Chapter three of The 4th Gate, Abe meet his first inhabitants of this world.
Dream Catchers
Wow… he thought. They had been climbing for a full ten minutes, and he was
finally starting to appreciate just how high the cliff was. They were probably
a five hundred feet into the air. He could see the bottom of the cliff. About
twenty feet away from the bottom there was a tree line. The trees were all
evergreen and from where he could see the trees stretched a good deal of the
way into the distance, or at least much to far for him to make out clearly the
place where they stopped.
The cliffs were not simply bare
rocks, although there were many good handholds for him to grab onto in order to
make his way down. Every so often there would be a nest attacked to the cliff.
The nests were strange; they seemed to be made of a white crystalline
substance. They looked smooth and oddly slick. They reflected the light very
well though, but it made looking at them rather painful, as they would be small
bright beacons on the cliff.
He even got close enough to touch
one at one point. He had reached out and rubbed his hand against it. It had
been perfectly smooth and pleasant to the touch, and oddly cold. Very cold, it
felt as if they should be frosted. He had been able to look inside of that one.
There had been several eggs each the size of his head and dark grey. The nest
seemed to have been built on top of a crag in the rock, for the nest extended
into a small cave in the back of the nest. The floor of the nest was covered in
pine needles. Near the front of the nest one of the shells was broken, and
pieces littered the floor.
Curled up in the needles was a
baby, a baby leecher. It looked rather like a worm, probably about the length
of his forearm. On the end he presumed to be it’s head there was a sucker
rather like a leech, it was breathing out of this sucker mouth slowly. Just
behind its head the skin membrane of it’s wing started, it sprouted from its
neck and the membrane stretched down covering it’s body nearly all the way to
the end of its tail. The membrane was covered in a soft looking fluffy down,
snow white.
Abe had to suppress the urge to
reach out and feel the down, because even though the membrane was thin he had
seen the other adult lechers pumping them powerfully as they climbed back up the
cliff, so he knew they had to be strong. But it was sleeping it would have been
cruel to wake it up. I was still covered in the thick ichors from the inside of
the egg, and it had just been born and was probably only hours old.
They were probably a third of the
way down by this point. He no longer knew how long they had been climbing. It
was mind-numbing work, and frankly boring.. During the time he has simply let
his mind wander to other topics, such as the baby leechers, but never straying
back to the woman. Not the woman it had been to strange to terrifying. It would
cause him to lose concentration, and concentration was something he needed for
the climb.
They had to several times move to avoid getting close to
adult leechers. They attached to the wall with their tails, but instead of
simply being fleshy like the child these ones had a long curved talon on the
end of theirs. It was probably a foot long, maybe more, and now that he was
close he was able to judge their size. They were between ten and eleven feet long.
Absolutely enormous creatures, and around their wing membranes their bodies
bulged out and were around one foot thick.
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