A mare and her dog

by cammera

Night 12: As the river falls, does its forest die?

Applejack woke up to moonlight. She looked up, through the holes in the ceiling and at the dust motes playing in the light ray, trying to remember why had she decided to move at night.

Then a shape, far too big for her tastes, flew high in the sky, blocking the moonlight for a moment.

She got up with a grumble, woke up Winona, and donned her bags, then walked out of the building. It seemed like an old church, its stained windows long since broken or stolen, and it barely held together.

A cry sounded in the sky, and her head snapped to see a roc catching a smaller bird like a bug.

Buildings falling on her while she slept were a risk, but rocs were a certainity. At least most of them slept at night: she had been waken up several times during the day to find out that the rocs had apparently decided to take the forest as their breeding ground, and the local wildlife was doing poorly against them.

And if she had it her way, she wasn't going to do against them in any way at all more than she had already.

They walked across the abandoned city, their advance slow from having to keep eyes in both the sky and the ground.

-º-

A few hours later, Applejack stopped by a river to fill her canteen. The water was only a trickle and the area had a lower, swamp-like ground and several broken trees, something that didn't surprise her after noticing the amount of holes in the river bed. As much as she wasn't a geologists, the situation with the moles didn't seem like one that could last much longer.

There was a fluttering, and they barely had time to run to the shadow of a standing tree before a small roc landed by the river. Small for a roc, at least, which still meant twice as big as a bison.

They crouched in the shadow, watching the bird first drink and then bath with what little water there was. Its movements were graceful in a way that was in odds with its size as it picked small amounts of water with its beak and spitted them at its (His? The bird was too young, and the plummage too androgynous, for her to say) feathers in small sprays, then patiently cleaned the feathers of parasites.

After a while Winona pressed into her, waking her from the stuppor she was in, and they crawled into safety.

-º-

By the time they found a suitable place to sleep in, they had had to avoid three more rocs, thankfuly avoiding detection every time. It wasn't even a village, but the few ruined buildings had a sturdy construction, and one of them had (sort of) survived across the years. It was small, most likely a storage shed from the few ruined tools the owner had left behind-- a saw, longer than she was, and a screw press, both too large to pass through the door without a few hours of effort.

Still, she gave them a confused look. Tools like those were valuable enough to justify dismantling the shed around them.

But it didn't mater, at the end. She shook her head to clear it, gave a last drink to her canteen -trying to ignore the lingering taste in it-, cleaned quickly the thick layer of dust from the ground with a piece of cloth, and extended her mat in the ground, then laid on it.

Oh my, a visitor

Comments

[cammera]

6828394 For now™

[Aatxe360]

It feels like an entire chapter is missing and you don't specify as Winoa as part of "they" anywhere.

[cammera]

6828432 >Winona
Oh hell I knew I was forgetting something. Fixed that and part of a scene I had somehow managed to forget writing.
That's the fun thing about proof reading what you wrote a few seconds ago. You go from memory. So new rule: wait fifteen minutes before publishing anything.
>Missing chapter
Huh, yeah. I set up a morning-noon-night rythm, and breaking out of nowhere is a bit jarrying.
Added a scene to the last chapter to provide a bit more cohesion.