Hard Mud

Hunger Clock: 53%

Water made mud soft. That was the answer, and it was a useless one. I was fourteen inches long, and I didn't have hands. I couldn't carry water. I couldn't dig a channel from the stream to the shelf, not in a week, not in a month. I lay in my tree at dawn and went through every idea I had, and every one of them ended the same way, with me standing next to a stream I couldn't move.

So I decided to try the stupid way first. Sometimes the stupid way works, and if it doesn't, at least you learn why.

But first I ate, because fifty-three percent was too low to be stupid on. I went to the slow water below the bank and stood in the shallows under Stillness until a fish drifted close enough, and took it with one strike.

[Kill] Stream Fish ~ Lv.4
XP gained.

Hunger Clock: 53% → 62%

Then I went to work on the shelf.

I didn't try to break through the middle, where the heron had failed. I went to the breathing hole, because a hole is the one place where something is already broken. I set my legs on either side of it, put the tip of my right scythe against the edge, and scraped.

A grain of dried mud came loose. Just one, about the size of a seed.

I scraped again, and another came loose. I kept going. I worked the edges of the hole around and around in a slow circle, scrape and turn, scrape and turn, and every few scrapes I'd stop and feel for the breathing to make sure I hadn't woken it. The sun climbed. My scythe tips started to ache, then burn. I switched to the left, then back to the right.

It was the most boring thing I had done in this body, and I did it the way I used to do spreadsheets, in pieces. One scrape. One grain. Don't think about the whole shelf. Just the next grain.

By midday the hole was as wide as my head. By midafternoon it was as wide as my body, a shallow pit with smooth sides, and the mud at the bottom was darker and a little cooler. I could smell it better now, that mix of wet earth and old fish, and something else under it, a slick, sour smell like something that had been sealed in its own skin for a long time. The breathing was louder too. I could feel it come up through my feet.

I bent down to scrape the bottom of the pit, and the bottom of the pit cracked.

It wasn't my scythe. Something under it had moved. A thin crack ran across the floor of the pit, and the next breath didn't come slow. It came fast, a short hard puff, and then another.

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

I jumped back out of the pit just as the floor broke open.

A head came up out of the mud. It was long and blunt and gray-brown, wrapped in some kind of thin, dried skin that tore as it moved, and it was big. Its mouth alone was wider than my body. It opened that mouth, and there were no fangs, just two hard ridged plates where teeth should be, like the edges of a shell. It snapped at the place where I'd been standing, and the plates came together with a crack I felt in my legs.

Then it saw me, or smelled me, and lunged.

It couldn't get far. Most of its body was still locked in the mud, and it could only reach out of the pit with its head and the front of its body. But that was a lot of reach. I struck at its head as it came, and my hook skidded off the slick skin like I'd swung at wet soap. The plates snapped shut an inch from my leg. I struck again, aiming for its eye, and it pulled its head back, and my scythe hit mud.

I backed off to the edge of the shelf, scythes up, legs set, and the Mud Sleeper stayed where it was, half out of the pit, gulping air. It was breathing hard and fast now, as if it had forgotten how and was just remembering. I could see its body moving under the cracked mud. It was long. A lot longer than me.

We looked at each other for a long while. I could have tried again. I could feel the Frenzy pulling a little, telling me that it was stuck and I was free, and I should just go in. But I'd seen how fast those plates closed. I'd seen my hook slide off its skin. And I had a feeling that if those plates ever got one of my legs, they would not let it go.

"Not like this," I thought. "Not in your hole, on your terms."

The Mud Sleeper seemed to agree. After a while, it stopped gulping. Its breaths got longer. Then, slowly, it pulled its head back down into the pit, into the wet mud at the bottom, and the dark slime on its skin seemed to swell and spread and cover the opening. By sunset there was only a dull, wet patch in the middle of my pit and a new breathing hole, small and round, at its center.

Status: Dormant

I'd spent a whole day and gotten exactly nowhere.

Except that wasn't true. I sat on a root above the shelf and went over it. I knew how big it was now. I knew its skin was too slick to hook and that its mouth was the real danger. I knew it was slow to wake and clumsy when it did, and that it couldn't move well while it was locked in mud. And I knew it was hungry. You could see it in the way it lunged. Something that hadn't eaten in years didn't get to be picky.

Hunger Clock: 57%

The sky turned a strange color that evening. Not the usual gold, but a yellow-gray, heavy and low. The air got thick and still and smelled of metal. The frogs were louder than I'd ever heard them, all of them at once, and the insects were flying low over the water, so low the fish were jumping for them. Off to the west, very far away, something rumbled.

I knew that smell. It was the smell of the city right before a summer storm, when everyone on the street started walking faster.

I looked at the old waterline on the trees, well above my head. I looked at the shelf, and my pit, and the little round breathing hole in the middle of it. Then I looked at the stream, and the low ground between the shelf and the water where a flood would come in first.

"I don't have to move the water," I thought. "I just have to be ready when it comes."

I picked a root that hung out over the low ground, thick enough to hold me and high enough to stay dry. I climbed onto it, folded my scythes, and settled in to wait for the rain.