Predators

🍄

The longer the swarm walked, the calmer Chop seemed to get. She was annoyed still, but not as upset as before. The scent of anger subsided and, as a gesture of goodwill, she cobbled together a single ration of breakfast for Fern using a broken piece of acorn and a bellyful of nectar. The rest of the ants stopped holding their collective breath—things were far from perfect but the walk ahead of them would be smoother.

The brown-shells led them through low, leaf-covered valleys in the underbrush and tall, treacherous canopies in all shades of green. They marched into impossibly tight squeezes under stones and fallen logs, then skirted sandy streambeds, sticking close to thick clusters of reeds.

The scent markers of Queendom Finch were far, far behind them now. Homesickness was beginning to hit in full force. Out here, there was no constant thrum of other insects at work, nor the sound of other insects talking, nor the scent of their emotion. The sensation was somewhat replicated in the temporary burrows, but it was hardly enough.

The ants were uneasy. The distance from their queendoms made them uneasier still. It was rare for an ant to stray from her homelands unless the colony was desperate for food or drink, or they were brand new, still struggling to stake a territory of their own.

Chop was one of the few ants who had ever gone such a great distance. She was also one of the few ants who wasn’t dripping with the mustard-y, cloying scent of anxiety or murmuring to herself to keep the silence at bay. While the brown-shells handled it better, a large chunk of them were still obviously affected and eager to be home.

For Fern, it was as if she'd never left the colony.

The fungi were ever present. There was almost nowhere in the forest you could go that thousands of mushrooms, molds, and varied mycelia weren't living, eating, and conversing. And as a strangeborn to their kind, their scent was familiar and inviting.

All ants instinctively understood the horrors of the animal-devouring deathroots, but there was far more variety than that. There were mushrooms that ate other mushrooms; that ate trees; that snared worms in their roots. Some lived in peace with other plants. Some turned against this friendship and were parasites. Others lived on soft-skinned animals, burrowing into the skin to feed.

Most prevalent were the roteaters. They grew over vast swaths of the forest, sometimes eating a specific type of food (such as a felled tree or animal bones), sometimes devouring anything their mycelium could reach. Some were amicable and had territories full of different iterations and species, others preferred to keep to themselves.

These behemoths moved slowly through the soil as they ate. Rather than walking or digging, the fungus would “move” by growing forward and allowing the back half to die off once food ran out. In this way, Fern figured, more food would eventually end up in the abandoned spot and a new fungus could take up residence.

For lucky mushrooms, though, the food wouldn’t run out and they would grow massive.

Fern had once spent a shift walking over a fungus the size of Queendom Finch–its entire, root-like body completely invisible under the soil. It was holding several conversations at once in different areas of mycelium. The topmost parts chattered to the grasses, the lowermost to elder roteaters, the sides to young iterations hoping they could make a trade for much needed nutrients.

She could hardly wrap her mind around it. It was fascinating and exhilarating and Fern couldn’t imagine why Birch would want to hide her from this.

Two of these behemoth mushrooms, Iteration Of A Fast Talker and Iteration Of An Argumentative Sort, began to appear so often that Fern learned to pick out their voices in the crowd and spent much of the march listening to them.

At the same time, Fern was properly learning about the mission, and the route they were taking east. She’d known Queendom Wren was eastward and that the path curved by a river, but not much else.

From Chop, she learned the swarm had to go near the riverside, for that was the location of the Tavern: a stump containing a little haven where bugs could eat and rest for a small fee, and even get more food if their luck was good. Beneath it, narrow tunnels stretched out to provide extra dining or sleeping space, and to give soil-dwelling creatures access without having to surface. Most were made by said digging animals after the Tavern’s creation.

Towards the end of the morning, they drew close to the river. It was a swift, muddy blue snake that sliced through the land, so wide none of the ants could see the other side. Though it seemed calm at the water’s edge, where the reeds stood tall from the water, beyond that the current looked like it could outpace a tiger beetle three times over. And beyond that, the other side of the forest loomed, little more than a blur of greens and browns.

At the shallows of the riverbed, a beetle was standing on rocks that rose from the water to drink. A moment later, a huge set of jaws lunged from the depths, and the spot was empty. Fern couldn’t make heads or tails of it. She didn’t know what a fish was.

Moments later, a dragonfly made the mistake of dipping down to drink from the river. A massive, pungent body came flying from the shallow riverbank towards it, so fast it was little more than a green smear. It was as if the predator had materialized from grass and reeds.

The dragonfly barely noticed it in time and swerved out of the way. It escaped the escaped the frog’s gaping maw by a hair’s width.

“How close would you say we are?” Fern asked a brown-shell. She hoped her fear wasn’t apparent in her scent.

“Almost at the halfway point,” the brown-shell replied, “We’ll be stopping for a rest at the Tavern sometime this afternoon if we keep walking upriver.”

The march continued in relative silence.

With so much activity at the river, it was a matter of time before predators attacked.

A dragonfly snatched an unlucky brown-shell up and carried her away. Some smaller ones tried but were thwarted. Another deadly incident saw a lizard happen upon them. Too fast to see coming and too fast to mount a defense against, the ants had no choice but to scatter and hide where the terrible beast couldn’t reach. Those directly in its path were swiftly crushed in the reptile’s jaws.

After all this, Fern became convinced she might faint the next time a shadow moved too close to her. She was at the height of regretting sneaking off but would not put on a weak appearance while Chop was here, judging her. She pretended that nothing could scare her until the river and all its nightmarish creatures were far behind them.

After the river’s scent faded, they kept marching for another few shifts. It was uninterrupted. Peaceful. The sun was rising high in the sky now, shortening the shadows and providing the cold-blooded ants a much-needed boost.

Propelled by the nice weather, they quickly came upon a dark, thickly canopied patch of forest. Only faint trickles of light peeked from between the leaves. Within this cool place the swarm encountered perhaps the grimmest sight an ant can encounter.

A death alley. The final home to insects slain by deathroots—and to insects that were technically still alive, just in the process of being eaten or releasing spores.

“It’s moved,” a brown-shell said. She stared deeply into the alley before she continued, “We’ll have to adjust course, won’t be a problem.”

Fern disagreed. It was the first death alley Fern had ever encountered. She had been told they could move but regarded it as a scary grubtale. She knew what a dead ant looked like, what a dead ant was, and despite her young age, she wouldn’t be fooled by such an obvious attempt to get under her bones.

Now, knowing this was true, her dread at the sight only multiplied tenfold. How did a death alley move? Did it pick up the legs of its victims and adjust course?

Fern stared into the alley as the ants began marching again. It was composed of petrified bugs in various stages of decay. All were clinging to high up stems and leaves where spores would be most likely to rain down on the unsuspecting. The usually tightly knit bones had been forced apart by pale mycelium and spindly-stemmed, bulbous caps. With no scents to mark them by, they had become faceless statues.

The roots didn’t look or smell all that special, at least. And the brown-shells would have told everyone if they were truly dangerous. That provided Fern some relief.

For once, however, her ability to hear fungi was disconcerting. The deathroots spoke. Their ambling utterances travelled up her antennae and overlapped in her head. Each talked to itself, unaware of its neighbors. Fern looked away and tried to ignore it—there had to be a regular ant conversation or chirping bird she could focus on instead. Her mind and her instinct, however, were always working to separate out the background noise. She couldn’t help but listen:

“And so, now we die. Starv’ed.”

“A noble death… a sacrif’ce of two.”

“Our senses have not yet rott’d. What is that cur’ous thing down there? I beli’ve it stares. Helloooo, hi. Haha.”

“Ah, my death throes. I wither. My final words, I pray to you, Lucelua…”

Fern shuddered. She knew of Lucelua but not much beyond its name. She knew that a deathroot was a fungus, that it should be perfectly reasonable that it could speak, and was disturbed all the same.

Did this have something to do with Birch’s fear? Fern wondered, How could she have known I could do this, anyway? Why would it make her afraid of me?

“Scared?” blue-shell nudged her forward, a teasing tone in her voice, “Is it your first time seeing one of those?”

“It’s awful,” Fern said.

“Of course. I… may have been a little mean just now. You learn to pay your respects from a safe distance and continue work after the first few times.”

“I guess it’s all you can do.”

“It is.”

And so, they left.

 

🙉

The rest of the march, Fern kept an antenna out for any fungi growing below them. Sometimes, when she noticed blooming mushrooms or molds in the distance, she’d perk up and take a listen, often searching for more mentions of Lucelua.

Fern gleaned that it had some connection to luck, and the fungi invoking its name were hoping to have some blessing bestowed on them. They spoke of it when they were hoping to grow large and find food, when they suffered attack from fungi-eating creatures, and when they fought one another.

What intrigued her more, however, was the mention of a villain.

Only one mushroom ever seemed to bring it up. Its body stretched east and west, and it spoke in a fast, forceful way other fungi found irritating. It was none other than Iteration Of A Fast Talker. Fern nicknamed it Taro. She also learned to hunt for its sprouts, which appeared along the bases of trees and had dark, brown-ish pink caps.

Then there was the blunt, forever-unenthused Iteration Of An Argumentative Sort. She called it Argo. It was a lighter color and preferred to dwell in the shade of ferns.

Searching for these two became her primary goal, as they were reliably chatting about this “villain” and whether it was real. But the swarm moved by so fast that what she heard was often so short it was useless.

At last, when the swarm took a break, she found Argo and Taro speaking to one another in the nearby soil and edged as close as she could to them.

Taro was chattering to whatever would listen.

“YOU MUST BELI’VE ME!” Fern heard it say, “THE TEXT’RE IS VILE, THE TASTE, THE SPEECH. IT IS LIKE US AND YET NOT, AN ANIM’L THAT GREW MYECLIA! AND WORSE! IT IS A FOUL TRICKST’R, IT”—

“It is not poss’ble,” Argo replied, “That you describe died long ago. Have you eat’n someth’ng foul?”

“FOOLISH IT’RATION. MY BODY GROWS THRO’GH THIS WHOLE FOREST, IN MANY ROADS, JOINING WITH MANY PLANTS”—

“And?” Argo interrupted.

“I AM MIGHTY IN THO’GHT, YOU ARROGANT THING. I KNOW ALWAYS WHAT I AM PERCIEV’NG.”

“Whatev’r you say. You know, this quite stresses my poor mycelia, Taro,” Argo said.

“YOU…” Taro paused. Argo must have been implying Taro was too loud, as moments later it was speaking quietly, “You fancy yourself stress’d? Ah! I am surrounded! By idiots! You’ll see, when my eastern it’rations send for me, you’ll see I am speaking truthf’lly.”

“Will we? I look forw’rd to it.”

There were some quiet, grumbly noises from Taro afterwards, but Fern couldn’t stay to hear what would happen next.

In ant time, the conversation had taken the entire half-shift the swarm had been resting. It was time for them to move on again.

Fern held back a miasma of irritation as she realized the fungi world was far too slow for her liking. (She’d probably have preferred to be bambooborn.)

 

🦨

By the time Fern started to wonder if her feet would fall off, a brown-shell finally declared that they were nearly to the Tavern.

Unfortunately, she also declared there was a massive mammal blocking their path. The creature was black with two white stripes running along its back and joining into one at its head and tail tip. It trundled around in the underbrush, snapping up any small animals it could find. Even though it was quite round and fluffy, like a bumblebee, it was managing to catch very nimble creatures. Fern had never seen anything like it before.

“What is that?” she asked a nearby brown-shell.

“A skunk. We’d better not get spotted by it,” the brown-shell replied.

Oh. So they did eat ants.

“We’ll sneak past and get into the Tavern while its back is turned,” Chop said, “We can use the plants as cover.” She pointed a wooden leg at the Tavern—a large tree stump a few minutes ahead and slightly to the left of them. It sat right next to a wide, bubbling offshoot of the river and was hidden by a covering of alder, hemlock, and lavender-like loosestrife. Its entrance was nestled underground, an inconspicuous tunnel that had faint traces of the brown-shells’ pathing scent to mark it. Had the swarm not been downwind of it, Fern wouldn’t have suspected anything was there.

Dreading every step forward, Fern fell into formation alongside her sisters and cousins in the swarm as the skunk stomped around nearby. She shook from claw to antenna each time it took a step.

Halfway to the Tavern, the grass behind them started to rustle, but it was too quiet to be the skunk and went ignored. Moments later, a mortified cricket went leaping over them. “Run for your life!” it screamed.

At that, a faint alarm smell coursed through the swarm. All at once the ants picked up speed, Fern included, though her small size meant she was falling behind. Still, no panic had set in yet. The cricket may have been the mammal’s intended target. A sudden movement could give away their position, so the swarm instead kept a slow-ish place and veered off the planned course to avoid the skunk’s warpath.

Fern was hopeful the plan had worked. For a moment it seemed it had, then the thundering pawsteps seemed to draw closer, and closer.

She and several others glanced behind them. The skunk was right on their heels.

Saliva flung from its mouth and splattered against the dirt behind them as it lunged for the nearest insects. Huge, white teeth stuck out from its shadowy maw. The heat of its breath sent the ants at the very back into a terrified sprint, but their uninformed, slow-moving sisters up ahead blocked their path.

“The skunk is going to eat us!” Fern screamed, throwing out as much alarm-scent as she could muster.

At once, the entire swarm surged forward. If Fern hadn’t clung to the abdomen of a larger ant as she fled, she would have been left behind.

The skunk’s shadow grew to cover the swarm as it approached. The tremors of its steps grew so strong Fern could hardly keep herself upright. Her stomach shook so violently she grew ill.

The swarm dove for the Tavern’s entrance, packing themselves into the tunnel only to discover the way in was covered by a huge rock.

We’ll never make it! Fern despaired, And they’ll never let us in, anyway!

The faint crunches of devoured ants grew louder and louder behind them as the strongest ants rushed to pry open the door.

Fern glanced behind her.

The skunk’s beady eye stared at them outside the entrance. Then it was gone and replaced by a huge pink tongue and mountain-sized fangs.

“Hurry up!” an ant shouted.

“We’re trying!” another snapped back.

The smallest ants rushed inside first as the door opened. The larger ones were still trying to get in, so tightly clustered that even Fern couldn’t squeeze over or under them.

Just when it seemed like the effort was hopeless, some unseen force on the other side of the door gave them aid. It opened just wide enough for even the largest ants to get through. Fern dove in headfirst, tumbling like a leaf on the wind as more ants piled in behind her.

The door slammed shut with a heavy ker-thunk just as the skunk reached them.

The stump shook violently as the skunk rammed its snout into the rock. Alarmed yelps rippled through the crowd of arthropods inside as the floor began to rumble. The skunk was trying to dig them out.

This story may have ended quite abruptly if it weren’t for a burly spider sending the thing whimpering away with an extremely sore nose. A small opening was made in the door for its head to poke through, and when the skunk reached its snout in to poke around for insects, the spider lunged.

At last, its tremorous digging stopped. Its footsteps grew softer and softer as it left to find a safer, easier food source.

The sizable group of surly grasshoppers, crickets, and beetles who had opened the door for the ants began to disperse back into the Tavern, except for one. He was on the smaller side, a striking black and yellow color. The yellow bordered his neck, face, and the edges of his thorax and abdomen, with intricate patterns of it on his thighs. He must have been a nymph—a child—still, as he had no wings.

“I thought you got wiser as you got older!” the black hopper spat at Chop, “Just lead a skunk to my Tavern, why not? Suppose next you’ll let in a bat, a badger!”

“I didn’t know it would see us. Thank you for letting us in,” Chop said, still panting, “And who are you? Grandson of Boom, maybe?”

The hopper nodded. “That would be I. Son of Boom Junior. I’ll be the sixth generation to run this place,” he bragged.

“So you don’t run it, then. Right, and you are…?”

“Thunder. You’re welcome for saving your hide, by the way.” With that, he walked deeper inside.

“Hm,” Chop snorted as he left, “He doesn’t have Boom’s accent.” She turned to the swarm and addressed them. “Mind your manners, everyone. This is supposed to be a neutral ground.”

Finally, they were all permitted to enter.