hungered for something else that the humans had: sweetness and sadness. Our strange emotions that ruled our universe and had been developed by seeing our neighbors and children die while wishing for their survival. These emotions became the sweet desserts that the old gods ate.
Rituals upon rituals upon rituals were made for the old gods. Their massive eyes would watch them with an odd, thirsty calm as they drank our emotions in. Humans in groups learned different god’s preferences and built their society around satisfying a terrifying yet loving benefactor.
The beautiful red Fox loved weddings and desire. It would curl around a group of young humans that were bonding themselves to each other. The fox required that this group never touch fully before they made their promise in its ear. Then that night they would lie in the mountains of soft, deep, velvety fur and make love for the first time on the old gods back. The fox would rumble and purr underneath the human moans.
The Turtle was obsessed with mourning and the death of those long dead. It required it’s humans who lived on its island-like shell to record the names and loving acts of each person in each lineage from the very beginning of time. Parents would recite stories to their children about their grandparents and great grandparents and their great grandparents before them. Deep, powerful, emotional stories of pain, and they would all cry at the end, banging on the ground, the Turtle’s shell, as hard as they could. Every week the humans would light a fire for each loved one who had ever died and try to keep the fire going, heating the tortoise, while they sobbed.
The Lark was fascinated by change in the bodies and in the minds of the humans. Parenting and adulthood were curious for the bird, for old gods never raised their children. The bird demanded clothes on its humans, feathers that covered the humans up and made them see shame in each other. Different colors for different ages, different colors for different genders, different colors for those who made mistakes. The change between colors was a massive affair, humans would get naked under the eyes of the bird and wait for a day and a night in the cold and the rain while the bird hunted down the fluff and trinkets that would cover them again. The bird required children to leave their parents upon the age of thirteen. Too young to feel safe, but old enough to survive their silent pain. The bird would stare into their eyes and then pick them up flying them to another nest of humans hours and hours away.
The Wendigo never left. It’s horrible whistling and ice cold breath still rang through the woods at night. It never crossed the ancient gods, never stole from their herd. But it knew the sadness of being one of the enslaved. It offered freedom for humanity a chance to not need do anything but live in its forest. Some humans chose freedom and had their guts turned into ice. Some humans chose freedom and ate their children with the distended mouth of the Wendigo. Some humans chose freedom and moaned in the night, crying and sobbing and chewing the ice cold of their own hands and feet.
In that way, humanity never lost its emotions and the gods never grew tired of us.
Prologue: The Merchant
The true prologue to the Crossroads story I begin writing a long time ago and then took offline. The plot and characters of that novella are much more fleshed out now, though it remains to be seen how much of it will end up on here.
Thago is burning. The river is burning. The Floating God is burning. It began with unrest, an uprising among the slaves of the lower barges, made perilous by an attack by the servants of the Two-Eared Crown. Coincidence, surely. So the magisters and princes must have thought. Coincidence, perhaps, they would take to their grave. But the Merchant knows this was not coincidence. It was fire, built and kindled and sparked by singed, practiced hands, spread by design and the carelessness of those who saw coincidence in such things. And now Thago is burning.
With this certainty, the Merchant finds himself in the plaza before the palace which was once a temple. The northern and eastern launches have been blockaded; the bridge to the trade barges is ablaze, and the flames now lick the palace’s western walls. The southern dock below swarms with the enemy, and above, the Riversworn guard their trapped princes, awaiting reinforcement that will not arrive in time, hopefully and foolishly unaware that their only path out is through the force massing beneath them. The Merchant draws his sword and locks his shield to his arm. His task is impossible but clear: He must somehow give them enough time.
Five race up the steps now. They are scouts meant to reconnoiter, but they charge anyway, seeing only the Merchant in their path. Their spears stall upon his shield, and he dispatches them quickly. One tumbles down the steps, two die to his blade, two are pushed from the plaza to the churned water fifty feet below. One will drown, the Merchant knows. The other will be rescued by his countrymen. But there is little time to dwell on either fate, for a much larger host of soldiers has begun its determined ascent.
Many fall before him–seven more are hurled into the water, fifteen bleed out there on the plaza, nine thrown down the steps collide with eleven climbing, and two more collapse, skulls fractured by the spur of the Merchant’s shield–but the number on the plaza with him continues to grow. He is driven back to the palace entryway, certainty resolving that his vain gift is reaching its limits. Then the soldiers fall back. They open a wide circle as a silhouette crests the stairway behind them.
The Merchant recognizes this one, recognizes the tattered regalia, the scar over his broken nose, the long knife set ablaze by magical gifts twirling in his hand. This is Brother’s general, the one called Ignigoet, Pyrotechnic of the Left Hand. It is betrayal then. The Merchant suppresses a roar and hurls himself at the smirking man.
Their engagement is swift and brutal. Ignigoet parries the first thrust, catching the Merchant’s shield with his offhand. They separate. Ignigoet throws a barrage of knives into the Merchant’s shield. Then the flames upon them detonate, and the Merchant is scorched and sprawling, and time has run out.
He dimly notices the knife cut his throat as he stares up at the plumes of smoke in the night sky. The general kneels over him, but the smirk is gone. His face is impassive, and the burning eyes therein do not belong to Selenus Ignigoet. The Merchant realizes too late that this is no betrayal at all.
And then he is gone.
Top Image: From Stories, by Rae Johnson
The Thing in the Woods
A rare piece of standalone short fiction.
One day I went wandering, and as the sun got low in the sky, and the clouds turned stormy over my head, I found myself at the edge of the woods. In clear need of shelter and with no means to build my own, I ventured in. The dark had only just fallen when I was beset upon by wolves. They ran me down and bit into my flesh and tore my bleeding corpse apart.
***
The night passed, and the sun rose, and I lived again.
I returned to the forest’s edge, armed with wits and weapons, and when night fell, and the wolves again approached my camp, I shot the first of them dead, ending the chase before it began.
“You will come no closer!” I shouted after the remainder, confident I was heard, for I felt then the woods’ countless eyes upon me. Alas, one pair of those eyes belonged to a brown bear, which wandered, hungry, into my campsite, undeterred by my shouts and gesticulations. My first shot barely wounded it, and I did not get another. It mangled my shoulder with a swipe of its claw and, biting into my chest, slammed me into a tree until my skull shattered.
***
The night passed, and the sun rose, and I lived again.
When next I returned to those woods, I brought with me others as eager as I to conquer the brutality of that place. We came well-prepared with tools and traps and, of course, our firepower, and on account of our numbers–or perhaps the noise we made in our conversation or careless trudging–the wolves did not bother us at all. It was not until the third night that we came upon another bear, its leg caught in one of the traps we had cunningly placed at the perimeter of our day’s patrol. Incensed by pain, the beast attempted to charge us, but restrained as it was, it perished in a hail of bullets before crossing even half the way.
My companions and I were in good spirits then, for we had conquered the monster. The things in the woods–we believed–were no longer any threat to us. But come morning, we realized a new worry: In our trek into this place, we had taken scant inventory of the movements of the sun above, for it had been obscured by branches and far from the forefront of our minds. We had little idea of where we were, and there, three days’ journey of indeterminate direction into the undergrowth, we had little idea of how to return. Moreover, as the days passed, as our aimless wandering brought us no closer to anything we’d seen before, it began to grow colder, and the number of beasts about seemed to dwindle. And as our supplies grew sparse and our worries thrived, I began to feel more and more as if I were being watched.
It was not an animal–of that I was sure–for I had grown cognizant of the ways in which their presences intruded upon ours. Rather, it seemed as if the forest itself was watching, laughing, licking its thorny lips in anticipation of the fate which imminently awaited our arrogance. Such a fate did seem to be waiting, after all: It seemed we would likely starve and succumb to the cold within the week.
I did not starve, though. Instead, I awoke one night to my companion standing over me, hefting an axe and grinning madly.
“We’re all just animals, aren’t we? Eating to survive?” he cried out, as much to himself as to me, and brought the axe down. Not exactly an illuminating thought, I noted as my head split open.
***
The night passed, and the sun rose, and I lived again.
While I had been glad of my companions in my previous life, it was clear to me that in difficult times, their presence would turn to liability. So the next time I ventured into the woods, I did so alone, seeking not to conquer their brutality but, rather, their austerity.
Searching closely this time among the boughs and brush for floral details my foregone predatory inclinations might have overlooked, I came upon a bush laden with red berries which were tart to the taste. I tasted them, then ate my fill, satisfied with my find, but that night I found my bowels so inflamed that when the wolves came, I could scarcely defend myself, and they feasted happily on my viscera.
***
The night passed, and the sun rose, and I lived again.
Subsequently, I avoided those berries, but, determined to find some sort of sustenance that might supplement my stores in the colder months, I continued to seek out the marginalia which I had previously ignored, accumulating a wide variety of brown mushrooms, white mushrooms, black mushrooms, herbs, fruits, roots, and saps, nearly all of which–I discovered over as many lifetimes–brought about my death in some fashion.
***
The night passed, and the sun rose, and I lived again.
Much time thereafter, having amassed some knowledge–still hardly sufficient–of survival in those woods, I found myself despairing of my mission, for I could see only more death resulting from further effort. It was in this state that I spotted, between the thick branches which saturated the forest’s depths, a small shack, firelight in its window and smoke rising from its chimney in tentative wisps. Bewildered but heartened by the discovery, I approached and rapped on the door. A disheveled woman answered.
“I beg you: help me,” I said. “I have searched many years and paid uncountable cost with precious little to show for it.”
“Why do you search?” she asked. Her face was dull. Her eyes were wild. I told her:
“I seek the wisdom to conquer this place.”
“Hmph,” she grunted. “You are not of this place, then, are you?”
Not waiting for an answer, she invited me in and gave me a bowl of stew which I found hearty and pleasant, though I did not recognize the roots and meats therein.
“It is clear you know much of these woods,” I said. “Would you do me the kindness of sharing what you have learned?”
“I know these woods. I fear these woods. I am a creature of these woods,” she replied. “I inhabit the shadows between the trees. I fear those shadows. I recoil from them in awe and horror. But you have been away too long, and you have forgotten what casts them.”
“I am not afraid of the dark!” I protested. “I merely wish to be prepared for what stalks it.” She cackled:
“You should fear it! You stalk the dark–you are a beast! The beasts that survive learn to fear!”
At this, I began to notice a blackening at the edge of my vision and a sharp pain in my stomach, and the old woman donned a crown of bone and antlers which, I realized, had hung on her wall since I entered. Unable to move, I could only watch as she drew a knife and carved my heart from my chest, and in that moment, I felt what I imagined was an inkling of the horror she had described.
***
The night passed, and the sun rose, and I lived again.
I reentered the woods immediately, retracing my steps through the brush with new fervor. It felt then like anger, perhaps righteous indignation that the hag should so betray a traveler seeking aid, but I still retained enough presence to recognize the unsettled, writhing terror beneath it. The poison and bones and antlers, the darkness that surrounded the woman had rattled me, and I was driven now to respond in the only way I knew. I came again upon the witch’s shack and crashed through her door and battered her skull to a pulp with the butt of my rifle, and then, my racing heart assuaged that the threat had receded, I went about gathering what I had come for.
I scoured her shelves for wisdom in whatever form: parchments, recipes, jars of ingredients wet and dry that I might recognize, memorize, harness. I found it, so very much of it, and I spent what felt like lifetimes there in that shack, absorbing what the old woman had been. I brewed her potions and cooked her stews, and when I had no more of her ingredients left, I went out and gathered them anew, each from a dark and invariably unsettling place. A day arrived when I sat in that ragged cabin, harrowed and manic and at last satisfied that I had conquered the fierce shadows of those woods, and on that day, I was shaken to attention by a hammering at my door.
I opened it to find an unruly mob, stereotyped to the last man with torches and pitchforks, who wasted no time on pleasantries and attempted immediately to force their way through. Holding them back for only a moment, I beheld the contents of my shack in the woods–the scattered parchments, the cauldron bubbling with flesh lumps of unsavory origin, the string of dried human hearts I had “gathered” in my most recent foray outside, and, of course, the seven-foot-tall man with the head of a deer who had been with me since I came to this place–and realization overtook me.
“Perhaps I let this all go too far,” I remarked to the deer-headed man as the mob finally overpowered me and burst through the door. They tied a noose around my neck and dragged me outside. The deer-headed man followed.
“I think not,” he called after me, a hollow, guttural echo reverberating between the trees. “You did not go far at all. You simply fell into a trap.”
As a woman tied my rope taut to a branch, I called back:
“Are you actually talking to me? Do deer throats even make those sounds?” I saw him shrug, but at that moment the woman kicked the block out from under my feet, and the snap of my neck cut the conversation short.
***
The night passed, and the sun rose, and I lived again.
When next I came upon the forest’s edge, I paused, reflecting on the traps I had stumbled upon in my past lives. Behind me in the light, humanity had spread fearless and far, erecting towers of metal and stone, and now there was little left beside the metropolis, its controlled, sub-rural gaps, and, of course, the woods, still dark, inexorable, frighteningly constant and yet faded, it seemed, from every human attention but mine. I was still drawn there, but it occurred to me that the injury which so drove me before now barely ached. Once I had thought to prove myself better than this place, but now, my inferiority a foregone conclusion, I found myself at the edge of the woods all the same.
I was afraid, I realized. Afraid, of course, of the woods, that I should enter and again be so thoroughly consumed, but that fear which so struck me then lay not before me. It was behind me, what I fled, the metropolis, the sterile nauseam of “progress” shepherded by system, by vast presences of voltage and industry which needed no longer hide in the shadows between the trees. They hungered like the woods, would gladly swallow me if I stepped back through their shining gates, but I knew that if I decided to fight back, to rebuff the paper teeth that gnawed my soul, those presences would vanish into aether, and the only blood on my fists would be that of people, innocent of–incapable of understanding–the horrors they comprised.
The presence between the trees, though, offered me a certain courtesy. It offered me an opponent.
“Escape to the Great Outdoors!” blared a sanitized imitation of a woman’s voice, resonating, discordant, across the woods’ threshold, distorted by trees and what sounded like rattling, corroded tin. “Exclusive Travel Packages Available Today!”
I was of course uninterested in such an offer, but I had a notion that, in actuality, none was being made to me. Intrigued, I crossed into the trees. It was not long before I came upon a clearing, and at its center I found the source of the strange advertisement.
Standing there in the afternoon sun, motionless but hunched, as if paused, hesitating before its next step in a hopeless shuffle forward, was a bizarre and uncanny creature. It loomed over me, fifteen, perhaps twenty feet tall, with a body resembling an emaciated–perhaps mummified–corpse, overgrown and infested with roots, branches, debris, and a winding, itinerant thread of barbed wire. The corpse-giant had no head, but where its neck ought to have been, a metal pole jutted from its flesh, wreathed by two strands of electrical cable. Atop the pole, the wires attached to a pair of siren horns, fastened at asymmetrical heights over the creature’s left and right shoulders. Its stance was wide, no doubt due to the precarious balance offered by its semi-skeletal legs, and its arms hung lifeless in front of it.
It stood oblique to me, “facing” the woods to my left, but though I found its countenance quite unsettling and feared the consequence of making myself known, I could not help but query:
“Didn’t I read about you on the internet? You’re someone’s scary story! You’re a product of civilization! Why are you out here in the woods?” With a screech of feedback, the creature’s sirens blared to life.
“Face your fears for a better life!” imported the static-ridden voice of a hip-and-with-it everyman. “Ask your doctor if Phobilify is right for you!” Then, with a shudder, the creature turned to face me, taking three halting–and yet somehow violent–steps. I stared into its faceless, industrial visage, curiosity only barely overcoming my terror, and considered whether I ought to turn and run.
The reaction which instead emerged from my gut was a hysterical giggle, which I quickly suppressed, clamping a hand over my mouth. But the thought behind it remained: It was ridiculous, wasn’t it? I knew these woods, knew to fear them, knew that to face them risked my life and my sanity. I could lie. I could admit to an astounding lapse in judgment which brought me here, face to face with the darkness in its own home. But I would not. I knew, this time, I would not. I wanted to gaze into the darkness, to see in it not the meaningless void which humanity saw in the woods but something else–something shifting and unknowable–which I hoped, with all I was, still lived in my own heart as well.
And it was funny! This electo-cryptid before me, this thousandth face of the ineffable thing in the woods, sounding its mockeries, its empty calls for monetizable attention–it was laughing! And I had a sense, a hopeful suspicion, that it was laughing with me and not at me.
So I stood there, defiant, terrified, giggling, as the siren-headed thing lurched, seized me in its dry, slender fingers, crushed my ribcage in its grip, and though I died, defeated utterly once again by this thing that lived here in the woods, I realized amidst the rush of air from my chest that, somehow, I no longer felt trapped.
***
The night passed, and the sun rose, and I lived again.
It was many years before I again spoke with the thing in the woods, though in that time my demeanor toward it softened. I did not abandon my forays beyond civilization; rather, I renewed my vigor, seeking with every opportunity the uneasy solitude I found among the trees, tolerating–or perhaps embracing–the uncertainty of survival which came with it. I had cultivated a healthy awe for the forces whose sway I navigated there and a healthy fear for the gaze I felt upon me in the night, but even so I was surprised to eventually find others like myself in that place. We were few, and it took years–lifetimes, even–for us to find communion there, but I was not alone. There were rare others who found that strange comfort in the unknown’s hungry embrace, who were as well deeply unsettled by the monolithic indifference offered by their fellow men amidst the cities and the streets.
Together, we were resilient to the forest’s caprice, and in time, we ceased departing it altogether. We found a clearing–perhaps the same clearing where I had perished to the siren-headed beast, though I could not be certain–and built a town, snug amidst the trees, and we thrived there, going about our lives–and the lives after those and the lives after those–until one day, a man strode in from the woods, hefting a shabby briefcase up to my doorstep. His breath smelled of charcoal, his shoes worn but uncannily pristine, his perfectly greased hair clashing nauseously with the threadbare, burgundy suit hanging loose on his frame. He was a traveling salesman, he explained.
“Traveling from where?” I asked.
“Oh, ya’know, hereabouts, thereabouts. Th’important thing’s what I’m bringin’ to ya, though!” He knelt and balanced the case on his knee, undoing the clasps as he flashed his plastic smile, and just then, behind his dead eyes, I saw something writhe. I knew what would be in the case. I knew it would be like a faraway shelter, simple, familiar in its use, eerily out of place. It would have some hidden, darker side, a sordid history perhaps, or an old, dusty curse of which the salesman would relay only the slightest rumor. It would compel me to cling to it, press past the ill fortune it would seem to bring until, finally, the mystery of its existence dangling, tantalizing before me, I would be devoured. I would almost certainly die, I knew, but it would not be before I tasted the narcotic brine of the unknown, the fear, the horrible something which I had always truly sought.
I knew what would be offered, so I met the man’s stare, looked past him, gazed again upon the thing in the woods whose shadow twisted behind his eyes. And with the case’s last clasp still fastened, I preempted:
“I’ll take it.”
Top Image: yo bro is it safe down there in the woods? yeah man it’s cool, by Tomislav Jagnjic. I do not own it.
Purchase a Little Piece of Suffering Today!
Coming from here…
This is so much later than “this week”, but testing shipping took a hot minute. While work is ongoing on literally everything, we’ve set up a shop! Offerings are limited right now, though we’re working to set up more soon. But still, if you’d like to buy a print and support our work, we’d be very grateful.
Shells of Dead Things
This past weekend, I visited my parents, and in keeping with ritual, timeworn in the considerable period since I left home, I picked up another box of childhood possessions needing allocation between the designations of “keepsake” and “trash”. In it this time, I found a boardgame, a pre-production copy given to me by its designer (my high-school girlfriend’s father) at around the time of its retail release. It was a spiny memory, hence my writing about it now.
If the game were a seashell, it would be an unremarkable one, chipped, dull mottled white and brown. It was a physically clever design, but when all was said and done, it was just a limited set of sudoku puzzles, rendered in three-dimensional, physical space for reasons that I’m not entirely sure were thought out. Predictably, it had little appeal to the sudoku demographic, and as far as I can tell, there is no longer any way to acquire it. Like a seashell, it’s just detritus now, washed up on a beach, ejected entirely from its medium of existence.
Also like a seashell, it remains as a reminder of something no longer here. Game project failures are a dime a dozen–even the best developers have tons of them–but this man never got another shot. If memory serves, within a year of giving me this gift, his cancer returned from a ten-year remission and took him from his family and whatever projects he might have intended as a second swing. There’s a true but tired moral here of how life (and its grim consequence) will relentlessly fuck with our best laid plans, but what I felt as I picked up that game was just a strange, calm shiver, a slimy, ephemeral thing crawling up from the sea to remind me that the shell I hold is important, that it once meant something.
The meaning there is not the same as the moral, and of course it’s difficult to parse. But even though I can look down at the sand and see the horizon of shells, stark, white, legion at the water’s edge, I know the apparition isn’t wrong. This one did once mean something, and my own unique ability to remember it suggests it’s worth keeping.
Infrastructure
Sorry for the relative radio silence. Work has been ongoing, albeit slowly. I have a relatively exciting update coming this week, but I wanted to drop a small preview today (while I’m thoroughly engaged):
Image: The Third Gift, by Rae Johnson
Humanity’s Eyes, Part 4
Continued from here. This will be the final part–I will post a unified version (like I did for the LaSein Account) soon.
I lived in the wet
For a long time
This odd striving place
Where things kept growing
I learned the humans were burning down the last bits of the forest
Hacking off the trunks and limbs of the trees
Killing the furry people who hid behind them
They were very harsh these humans
It was no matter to me
I did not depend upon the trees
I buried myself in the sand and the dirt
The drying of the forest felt good on my thick and chitinous skin
I could smell the humans, the fuzzy creatures, or my marked
From far away. I remained out of sight
Anytime I wanted I could kill a human or two
When they were particularly lingering or loud
The humans cut down the entire the forest some years in
All of the creatures that lived in the trees were dead
My marked humans began to leave
Walking up the mountain, where their scent eventually disappeared
They left me
In this moist and dirty place
And I started to reflect
Upon my life
The old man
And the little girl with the emerald eye
Maybe I had wanted too much from her
From all of them
Though, I don’t know if I had ever wanted anything
Survival maybe
Gifts maybe
To be seen, to be near
I saw in myself for the first time a sort of softness
Beneath my now granite-like hide
I understood I really did like loving them
My former little group of marked humans
The girl
And love was what it was.
I started to take care of little creatures I found
Letting them live in my hide
Providing them little goodies, food bits, bugs I found
I enjoyed these little creatures scurrying all over my body
Then the mountain came crumpling inward
Like a strange earthquake
A horrifying sight
Dust billowing everywhere
Moaning and twisting of rock
The tops of the peaks came below the clouds
And beneath the clouds they shined like gold
I smelled smells I had never smelled before, along with metal and fresh growing plants.
There was much blood then
Those next days
I smelled much blood
And the tang, the sour taste of magic being cast
Me and my little creatures waited
Burrowing in the sands
Eating, avoiding
Living as we did.
Then I smelled my marked
The ones that had left me so long ago
Sand Lips. But not Sand Lips. A child maybe that had grown
And the unknown scent of something. Several things, living, but mysterious.
The humans now crowded the top of the mountain
And my marked were walking down
down into the desert
Deep into the heat, the land of no water,
the land of the dry, the beautifully dry
I walked towards them
These marked and the mysterious others
Me and my creatures were going back to the land of the hot
My true home
And I gave these new creatures little gifts
Just as the girl had done for me
I watched over them.
Not a part of them, but near them
A demon
A crag
A landmass
Sharing its home
Humanity’s Eyes, Part 3
Continued from here.
As the sun grew hotter the days grew longer
The earth became drier
Fewer and fewer plants grew up in the damned wastes that were my home
My odd little collection
Of marked up little humans
Was suffering
Their people, the older ones, but not too old
Would go further and further into the wastes
Hoping to find and bring back a large cactus
Or find a small pool of water
Or a beast whose blood they could drink
Some of them got hurt when one of those beasts found them instead
The next days I noticed they were packing
Gathering together their little makeshift homes of canvas and bone
Loading them on sleds
They were leaving me
This land of sand and sun
Leaving this waterless pit
As they left, they left behind a final bowl for me
A final farewell of types I supposed
My shovel-like fingers took up the offering and it crunched in my teeth
I felt alone
For the first time in a long time
I wished for their odd presence near me
I missed the giggling screams of their children
Missed the strange noises they made at night
Missed their footprints in the sand
So I followed them
Their stench was lingering long in the desert
Clear tracks.
I didn’t wish them to notice me following them
I don’t know why I cared
But I wished to remain a secret
My long legs and massive arms easily moved through the desert
I followed them many nights
Just past the point of sight, a day away, no more no less.
The ground became thicker
Moister
Dirt
The bugs were different and disgustingly plentiful
Every little nook and cranny of earth seemed to have a bug inside
It seemed grotesque
My little pack of marked humans came
To a partially burned forest
With a mountain in the middle that stretched into a thick layer of clouds
And a massive human settlement
that stank like a decaying corpse
Full of humans
Normal humans
The kind covered in crunchy metal and hateful looks
I stayed away from this human settlement
And found the first pool of water I had ever seen since I was a child
A small puddle and I saw my face
Spikes were ripping out of my carapace in hellish angles
My deep seated eyes were even darker yellow than I recalled
My snout was sharply pointed and looked almost like a beak
I was so caught by the look on my face
The look of my face
The look of me
I did not notice the human until they screamed
I turned towards them
They were a quarter my height
An eighth my width
Built like a tree where I was a mountain
They threw a spear at me
Like I was a dog to be killed
They pulled out a small sword and screamed in rage
Their spear hit my outer carapace
Jammed inside
Stuck like a twig
They ran at me with their sword
I lifted my thick shovel like hands
Their sword bit into my wide and hardened fingers
Their sword got stuck in me
They looked down in shock
Up in fear
My hands crumpled around them
Squishing this human’s meat
Pressing their limbs into their body
Picking them up
I held them in the air, immobile, helpless
Thinking of squishing the blood from their meat
But I instead I held them in front of my flat yellow eyes
They asked me what I was
I said I was the crag
They spoke strange
Bouncy and fluid
But a sound I oddly did not fully hate anymore
They asked me if I would kill them
I looked at their pulpy limbs
Soft squishy face, tears at the brim of their eyes
I said no
If
I looked at the human
Told him the name Sand Lips
Confusion covered their face
But also recognition
I told them to ensure Sand Lips was safe
Along with the little ones Sand Lips kept
I told them to ensure these marked were safe
Or I would smell their scent
And I would kill them as prey in the night.
I breathed deep into this human, learned his smell
I stared into their eyes and asked if they accepted the terms of my agreement
He said yes. The fear in his eyes was fresh, moist, and sweet.
I dropped him
He ran.
I smiled.
I had no more hate for humans.
They were small and afraid.
As they should be.
Part 4 here.
Humanity’s Eyes, Part 2
Continued from here. As before, by Leland.
The next many years were long and harsh
They were also lonely, but I had no idea what that meant at the time
In the beginning I was like a piece of sand.
I blew from place to place
I felt nothing on my insides.
I ate
I drank
I killed
I moved
Life was a never ending cycle of survival
Though my body continued to morph and change
My chitinous ledges grew larger
My fingers grew thicker and harder
I could tear out huge piles of dusty earth
And suck out the soft crunchy creatures that burrowed beneath
I was a moving land mass.
Not a monster
A thing
An object
My hate roiled inside of me
But without eyes watching me
Reinforcing that hate
It began to bake into my bones
But the eyes
The eyes of my mother
Of the only girl to give me a gift
And the smell of that lock of her hair
Was still fresh every time I remembered
I would cringe in those times.
As the years wore on that pain stayed true.
I avoided the smell of humanity
That would drift in with the dusty blasts of air sometimes
I preferred my thick and rigid solitude
As I roamed one day I smelled blood
Fresh blood
Active blood
Human blood.
I sat on my haunches. Staring into the far setting sun.
I decided to pay back the one act of kindness I had received
And walked towards the blood.
The sun had almost set by the time I descended upon the moving human
One of the grit, the marked, the human rejects I had been raised with, was sliding in the sand.
Legs inert and twitching behind them
Blood staining the sand as they moved.
They had a fierce and hard look in their eyes, dust embedded in their teeth.
They first felt my shadow land upon them
They looked at me
A moving mountain
With my fetid yellow eyes
They showed fear on their face. Or maybe acceptance. Maybe denial
Something firm and unrelenting.
I spoke the language of the desert to them.
The words sounded odd and strange in my mouth
They were shocked I could speak
And relieved.
They said their name was Sand Lips
And they needed to send a message
That the Mukori were coming
To kill the Kamai
Their exhaustion took them
And they fell into the sand.
I looked at the grit. The marked and scarred human. Helpless. Desperate. Clinging to life over some words they claimed needed to be heard
Heard by someone human.
I stared at this breathing corpse for a while
Thinking of this message
The Mukori, the Kamai, Sand Lips
Names felt strange in the desert
I was a demon, a mountain, a pair of yellow eyes
Sand Lips.
Sand Lips.
I hated names.
I hated these monikers of humanity
I hated them in my ears
In my throat
Along my tongue
I pounded the desert
Threw a massive boulder,
Flung a mountain of sand
Trying to throw it out of me
But it was stuck.
These names
These filthy human names.
The desert could not take them from me.
For the desert was no home for humans.
Only those filthy human camps could take these names
I screamed
A sound so loud the sky quaked
And the moon cried
I lifted the filthy human over my back
Limp and helpless
A sack of barely breathing meat and pus
I moved my body weight forward
Let my legs press against the earth under me
I loped
Towards the humans
The sickening smell of the humans
I saw their little fires in the distance
The ground under me flew
The cool wind whipped into my eyes
The earth stretched and narrowed and the fires grew larger
I came to the fires, the humans all around, all marked, all cut, all children of the grit.
I crashed into their makeshift home
This little gathering of scarred humans
Humans that were so small
Looking up in terror
Shear terror
I was still a demon
And they had no idea what I was here to collect
I put down the limp sack of meat from my shoulder
And I spoke those pus-riddled human words
The Mukori, the Kamai, Sand Lips
Told them they would die.
An old human came out
Thanked me
Whatever that meant
Said they knew not who I was
Said they had not seen one of my kind for a long time
My kind
My… kind
Tears began to leak from me
The elder lifted a bowl up to me
Some sticky nectar of the cactus fruit
I ate the bowl.
This was the second human to ever give me a gift
I left
Went back to the dark
To the desert
The sand and the rocks
The moon and the sun
The bugs and the earth
But I continued to smell these humans
And I did not go far.
More humans came
Clanking humans
Loud humans
Humans laden with the pungent, sour smell of relics
I killed these humans, before they could see me, before their eyes could look at me in disgust
Like a pack of bugs they crunched in my teeth
I Split them in half
Popped them like flies
I left them dead there.
They were too loud.
Entitled, angry, and hellishly human.
Their trinkets smelled sweet
And I ate them
They powdered in my teeth
Leaving my mouth sour and salivating for days
I decided this part of the desert was mine
And these cut and marked humans
The ones with the sand lips
Could stay in my piece of the desert
And stay they did
Leaving little bowls of cactus nectar out for me
I felt a touch soft towards them
Like a favored rock or time of the day
I would not choose their death
And they grew older and smaller
And I grew larger and larger
Part 3 here.
