Wulf (The Fifth Place #1)

by Set Sytes

there will always be people who hate what they don’t understand.’ ‘The world can be a cruel one,’ Jay said. ‘Don’t blame the world. It didn’t choose to have us.’

Later that day they approached the green mounds they had seen spotting the grasslands from afar. Neither Alexia nor Dol Sander had remarked on them, no doubt having been long accustomed in this world to the sight, and so Jay, expecting simply a strange feature of the landscape, kept his mouth closed and simply eyed them curiously. At first he thought it was a trick of the light, or of his vision, or the wind. But it was only when they were closer that he realised with alarm that some of them, very, very slowly, were moving. ‘They’re alive,’ he said in an awe-inspired whisper. ‘Really?’ Alexia said. ‘They’re just mossbeasts.’ She said it like somebody on his old Earth might say they’re just cows. Jay was left open-mouthed as he directed Khyber towards the nearest one. Every so often he was confronted with a powerful reminder that this world was an alien one. It was in these moments that his fascination and awe overrode the mould of Old Jay’s familiarity; shivers ran up his back and he felt almost dizzy.

He dismounted Khyber and walked to the huge mound. Close to he could see it was hair, or fur, thick and straggled. The name was apt. The beast’s coat could have been mistaken for moss, and he wasn’t sure that moss itself wasn’t layered into the fronds of hair. He reached out with a hand and touched the hide, tentatively at first, and then running his hands though it with delight. It was incredibly soft. It wasn’t quite like any other animal he’d touched before. Despite, or perhaps because of the softness, it felt in part as though he was pushing his hands through rich undergrowth, a green bed for tiny bugs and flowers. There was no visible face or feet to the mossbeast, for the hair reached down to the grass, and seemed almost tied to it, simply an uprising extension of the land.

Jay looked about at the other mossbeasts. It seemed to be a herd, he realised, and they were on the move. A herd of roving hills. ‘They’re like,’ he waved his hands in the air, trying to express himself. ‘They’re like woolly mammoths, crossed with Cousin It. But green. Well, nothing like that in fact. They’re like living hills.’ ‘You say a lot of things that don’t make sense,’ Alexia said. ‘Don’t I fucking know it,’ Jay said under his breath.

‘I found an anomaly, sir.’ ‘Go on.’ ‘You remember the experiments into lower lifeforms? Lending them the minds of the more advanced?’ ‘I remember.’ ‘We were looking for a chain, and found nothing. That is because I believe the chain was cut short. I found readings that were reminiscent of those we encountered during those experiments.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘The missing subject, sir. I believe he – or another mind in the chain – may have entered the mind of a lower lifeform.’ ‘I thought the experiments proved a failure?’ ‘Overall, yes. There were mixed results.’ The man with the green eyes hesitated. ‘It was shown that two minds could co-exist in the same mould, that one is not pushed out, providing one mind is substantially less complex. The new mind can take or share the reins of the less sentient. And so . . . and so the chain breaks.’

Dol Sander had kept them from taking the road through the forest, telling them that he sensed eyes on them, and had done for some time. He told them that the woods would cloak their path to any interested parties, any who might be curious (aggressively so, was the hint) as to why a Stoneswell girl, a Rathian, a Duna and most bizarrely of all a black tiger would be travelling northwards together.

They slept amongst grey ferns and pink flowers that nuzzled against the trees.

He had never hunted before – unless you counted hunting for items down supermarket aisles – and thought he’d make a complete hash of it, but trained instincts and reactions got him his prey. He found, without really thinking, he even knew how to prepare the meat. He wrinkled his nose at the blood and guts, but this was more because he felt it was a motion old him would have done than any genuine disgust. It was, after all, little in comparison to the butchery of the mountain men back in Appalia. And it was clear Jay Wulf was a man who had long become accustomed to the insides of things.