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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 85: Slade 279
Table of Contents
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Shella awoke before the bubble collapsed. He told her what he had learned and what he was guessing. She suggested that before he got his nap she should try to conjure some food. The spell required her to dance in a tight space for a few minutes, but when she stopped nothing happened.
“That should have worked,” she said.
Slade shrugged. “Maybe it will work later, or maybe I’ll have to go hunt mastodon, or whatever it is. Don’t worry about it. I would say we won’t starve to death, and frankly in this world we’re more likely to freeze to death first, but either way we’d be off to another world. Meanwhile, I’m going to get a nap.”
Shella had donned her cloak over her robe and was lacing up her boots while he was removing his. He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and said, “Wake me if anything changes,” and crawled into the blankets, still warm and smelling of her. He drifted off quickly.
When he awoke she was sitting on the ground in front of him. “Oh, good, you’re awake,” she began.
“Why? What happened?”
“I’m not really sure whether any of this is significant. The comfort bubble spell ended, and it took me three tries to restore it. That’s probably not a big deal. I tried to create food again, and that didn’t work. But I think the big thing,” and she suddenly stopped and giggled.
“The big thing?” he prompted, but she seemed to giggle more. “O.K., what’s funny?”
“Well,” she said between the giggles, “you said that they were, what, huges? Gigantics?”
“Mammoths?”
“Right, that was the word. I think you should take a look,” and she nodded toward his back.
Trepidatiously, he turned around, and his field of vision was filled with huge, dark, elephantine shapes.
His memory of elephants was that they were tall, taller than he was by at least half, maybe as much as twice as tall. That would put them between twelve and thirteen feet tall. These, though, now that they were as near as twenty yards from him, were about thrice his height; he dreaded how tall the largest might be if it reared on its hind legs and raised its trunk in the air. He began to fully appreciate the meaning of the name.
He also thought it unlikely that they would be a good choice to hunt. That saber-toothed tiger was sounding safer every second.
He realized that the largest animal in the herd was watching him warily. That said something--he was perceived as potentially dangerous by something massive and powerful. It was clearly eating the grasses from under the snow, and in that sense it was not a threat. It struck him that herd animals were generally prey animals, and the set of the eyes to the sides of the head suggested that this creature had nearly panoramic vision, a quality that marked it as prey. He again was concerned about the predator. Canine, feline, ursine--something big enough to bring down an animal the size of a bungalow, it was difficult to imagine, even if it hunted in packs.
“Fancy some lunch?” he said.
“You’re kidding, right?” she answered.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I’m kidding.”
He continued to stare at the monsters.
“Speaking of food,” she said, “I tried the dinner spell again, and got nothing.”
Not taking his eyes from the beasts, he said, “Well, no rush. Let’s hope third time’s the charm. We can probably get water from the snow, but we can’t eat the grass, or if there are grasses we can eat, I don’t know how to find them.”
It was not looking promising.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
