Niche, Chapter 1

The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished. Well, backwards was its final course. Before that, the river fell into the sky.

And before that, everything trembled and shook.

This is how it happened and this is what we will tell our children and they will tell their children, and so our story will be passed down for all time.

Long int0 the future, when each of us here are decomposed and integrated back into the Living Earth, our people will still tell the story of this day!

They will tell how it all started with a mighty Earthquake— the very foundations of our world strained and groaned.

The violent tremors threw our proud Foragers from their Water Bears.

Our people screamed and tried to take cover, but then our whole world tilted! Everything went sideways. Floors shifted to be like sheer walls, then everything flipped completely upside down!

I found myself scrambling around on the ceiling of my dwelling, and heard such a horrible chaos outside.

Homes that weren’t deeply rooted fell right off our world, torn down into the Beyond by their own weight. We could hear the voices of children trapped inside— screaming as they fell away. But who could help them?

Those who survived were hardly able to help themselves. Most of us scraped by on pure luck!

Anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to have already been sheltered in a burrow like me or quick enough to grab tight hold of a stem or a leaf or a stalk was… lost.

They simply fell away, into the Beyond.

That’s how the queen vanished.

One second she was holding Green Council on her throne under the sun, the next she was thrown from our world like so many others.

It was nearly impossible to keep our bearings, while our world was spinning and tilting back and forth.

Some say they looked to the sky and saw a giant face, smiling down at us, as though it were holding our world in the palm of its massive hand.

I was in my shelter, so I never saw it. But survivors who clung to our world outside said that the face was like that of a child. Broad and beaming from horizon to horizon. With hair like the sun and eyes that were bluer than the sky. Then the face changed, a giant object passed between us and the monstrous creature’s great eye. The object was like a dew drop, but large enough to cover our whole land. It magnified the monster in the sky, giving those who saw it a terrifying view into one half of its staring, searching gaze.

But why would a god rip our world into the air and spin us around? And then smile about it? No.

This giant wasn’t a god. A god would never be so cruel.

I think that was a demon grinning at our destruction, gleeful at our misery and basking in our losses.

Witnesses tell that the face in the sky receded and our world quaked again, and when the tremors finally ceased our world was left disoriented. As though the giant picked us up and then slammed us back down, terribly off kilter. The river that had been flung into the Beyond came rushing back, but now it flows in reverse.

Our lives will never be the same, and our grief at the loss of so many of our people will never fade.

But we cling to one small hope… our expedition into the Beyond.

These brave Foragers you see before you, they have volunteered to take our peoples’ first deliberate steps into the Beyond!

They will journey to the edge of our defended territory, then into the Wilds, where the safety of the Green gives way to jungle. Our hunters are well versed in navigating the dangers there— the untamed Water Bears, the Wheel Animals, even the terrifying Round Worms and the deadly Changers….

But our Foragers will push on into the increasingly hostile and poorly charted Tangle.

You’ve all heard the stories of those lands. The voracious Giant Mites with their terrible, crushing jaws. They can eat one of our Water Bears in one bite! They stomp around, hunting any creature unlucky enough to wander into their territory— according to legend, they’ll even attack and bring down those gentle behemoths, the untamable, unassailable Spring Tails.

But our Foragers will press on through the Tangle, to the very last boundary between known and unknown.

We know they will make it this far because we have faith in their strength and skill and bravery.

We pray to the Earth gods for their safety on this journey.

Still it is possible that some will fall to the dangers, and know this: if they fall, they shall be lifted back up as heroes for all eternity with their names carved into the Stone of Records.

But those who weather the journey through the tangle will climb down into the mysteries of the Beyond.

They will be the first of our kind to willingly traverse the edges of our world and the limits of our knowledge.

Explorers, they will see things beyond our wildest imagining.

They will search for our people who were lost in the great earthquake— even to the bottom of the Beyond!

They will look specifically for signs of our good queen. But they will return with as much closure as they can carry. They will tell us what befell our lost people.

It may be folly to hope too hard, but there’s always the chance that some of our kind survived the fall into the Beyond, perhaps some of our loved ones can be reached and rescued and brought back home.

Otherwise, if they are dead then we hope to retrieve their bodies and initiate their blessed Decomposition, so they may reintegrate as Earth intends!

But folly or no, we shall hope. Let us send our Foragers off with all the hope we can muster!

***

As the Chronicler finished speaking to the crowd of shaken survivors, he opened his eyes wide so they could see his soul plainly.

And his soul was overflowing with faith and belief that their people would carry on! That todays tragedy would be remembered, and their losses would be mourned, but that this cataclysm would not be the end of them.

They began to cheer!

And they all circled up and laid hands on the Foragers, and on their Water Bear mounts, so they could communicate their hopes and blessings in the purest way they knew: with the chemical transfer of touch.

Communal courage welled up between them, and brought them to the heights of peace and ambition.

Then the Foragers departed, and the gathered community watched them gallop away into the Wilds on their loyal Water Bears.

But soon after they’d gone the giant face swept back into view, blotting out the whole sky once again and casting their land in darkness.

Many of the people ran for cover, some fell to their knees in prayer. Others had the presence of mind to know that this moment may be their last. These endeavored to be ready for the great Death. They lay flat on the Green and wedged their hands into the soft bits of earth, to fully ground themselves and maximize their communion with their world and their home— for them death would never be the end. As long as the cycle of decomposition was embraced, they’d find new life in the towering stalks of the Green, and in the slime molds that would feed their people for ages to come— maybe even in the predators that lurked in the Wilds and in the Tangle.

Death in the Green or anywhere on their world always meant reintegration. That’s why it was so tragic how so many had been lost to the Beyond— if they remained lost out there, their matter may never find new life, and there was nothing these gentle folks hated to consider more than their lives or deaths going to utter waste.

But the chronicler was not ready for Death, neither wasteful death in the Beyond nor a good and useful death at home.

He was defiant.

He stood rooted to the ground by his feet, paralyzed in terror and awe. And as he stared up into that horrible blue eye; with its cavernous pupil of darkness, he felt a steely resolve take shape in his gut.

He would not bow. He would not flee.

But he wept for his people.

He raised his communing staff and shouted and shouted to the eye: “begone, leave us alone!!!”

***

A clamoring of tiny voices rose up from the moss— but their cries were all too high in frequency and far too low in decibels to be heard by the girl with the magnifying glass.

But she knew she had found something magical, the first time she’d picked up that wet moss. She had seen a miniature village with tiny, little men and women scurrying around. At first she’d thought she’d discovered real fairies, but she hadn’t seen any wings.

So she hadn’t known what to call them. Maybe sprites?

But then she had realized: with how small they are, they must be very fragile. She tried to put the moss back exactly the way she’d found it, for fear of disrupting their little ecosystem. She pressed the moss gently back into place, barely touching the gentle flow of spring water that trickled down between the rocks of the cliff face.

Then she ran to tell her dad that she had discovered little people living in the moss.

He had chuckled, and told her to have fun.

And she had come running back to watch them some more.

Now she watched them scramble around under her gaze, but one in particular stood quite still. He had a little green beard that wagged almost to his toes, and he had big eyes, (well, almost microscopic eyes, but they were big for his body) and big droopy ears. He was wearing what looked like a scrap of goopy, brown fabric, almost like a half decayed flap of leaf litter and he held a little tiny staff, which seemed ceremonial.

She noted that he looked a little bit ugly, actually too ugly to be a sprite. More like a goblin or an imp.

But oh so small! Aha! Maybe he was a gnome?

And she had the distinct impression that this little man, whatever he was called, he was gazing back up at her.

Then he waved, but it wasn’t the greeting she hoped for. He was waving her away, shooing her, and raising the staff as if to ward her off.

Like a grumpy old man.

Why? Was he mad that she had picked up their mossy home?

She felt a wave of guilt— deep sadness. Had she disrupted their tiny village by moving the moss around?

She hoped she hadn’t caused any harm.

She didn’t even know they were there at first.

She was just hoping to see some tardigrades with the magnifying glass her dad had given her for her birthday.

She wanted to apologize, but she wasn’t sure how. If she tried to speak this close to the moss people, she might blow some of them away.

So all she managed was a frown, as she looked down into those big, ugly, microscopic eyes.

***

The Chronicler saw it, the giant terror’s soul laid bare in that one humongous, magnified eye.

He saw her confusion, he saw her regret, and he saw her wish to make amends, her willingness to help.

But they needed the full communion of touch to understand eachother. The power of pheromones and the magic of chemical exchange would bridge the gap.

He lifted the communing staff higher, and urged her with his eyes, to touch… gently.

Then they might understand one another.

She drew the magnifier away. Her finger came into view. It approached as gently as an earth shattering, gargantuan finger could.

And he stung her with the staff of communing as gently as one of his kind could sting.

But neither gnomes nor girl came away unharmed.

His world shook again, with yet another quake. This one was more gentle than before, but still terrifying for the microbial people who felt it.

And her finger pulsed with pain, where the Chronicler had stabbed her with that needle sharp staff.

It wasn’t venom which pulsed under her skin. It was information, packed into a chemical payload inwhich she was not fluent. But as her nerve impulses carted the flash of pain to her brain, she began to understand in the vaguest sense that she had shattered his community. It came as more emotion and feeling than any specific terms.

Somehow she had interfered and scattered many of their kind to the rocks below.

The Chronicler clung to the communing staff, even when she withdrew, and rose into the sky on the skin of her humongous finger.

He absorbed much through the sustained contact, fluent in this manner of talk, he quickly understood what she was, where she came from, and how powerful she could be, even with her accidents. And he understood the broader terrain and physics beyond their world of moss, he understood it all through the giants eyes.

His hope that the lost may still be alive fully blossomed.

He transmitted more information, to refine that first willful communication between microbe and human.

He showed her through blurry thoughts she could now begin to understand:

“Yes you may help. I will help you help us, without any more destruction. Be careful where you step.”

***

From the wilds, the Foragers saw the giant approach again. They felt the tremor. But they were too far away to help. They didn’t know what to do, so they communed and decided to quest onward, in defiance of the dangers that lay before them as well as those that lay behind.

They pressed on; warriors and explorers, who knew they might no longer have a home or people to return to…

They placed their prayers of faith into the Earth and spurred their Water Bears forward.

Authors note:

This was written as part of the Fantasy Prologue II vocal+ challenge. There’s still time to enter if you’re interested!

My take on this challenge is a warning about consequences of careless human interaction with the environment.

In folklore, gnomes are tiny people who live underground and help plants grow.

The gnomes in my story help things rot. kind of like anthropomorphicized, sentient bacteria. they’re supposed to be kind of ugly and gross. They wear rot for clothes, they eat mold and detritus… but still, they are miracles of the microscopic world. The other creatures mentioned in the Wilds and the Tangle are real invertebrates and microbes.

They’re a less malevolent iteration of an idea I posted on Reddit/r/twosentencehorror a while back:

Oh, and here's a song that fits what I was going for: