Chapter 7: Chapter 6 - Light of Moon

Arms made their way to the nest, dragging their cow, self-satisfied, and was blown away to see what their ditch and Noisemaker’s walls had become. No trace of grassless dirt remained, all of it under a huge dome of brownish-yellow clumpy crystals with the look of wet sand dribbled into a mound, touching it, it had the texture of glass – likely with a greater resistance to shattering, not that Arms would be willing to test it given that they’d already imprinted their ass in the foundations.

Inside of the structure was so very dark, faint glows of an escaping sun tracing through where the walls were thinnest, but otherwise the place was purely a smell-scape, something Arms wasn’t quite pleased with. But, who could resist that darkness, the same darkness as existed when the world began at 10AM this morning of the 11th of Julioaugust.

Noisemaker scuttled forth from the outside, while Leader could be seen before they saw you, the wet slapping of their paddle-like feet unmistakeable in the nest, Noisemaker walked in near silence. Better yet, their ocular antennae trailed and waggled in all sorts of directions, and their torso, unlike any other creature’s, did not bob up or down with their walk – given that they had a metre-ish of muscular body trailing behind, a perfect stability, a statue-like composure only broken by the constant undulations of a semi-transparent head, those face-tentacles always wriggling, testing, sensing.

‘How are you feeling?’ Arms shifted, dropping the cow in the centre of the room, where seemed appropriate, Noisemaker melted into the darkness. “Still sore, but better, thank you.”

‘Good, good.’ The scent could be anywhere, above, behind, a direction-less voice.

Wings buzzed, and near them could be heard the brief thwacks of fruit dropping into a big pile – as their wings got bigger, they got faster, and as they got faster they got louder. Inside of the nest the noise felt unbearably loud.

‘No flying in the nest please.’

“Okie.”

“It’s getting so dark, are we going to be okay?”

‘Yeah, I think it’s all gonna be okay.’ Noisemaker crept, only making the sounds of wet slathering of their hare-lips, covering their mouth.

Leader was still visible, there appeared almost the faintest of glows, as minimal an illumination as a single star’s, perhaps it was just their colour, but many members of the family all seemed to come to the idea that Leader was glowing.

“Boom – Boom” softly in the distance, like the thumping of Arms’ fists, but far, far away, Arms and Wings turned instinctively to the noise, either thinking what was that? or: that must be a huge creature.

Leader and Noisemaker turned to eachother, Leader, for the first time, emitting ‘fear’ pheromones.

‘Guns.’

The two, with Arms, left the darkness of the nest, observing the nighttime for the first time. Arms ambled slowly, dull armour glowing in the cloud-dulled moonlight, their boulder-head lifted to the sky, and Noisemaker put their hand in Leader’s hand, and their other on Arms’ craggy shoulder. Noisemaker led them fervently, legs scuttling with purpose. ‘Come see. Come see.’

‘What are you doing?’ Leader asked, they were pulled in the direction opposite the human village.

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‘Going East.’

They stumbled in the near-darkness, Arms following where the two scent-casters led. Hooting noises at them from the trees above and on occasion Noisemaker’s leg would jump up at the cold touch of a wet snail, the woods let in a glittering light from the East now with the cover of darkness giving way for the same orange that before made up the whole of the sky.

Tall bands of light shifted between the shadows of trees, following with the continuous movement of the family and beaming from the left to the right, rays of gold slid across eyes, across tiny beads in carapace, and pearlescent specs on fleshy tubules, and on eyes embedded in blue fat.

The sky was unhidden from tree-cover, clad in royal purple and sunset crimson where the sun’s crown of stars stayed away from their fire-monarch, a ball of gold seeping its light into the soil, spewing wavering rays that gilded the once-humble earth. Flowers morphed out of the dirt, leaves and fronds, gathering at the water’s edge, bowing to the dying star, the family sat with baited breath, slits of resplendence in their eyes. Noisemaker’s two hands reached up, pointing aimlessly, unable to capture the event in front, the sky reddens, the sky reddens, the sun touches the earth and silhouettes a city, the earth absorbs the sun, seconds pass and the sun is gone, only pink vapours remain. The black spires of a village larger than the family have ever seen. Two tiny suns appear on its edge.

“Boom. Boom.” The silence is broken, the birds fly up, the awe is lost. And the enormous body of golden water becomes blackened by nightfall.

Noisemaker scans behind them with an ocular rod, Arms arches their neck upwards, jaw unfurled, observing the night sky’s purple herald, stars twinkling into existence, before being subsumed by clouds as another boom sounded in the distance, this time from behind.

“What are those sounds?”

Leader answered.

‘That’s thunder. Lightning makes those sounds.’

Noisemaker thought to themselves about the merits of honesty. ‘Those previous booms, they were guns, from the humans. A gun is like a machine for breaking something from very far away.’

“Ah. What do you think they’re shooting at?”

Leader interjected. ‘Probably eachother. Humans kill each other for reasons they assume are important.’

With that, water began falling from the sky in teeny tiny droplets, rapidly it was become incredibly dark, and the three turned to go back home. Rain explored Arms’ cracks, and Leader’s fatty head was slick with water, glittering with reflected gunfire as the three absorbed into the forest.

Noisemaker paused, behind the rest. Where Arms had stood, near the water, fresh water, footprints sank into the earth making themselves into reservoirs where the water flooded in, seemingly from under the earth?Noisemaker asked themself if perhaps the earth was floating atop an ocean which existed under it, if you dug deep enough could you touch this mysterious abyss. They thought of digging near the nest, to see if water would pool under.

Dots of cold rap-tapped against the engineer’s body, the rain caressing in a continuous drizzle, tap-tapping against the skin. Arms’ eyes closed, they lifted their head to enjoy coolness of the water – and Noisemaker wondered at how beautiful it must be, to not have known what rain or a sunset was, to experience it by surprise, these alien things.

As they trekked through the woods, they reached their nest, animals rustled in the undergrowth while the rain tit-tatted above on the canopy, heavy globs of water falling off of pointed-leaves, sometimes smacking Noisemaker’s stalks giving them a need to retract. When such drops hit against Arms it sounded like “thwap.”

Noisemaker paid extra attention to the water building in the mud, sight was becoming useless over time, and scent was becoming a primary mean of perception, with a new smell building on the wind, a familial scent, stronger with proximity to the nest. When most of the family entered into the structure, on which the rain rapped most serenely, they saw what Wings had been doing on their lonesome.

A spiral of glowing bulbs had spread across the ceiling, orbs not unlike Wings’ eyes, each a soft-jelly-thing containing in it the tiniest speck of flesh, in their faint green light, it could be seen that they were embedded in the same mucous-lined meat that the initial egg’s of the family had been embedded in, Noisemaker smelled it crawling up the wall, spread thin in comparison to its previous bulk, like a web of skin and adipose peacefully undulating. A clacking of steel claws on the cartilage-like surface of the hive and Wings appeared, smelled and heard but not seen in the darkness.

“Look.” They probably were pointing at the little lights against the dome above. “My children.”