Leaft

Saif put up his hand, but accidentally poked himself in the face with a stick.
He tried to grab it with his hand, but he only ended up waving it around. Was this his hand? It looked like a stick that tapered off into a serrated edge with pincers at the end. Where are his fingers? Where’d his normal hand go? A bolt of lightning shifted him out of his thoughts, too spooked to notice how muffled the thunder was. He looked down at himself, finding that he was sitting inside the remains of an egg. Saif shivered as he stood, what little warmth that had woke him had dissipated already.

Saif glanced around, studying his surroundings. He was in a cage of sorts, with garbage on the ground. He went up to one of the walls, finding that it was solid against his touch with holes only large enough to fit the tip of his pincers. A breeze of cold air passed through just fine. Another shiver wrecked through him, an instinct directed him to a pile of junk in the corner. He tried ignoring it, focusing on the outside of the cage, but there was nothing to see aside from giant drapes of cloth.

On awkwardly thin legs, Saif shuffled his way around sticks and leaves toward the corner. He got on his… not knees exactly, his hind legs, and tried to rummage through it. He uncovered a surprisingly soft green cloth that smelled familiar. With great difficulty, he learned to manage his pincers and the serrated edges of his arms- there’s no way those are his arms now- to heave the cloth over his shoulders and tie it around his neck. It enveloped him in a warm and comfortable embrace.

An embrace Saif couldn’t remember ever being in before. Strange. Shouldn’t this feel familiar? Everything is foreign to him.

Removing the cloth had revealed the corner of his cage. Saif edged closer, kicking aside some garbage. There was a nail sticking out of the wooden frame, barely holding the mesh together. Saif debated it for a moment, he could just… pull it out… right?

With no force at all, Saif pulled the nail out. His unexpected strength took him off guard, falling back into the floor of the cage with the nail still in hand, getting it tangled in the back of his cloth. Saif stood, not wincing as he felt no pain from the fall. Was this a dream then? Why was everything so weird? That feeling in his chest came back, the instinct. It drew him in the same direction as earlier, where the nail had just been. Instinct told him to escape.

Saif sighed and followed.

Lifting up the mesh wall broke the silence. All at once, he could hear a booming argument with nearly a dozen distinct voices clashing into each other. He winced. It was so loud, too loud, with the voices rattling around inside Saif’s skull. He debated ignoring Instinct and staying in the cage for longer, but then he started to process what he was hearing.

“No, no, no! I forbid it! How dare you insinuate that a lesser being of any sort may be better than a Greater!”

“You thick headed oaf! You cannot discredit the entire nation simply for your lack of intellect!”

“LACK OF INTELLECT YOU SAY?”

“Hush you two. We need to talk about the important matter; locating the traitor.”

“Whose to say we have a traitor at all?”

“Do you deem the monster attacks normal, perhaps?”

“Of course not, for I am no fool. Though I fail to see how that relates to a traitor in our midst?”

“The disappearances of the other Greater Beings pose a threat to us. If not for what they might be scheming behind our backs, then for the thing that has hidden them from us. We must confirm their locations and their loyalty to the Council. It is a matter of utmost priority.”

“Ugh, at least let’s figure out what Time’s doing. It’s been screwing with our meetings big time. Moon and I are working over-time trying to keep up.”

“Sun’s right. Devastation aside, we must ensure Time’s safety.”

The voices faded into the background, Saif unable to understand their language anymore. Instinct was back, drawing him away from the cage. He followed his intuition, walking away from the cage. He weaved around some legs, barely managing to avoid getting crushed by a few papers that slid off a table high above. Saif only realized how small he was once he got to a hallway and looked back.

Creatures of all shapes sat in two halves of a massive circle, facing one another and shouting. They were big. Extremely big. Even when Saif tilted his head back as far as he could, he still couldn’t see their faces.

Instinct didn’t let him wait around for too long, drawing him outside the circular room and into a stupidly long hallway. It took ages for Saif to navigate, walking as fast as his hind legs could push him, following the sound of crashing water.

He made it out of the maze of bright hallways and into the open air where Instinct told him to take a great deep breath. He did, and he smelled but not with his nose. He took in the traces from the air, smelling the world around him through something on his face. Saif could pinpoint that there was a volcano off in the distance through the ashy remains, along with blood and danger. In one direction, he got the salty breeze of an ocean. The other direction promised rich earthy dirt, and pointed him to a city, bustling with all sorts of people. In every direction, little scent markers lead his way. It brought an itch to his face that his stick-arms can't reach.

Saif steadied himself by taking his focus off the scents and putting it into his immediate surroundings. He was standing on a large stone patio of sorts just outside the building where various decorated columns lined the walls. It’s kinda like a colosseum, his brain told him, though the words carried no meaning to Saif.

Beyond the circular building was water, lots of it, and though he couldn’t see it, it was loud. He headed in the quietest direction, south. He walked until he came across a river of sorts, with a bridge leading him over the water. Saif started to cross it, but didn’t make it half way across the bridge before Instinct froze him in place. On the other side, the world turned an un-natural grey, promising a punishing death should he come near. Flashes of black flickered at the edge of his vision. Saif shouldn’t go further.

He turned back, heading west on a whim to circle around the building until he found another bridge. Unfortunately, this one was a dead end. The bridge ahead was half broken, with a miasma of grey clouding the broken rock. This side was loud, and when he got on top of the bridge’s railing, he could see that the water trailed into a large waterfall, crashing far below. So, he was on some sort of cliff? There had to be a normal way down.

Welp, third time’s the charm, Saif thought, heading westward around the circle. Wait, where’d that phrase even come from? Saif focused, but no matter how much he thought, he couldn’t recall why he said that. Luckily though, this bridge and the path beyond it seemed to be ordinary. It led him down a ridiculously large set of stairs that arched all the way down the mountain.

He climbed down with ease. He walked the first few hundred steps before getting caught on one that was a little too low. After that, Saif tumbled all the way down, not feeling any pain as he smacked against the stone for a really, really long time.

Once on stable land, Saif got up, surprised that neither cloth around his shoulders nor the nail on the back got shaken off the whole way down. He looked up at the curved staircase, and would have whistled at just how high up the mountaintop was.

Saif was in an entirely new area, one he couldn’t scent like the others, although it was very close. It smelled of nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was sterile and new. Saif walked through the city, though it was still as dead. There was no one here. Saif continued on the path and reached another circular cross-roads. What’s this place and its obsession with circles? He went west, passing by many buildings with no one in them, and too-carefully kept facades. It was supposed to be beautiful and royal, but this close to the ground, it read as eerie and grey, just like the other two bridges at top the mountain.

Another bridge and finally, the first signs of life. A large guard ran up to him, dressed in silver armor with a spear by his side.

“YOU THERE!” He bellowed, using the spear to pluck Saif up by his cloth cloak. “How did you get here? You’re lucky the Greater Beings are in their meeting or you would’ve been killed! Now, off you go.”

The guard put him down on a dirt path outside the sterile city and ran back across the bridge just in time for a different guard to appear. The new one had a band of green around their arm, to which the plain saluted before the second guard left.

“What are you still doing here? Go! Shoo, little bug.” The guard waved him away. Saif blinked in response, finding he had no voice to reply with.

Really, what was he doing here?