Both Those Things
Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2012 8:58 pmMarlah der Harianne awakened early to milk the cows and drown the new kittens she heard mewling in the barn. Mother Mouser, the portly tabby that kept the Harianne barn free of rats, had been swollen by some howling tom over eight weeks before. Mouser had given birth, so Marlah brought a bucket.
As dawn scraped its way over one of Myrken's most prosperous dairy farms, the middle-aged farmwoman kicked through clumps of icy snow to attend to her morning duties. She only paused when her heels started squelching in mud, and beyond the cone of her weakening vision, she saw something laying in the snow just outside the decrepit barn: a sprawled figure, an animal on its side.
The stink of hot blood and musty, pungent cowshit almost overcame her. She crammed a cloak-sleeve against her nostrils and got closer, her feet gurgling with each step. Mud, however, was not the culprit underneath her boots, nor was it even feces on the snow. No, it was runnier, thick like syrup, steaming in the morning.
Blood.
She saw the deflated cow's corpse and at first had thought it just a lump of discarded blankets. Brown and white hide had been ripped open like carelessly-torn parchment. The spine was just an offwhite toothpick, the vertabrae having been crunched into scattered shards. Very little remained of the skull, but the cranium was a cleanly-licked bowl, and whole hooves had gone missing. Blood stained the icy snow for yards around. Long splatters. Trails of blood were strewn in artistic patterns up the side of the barn as if flicked from a swinging blade.
The corpse had been emptied of its entrails. It was a husk. Few ribs were left. If the cow were a cone of corn, the kernels would have been eaten. The cob too. It was nothing more than a dessicated lump of cow-that-used-to-be, cracked open like a festering blister in the chill morning.
Yet, what Marlah der Harianne saw first was not the murdered cow, or the claw-marks that had torn its battered skin.
What she saw before anything else was the grass sprouting from the snow, an abundant mass of it, green and tall and long alive, as if it had burst directly from the freezing earth. It formed a halo around the mauled cow, weeds that crawled high into the air, as tall as the farmwoman's waist. An oasis of spreading greenery amid the snow and blood. A hint of spring or summer, growing from gouges raked through the ice.
Kittens mewed in the barn. Marlah dropped her bucket and shouted, "Arnas." Her husband's name. "Arnas -- quickly, come. Something has happened."
Her gaze found something else, too.
Crimson footsteps trailing out from the blood. Toes like little red dollops. Human feet. Leading away, away, evidence of a murderer only recently fled.
Both those things need food to grow strong, king Bug had said.
And because of that, the grass was what he had Done.
As dawn scraped its way over one of Myrken's most prosperous dairy farms, the middle-aged farmwoman kicked through clumps of icy snow to attend to her morning duties. She only paused when her heels started squelching in mud, and beyond the cone of her weakening vision, she saw something laying in the snow just outside the decrepit barn: a sprawled figure, an animal on its side.
The stink of hot blood and musty, pungent cowshit almost overcame her. She crammed a cloak-sleeve against her nostrils and got closer, her feet gurgling with each step. Mud, however, was not the culprit underneath her boots, nor was it even feces on the snow. No, it was runnier, thick like syrup, steaming in the morning.
Blood.
She saw the deflated cow's corpse and at first had thought it just a lump of discarded blankets. Brown and white hide had been ripped open like carelessly-torn parchment. The spine was just an offwhite toothpick, the vertabrae having been crunched into scattered shards. Very little remained of the skull, but the cranium was a cleanly-licked bowl, and whole hooves had gone missing. Blood stained the icy snow for yards around. Long splatters. Trails of blood were strewn in artistic patterns up the side of the barn as if flicked from a swinging blade.
The corpse had been emptied of its entrails. It was a husk. Few ribs were left. If the cow were a cone of corn, the kernels would have been eaten. The cob too. It was nothing more than a dessicated lump of cow-that-used-to-be, cracked open like a festering blister in the chill morning.
Yet, what Marlah der Harianne saw first was not the murdered cow, or the claw-marks that had torn its battered skin.
What she saw before anything else was the grass sprouting from the snow, an abundant mass of it, green and tall and long alive, as if it had burst directly from the freezing earth. It formed a halo around the mauled cow, weeds that crawled high into the air, as tall as the farmwoman's waist. An oasis of spreading greenery amid the snow and blood. A hint of spring or summer, growing from gouges raked through the ice.
Kittens mewed in the barn. Marlah dropped her bucket and shouted, "Arnas." Her husband's name. "Arnas -- quickly, come. Something has happened."
Her gaze found something else, too.
Crimson footsteps trailing out from the blood. Toes like little red dollops. Human feet. Leading away, away, evidence of a murderer only recently fled.
Both those things need food to grow strong, king Bug had said.
And because of that, the grass was what he had Done.