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razeThis is part two of the prompt "What in the everloving fuck is that thing?" given by smw, involving Trent of Raze and General Borz of Other Nations, as well as The Monster, The Champion, and The Avianimata of Deadlands. Setting is the deadlands, narrator is Trent, wordcount of part two clocked in smaller at 2k-ish, but far more action dense. And weirder. Disclaimer: there was not a day's distance between typing and proofing this so it probably has errors or repetition.
You can read part one here.
Continued...
We traversed the unfamiliar landscape in relative silence, though Borz did, on numerous occasions, indicate her exasperation that I spent the first twenty minutes or so of the trek pausing to lift every rock, poke my snout in every crevasse, testing the theory that perhaps there was only invertebrate fauna to be found. Like the rest of the land, however, these holes and hollows were defined by absence, with not so much as an earthworm nor even one's castings to be found. By the time we were nearing the source of the smell, I was so accustomed to the only sounds of life being our own footfalls that I was startled by the faint but distinct sloshing of water in the distance - not a rhythmic tidal sound, but rather a noise like something large and clumsy-footed moving in it.
"Ah!" I exclaimed, my enthusiasm renewed. "This makes sense; we've encountered no water source of yet and perhaps, because of that, no life." These words were equal parts wishful and false; no place on earth was too dry for some form of life to scrape out an existence, not even scorching, wind-whipped Saharan sand dunes; life existed for the fact that it was life, not because living was easy.
If Borz drew the same conclusion, she made no comment, only tested the air, wrinkled her nose, and said, --Are you sure we are pursuing a live organism? This is smelling more like old decay the closer we come.--
In truth? She was right, though even decay meant that there had been life, and that in and of itself was hopeful. What's more, behind it all, I thought I caught undertones of something faint and avian. So I insisted, "Something is alive out there. Even if all we find are carrion birds, it would be a comfort to know there is something to clean up should we die here."
Expression humorless, she replied, --You have an odd definition of comfort.--
Over the crest of a steep hill, rocky in a manner so akin to the mid-west that it might have felt like home but for the absence of cacti, sage-brush, fleet-footed lizards skittering in my wake, we finally had a vantage point to see the landscape in panoramic view. There was, predictably, a great deal of humdrum nothingness in all directions: rocks, dusty flatlands, hints of once-trees so bare and desiccated they may have been a millennium dead as easily as a decade.
What was there, however, was so overwhelming that one could scarcely pull their sights from it. At the base of a faint depression that was a valley only in name rather than character spread a lake with eerie-still shores and water so clear you could see its bottom - void of vegetation, unstirred by fish - no matter the depth. Yet this place was not lifeless - a far cry from it, even - for a truly lively scene of epic proportions was unfolding in the shallows of its farmost shore. What I saw was so confounding that I had to look at Borz for confirmation that what I was seeing was not merely a fabrication of my mind. She appeared sufficiently startled to confirm that this was no mere figment; she reared back on her device like a startled horse, bristling with teeth bared, ears flattened - the first hint of genuine fear I'd observed of her thus far.
The sight was, indeed, fearsome to behold. A beast that was, by my estimation, easily three stories tall at its shoulders - far beyond the height of any modern terrestrial mammal known to man - was facing off with a creature I would peg as some manner of avianthrope, though even my extensive background of as a preternaturalist couldn't place a name to the species. It had a corvid's head atop a man's black-feathered body, no proper wings or even modified wing-arms to speak of, but scaled and taloned extremities - reminiscent of a siren in some regards. A broad fan of iridescent blue-green tail feathers bobbed and ticked with its movements as it engaged the behemoth.
My impression of the birdman's opponent was monster despite myself; it had leather-dry skin stretched pale and thin as a paper lantern over a figure that screamed wrongness, its proportions skewed in nightmarish funhouse-mirror ways. It moved lithely for its massive frame, its too-visible skeleton as light and hollow as birds' bones if the quiet of its footfalls were any indication. Its long legs ended in primitive hooves: fused central digits, short claws to either side. Its face was horse-like only in its likeness to a night mare: beady eyes stared from crater-deep pits of sockets, and lips pulled back to where they seemed they might tear revealed graying gums and long teeth that were decidedly not those of an herbivore.
As we watched, stunned to awed silence, the beast swept one massive paw at the birdman, who countered by dancing back, raking the creature's wrist - its thickness greater than his torso - in passing. Where his talons struck, leaving seemingly inconsequential little scrapes at first, the flesh plumped and parted, the hollow bloodless gouges becoming ugly gashes spilling over with lanced fat and fascia, seeping a red too vibrant for this place down the monster's hide.
The birdman made a great sweeping motion with his hands, seemingly pantomiming the gathering of rope; I watched in fascination and disbelief as the blood rose from the wounds in a brilliant crimson thread, drawn towards the feathered mage. It writhed in a snake-like mass in the air before him; he flung his hands out to both sides and it parted in twin cords that struck the bank with such force the ground was pierced. The moment they made landfall, the tendrils proliferated with tiny branches, taking on the likeness of the veins from which they were born, and from the tip of each capillary budded foliage - each a diminutive, blood-red, seven fingered maple leaf.
"You are inseparable from this place, and I will return you to the very soil if need be," a voice rang out. I followed the sound and discovered an unsettling sight: nestled in the ruined pulp of a shattered bird's body that had been pressed neatly into earth in the crater of a giant footprint was a featherless hatchling. It's head wobbled unsteadily in eyes-closed neonatal clumsiness, yet clear as day, its voice rang out, "If you will not give the host peace, we will win it by combat."
These words seemed to distract the birdman, who glanced briefly in the hatchling's direction. The monster took advantage immediately; tearing its rooted limb free such that whatever magic entranced its blood collapsed in a crimson mist, it struck its opponent so that he was sent sprawling through the air, his feathered body ricocheting across the water's surface like a skipping stone before plunging below the depths. The beast pursued, made a heavy-footed pounce fashioned to crush rather than capture where the birdman vanished. An ugly grin of triumph twisted its overstretched maw, and it turned its head towards the hatchling, jeering as it called back, "Your champion is tiny, futile, destined to fail - just like you." It had a voice like a rockslide; even Borz cowered at the sound. "I will not be exorcised by your petty meddlings; control of the host will be mine."
I expected it to target the little bird next, felt the familiar field biologist's conundrum: the virtues of non-interference even when faced with a sympathetic - or just pathetic - inequity of odds between subjects. Yet the beast did not rush for the vulnerable neonate, but rather plunged below the water's surface, which seemed too shallow to bear it from afar. As we watched, it swallowed the behemoth fully, its long tail leaving ripples in the water that radiated out to the shores, where they simply halted rather than spilling over. It was as though they had struck a wall - no, not even, for such a barrier would have sent them rippling back. Instead, the shore seemed to absorb all of that energetic potential, reclaiming placidity; even the laws of physics fell flat in this place.
--We should go,-- Borz urged. --They have not detected us yet, but that will change.--
And she was right, of course, but looking at the glass-still surface of the lake, the absence of any evidence of the struggle we had just watched unfold - let alone the creatures swallowed by its depths, and the tiny bird at its shores that was sprouting down and opening its eyes before my very own, I was transfixed.
--Dr Wiktor,-- she snapped, already making a slow back stepping retreat.
Before I could answer, a voice called out, "Who are these others?" The hatchling, I realized, was aware of our presence. "You are none of the host's elemental inhabitants. You are... fictives." There was surprise apparent in its tone. "How have you come to be here?"
Venturing slightly closer, I cleared a throat that suddenly felt too dry for speech and replied, "We were hoping we might find someone who could answer that for us."
"Do not come nearer!" Cautioned the bird. "You mustn't make contact. Fictives have no place in the Deadlands, and I fear how contact between us might impact the host."
I reluctantly obeyed while Borz did the favor of having never approached to begin with. "I'm afraid these terms are foreign to me," I explained. "What is the host?"
The bird, now fully down-clad with the start of pinfeathers at the margins of its wings, regarded me with a steady head and intelligent orange eyes. "To frame it in a way you might understand: the host is our ecosystem, and you are an invasive species. You would do well to avoid interference in our affairs, for your sake as well as ours."
I nodded compliantly and started to ask if the bird knew how we might return to our respective homes, but was spared the peculiarity of further conversing with a fledgling as a flurry of movement broke the water's surface. Feathers drenched, water beading off of his scaled forearms, the birdman erupted from the depths with his talons in the throat of something that resembled the mighty beast who had vanished moments earlier only in the lifeless taupe of its hide and the fierce shrilling of its angry voice as it was wrestled to the surface. That aside, it seemed a different creature altogether: smaller, its body baboon-like, hoofed central fingers now flanked by longer, sharp-clawed digits. It bared a short, pointed muzzle of crooked fangs at the birdman, struggling such that it moved under a loose cover of flesh that sagged and pooled like overstretched pantyhose everywhere but where it's opponent's hands left it plumped with blood and muscle.
Panting, his muscular chest straining with ragged breaths, the birdman dragged the squalling beast ashore and flung it disdainfully onto the parched earth. It flailed like a mortally wounded thing before clawing its way over the rocks and running in a tail-tucked coward's retreat into the wilderness. Its scrabbling prey-beast movements attracted my eye in a way its more imposing iteration had not, and my legs twitched with the urge to pursue - something Borz recognized and acknowledged with, --Don't,-- and the soft pressure of one skeletal palm on my thigh.
The birdman watched his adversary vanish into the distance, then turned to face the fledgling, which had - somewhere in the course of our distraction - become a fully feathered, faintly magpieish creature with shiny black feathers and thumb-shaped patterns on its primaries that appeared white at first glance. On closer examination, and with the movement of spreading its wings, they were pearlescent, catching the light in an undulating rainbow of gentle hues. It was unlike any bird I'd ever beheld, even among iridescent tropical species whose bright plumage shimmered in sunlight.
"Well done," crowed the bird, its words acknowledged by the ducking of the birdman's head. I noticed that the movement was punctuated by several of his feathers drifting loose, as if in heavy molt, but they sublimated into nothingness before ever making landfall. There will never be enough field journals to record these observations in a way that gives them justice, I thought. If Borz did not gather a direct translation from her mental eavesdropping, she at least caught my drift, smiling knowingly my way.
"Your duty is not fulfilled," said the strange magpie, addressing the birdman. "You may rest only after you accompany these fictives to the borderlands, that they might return to their respective universes." It turned, now setting its gaze on us. "Please go willingly."
smw, involving Trent of Raze and General Borz of Other Nations, as well as The Monster, The Champion, and The Avianimata of Deadlands. Setting is the deadlands, narrator is Trent, wordcount of part two clocked in smaller at 2k-ish, but far more action dense. And weirder. Disclaimer: there was not a day's distance between typing and proofing this so it probably has errors or repetition. You can read part one here.
Continued...
We traversed the unfamiliar landscape in relative silence, though Borz did, on numerous occasions, indicate her exasperation that I spent the first twenty minutes or so of the trek pausing to lift every rock, poke my snout in every crevasse, testing the theory that perhaps there was only invertebrate fauna to be found. Like the rest of the land, however, these holes and hollows were defined by absence, with not so much as an earthworm nor even one's castings to be found. By the time we were nearing the source of the smell, I was so accustomed to the only sounds of life being our own footfalls that I was startled by the faint but distinct sloshing of water in the distance - not a rhythmic tidal sound, but rather a noise like something large and clumsy-footed moving in it.
"Ah!" I exclaimed, my enthusiasm renewed. "This makes sense; we've encountered no water source of yet and perhaps, because of that, no life." These words were equal parts wishful and false; no place on earth was too dry for some form of life to scrape out an existence, not even scorching, wind-whipped Saharan sand dunes; life existed for the fact that it was life, not because living was easy.
If Borz drew the same conclusion, she made no comment, only tested the air, wrinkled her nose, and said, --Are you sure we are pursuing a live organism? This is smelling more like old decay the closer we come.--
In truth? She was right, though even decay meant that there had been life, and that in and of itself was hopeful. What's more, behind it all, I thought I caught undertones of something faint and avian. So I insisted, "Something is alive out there. Even if all we find are carrion birds, it would be a comfort to know there is something to clean up should we die here."
Expression humorless, she replied, --You have an odd definition of comfort.--
Over the crest of a steep hill, rocky in a manner so akin to the mid-west that it might have felt like home but for the absence of cacti, sage-brush, fleet-footed lizards skittering in my wake, we finally had a vantage point to see the landscape in panoramic view. There was, predictably, a great deal of humdrum nothingness in all directions: rocks, dusty flatlands, hints of once-trees so bare and desiccated they may have been a millennium dead as easily as a decade.
What was there, however, was so overwhelming that one could scarcely pull their sights from it. At the base of a faint depression that was a valley only in name rather than character spread a lake with eerie-still shores and water so clear you could see its bottom - void of vegetation, unstirred by fish - no matter the depth. Yet this place was not lifeless - a far cry from it, even - for a truly lively scene of epic proportions was unfolding in the shallows of its farmost shore. What I saw was so confounding that I had to look at Borz for confirmation that what I was seeing was not merely a fabrication of my mind. She appeared sufficiently startled to confirm that this was no mere figment; she reared back on her device like a startled horse, bristling with teeth bared, ears flattened - the first hint of genuine fear I'd observed of her thus far.
The sight was, indeed, fearsome to behold. A beast that was, by my estimation, easily three stories tall at its shoulders - far beyond the height of any modern terrestrial mammal known to man - was facing off with a creature I would peg as some manner of avianthrope, though even my extensive background of as a preternaturalist couldn't place a name to the species. It had a corvid's head atop a man's black-feathered body, no proper wings or even modified wing-arms to speak of, but scaled and taloned extremities - reminiscent of a siren in some regards. A broad fan of iridescent blue-green tail feathers bobbed and ticked with its movements as it engaged the behemoth.
My impression of the birdman's opponent was monster despite myself; it had leather-dry skin stretched pale and thin as a paper lantern over a figure that screamed wrongness, its proportions skewed in nightmarish funhouse-mirror ways. It moved lithely for its massive frame, its too-visible skeleton as light and hollow as birds' bones if the quiet of its footfalls were any indication. Its long legs ended in primitive hooves: fused central digits, short claws to either side. Its face was horse-like only in its likeness to a night mare: beady eyes stared from crater-deep pits of sockets, and lips pulled back to where they seemed they might tear revealed graying gums and long teeth that were decidedly not those of an herbivore.
As we watched, stunned to awed silence, the beast swept one massive paw at the birdman, who countered by dancing back, raking the creature's wrist - its thickness greater than his torso - in passing. Where his talons struck, leaving seemingly inconsequential little scrapes at first, the flesh plumped and parted, the hollow bloodless gouges becoming ugly gashes spilling over with lanced fat and fascia, seeping a red too vibrant for this place down the monster's hide.
The birdman made a great sweeping motion with his hands, seemingly pantomiming the gathering of rope; I watched in fascination and disbelief as the blood rose from the wounds in a brilliant crimson thread, drawn towards the feathered mage. It writhed in a snake-like mass in the air before him; he flung his hands out to both sides and it parted in twin cords that struck the bank with such force the ground was pierced. The moment they made landfall, the tendrils proliferated with tiny branches, taking on the likeness of the veins from which they were born, and from the tip of each capillary budded foliage - each a diminutive, blood-red, seven fingered maple leaf.
"You are inseparable from this place, and I will return you to the very soil if need be," a voice rang out. I followed the sound and discovered an unsettling sight: nestled in the ruined pulp of a shattered bird's body that had been pressed neatly into earth in the crater of a giant footprint was a featherless hatchling. It's head wobbled unsteadily in eyes-closed neonatal clumsiness, yet clear as day, its voice rang out, "If you will not give the host peace, we will win it by combat."
These words seemed to distract the birdman, who glanced briefly in the hatchling's direction. The monster took advantage immediately; tearing its rooted limb free such that whatever magic entranced its blood collapsed in a crimson mist, it struck its opponent so that he was sent sprawling through the air, his feathered body ricocheting across the water's surface like a skipping stone before plunging below the depths. The beast pursued, made a heavy-footed pounce fashioned to crush rather than capture where the birdman vanished. An ugly grin of triumph twisted its overstretched maw, and it turned its head towards the hatchling, jeering as it called back, "Your champion is tiny, futile, destined to fail - just like you." It had a voice like a rockslide; even Borz cowered at the sound. "I will not be exorcised by your petty meddlings; control of the host will be mine."
I expected it to target the little bird next, felt the familiar field biologist's conundrum: the virtues of non-interference even when faced with a sympathetic - or just pathetic - inequity of odds between subjects. Yet the beast did not rush for the vulnerable neonate, but rather plunged below the water's surface, which seemed too shallow to bear it from afar. As we watched, it swallowed the behemoth fully, its long tail leaving ripples in the water that radiated out to the shores, where they simply halted rather than spilling over. It was as though they had struck a wall - no, not even, for such a barrier would have sent them rippling back. Instead, the shore seemed to absorb all of that energetic potential, reclaiming placidity; even the laws of physics fell flat in this place.
--We should go,-- Borz urged. --They have not detected us yet, but that will change.--
And she was right, of course, but looking at the glass-still surface of the lake, the absence of any evidence of the struggle we had just watched unfold - let alone the creatures swallowed by its depths, and the tiny bird at its shores that was sprouting down and opening its eyes before my very own, I was transfixed.
--Dr Wiktor,-- she snapped, already making a slow back stepping retreat.
Before I could answer, a voice called out, "Who are these others?" The hatchling, I realized, was aware of our presence. "You are none of the host's elemental inhabitants. You are... fictives." There was surprise apparent in its tone. "How have you come to be here?"
Venturing slightly closer, I cleared a throat that suddenly felt too dry for speech and replied, "We were hoping we might find someone who could answer that for us."
"Do not come nearer!" Cautioned the bird. "You mustn't make contact. Fictives have no place in the Deadlands, and I fear how contact between us might impact the host."
I reluctantly obeyed while Borz did the favor of having never approached to begin with. "I'm afraid these terms are foreign to me," I explained. "What is the host?"
The bird, now fully down-clad with the start of pinfeathers at the margins of its wings, regarded me with a steady head and intelligent orange eyes. "To frame it in a way you might understand: the host is our ecosystem, and you are an invasive species. You would do well to avoid interference in our affairs, for your sake as well as ours."
I nodded compliantly and started to ask if the bird knew how we might return to our respective homes, but was spared the peculiarity of further conversing with a fledgling as a flurry of movement broke the water's surface. Feathers drenched, water beading off of his scaled forearms, the birdman erupted from the depths with his talons in the throat of something that resembled the mighty beast who had vanished moments earlier only in the lifeless taupe of its hide and the fierce shrilling of its angry voice as it was wrestled to the surface. That aside, it seemed a different creature altogether: smaller, its body baboon-like, hoofed central fingers now flanked by longer, sharp-clawed digits. It bared a short, pointed muzzle of crooked fangs at the birdman, struggling such that it moved under a loose cover of flesh that sagged and pooled like overstretched pantyhose everywhere but where it's opponent's hands left it plumped with blood and muscle.
Panting, his muscular chest straining with ragged breaths, the birdman dragged the squalling beast ashore and flung it disdainfully onto the parched earth. It flailed like a mortally wounded thing before clawing its way over the rocks and running in a tail-tucked coward's retreat into the wilderness. Its scrabbling prey-beast movements attracted my eye in a way its more imposing iteration had not, and my legs twitched with the urge to pursue - something Borz recognized and acknowledged with, --Don't,-- and the soft pressure of one skeletal palm on my thigh.
The birdman watched his adversary vanish into the distance, then turned to face the fledgling, which had - somewhere in the course of our distraction - become a fully feathered, faintly magpieish creature with shiny black feathers and thumb-shaped patterns on its primaries that appeared white at first glance. On closer examination, and with the movement of spreading its wings, they were pearlescent, catching the light in an undulating rainbow of gentle hues. It was unlike any bird I'd ever beheld, even among iridescent tropical species whose bright plumage shimmered in sunlight.
"Well done," crowed the bird, its words acknowledged by the ducking of the birdman's head. I noticed that the movement was punctuated by several of his feathers drifting loose, as if in heavy molt, but they sublimated into nothingness before ever making landfall. There will never be enough field journals to record these observations in a way that gives them justice, I thought. If Borz did not gather a direct translation from her mental eavesdropping, she at least caught my drift, smiling knowingly my way.
"Your duty is not fulfilled," said the strange magpie, addressing the birdman. "You may rest only after you accompany these fictives to the borderlands, that they might return to their respective universes." It turned, now setting its gaze on us. "Please go willingly."
