Predators were easy to smell, but it wasn’t as easy as just avoiding the scent. The tall grass around the watering hole reeked of them, but the herd couldn’t exactly avoid water. The filly felt the same sense of heightened awareness as always when the herd crept close.
At the same time though, it was hard to remain at that level of paranoia. Sometimes her mind would wander to other things. Today it wandered to her future. Her still growing mind longed to leave her birth group and find another, and there were two unrelated breeding groups at the watering hole. The dominant males from each group were having a scuffle, and she considered wandering off with the group of the winner.
In a flash, that was all forgotten as she caught a glimpse of a brown figure rushing her in the corner of her eye. She didn’t take time to look and see what it was, because she instinctively knew it was one of the monsters. Luckily she had a lead on it, and they could rarely keep up with a healthy nearly-mature zebra.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t trying to keep up with her. All too late, she realized that it had herded her close to the tall brown grass. Inside two figures of nearly the same color darted out towards her, closer than the one behind her and headed on a collision course.
She panicked as she found her within the predators’ surprise pincer move, and searched frantically for a way out. She banked, coming a tail flick from a swipe at her front leg from the deadly claws of an attacker, and darted again. Heart beating hard in her head, she didn’t have time to stop.
For a moment she thought she was about to run face-first into what looked like a reflecting amber surface, but instead blew through it, with all four hooves flying over ground. Faster than a blinkt, her head swam as her vision turned into a cascade of colorful lights, like the colorful streaks in the sky she’d sometimes seen after rainstorms. An instant later, she found herself some place else.
She had little time to take in the new surroundings. The air felt damp and the foliage around her was deep dank green compared to the sun-dried land she knew, and it felt like she was surrounded by more trees than she’d ever seen in her life, and not like the ones she knew. They were massive, rising high above her head. As she glanced up, she saw why it was dark... the dense trees above her blotted out the sky. They looked like dark teeth as she stared upwards, as if she were in the maw of a giant.
Her eyes not yet adjusted, she turned back to the only light source she saw, the thing she had just came through. It shown there before her, golden and round, as if the bright globe in the sky had tumbled to the ground.
She took little more than an instant to take in her surroundings, then her mind focused more than ever. As the glowing passage shimmered, she realized something else was coming through and exactly what it was. Usually the only thing she could think of when running from the monsters was ‘faster’, but somehow now that seemed like an option rather than a solution.
Instead, she took a stance several hoofsteps in front of the hole in the world, bracing her front legs against a solid rock that sunk into the ground in front of her. The instant a form came through the egress, she lunged her hind hooves back with all the power stored in her hind. It wasn’t just a frantic kick, but a targeted smash landing solely on the mouth of the creature that wished to devour her.
She heard a loud crack as she impacted the flesh-tearer’s jaw, and felt the bone give to the impact an instant before the rest of the body flew back into the distortion where it came from. The zebra felt an almost perverse-feeling shimmer of pleasure as she watched it skid back across the grass on the other side. She hoped she’d deprived it of its ability to harm her kind.
Or maybe she didn’t see that? She couldn’t see through the strangely solid sheen, but a dozen images of what might have happened flashed through her mind. Whatever had suddenly boosted her cognitive skills seemed to have supercharged her imagination as well, and for a moment she had trouble telling the difference between that and reality.
Her eyes kept locked onto the portal, noticing every ripple and glint for a sign that something might be coming through. She didn’t stop until her heavy breathing became more relaxed, and she slowly untensed her muscles. It seemed likely that the other monsters decided to not go through when the first flew back out with a broken face, but she wasn’t taking any chances, moving behind the strange thing to hide from anything else that emerged.
At this point, she realized that it wasn’t round like a rock, but flat. It was thinner than anything she’d ever seen. From the back, it was completely invisible, she could see right through it, seeing its glow illuminate the area in front of it with no visible source.
What was it? Had it opened to save her from the beast? No, surely not, or it would have opened for other herd members in need. A random stroke of good luck then?
Normally she wouldn’t have even cared. She escaped, survived for another day, so she’d go back to existing for as long as she could before inevitably being devoured once she was too sick, old, or unlucky to flee. But now the idea stuck in her mind, an insatiable desire to not be satisfied with something fortunate happening. She wanted to know why it happened.
How did she get here? Where even was here?
She looked around at the foliage again to get a better look. There were so many kinds that she’d never seen before. Even the bark on the trees, some as thick as the length of a large stallion, was completely foreign. She moved a hoof to brush against the surface of one, brittle crackly bits tumbling to the ground.
Now that she wasn’t distracted by the sound of her own heart thumping madly in her chest, she could take in the sounds too. The trees were full of birds, many with beautiful calls but none of them familiar. The leaves of the forest made a constant rustling sound as the wind passed between them.
Smells she’d never experienced invaded her nostrils. Many smelled like food, while some were the distinct odor of other creatures. Again, she tried to identify them but couldn’t. She couldn’t even tell if they were predator or prey-
That thought brought her around, and it occurred to her that this experience should be terrifying. She was used to a land that was so flat and empty that in places you could see objects that would take a good a quarter of a day to get to. Now she was in a place that was so busy with trees and rocks that she couldn’t see twenty hoofsteps away, and there might be a hungry flesh carver behind any of those objects. Any unfamiliar sound or smell could be signaling the approach of a great beast, and she would never know it.
Yet there it was again. Something was overriding that fear, keeping her from diving back through the shimmering pool in the air to get back to her herd. It was that burning desire to know the things that she didn’t, and this place was full of them. In an instant, life had become more than just survival.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t terrified. On the contrary, she was horrified. She had never felt this building level of skittish, yet this strange new feeling was somehow preventing her from acting upon that fear and rushing back through the glowing hole.
And even beyond that. She felt a shiver of realization as it hit her that she didn’t just not know about this place. Did she even know anything about herself? Her normal life had been filled with reacting to stimuli and nothing else, and somehow that felt dull and incomplete now. A joy like she’d never felt shivered through her as she came to the realization that she could move beyond what she was and become something else, something that no herd member had ever seen, or could even understand.
As her eyes scanned the location, she saw something different. It looked like a thin, leafless plant trunk sticking up out of the ground, but there were no branches where leaves would have ever been. Instead, there was a flat piece of wood at the top, looking like it was attached by some means rather than growing there. It was clearly wood grown from a different type of tree.
There were markings on the wood, indiscernible scribbles, but looking at them, she felt like they must have some meaning. Yes! A few of the symbols repeated, and they were all in organized rows as if meant to be looked at in order. There were three rows of symbols, and the one on the far left of each row was the same, a single line with two more lines forming a point at one end, yet always oriented in a different direction...
She approached the strange thing, and looked around it. She realized that the ground was odd around it. There were paths leading in three directions around the object, but they weren’t like the paths formed by walking that she’d seen. They were neatly coated over with some kind of interlocking rocks. She tapped her hooves against them and they didn’t shift, as if somehow stuck together. Two of the paths showed more signs of being traveled through than the third, which had felled branches across the path and plants coming up through the cracks.
Gasping in sudden realization, it occurred to her that each of the left-symbols corresponded to the direction of one of the paths, one to the left, one to the right, and then the one pointed upwards must refer to the path behind where the flat surface faced. Someone had made these markings to tell travelers where each path led.
It was a strange rush she’d never felt. The frustration of not knowing suddenly replaced with the knowledge of what it meant, like releasing a surge of strange new emotion.
Coming to such a conclusion made her wonder how many odd little things she’d missed in her past. There were plenty of them, little oddities that littered the savannah which she’d never seen anywhere else. She looked at the shimmering passage again, wondering if she might could go see what they were. But no, what if going back through robbed her of her new understandings?
Or she could see where these paths led? She might could even identify the other symbols by seeing. The curiosity burned more than ever, each passing moment here adding more questions that she needed to answer.
What if the strange object signified that there were others here like her? That could think more? After all, why create such a thing if you didn’t expect others to understand it? If these creatures were near, they might be able to help her understand. If they had symbols and could communicate things with them, perhaps she could learn them too.
Then again, she had no idea who the creatures would be. What if they were predators? For all she knew, some of the fierce monsters from her home made it through and experienced the same new more thinking that she did. It didn’t seem quite as likely that predators would make paths since they didn’t normally stick to them, but the chance was always there. Was it worth the risk of facing a killer that could think more, stalk more, KILL more?
She could go back, but again, would that tear away her new insights? Even if it didn’t, would the others even understand her enough for her to direct them through the ingress too? She wasn’t even sure if she qualified as the same kind of... thing that she was before. Her perspective changed so much that her family was barely family anymore.
She was about to leave them for another herd anyway, as all did when they grew up, full of others of her kind she didn’t know. They could sate the new desires welling up in her maturing body, but they couldn’t provide affection and stimulation that her new mind had identified and now desired more than anything else.
The more she thought about it, the more she concluded how ignorant she’d been. She had been about to decide which herd to go with, which stallion to be bred by, based on who which of them won a fight. She didn’t know anything about those stallions. How did she know the one that won the clash would be the best? What if an inferior male just got lucky in a single fight?
Yet at the time, it hadn’t even occurred to her that she should get to know a potential mate before deciding to go with them, or that maybe she should get to know more than one and choose between them instead of going with the first fairly reasonable option. She had been minutes from walking off with a complete stranger with the intention of making foals, and it hadn’t even occurred to her how important that decision was until now.
So instead of heading back in fear at the prospect of advanced jforms of slaughter, she did more investigation, and idea that itself would normally never occur to her. After nosing around the path, she found several sets of hoof-prints just off the stone, as if they’d taken breaks along the side. There were many different sets, as if the path was used by many hooved creatures. Most were about the size of her own, but some were smaller. What seemed to be the most recent ones was a single large one with several smaller ones with them, like a mother with foals.
She searched about fifty hoofsteps distance in the two most traveled directions, and didn’t find a single pawprint. What’s more, all the hoofprints were even spaced as if trotting at a relaxed pace, not galloping or running from anything. It seemed likely that this area was fairly safe then.
But still, did that necessarily mean it was a good idea to stay? Even hooved creatures might become violent if their territory were invaded by an outsider. There were many hoofprints though, and they seemed varied. All of them were straight lines, no wide sporadic motions that would indicate they were fighting one another.
She realized she might only be convincing herself of what she wanted to be the case, but she believed there was a greater chance of the occupants being friendly. Now she had to decide if the chance was great enough to warrant her taking it.
Looking back at the portal, she came to the realization that it was slightly smaller than before. Before the top barely touched the thick branch of a tree just above it, and now it was about a hoof’s width distant. This thing had appeared from nowhere, and it seemed obvious that it would soon return to that state.
She knew she had a time limit, and she had to decide. Did she limit herself by returning to her herd and home, or retain her new mental capacity despite how terrified and uncertain she was? Knowing that she wanted to know things that she didn’t was an odd sort of tension that she’d never felt before, and she could immediately remove that unpleasantness by returning to the blissful ignorance.
But she would also rob herself of the joy of figuring things out. Simply understanding what the strange wooden thing was, had been a thrill. She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to realize what the symbols mean, or who used this path, or what other kind of strange things lurk here, dangerous or not.
The zebra felt dizzy, laying down in the grass and panting. She wasn’t physically tired, but such a decision laid out before her was exhausting in a way that she’d never experienced. It also wasn’t pleasant, yet she realized that she’d rather have it than not.
Had she ever even done this? Actually thought about a decision? She’d always made them in an instant, choosing a path and never looking back, nor giving thought to how she might do things differently. Now she wasn’t just overwhelmed by the importance of the decision at hoof, but had countless ‘what ifs’ running through her mind for every important decision she made without a second thought before.
Worse, she knew as soon as she made this decision, the most important in her life, she’d second guess it.
If she could. If she went back, she wouldn’t even know how to do that.
It seemed obvious already to her what decision she was going to make, yet still a fight raged inside her mind stronger than any she’d seen in real life. Not only was she no longer content to make an instant, thoughtless choice, but also felt the need to run that answer through a series of other questions to make sure she had chosen correctly. Her imagination charged up again, rushing through dozens of potential scenarios, the wonderful and horrible things that might happen should she stay.
She looked back up at the wooden plate at the top of the long stick. The two most trodden paths obviously led between two places where creatures had recently been. They were hooved, and didn’t seem to have made any aggressive movements when meeting on the road. There was always a chance she was missing something, and she didn’t have time to check a significant length of the path, but...
Finally, she felt like she had made her decision, though she wasn’t rightly sure at which point it had been made. Her new awareness seemed so much more complex than that.
Looking back at the passage, she saw it was still big enough to hop through, but she no longer felt any desire to. For the first time in her life, she was able to overcome her screaming instincts and do what she wanted to do.
What she wanted. Had she ever even truly wanted anything before? No. She had been told by her basest of instincts what to do and did so, but now it was different.
As she had expected, she second guessed her decision once it was obvious that the hole was too small to squeeze through. She felt a rushing urge, just for an instant, to try to flail her way through, but quickly pushed back the remnant of her old self. That aspect of herself was gone, and even if she wanted it back, that wasn’t an option any longer. She’d pushed herself into one choice, and thought it was the best one, but still felt nervous.
The eddy went from gaping to tiny, down to the size of her head, then her hoof, all the way down to a tiny prick of light hovering there in midair. As it died like the last spark of a raging prairie fire, it left her in the darkness of her new home.
She wasn’t even sure why she waited for it to close. Perhaps she thought she owed her old life enough to see it off. After all, even if she might have found something new, it was the thing that made her who she was and would always be full of special memories, some that she didn’t even realize were special before now.
The filly- the mare? -stood, taking a deep breath and looking down the two most trodden paths. It was impossible to know which was best. Did they lead between two family groups, from a grazing area to water? It could have been anything, but for it to be used so often, they had to be important.
She could always wait for someone to pass, but she wasn’t sure how old the most recent hoofprints were, and she might be waiting for days. One thing about her new intelligence is that she found it more difficult to make a choice between two equal things, whereas before she would have just chosen one at random on instinct.
In the end, she chose the path based on which symbols on the strange wooden thing she found the most pleasing. It was shallow logic she knew, but she wanted to have made the decision based on something.
Turning to the right, she made herself trot deeper on.
