Lost of thoughts

by CraftAids

chirupndevoer

Something not unlike but not quite crickets made the ambient serenade under the canopy. The forest floor had a strange lack of overflowing and un-navigable greenery. Grassy tufts and clumps of mushrooms could be spotted in the dim, blue-ish light. The ground rose up into dangerous peaks and swallowing troughs. There had even been one slight overhang with roots sticking out of it. The light didn’t carry very far.

A cobweb, or perhaps a spider web, was torn down and wrapped his face. It itched and tugged and got in his eyes, and he made faces and blinked and rubbed his forehooves over his head. When it was gone, he glanced around and hopped to the nearest bit of grass and devoured it. It tasted like salted paper with oregano and the forest's mushrooms tasted like glue. The bushes tasted worse. It wasn’t that he liked those flavors and it wasn’t that he hadn’t eaten, he was just still hungry. He had been eating since he entered the forest. The hunger drove him on.

He didn’t look in the trees. He ran a circle around the base of one and ripped a sheet of moss off. He chewed and swallowed and immediately directed his attention to the foliage growing out of a nearby rocky outcropping. He shuffled his forehooves across the wall and stood on his hind hooves, focusing only on the wall before him. He shuffled over a short distance until he had to stretch out over a bush to get any more. He lowered himself to scavenge the tufts in front of the bush. He searched around its edge, stuffing his face under it to get at what he found. A dense pocket of grass sat, tucked into a crevice between a steep dirt hill and the rock outcropping. He followed it. A rock shifted loose under-hoof and he fell to his stomach for a moment before getting back up, consuming all and carving a barren trail to the top. The rock tumbled, unnoticed.

He could see slightly more from up here. Similar shaded trunks and grasses and dirt and greens faded off in each direction. The chirping sound was louder. Everything in sight was still. His stomach ached and he was off again, head first down the nearest semi-clear trail
.

Another mouthful of tall, hard, and green plant followed a swallow of shroom and was followed by short, kind of pokey plant matter. He found stalks of tall, bulbous plant along a trench and then reached up to chew on hanging vine. He tugged it down and started grinding it between his flat horse-teeth.

A painful “scree” zipped through, above, between someplace unseen and a nearby tree on buzzing wings. All that he glimpsed was a sharp, black limb coated with sparse, long brown whiskers disappearing overhead. It was silent. The creature did not show itself again.

It hadn’t occurred to him just how lost he really was. Now, though… now he’d seen a bug. He would have to sleep soon. In every direction, all he could see was a carpet of brown leaves and dead twigs and randomly placed trees and bushes and tufts of assorted food. The blue light coming through the trees lit the scene well enough that he could see the forest immediately around him, before it faded off into the dark.That thing could have been anywhere. Anything could have been anywhere. There was nothing he could do about it. His fear and his hunger fought. Hunger won.

He, like an individual in total control, chose one of the indistinct paths at random and resumed the process of slowly beating back his hunger like a panda. He heard nothing but under-hoof crunching, the creaking and rustling of the trees, and his own heartbeat, breathing, and chewing.

He pushed his head through a space between two more highly complex and individual, but still indistinguishable, specimens of plant life and into a gentle downhill clearing covered in grasses and calm blue light and light blue flowers. It was a buffet of mediocre free food. It would have been typical, if disappointing, if he had failed to appreciate the flavor of a full meal. Fortunately, this wasn’t any better than the rest of the grasses. Then, he ate the flower. After a day of spiced sod, that first blue head was an explosion of blunt flavor. He stopped and closed his eyes. He ran his raw tongue across it, unraveling the bulb and sticking petals to most of his mouth. He mashed the pedals already on his teeth, and they felt strange, like they were being numbed by chemical sour and sweet. The petals were slowly dissolving in his saliva, and they each soon released strange, electric taste surges where there had been subtle peanut & tea.

The next flower was devoured. So were the rest. The grasses were untouched and all of it was under-appreciated. He felt tired now. He managed a shamble over to a bush in a dip in the earth and crawled inside of it to hide and rest.

He was full.