Chapter 13 - The Search Party part 3

My dreams that night were wrought with terrible imaginings. In my sleep I suffered visions of a great demon snake, its scales black and shiny like obsidian stone, its eyes huge and glinting with evil intelligence. In my dream, the demon snake burst through the leather walls of our domed tent and began to feed upon my screaming children. Its vast, cylindrical body twisted and lunged violently as it snapped them up, one at a time, from their sleeping furs before tossing back its head and swallowing them whole.

Now it was my people's belief that our dreams were as real as our waking lives, that we should face the terrors of our nightly imaginings as courageously as we faced the dangers of our waking existence, so I tried to be brave. I did my best to fight the demon snake, thinking that if I could kill it, I could cut open its body and rescue my babies from its belly before they were smothered. I threw myself upon its writhing coils, thrusting my knife into its pulsating flesh. It hissed in pain, its cold black blood spurting in my face, but try as I might I could not impede its vicious rampage. One by one the wicked creature devoured my children.

I wrapped my legs around its coiling body. Thrusting my knife into its flesh, I used the handle of the blade to pull myself closer to its head, thinking to stab it in the eyes, blind it, kill it. It bucked its body and tried to throw me off but I clung stubbornly on.

"You monster!" I roared. "You fiend! I'll kill you for what you've done!"

Its wedge-shaped head whipped toward me and its mouth split open in a horrid, fanged grin.

"Foolish mortal," it spat. "I am the great god Tat! I cannot die by knife or spear!" It spoke to me in moist hisses but somehow I could understand what it was saying. "I am the darkness that devours all living flesh!" it said. "I am the hungry maw of death. I am the churning belly of eternity."

Its huge jaws gaped, exposing row after row of needle sharp teeth, and behind the teeth, the quivering sphincter of its throat, perversely carnal, gateway of oblivion. I jerked awake as it lunged forward, engulfing my entire head in its mouth.

I opened my eyes in the dark, breathing heavily. I was afraid I might have thrashed in my sleep or cried out and disturbed my household, but no. Eyya still slept beside me, her face tucked into the pit of my arm, her hand lying on my breast. The children had not stirred. Brulde snored monotonously near the hearth, which had burnt down to shimmering coals.

I was slick with sweat. The air in the wetus felt too hot, too close. Carefully, so as not to wake my sleepmate, I removed Eyya's hand from my chest and eased my arm from beneath her head. She sighed and curled up her legs but did not wake. I rose and stepped carefully over Nyala and Poi-lot, ducking out through the tent flap.

It was night still, though the sky to the east had begun to lighten. Day was kindling just below the rugged black horizon. Soon the sky would burst aflame and the sun would rise to warm our wooded valley. Already, dim tongues of pastel-colored fire licked the encircling mountain peaks, gleaming on the topmost shelves of the distant glacial floes.

My breath steamed the chill air. I could tell by the smell of the wind that the season was turning. The world would soon be cloaked in the icy mantle of winter, summer just a fond memory and no guarantee of its return.

I stood under the sky of my ancestors, naked and alone, and reached out with my senses. The dream was still very much with me. I was trying to see if I could sense anything supernatural nearby, the demon god of the Fat Hands perhaps. I imagined the great snake watching me from the darkness that lay just outside the light of our campfires, coiled in some dank crevice, its black scales and glittering eyes hidden in darkest moonshadow.

I felt nothing, of course, but the chill night wind. I heard nothing but the song of insects and the twitter of birds in the surrounding treetops, rousing for the coming day. One of the camp dogs trotted up and licked my palm. I crouched down and ruffled his fur and let him slather my face with his tongue, smiling at last as I released the dread engendered by my dreams.

I believed in the spirits of my ancestors. I once saw the ghost of my grandmother wave to me from the entrance of the Elder Siede just days after she died. But I did not believe in gods. I did not believe in demons.

Fat Hands are a silly lot, I said to myself. Scared of the shadows in the back of their cave.

"Like little children," I said to the dog.

There was no monster preying on the Gray Stone People, only a hungry old speartooth. Monsters prowled only in bad dreams and the imaginations of children, not in the real world, where a tree is just a tree and a stone is just a stone.

As I'm sure you already know, dear readers, I was very, very wrong.