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Beyond the Oasis Chapter 5

Story Synopsis

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The sky was a dazzling shade of blue with a great, unblinking golden eye. There weren’t many places to see the sky like this. Most of the Oasis was covered by canopy or cliff walls. Dawn would love this view, Petal idly thought as she tracked the lazily passing clouds. She should go get—

A feeling, sharp and deadly, shot up from her leg. Everything came slamming back into focus.

The bridge, she was stuck, it failed. She fell. The pain from her leg pulsed again and left her gasping.

Petal heaved herself to sit up, arms trembling with the effort, to look.

The canyon walls loomed overhead, coming straight up from the smooth stone ground. Well, not that smooth. Furrows as wide as her fist randomly pocketed the ground, bursting with golden flowers. Oddly wide holes were scattered throughout the walls.

A shudder went through her when she finally got the courage to look at her leg. It was bent. Just below the knee. The damned right paw angled abruptly to the side. Her toes wouldn’t move. She struggled to keep her meager breakfast down the longer she looked. Limbs shouldn’t do that.

Then came the frantic calls as two bodies descended upon her.

“Olive!” She gasped when the pup slid to his knees and pulled her into a hug. Tears from pain and relief dripped down her cheeks.

Any words of substance were lost in a panicked babble between them.

“Angry one, we must leave. We must leave now.” Persistence said in a stressed hiss.

Petal pulled from Olive and tried to focus. The Tokaan was anxiously pacing and watching the odd holes in the walls. It reminded her of the way the meerkat-birds knew when a predator was near but didn’t know from where.

“How would we leave? Your ‘good’ bridge is gone—” A thought occurred to her—“How did you get down?”

“We climbed.” Olive pointed behind her. She followed his finger and saw a rope ladder against the canyon wall. No, not a ladder, the bridge. The planks and ropes hung in a tangled mess stretching toward the canyon floor. The posts on the other side must have held.

Persistence lowered her raised tail with a deep breath. “Yes, yes. We climbed down and we can climb up. Quickly!”

“I can’t walk, let alone climb,” Petal incredulously admitted. Anger at the Tokaan, at herself, at the situation, had distracted her from the pulsing pain. But that could only last for so long.

Persistence finally truly looked at Petal’s leg. She blanched, grimaced, turned around and then vomited. The pup leaned back with an exclamation of disgust. Petal stared numbly as the Tokaan stayed bent over for several long moments.

“I will…I will carry you up,” she said, standing up and wiping her mouth on her shirt. Studiously avoiding eye contact with either Wolkins or the bent leg.

Olive snorted incredulously and Petal couldn’t help but agree. Before the argument could continue, a high-pitched clicking echoed through the canyon. Both Wolkins’ hackles involuntarily puffed up, as the noise continued.

“We woke them up. But this late in the season—they should be gone.” The Tokaan spun in place, trying to locate the source, but it seemed to come out of the stone itself.

“Woke what up?” Petal demanded as the rhythmic clicking grew louder.

A round head, a blue so dark it was almost black, slowly slid from one of the holes in the canyon wall. Two antennae tested the air, before turning in their direction. Mandibles as long as Olive was tall clacked together as the beast scented them.

“The gladers,” came the horrified whisper.

A red segmented body, the same width as the head, eased itself down the wall. Bright yellow legs sprung from each segment and clicked against the stone. It was easily twenty paces long.

It was coming. They needed to go. They needed to go now. But Persistence just stared, mouth open and tail raised, as the glader delicately picked its way closer.

Petal seized the Tokaan’s arm and frantically shook it, “Run, idiot!”

The touch broke her trance and Persistence lurched into motion. She awkwardly pulled Petal’s arm over her back as Olive took position on the other side and pulled his sister up.

Petal yelped, pain racking her body, as her right paw dragged against the ground. The other two were too short to lift her and run at the same time. The glader snapped its mandibles in excitement at the sound. More clicking echoed from the stone walls.

With a snarl of effort, she leveraged her good leg under her and held the bad one as high as possible. The pup stumbled and nearly fell as she tried to hop, but the Tokaan seemed to understand.

“Left paw, right paw, left paw, right paw,” Persistence chanted, voice shrill from terror. Between the pair and her good leg, they all managed to shamble into a run.

The glader was in no hurry to catch them or they would have already been dead. But even its leisurely pace ate up the distance with those many pairs of legs.

“Tunnel!” Olive shouted.

Tucked against the canyon floor was indeed a tunnel about two paces high. It was framed by two pillars with swirling designs, faded from the sun.

“We do not know where it leads,” Persistence argued as they skirted between a few boulders. “Perhaps we can—”

“Perhaps we can shove it!” Petal risked a glance back and saw the mandibles, sharp and shiny, crack a boulder in half. “It doesn’t matter as long as it’s not here.”

The Tokaan angrily hissed but still sped up to help cross the remaining distance.

As they sprinted past the pillars, Petal’s paw caught on something. She fell hard, unable to catch herself, and pulled the pup and the Tokaan down with her.

A feeling like fire shot up her leg and consumed all thought for a long moment. Iron bloomed on her tongue as frantic hands prodded her.

The Wolkin let herself be pulled up, but struggled to get her good leg steady. They didn’t have time for this. Something wet dripped down her chin. A low-pitched keen escaped her.

“Peace, Angry one. It stopped.”

Petal raised her head, unaware that it had been down at all. The glader paced at the entrance to the tunnel, its long body hypnotically wrapping around itself. The tunnel was taller than it was wide and not nearly as wide as the holes in the canyon wall. Maybe it couldn’t fit.

Olive shifted and stepped on something with a crunch. He startled, jerking back hard enough to nearly send them all to the floor again. Both Persistence and Petal hissed in reproach.

“It’s not my fault. There’s something buried here.” The pup kicked at a nearby dirt clod and exposed a few white skinny stones laying in parallel lines.

“Kick it again,” Petal mummured, a horrible thought growing at the oddly familiar pattern.

Olive complied with a shrug, kicking with more force. The empty sockets of a partially buried skull stared up at them. Persistence shrieked, blunt claws digging into the arm she held.

In the overturned sand where Petal had tripped, more long bones glinted in the sunlight. Evidently, a glader could squeeze inside when it wanted to.

At the entrance, the glader’s mandibles snapped again.

They all turned and went further inside at a brisk pace, the Tokaan’s chanting barely louder than the clicking.

The tunnel might have been smooth at one point, but it was much neglected. Sconces sporadically hung from the walls. Tucked inside them were small plants with glowing flowers, providing just enough illumination to navigate each turn. The initial tunnel twisted and split, sometimes opening into grander rooms. Broken pottery and moldy scraps of fabric were scattered everywhere. They all ignored any crunches underpaw.

Olive’s white coat glowed in the dimness. He led them confidently through each turn, pausing only briefly to scent the air. Tokaans did not have much in the way of senses and Petal was well past differentiating the subtle fresh air from the rest of the dank space.

The tight tunnels warped the clicking from the glader’s legs and made it difficult to tell how far away the beast was. But if it was audible, it was already too close.

Eventually, Olive found an exit. As the group squinted at the brightness it became obvious that this was somewhere new. Besides the missing remains of the rope bridge, the canyon walls were wider apart and no longer looming. The walls themselves had smooth, reflective rocks in branching patterns embedded into it at random.

“Glass,” Persistence muttered before enthusiastically repeating, “That is glass!”

Both Wolkins stared at her as they shuffled further away from the tunnel exit.

“If there is glass in the stone, that means we are close to Sanctuary.” The Tokaan craned her head around like if she just looked hard enough, the town would appear.

Just a little further. The pup’s tail wagged happily, exchanging a grin with Petal. But that grin turned into a look of horror. She whipped around to look into the tunnel.

A shape solidified in the darkness left behind, the tell-tale clicking spoiling the open air. The glader clung sideways on the wall, just managing to fit in the tunnel. It had found them again. Except, there was nowhere to hide this time.

The long antenna poked out, tapping the ground until they brushed against Olive’s legs. They retracted slightly, then the head slowly came out with mandibles primed to shear.

Persistence muttered something under her breath and shrugged off Petal’s arm.

She snarled at the Tokaan, but struggled to remain standing, as Olive trembled under the sudden change in weight. Persistence paid her anger no heed and firmly pushed the Wolkins. Both fell back in a sprawl on the ground.

Body spasming, Petal laid gasping as Persistence stooped and wrestled the Wolkin’s backpack off. She pulled out the damned Orkma-marked bag. With a sigh, she opened the bag and took out a bright, yellow rock.

Petal didn’t look at the pup, but she could feel his shaky breath as Persistence let the backpack drop without a thought.

The Tokaan clutched the yellow rock in her claws, eyes never leaving the glader. It raised itself high, most of its body still twisted inside the tunnel. Rock in one raised arm, Persistence moved a step back.

The slug eater was going to leave.

Petal kicked out with her good leg. She caught the Tokaan in the back of the knee. Persistence staggered, her arm coming forward hard. The yellow rock flew up and hit the canyon wall just above the glader’s head.

A bright flash of light blinded them, with a noise so intense it felt like the air itself was growling. Chunks of rock hurled down from above onto the glader. It thrashed, its many legs straining to run, but the tunnel had already collapsed. Its back half was trapped.

Petal crawled backwards, hands raised to shield Olive from the smaller debris, as the canyon shuddered. There was just enough time to see huge pieces of stone slough off the wall before everything was hidden by dust.

Then there was nothing to do but pray.

As the world finally settled, Petal uncurled from around Olive. They helped each other sit up, the silence strangely frightening. The rock dust still hung thickly in the air, interspersed with glittering golden particles. Dirt and small debris continued to drop as the canyon wall stabilized around the new crater marring the surface.

The glader was dying.

Aside from the numerous rents in its carapace, a spear of rock had punctured and pinned its front half to the ground. Yellow fluid bubbled from the wound and spread out in a sticky puddle. It reflected off the glass among the scattered rocks in a dizzying kaleidoscope. The head shifted, a leg wiggled, but it was only a matter of time.

Petal should have felt good about this. The monster was dead. They all lived. It should be a good thing.

The Tokaan pushed her front up, blinking in a dazed manner. The force had literally blown her away and she had somehow managed to land several paces away from the Wolkins. As Persistence turned to face the carnage, her expression quickly sobered.

“No.” The Tokaan sprang into a faltering run, stumbling over the field of debris. Hands smeared the yellow fluid as she desperately pressed on any cracked chitin she could reach. The massive mandibles clicked one last time before going still. Apologies spewed from her mouth as she crumbled to the ground.

Petal, with Olive’s help, came to stand near the edge of the yellow fluid. The pup glanced at her, ears pinned to his head, but Petal didn’t know what was wrong with the Tokaan either.

With a deep sigh, Persistence straightened and pressed a hand to the glader’s hide. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. Guardian, forgive me.” Then in a voice like steel she asked, “Why did you kick me?”

“I thought you were trying to run,” Petal uncomfortably confessed. She had been so certain. Then something else dawned on her—“You had me carrying a bomb?!”

“I never requested anything of you.” The Tokaan finally turned around, and the devastation on her face was clear. “It was meant to scare. Only to scare. Do you still trust me so little?”

The Wolkin didn’t have anything to say that would be true.

“I’m sorry about the glader,” Olive offered after a long moment of the two staring at each other. “It is kind of cool looking.”

Persistence stood, uncaring of the yellow fluid staining her pants and poncho, and beckoned them to follow. “I will take you to Sanctuary and report to the Elders. Then I never wish to see you again, Angry one.”

Petal couldn’t fault her for that. “Thank you,” she said, as they started forward. Though the words felt wildly underwhelming.

A noise echoed through the canyon, a deep rumble vaguely akin to the glader’s clicking. Expecting more debris, Petal continued forward. However, something big fell behind her with a sickening squish. Rounded and curled, it could reach her shoulder if it had been standing. The creature was obviously very dead, its thick shell almost split in half.

Persistence vomited, once again, as globs of viscera spilled out of the cracked shell. Olive clamped a hand over his face to block out the plethora of smells.

Something cracked that thing like a nut. Petal looked around frantically. She soon spotted the dark blue head hanging over the top of the canyon wall. If the other glader was massive, this one was gargantuan.

They all watched in numb terror as the beast slunk down the wall, a low hiss of air emanating from its shell. Its head alone was big enough to blot out the sun. Even as the front pairs of legs scuttled along the ground, the majority of its body remained out of sight at the top of the canyon. It poked the smaller glader with an antenna, mandibles clacking rhythmically. A pause, as if waiting for a response. It clacked more urgently when none came.

A whimper escaped Olive as the huge glader grew more agitated. Persistence waved her arms, as if she could plead with the beast. Between the sound and movement, the glader stopped its examination and locked in on the terrified group. It froze for a moment, antennas prodding the air at their fluid stained clothes. The mandibles, easily five paces long and shiny with drying blood, snapped with a thunderous crack.

It didn’t seem to care that the gladerling’s death was an accident.

The glader lurched forward with a piercing hiss. The two Wolkin children screamed, frozen in fear, as the serrated mandibles enclosed their soft, squishy bodies.

As Petal stared into the beast’s yellow iris, a dark shape suddenly blocked her view. A tall cloaked figure stood before her, their outstretched arms stopping the mandibles from snapping shut. Blood dripped steadily from their hands as the massive glader fought against their unwavering hold.

Face partially obscured by a black hood, they glanced at the stunned Wolkin with an elated grin.

“Need a hand?”

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