Piercing the Bleak Chapter Two

Xacquan, losing hope because she cannot find the creatures from her dreams, collapses upon the Greylands, only to be awoken by a peculiar looking creature like herself.

CHAPTER TWO

            It was in a new stage of my life that I awakened.  Not willingly, but because my body was being pulled ceaselessly despite all efforts for it to cling to the tree.  A pesky noise was connected to the puller of my body, and it said, over and over again, “Wake.  Up!  Wake. Up!  Wake up!”

            A dreary thought floated across my woozy mind.  Perhaps it was the Cray.  Maybe it had developed its own sentience and was finally coming for me, coming to take me home on large, curling-root legs and hard, cradling branch arms.  Maybe it had begun to miss its longtime partner, as I had grown to miss it.  Maybe it was tugging upon my body with its twisting, grey branches, ready to pull me into a leafy embrace…

            “Wake.  Up!  Wake.  Up!”

            I opened my eyes.  Mostly because I had realized that whatever is pulling me had a soft touch, and whatever it was using to grip seemed to wrap around my ankles like clothing, which fit just right.  “What are you?” I said to the thing across from me, which released my legs.

            The speech feature beneath its smell feature widened, along with the two black and white balls distributed evenly across the center of its face.  It had arms and legs, and clothing only a small bit different than mine.  I imagined myself to look somewhat like it, other than the fact that the color of our surfaces are rather different.  My surface, according to my arm, was pale grey, whereas the surface of the creature in front of me had a surface the color of the Cray.  Dark grey.

            “I am an Ash person…” the creature replied hesitantly.  “Like you, you see.”  It did a shuffling thing with its feet, stepped on one and then the other, then repeated itself.  “Do you have a name?” it finally said after a silence that felt like eternity.  “I’m Ragmon.  Ragmon Ebterstep.”

            Name.  I knew the meaning of such.  “I am Xacquan,” I said.  “Xacquan…”  The creature had a second word to describe itself.  So must I.  “…Oftecray,” I finally decided on, still taken aback by the creature, and unable to think properly yet.  Oftecray.  Of the Cray.

            “That’s a rather unusual name,” the creature said as it did something strange with its speech feature: raised it up on one side.

            “But it must be,” I say confusedly.  “For how must one be identified apart from the rest as a name the same as all others?”

            It just stared at me.  “I see,” it said after a while, in a short kind of way.

            “What am I, Ragmon?” I ask.  I stood up upon my feet and stepped a little closer, touching the brilliant red long-cloth it wore wrapped around its neck and imagining it on my own. The creature stepped backward.  That’s when I realized that it was shorter than me.  Two hands shorter than me, at least.

            “An Ash person…” Ragmon said uneasily.  “A female,” it said as I gazed onward with dissatisfaction.  “A Nuzwierc.  A tree-suckler.  I don’t know what you want me to say.”

            “What is female?”  I asked.  “And Nuzwierc?”

            It looked downward and kicked at the Greylands.  A cloud of dust fluttered in the air, only to settle back down and coat the top of his foot-protector.  “I… I’m not the best person to explain that to you, you see.  I mean… Don’t make me explain gender.  Please.  Let me take you to my Elders.  They will know the best way to deal with you.”  And then, in a fragile voice, “It would be best to come with me, you know.  Otherwise Eirdiel and Natkoben may find you first, and they may be merciless.  ‘What you find in the Greylands, stays in the Greylands,’ they said.  Not that they’re bad fellows.  They’re very friendly, actually.  Just not like me.”

            “Merciless…” I muttered.  The word was not familiar, but there was a sleek feel to it.  Dangerous, almost.

            “They once found a girl here, a girl not much younger than you,” Ragmon continued.  “They tied her by the wrists and dragged her, kicking and screaming, to the colony.  Kicked her shins all the way here, and by the time they made it to the colony, she was a bruised mess.  But it only lasted until the Elders deemed her an innocent.  Now the girl, Pasava, is very fond of them.  Especially Eirdiel.  But everyone is fond of Eirdiel.”

            “Innocent…  Kicking… Screaming…Shins…Girl…” I said.

            “You mustn’t understand what I am saying,” Ragmon said, with a noise that sounds like hrrfff.  “How long’ve you been out in the Greylands, anyways?”

            “Forever,” I said.  The creature raised its headlines at me.  “Ever since I can remember.”

            “But you must know somebody,” Ragmon inferred.  “Your vocabulary seems fluid enough.  Except for anything that implies violence.  Or identity.”

            “I knew the Cray,” I said.  “It was my friend and companion for the longest time.”

            “The Cray?” 

The headlines are raised again, confusion, so I pointed up at the tree I had been feeding from.  “Similar enough,” I said, “to that.”

“The Cray.  It’s a tree?” Ragmon exclaimed.  It made a chuffing sound before rubbing a hand across its face.  “We have a crazy on the loose…!”

“Crazy…?”

“Yeah, I’ll explain later.  Please.  Follow me!”

With hesitation, quickly followed by intense curiosity and then a pulling sort of desperation, I followed my new acquaintance onward through the Greylands.  A new sense of invigoration coursed through my veins, and the only thing I longed for was to know, know, know.