Chapter 19 The World went Dark

We were at the far cattail stand, arms deep in the muck, pulling up thick, white roots. The first heavy drops of the promised rain began to fall, pit-patting on the broad leaves. 

Then, cutting through the hiss of the downpour, came the sound.

Trog’s voice but unraveled into something raw and terrible. A high, wavering shriek of pure, unadulterated agony, followed by a guttural, babbling wail.

Our heads snapped up. Muddy dropped his basket. Grub, still sore, went rigid. Our eyes met across the gathering storm. No goblin makes a noise like that unless the world has ended.

We ran. We abandoned the roots, the baskets, everything. We ran through the sucking mud, the rain hammering our backs, our hearts drum against our ribs. The sound pulled us, a lodestone of despair.

We crashed through the final curtain of reeds and saw the stump. The moss was torn from the entrance. And then we saw him.

Trog was on his knees in the churned mud before the stump, a scene of quiet horror around him. He was clutching a bundle of small, limp, mud-caked bodies to his chest, rocking, his face a twisted mask of tears and snot, his mouth moving in a continuous, whispered scream of words we couldn’t hear over the rain and his own weeping.

Our steps slowed. Stopped. We took in the details, each one a knife twist.

The little legs.
The headless hatchling in the mud beside Trog.
The four others, blue and bloated, arranged like broken dolls before him.

The world went dark.

Snag made a small, choked sound, like a rope snapping. He took a stumbling step forward and fell to his hands and knees, vomiting into the mud.

Grub didn’t make a sound. A great, shuddering tremor went through him, from his damaged feet to the top of his lopsided head. He took one step, two, then sank down as if his bones had turned to water, landing hard on his knees. He reached out a trembling hand toward the closest small body, Bog, with the sail-ears now clogged with dirt but didn’t quite touch it. His hand hovered, then fell into the mud.

Fort simply turned and walked, stiff-legged, back into the reeds. We heard a single, sharp cry, then the sound of head beating against a tree trunk, over and over.

Muddy was shaking his head, back and forth, back and forth, a frantic denial.

 “No, no, no, no, not again, not the little gobbies, not the new gobbies, we just got them back, we just got them back…”

I stood frozen, the rain soaking me, the scene etching itself into me.

Grill was the first to move toward Trog. He didn’t speak. We all knew, whatever happened it was not Trog's fault. Grill knelt in the mud beside him, put his arms around Trog’s shaking shoulders and held him. 

 Then, something in me snapped into focus.

“Mud in the throat.” 

 I wasn't talking to them. I was talking to the memory of a choking hatchlings, of patting a tiny back until a piece of root was coughed up.

I lunged forward and grabbed the nearest small, cold body, Mire. I turned him upside down, holding him by his ankles and shook him, gently at first, then with more force.

 “It’s just mud! Spit it out! It’s just mud! Spit it out!” 

A glob of black, peaty slurry dribbled from his slack mouth. Then another. I switched my grip, laying him on the ground. I placed my thumbs on his little chest, over where his heart should be. I pressed, released. Pressed, released. 

 “The pump can be started, if the jam is cleared and the spark is still there.”

Nothing.

I moved to Silt. Same process. Upside down, shake. A trickle of mud. Chest compressions. I leaned down, listening, my ear against his cold, wet skin.

A faint, wet gurgle. Then a shuddering, terrible intake of breath, a sound like a bellows full of water. His little chest rose. Fell. Rose again. The breath was weak, but it was breath.

A choked cry came from behind me. Not of joy, but of stunned, terrified hope.

I moved to Puddle. Shake. Compress. Listen. Another watery, gasping breath, followed by a weak, convulsive cough that brought up more mud.

Bog was last. I worked on him the longest, my own arms burning. Finally, with a sound like a sodden leaf being torn, his lungs pulled in air.

Three of them. Breathing.

I sat back on my heels, panting. The rain washed the mud from my fingers. For a second, a wild, impossible elation tried to bloom in my chest.

 "I did it. I pulled them back. I saved them!"

Then I looked at their eyes.

Mire’s eyes were open. They stared at the grey sky. Unblinking. A raindrop landed directly on his pupil. He did not flinch. He was gone.

Silt breathed, a slow, mechanical rhythm. His tiny hand lay outstretched. I touched it. It was limp. Cold. No reflex to curl around my finger.

Puddle’s chest rose and fell. His tongue, which had always been so busy tasting the world, lolled from the corner of his mouth, motionless.

They were empty. The spark that had made them them, the curiosity, the stupidity, the hunger, the love, was gone. Snuffed out in the dark mud. What I had restarted was not life. It was a hollow shell kept inflating and deflating by a stubborn, dying ember in their brains that only knew how to tell the lungs to move.

The miracle was a lie. 

I looked up at Trog. He had scrambled forward, his face a wreck of desperate hope. 

“They live? Hermit, they live?”

I couldn’t speak. I just gestured weakly at them, at their vacant, staring eyes.

He crawled to Silt, his hands hovering over him.

 “Little one? Silt? It is Dada Trog. You are safe. I will take good care of you. Breathe, just breathe…” 

He waited for a response. A chirp. A twitch. Anything. There was only the dreadful, rhythmic rasp-hiss of his breathing.

The hope on his face curdled into a new, more profound understanding. 

“They… they are sleeping?” he whispered, pleading with me.

“No, Trog. Their bodies are sleeping. But they are gone. Too long without breathing. The mud took their minds. They are… breathing shells. I'm sorry. I could not save them.”

A long, low moan escaped him as he gathered limp bodies into his arms, pulling all of them against him. He rocked them, not as corpses now, but as living ghosts. 

“I will care for you,” he wept into their unhearing ears. 

“I will feed you; I will clean you; I will talk to you until you come back. You will come back. You have to come back. It is my punishment to make you come back.”

Trog gathered the three breathing shells into his arms and shuffled inside. His mind, where once there had been anxious chatter, was now a still, frozen lake. He laid the hatchlings in the moss, and his world shrank to the square of ground around them.

The rest of us buried what was left of our hatchlings. Squirm’s legs, Slosh’s remains, the small, cold body of the one who never woke. We could not bear to leave them to the swamp. We dug a small, deep hole near the stump, under a shelf of overhanging roots. We placed them inside, curled together as they had been in life. We had no words. The ceremony was the sound of dirt falling on small, still bodies. On top, we placed the prettiest stone we could find. A smooth, river-worn piece of quartz that caught the light. It was a marker for a future that had been erased. 

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The next three days passed without any improvement.

  Trog dripped water into their slack mouths, tenderly wiped the accumulating grit from their unblinking eyes, and whispered stories they could not hear. When the sun was high, he fashioned a sling from reeds and vines, carefully bundling the limp little bodies against his chest to take them outside, where he would sit, holding them up to feel a warmth they could not sense. 

Meanwhile we worked. We worked until our muscles screamed, to drown out the screaming in our heads. We reinforced the walls, dug a drainage ditch, expanded the food cache. It was meaningless, but it was movement to distract ourselves from the pain of loss.

Fort dedicated himself entirely to the trees, vanishing at dawn and returning only in the deepest dark, if at all. His scouting reports, delivered in a flat, emotionless monotone, were impeccable.

 We saw the fresh cuts on his arms, the burns on his palms from sliding down rough bark too fast. He would take a scant portion of food and often, when he thought no one was looking, we’d see him pinch the skin of his arm until it bruised. Or dig a claw into his own palm. The physical pain was a punishment, a reminder to never let his guard down.

The rest of us were no better. We all coped in our own quiet ways. 

 Snag’s clever hands now picked at his own scars until they bled. Grill’s hopeful songs had turned into tuneless, hummed dirges. Muddy flinched at every splash from the swamp, and I found myself staring into the cook-fire for hours, seeing not flames, but tiny, reaching hands in the mud. Burning me each time I reach out.

But Trog… Trog had journeyed to a place we could not follow. He did not work. He did not speak. He existed only as a caretaker for a life that was already gone. His entire being was an apology to three empty hatchlings.

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After a week, the awful, merciful end came. One by one, over a single day, the ragged breathing simply… stopped. First Bog, then Silt, finally Puddle. Their little chests rose, fell, and did not rise again. The faint, false ember had guttered out.

We buried them beside their siblings under the quartz stone. Trog insisted on wrapping each one in a scrap of soft moss. He placed them in the ground himself. When the last handful of black soil was patted down, he did not get up.