The Land of Broken Roads

Dirt woke in the deep of night, when all was still and the darkness so complete he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. There was a thrum, a subtle vibration that swelled and faded in an even pattern. It was so quiet he wasn’t sure if he heard or felt it. But it was there, and it had encroached on his dreams and drawn him back to his body.

He lay for a while just listening, trying to determine what it was. Gentle waves of vibration passed through every part of him, but he felt it most strongly in his gut and his lungs. And his skull, or perhaps just his ears.

It went on and on, slow, even, and gentle. It nearly rocked him back to sleep, but the curiosity kept pulling him back. He finally got up from his bed of ferns and made his way out of the hole by feel.

The darkness was so perfect, so complete, that it awakened a very deep part of him that knew nothing but fear. He had a gnawing sense that there was something out there, something that he would never see before it caught him in its teeth. The primal fear pushed his eyes open wider and wider, made his breathing go painfully quiet and even. His mind stretched to find anything sensible to process, but there was nothing.

No sound, either. His skin’s sensitivity rose to compensate and he thought he could feel the fog on the air, but he couldn’t tell if he was feeling something real or just imagining it.

Wait. No sound. He listened with his ears, watched with his internal awareness. There was nothing. His imagination worked to fill in the gaps, still trying to create some sort of creeping thing headed his direction, but he pushed those thoughts away and focused.

The sound was gone. There was nothing at all outside. He crawled back into his hole and squirmed back into his nest of ferns until he was comfortable and tried to go back to sleep, but it only took a moment for him to realize the sound was back.

He listened for a while, trying to think about the waves of vibration instead of the gaping night only a few feet away from him. Anything could be coming for him and he’d never know it. But it wasn’t. Nothing was coming and he was being silly.

There was a motion to the hum, a rocking sensation, a rise and fall. A pulse, long and slow. The pulse was as subtle as the sound itself, but it was there, filling a slow count of three or four.

He decided the gentle vibrations rose from the ground, since if it was just a sound in the air, he wouldn’t feel it so clearly in his body. No, if it was a sound from above or outside, he’d hear it louder than he felt it. Whatever it was, it came from the ground, passed through him, and rose into the immense root above him.

If he ever saw Socks again, he’d have to ask what the sound was. Maybe the big pup knew, or maybe his mother did. How big was Mother, anyway? Mothers were bigger than their offspring. He knew that. He could almost imagine the size difference. Almost. But like any other concrete memory he tried to nail down, it slipped away.

It no longer felt unnatural to be a child, and now he wondered if it was affecting his speech or thinking. But how could he tell? How would he measure it, without other humans to compare against?

He couldn’t measure and it was useless to try. He was a child. He knew nothing else. He had no memory of any other life. For all he knew, this was how new humans emerged. The word for that was ‘birth’, but he didn’t have much of a concept to go with the word. Birth should happen where a mother was. He knew that, but maybe there had been a mistake. That didn’t feel right, but what did he know?

When he fell asleep shortly afterward, he dreamed of being a tree. His thoughts were so alien that when he woke, he could make no sense of them at all. All he could remember was the feeling of it, the feeling of using senses he couldn’t explain to perceive a world he couldn’t comprehend while awake.

But when he crawled out of his burrow into the stifling morning fog, he rested his fingertips on the heavy root, so much taller than his little body, and let himself feel a wistful longing for the dream world. Some kind of nostalgia for the unreal that could never be satisfied or shared.

Oh well. Sleeping underground had indeed kept him dry, and that was already a welcome improvement. And now it was time for water! It seemed such a treat that his pleasant melancholy vanished immediately and he began racing around licking up every drop. He got smarter about his method, too. He drank a lot more water if he just went around slurping up the little puddles that collected on bigger fern leaves, than trying to clean all the water off the whole plant.

His stomach was stuffed with water long before the fog lifted, so much it sloshed a little when he walked. He needed food, too, but he’d eat later when he had more room in there.

Running through the ferns got him drenched again, though, and now he was cold. All the black dirt caked onto his skin had turned back into mud. If only he had something to scrape it off, he might be able to get clean. But there was nothing to use, nothing at all. Not unless he wanted to try and scrape himself off on a tree, and his front was still healing from the last time he tried that.

So, now what? He had the whole rest of the day. He wanted Socks to come back, mostly. Or have someone else to talk to. But there was no telling if or when the giant pup would appear, so he’d have to keep busy before he started getting too lonely.

The first thing he should do, he decided, was memorize his tree so he could find it again. They all looked similar—impossibly tall and straight, gray bark forming pillars like stone to hold the green sky up. But they weren’t all exactly the same. The roots and branches were different.

He stepped out away from his tree and circled leisurely around it, paying careful attention to everything that might matter. His tree had six high roots, five big ones and one deeper one that was only as tall as he was. Up above, it had a branch lower than the rest that stuck out in a unique way.

Dirt circled it twice, letting it take as long as it took. He heard birds chirping from somewhere nearby, but gave them no heed beyond just enjoying the variety of sound. He moved in closer and circled his tree again, then dug up a few more grubs and had his breakfast. Then he walked out much farther and circled it again, trying to memorize its neighbors as well. They were too far away to bother visiting each one up close, but he could see enough. One neighbor had nine deep roots and no tall ones, and another had only four tall ones.

The more he stared upward, the more they seemed to take on distinct characters. To develop personalities. He kept getting flashes of his tree dream, just the memory of how it felt. Nothing clear. Perhaps he should name them someday, when he understood them.

But he learned his tree, as much of it as a little human on the ground could see. He named it Home.

After all that, he still forgot which root his nest was under. He had the wrong one and panicked when it wasn’t there. When he finally found it under the second root, one-third of the way out, he almost climbed in and took a nap out of pure relief.

The birdsong kept him out, though. It was getting louder, and that made him curious. He walked in the direction of the sound and it wasn’t long before he saw the motion of the tiny creatures flying up into the air and back down again, making the most noise he’d heard in his life.

As he got closer, he expected them to fly far away, but they didn’t. He got up close to one, only a few steps away. It was a little thing not much bigger than his hand, dark in color and moving too fast for him to see. Chirping all the while, it shot down from above and disappeared beneath the ferns in a spot where they were tall enough to reach his neck.

He looked up and saw a great crowd of birds descending from the unreachable heights. Dirt only spotted them from the motion against the dappled green canopy—they were much too far away to pick out otherwise. How far up was that, anyway? How high were the branches and leaves? How would he even measure? He’d have to think of a way someday.

One bird was bigger than the rest, pale in color. Much bigger. He could pick it out long before any of the others, but from the flickers of motion, it was certainly not alone. It was on its way down as well, but in a jerky, uneven way. It seemed to glide for a moment, then dart down, or change directions, then do it again and again.

The big one looked like it was struggling, and that made him nervous. But his curiosity was stronger than his caution, so he had to stay until he saw what was going on.

Dirt kept his feet planted and watched until it came down far enough to get a good look. Its dirty white color stood out against the green, and its long, mighty wings were tinged with yellow on the ends. It had four legs like Socks, two in front and two in back. It ripped at the air with its front and back talons and snapped with its sharp beak. The closer it got, the less confident he was that it was a bird, but what did he know?

The little birds were attacking it. That’s what was happening. It thrashed and screeched and tried to kill them, and they were driving it to the ground. They swarmed it in great numbers, all flying in and out to distract and harass it and break up its gliding.

It was bigger than him, he realized. Now that it was close enough to tell, the large bird wasn’t quite as big as Socks, but still huge compared to Dirt. It looked angry. It was maybe only a hundred paces above him in the air, still struggling to fight off all the little ones.

It was close. It was angry. It was heading down toward the ground, where he was. Those talons and beak would burst him like a grub.

Horror nearly kept him rooted to the ground. His heart pounded in his chest and he had to force his legs to start moving. Run! His legs felt like they belonged to someone else, slow to obey him.

He turned and ran toward Home, quickly picking up the pace until he was sprinting at full speed.

Before he’d gone fifty paces, something caught his ankle and sent him crashing gracelessly in the dirt.

“Boy?” said a scratchy, high-pitched voice. Dirt flipped around before even getting up and saw five goblins staring back at him. Two more pushed ferns away to get a look, then one more.

“Boy?”