Breathing Hole

Hunger Clock: 65%

I didn't sleep much. Every time the frogs went quiet for a moment, I listened for it, and every time, it was there. One long, slow pull of air, then nothing for so long I'd start to think I had imagined it, then another. By the time the sky turned gray I'd counted. Between one breath and the next, my own heart beat more than two hundred times.

As soon as there was light, I climbed down and went looking.

The dry part of the bank sat higher than the rest, a wide flat shelf of mud between the husks and the water. It had baked in the sun for so long that it had cracked into flat pieces, like a broken dish glued back together badly, each piece curled up a little at the edges. I walked across it slowly, one leg at a time, and stopped every few steps to feel through my feet.

I found the hole near the middle. It was round and no bigger than one of my eyes, with smooth edges, as if something had kept it open on purpose. When I put my head close, I felt the faintest movement of air going in. I waited, holding still, and after a long time a puff of air came out, warm and smelling like wet earth and old fish.

[Sense]
Target: Mud Sleeper ~ Lv.8
Threat: High
Status: Dormant

It was the first time the System had ever told me what something was doing. Dormant. Asleep, but deeper than sleep.

I stepped back and looked at the whole shelf with that in mind, and it started to make sense. The stream had been higher once. I could see the old waterline on the trunks behind the bank, a dark stain well above my head. This whole shelf had been underwater, soft mud at the bottom of a pool. Then the water had dropped and the mud had dried, and something living in it had dug down and sealed itself in, leaving one little hole to breathe through. And then it had waited.

I knew this one. The couch again, and a Sunday, and a narrator with a soft voice talking about a fish that could live in dried-up mud for years. Years without water. Years without food. It just slowed everything down and waited for the rain to come back.

I looked at the old waterline, and then at the husks, half buried in the leaves only a few body lengths away. The husks were old. The mud was old too.

"How long have you been down there?" I thought. "Were you here when it happened?"

It didn't answer, of course. It just breathed.

I sat on the edge of the shelf for a long time after that, thinking. I thought about the Clock, and the piglet, and every morning I had woken up lower than the night before. Down there under my feet was something that had solved my problem completely. It didn't hunt. It didn't eat. It just lived, for as long as it needed to, until things got better.

When I'd been poisoned, I'd lived through it, and the System had given me a resistance to poison. I'd practiced holding still, and the System had made me better at holding still. It seemed to pay attention to what happened to me and what I did. I didn't know what it would give me for killing something that never needed to eat. Maybe nothing. But I wanted to find out more than I'd wanted anything in a long time.

First, though, I needed breakfast.

The soft mud at the edge of the water was full of frogs, little brown ones that sat with just their eyes above the surface. I took one with a quick strike from the bank and ate it while I watched the shelf.

[Kill] Mud Frog ~ Lv.3
XP gained.

Hunger Clock: 62% → 68%

I was reaching for a second frog when the light changed over the water.

Something big came down out of the sky and landed in the shallows on long thin legs. It was a bird, gray and white, taller than any animal I'd seen in this forest except the big creature, with a long neck folded into an S and a beak like a spear. It stood perfectly still in the water, and the frogs all around it went perfectly still too.

[Sense]
Target: Spear Heron ~ Lv.7
Threat: High

I flattened myself against the bank and let Stillness take me. The heron took two slow steps, then its neck shot out and its beak went into the water and came up with a frog. One gulp. It took two more steps. Another frog. It was very good at this.

Then it walked up onto the dry shelf, and it went straight to the breathing hole.

It knew. It cocked its head and looked at the hole with one yellow eye, and then it drove its beak down into the mud beside it, hard. I heard the crack. It struck again, and again. Little chips of dried mud flew off, but the beak just bounced. The shelf was like stone. After a dozen strikes, the heron gave up and stood there looking at the hole. It had probably tried this a hundred times.

Then it turned its head and looked right at me.

I don't know what gave me away. Maybe nothing. Maybe herons just knew what a mantis looked like on a bank. It took one long step toward me, then another, its neck pulling back into that S.

I knew what that beak could do to mud. I didn't want to know what it could do to me.

When the neck shot out, I wasn't there anymore. I jumped sideways, and the beak drove into the bank where my head had been. Before it could pull back, I struck. I hooked the side of its face with my left scythe, right below the eye, and dragged.

The heron screamed. It reared back, flapping, and its wing caught me and threw me into the reeds. I scrambled up with my scythes high, ready for the next strike. It didn't come. The heron stood in the shallows, shaking its head, blood running down its beak from the cut I'd given it. It looked at me for a long moment with its good eye. Then it opened its wings and lifted off, slow and heavy, and flapped away down the stream.

I stayed in the reeds with my heart pounding and my scythes still up, and slowly I started to click. I hadn't killed it. I hadn't needed to. Something many times my height had looked at me and decided I wasn't worth it.

When I'd calmed down, I went back to the shelf and looked at the little chips the heron had knocked loose. Its beak was as long as my body, it had struck with its whole weight, and it hadn't even made a dent. My scythes weren't going to do any better.

I sat by the breathing hole until evening, listening to the slow breaths, and turned the problem over and over. The shelf was too hard. But it hadn't always been hard. It had been soft mud once, at the bottom of the water.

Hunger Clock: 66%

"Okay," I thought. "So what makes mud soft?"