There, I got a title. Rejoice.
Recap: We got some insight into a monster's mind in the last post as it slowly was hunting someone or something. The animal was wounded, which prevented it from hunting its normal game. Then it killed someone. OoooOOooo
Questions for discussion
1. How is Aryel as a character? What are her qualities from what you saw so far?
2. What about your perspective of her father? Abusive, strict, or what?
3. What are your views on the setting? Does it need to be described more?
4. How does it read? Are there any confusing parts in the story? Specify where they are if you would be so kind
5. Anything else you saw? Contradictions, telling versus showing, etc.
6. How are the descriptions of the animals?
Little bit longer post this time
Aryel Korbat glumly stared down from the mountain side towards the small area where her family’s cabin lay. It wasn’t my fault! It really hadn’t been. She had only been doing what she needed to earlier this morning and she certainly couldn’t be blamed for every little mishap. Her morning chores for the day had consisted of going out and gathering newly fallen sticks off the surrounding trees in the nearby valley that was maybe two or three miles from her family’s cabin.
On her way out, she had jumped over her father’s fence that kept the cows tethered up near the barn. Evidently in her haste to get over the fence she had somehow knocked the padlock open and several of the cows had managed to escape. Maybe if Pa secured the locks better, she glowered.
The animals were nothing special, but they were descendants from the cattle of the first settlers to Ryzel, much like Aryel herself was. She had hear Pa mention once how lucky they were that the cattle could eat the vegetation on this world, and that Serenity had to import all of its foodstuffs from offworld. She couldn’t imagine why that planet should be any different from this one.
Kyl alone knows why they would be different, she thought, uttering the name of the Martyr of Ryzel in wordless prayer. The Martyr had long been dead for many centuries, but her parents had taught her, just like the Lord would answer her prayers, Kyl Barlowe, the Martyr of Ryzel would as well. Certainly he at least would have seen the harmless mishap that had occurred with the cows.
But her father had seen it as nothing more than carelessness. He claimed that at fifteen years of age, she should be more aware and less flowerheaded about her chores. Then he had grabbed her younger brother and stormed off out into the fields to gather up the cattle that had gotten out. Martyn was her father’s light and joy, the son he had always wanted, and whom he kept close constantly, grooming his “heir” as it were. Pa held a much different attitude about his “unneeded” and “unwanted” daughter, two descriptions she had heard him callously throw out even when he knew she could hear him.
Pa had only needed an hour to venture out and gather the wayward cattle and during that time she had busied herself with feeding the chickens. Evidently the cows had given him more trouble than she had thought they might, for he was certainly in a terrible rage when he arrived back. Without breaking stride, he had grabbed her and paddled her bottom until she screamed and howled for the entire valley to hear.
Afterwards he had told her to go out and gather as many sticks as she could find for the fires and that if he wasn’t satisfied with the end result, he’d give her more of the same. The only relief was that he didn’t act that way to just her. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” her father had said more than once. If her brother messed up, pa would be sure to exact the same punishments on him as well. But he always seemed to find more excuses to get mad at her as opposed to Martyn. It was almost as if punishing her was almost akin to not having her around.
Winter was coming fast, and the nights around here during fall weren’t the hottest to begin with. Gathering the plentiful vegetation that fell off of the copper-bark trees would at least manage to help them with fires. As much as she disliked her father and the attitude he had towards her, she didn’t much like being cold either, so she continued to gather the sticks in a large pile down in the middle of a valley.
Her appointed gathering spot for the fallen timber was right near the banks of a small stream which had no name she was aware of. The valley and the stream had been her place to come when she needed time alone from dealing with her family. From her mean father, her apathetic mother, and her snobbish brother, this was one of the few areas that when her chores were done, she could escape out into.
Many a spring and summer afternoon had been spent out in this valley, as she sat underneath the copper barks trees and basking foliage in the warm sun. The flocks of prysmaflies darted overhead as both predator and prey pursued their own interests in glittering aerial dogfights. The dazzling four winged creatures darted here and there with an unnatural agility and grace.
As Aryel looked up, a blue chromatic falcon zipped overhead, in hot pursuit of some smaller creature that raced along on its rapidly four beating wings. The dashed all over the meadow, but the smaller creature evidently made it through the trees, for the falcon banked on its wings and headed up to a higher altitude far up in the sky. She watched for several moments longer and then continued her search.
More than once her boots sank into the mud of the swampy part of this valley. Streams flowed down out of the mountains and hills, feeding into the one that winded through here. She was relieved for what wasn’t the first time that she didn’t have to wear the dresses that many of the other girls she had seen wear around. Her britches and shirt did well enough for her, and a dress would have gotten in the way out here anyway. She had once dreamt of wearing one, but when the chance had finally come, she had found the piece of clothing so unwieldy, she had refused to wear it again. Pa hadn’t been much pleased with that.
She absent mindedly hummed some song she had once heard played at the saloon back at the town. She didn’t know many pieces of music because chance rarely found her in the proximity of Kyl’s Wells, the town that lay closest to her family’s small homestead. The village was too far to walk in a single day, and whenever her father went to trade the crops he grew for other necessities, she was never brought along except on the rare chance that her father was in a charitable mood.
“And that’s not often,” she spoke aloud. There was no one here close enough to hear her speak, and the animals that did hear evidently gave no care. At least she thought they heard. She had never heard any animals native to this area make any sounds. Her father had brushed her comments off that maybe they did make sounds and they just couldn’t hear them as being fool-talk and rubbish.
Walking down one of the hills, she carried a bundle of sticks close to her to keep any of them from falling out. As she moved through the marshy mud an odd mark on the ground caught her eye. She knelt down and saw the obvious pug-mark that lay in the mud near the stream. She mentally stored the location of the mark in her memory and half-ran towards her pile of sticks to drop the bundle off before she could come back and investigate.
She rarely saw animal tracks beyond the smaller shield-backs that roamed occasionally through the valley. The light gangly marks of the prysmaflies could be found when they came down from their flights to stumble about awkwardly on the ground while they sought a drink. She tossed the sticks into the pile and turned to run back to the mark, not even checking to see if she got them all in the general location.
Carefully stumbling through the mud, she pulled her pants up to avoid getting them caught in the swampy parts of the marsh. A lot of drainage came in off the mountains and that made this place both an ideal location for spotting wildlife, as well as a wet swamp for much of the year. She cautiously looked down at the tracks and tried to puzzle them out.
She knew a fair bit of tracking, but most of her knowledge had been picked up from other encounters with pathways of animals rather than any formal training. The majority of that knowledge had been garnered here in this very valley and she was familiar with all the animals that passed through.
Each footmark was actually a double print. The predators that made their homes in the surrounding mountains had elongated toes that branched into two separate feet. Each foot then led into three toes, a central digit and one to the side. To call it a hoof wasn’t completely accurate, but it was the best description that Areyl could think of. The marks were maybe a few inches thick, but at least for or so deep. The feet gave the animal good footing, but made it sink like a stone in mud and snow.
But this animal had not been hunting, judging by the distance from print to print. The entire span of the creature was maybe a little less than she was tall. Had the stride distance been more, she could have seen it was running, and the way that the feet lined up with each other likewise gave clues to the animals movement. No, this animal had simply been strolling.
“If this is what I think…” she muttered to herself as she scanned the nearby muddy area for more prints.
She found the multitude of tracks almost immediately. About ten or so feet away from her current position she found another set of prints from the same sort of animal. These ones were more slimmer and longer while the first group had been bulkier and wider.
“A male and a female,” she said out loud. She wasn’t certainly an expert when it came to pug-marks, but she knew enough to tell the different between an animal’s genders by its tracks. Males were larger and thusly had bigger tracks while the females had slimmer feet. These were the tracks of a patrol of makys. Evidently the patrol that lived around here had come down into the valley, probably three or four hours previously.
She knew if she looked around she could find more of the tracks of the dozen or so individuals that made up the patrol. They would probably be looking for some of the larger animals in the area.
“Probably an aegysback,” she figured. The massive animals were occasionally seen in this area. Each was probably three or four times as tall as she was, and several times as bulky. The massive plant eaters were generally solitary creatures and very often favored prey of the maky patrols. They were a tough kill to be sure unless the maky patrol played smart.
An aegysback had massive tree trunk-like limbs, and a massive saucer shaped head. It didn’t have keen senses, but if it figured out something was there, a slam of its broad head could crush a person’s ribcage, and outright kill a maky. They hadn’t been domesticated for obvious reasons.
The maky was a smaller predator, probably about half the size of a cow. It had a completely featherless and furless skin that from a glance looked more like a hard leathery substance than anything else. The four legs all ended in those double feet and were jointed with a high knee and a long ankle. Their head was slim and arrow like, but two jagged barbs on the side of the head. They had no eyes as far as she could tell, and only two holes punctured right through the end of that head as well as the mouth were the only features the animal had.
Still, she was slightly interested to see that the patrol was down here, and without another glance, she started following the tracks. Once they exited the muddy areas a few hundred feet further, the tracks became harder to find, and several times she had to double back and recheck for the subtle marks that showed the passage of the animals through the dry terrain. Were it not for the presence of so many, she thought she might have been able to follow them at all.
As it was, a stone that had been knocked out of its resting place, a trail through the grass, leaves scattered and branches broken easily pointed in the direction that the patrol was heading. They were obviously making no effort to hide their presence which meant they weren’t on the hunt. She had heard her pa say once that some earth animals made permanent homes and then only left them when they went hunting. Here on Ryzel that wasn’t the case, and the animals were all semi-nomadic.
For what reason she had no clue. She certainly wasn’t smart enough to think why animals did or didn’t do things. She just knew they did. The maky patrol would only stop to settle down when they were laying offspring, and as soon as the offspring were old enough, they’d continue on what seemed like an endless journey through the highlands of Kemland, the Eastern continent of Ryzel.
They would constantly be on the move, looking for game along their migration paths to hunt down. This patrol must have fed long before they came through here, and were now just shifting their area of operation. That was something she was sure of. The animals kept on the move so that they would never overhunt any single area. Animals would become acclimated to their presence and finding food would be much harder on the maky patrol.
She brushed off the concern of actually meeting the maky patrol as nothing of importance or worth worrying about. For starters, she was probably an hour or two behind the animals and it would require her sprinting at full speed to come upon them in any decent amount of time.
Nor did she worry what would happen if she did come upon them. They were often more afraid of people than people were of them. If she came upon the pack, and didn’t do anything obviously aggressive, they would probably give her blank looks and continue on their way.
Even the big kyels were much the same way. Whereas a maky was a small pack hunting animal, the kyel was a much larger predator that needed no pack to hunt. Generally solitary and found farther up in the highlands, kyels were just as shy around people as makys were. She had only ever seen one once in the forests and it had observed her with that big eyeless crescent-shaped head until it got bored and moved on.
She checked up at the passage of the sun overhead, making sure that she still had time to follow the patrol around and then get back to her chores. The sun had barely hit the apex of its height over the sky, so she knew she had several hours yet until she was expected back at her cabin. The tracks from the maky patrol continued through the valley, until they came up against the treeline of the hillside.
She stumbled almost to a start as she saw that the maky patrol suddenly seemed to go all over the area at odd angles here. She had difficulty in keeping the many different tracks straight from one another.
It took several moments for her to finally discern the different tracks from each other. Some thought that one animal track was no different from another, and at first she would have agreed. But a little bit of investigation and one could find the pugmark of an animal was as unique as a face was to another person.
She turned towards the treeline and then back to the tracks. Her first instinct had said that the makys had seen something in the trees and they were stumbling around either trying to get a better look or intimidate whatever they were looking at.
Aryel looked for the tracks that marked the departure of the makys from this area and as she suspected, the tracks showed what had to be the animals moving at a very fast rate away from there. Had something in the trees startled them? The questions popped into her head, and she remained at the edge of the treeline, looking cautiously up towards the hillside.
There was no place in this valley that she hadn’t been to at least once and as she recalled there was nothing special up in that area to draw attention. Few trees sprung up from this hillside, just enough to create a canopy, and the slight twinge of fear that had pierced through her slowly faded away. Very few things could put fear into makys and make them bunch together for protection. Hunters and kyels were about the only things she could imagine. And maybe an enraged aegysback bull could do it as well.
She looked up towards the hill and shifted back and forth in her position until she was satisfied that whatever had made the maky patrol so startled and scared had long since gone. As far as she could see, the hillside was barren, save for a few prysmaflys that flitted about the canopy of the trees and occasionally landed to pick up the golden colored seeds that fell to the ground.
The trees that grew here were the copper-barks and lion’s manes. The former being large trees with a slightly metallic brass colar that was incredibly strong and resilient. Her cabin was made of that material. Lion manes were a darker color, and were topped by long narrow leaves that were supposedly reminiscent of some Earth animal.
The more she watched, the more convinced she became that the coast was clear and her fear was nothing more than her imagination. She started forward at what she thought was a slow pace. Each step that she took, she looked down to check and make sure she didn’t step on any sort of branch or twig. Of the two different things that could scare a patrol of makys, the hunters and poachers were probably the more dangerous to her at least
She had heard of such people, but had never actually seen them. Wild men and women that stalked all through the wilds of the planet, searching for game to hunt and sell to traders were not something she wanted to associate with. The area she was in now constituted one of the more wild areas of the wilderness, where the only law was what you made.
Finding hunters and poachers could end badly if the stories she had heard were to be believed. Wyllyam Korgan, the boy at the next farm over may not be the most trustworthy sort, but if his stories were remotely correct, then she would be right to fear poachers. Part of her told her that her wariness was unwarranted, and what whatever had been here and startled the patrol was long since gone.
