//------------------------------// // deroepoffdearth // Story: Lost of thoughts // by CraftAids //------------------------------// He saw a rock coming, or he was coming at the rock. Regardless, he put his legs out to claim the impact. The water just swept him over the smooth surface. The water had been fast. The banks had risen to become cliff faces on each side. His attempts at swimming may have been good, or not, but they definitely weren’t effective. The water was slowing and another larger rock was showing. On this one, parts were even dry. It was almost right in his path. He was successful in mounting the stone. He was cold and getting colder and dripping on his boulder. To either side was a cliff face without grips and down was the water he came from. In the sky, the stars shone, but, from here, he couldn’t find the moon. A broken rope bridge hung a bit down one side. The cliff faces were dirt near the top and grey rock elsewhere, with orange and purple and pink shiny bits scattered across one side. Upstream was just higher water. Downstream was lower. The old slime on the rock returned as it got wet, and he would either shepherd himself in soon or fall in instead. He lowered himself into the water. It was a short ride. His head didn’t go under, and he took no new bruises or cuts. The water slowed. The walls moved on by him, and soon gave way to widened waters. Downstream, in the night, he could see something orange. He floated closer and saw that it was a flat stone and it was huge and it was embedded in one cliff face and a bit flat and it blocked the natural flow of the river. The water was slow, almost calm. The opposite cliffside veered off, leaving a flooded riverbank. He paddled and kicked and slowly drifted toward shallower water. Grass could be seen swaying in the water, except where his efforts suspended a cloudy trail of mud. He moved a bit quicker once his hooves contacted the ground, through they mostly just pushed through. The water was down to the bottom of his barrel before he could hold his head up. A tree with no leaves, studded with chunks of shiny orange, purple, and pink, sat before him. Some of it’s branches seemed shriveled, but others were disproportionately huge and gnarled, one of them reaching from the top to the the ground and off into the dark. a number of gnarled roots shot off from the body of the main trunk, providing a nice, dry platform. He pulled himself up onto the roots and for a moment, he just observed it. There was a small wet thudding from behind him. He turned his head. He turned his ears. Soon he was turning everything, and, soon, the sound was coming from everywhere, and he still hadn’t found its source. He stopped. The sound continued and quickly began sounding more like it had when he awoke. He turned only his head. The sound was still behind him. He moved only his ears. The sound stayed behind them. He pointed his ears back. The sound was in front of him. He held still and saw nothing move but the water lazily flowing around the giant orange stone and the grass waving under the water. He looked down. In the water, he saw. A long, black, jagged stick extended from his scalp behind each of his ears, on the end of which were writhing masses of pointed, black, curved, and hairy limbs and lunging fangs and single eyes, each locked onto his own through the reflection. He reared and looked up and saw nothing and felt nothing and was very, very, unwilling to let the issue drop just because the thing didn’t have mass and couldn’t be seen, apparently. He swung his head and heard the horrid confirmation of many small limbs smacking together as he slipped off into the water. He stood up quickly and found that the water was up to his knees here. He swung his head down, and the water splashed and parted. He left it under, and no bubbles came up, but some empty space still swung cuts of water open at him. He raised a hoof to apply bone-breaking pressure to something on his head, through water, into soft mud, standing on mud, on only three legs, with his head awkwardly lowered, but he couldn’t bring himself to give his leg to that dangerous thing. Still, it started pulling in the other foreleg, sending them back into the water. He scrambled for the safe footing of the roots and began swinging again, smashing the things against the trunk. The limb tips gouged the trunk. Individual joints popped and snapped and clanked together, some pieces falling off. The water parted around the pieces, leaving shaped bubbles that slowly collapsed as they faded from existence. Blood spurted from the air and painted the tree and colored the water. It hurt. He swung again. He swung again, and he stopped, panting and wide-eyed. He hung his head over the water and looked at the reflection of the two. One eye was busted. Most limbs were gone. Still, one lazily swung through the air, a mouth snapped at his ear, and one lidless eye stared back. He turned, lowered his head, and smashed the top of his head into the tree. The jagged, knobby poles holding the things away snapped. Claws and teeth descended on him. Scrapes and crunches sounded from his head and a weight landed on his back. Pain laced through his ear. A cut opened along one of his shoulders and a hole opened on the other. A set of little fangs sunk into his forehead. As he pushed onward, the impossibly sharpened poles on his head sank into the tree, crushing whatever part of the thing was still between his head and the tree. The surviving part of the thing rolled off his back. He could see it land on the roots in the water’s reflection. He pushed a forehoof through it and ground it against the root. It stopped. The tree creaked. The colored stones in the roots were glowing. He was tugging on his head, and slowly withdrawing the jagged poles from the trunk. He couldn’t see above him, but some green and purple tinting was pulsing across his blood in the water. Something hit his back. It felt like heavy air and kind of like static electricity. Weights appeared on his side and his shoulders and forehead. They felt hot. His head pulled loose. The heat and the feelings and the tinting lights went away. The only color light was the dim blue from the sky. The pain in his head-sticks was gone. He looked himself over and found dark stones clinging to his body everywhere he had been injured. The root he was standing on was blackened, but it had been fine before, and the trunk was rapidly darkening around the two holes he had made. The dark, grey stones ached. He rubbed his hoof across the rocks, but they didn’t dislodge. He could feel their rough surface rubbing under his skin, though it did not hurt. A clump of stone rested on his forehead. And, so, he sat in the water and rubbed hooves across his body until the wood under him gave way and then swam-crawled out, searching for dry land.