Wandering

Recovering

Entry #3

(Presumably)1st of July

By far, it was the most perplexed look I had seen on a face in my entire life. I was rather happy myself that I wasn't mirroring it – sure, I was just as confused as she seemed, but I've always been pretty good at walling up. It also helps that my “neutral” face is rather angry-looking. My eyebrows aren't exactly subtle.

Quite a few seconds passed with her just staring at me, unsure of what to do. During this brief timeframe I came to the conclusion that whatevershe apparently had realized about this situation, whichprobably had something to do with why she now appeared to be completely revitalized and not a broken, dying husk,I didn't have a single clue about. The more I thought about it, the more it irritated me – I've never been much for people keeping secrets from me, and as any good academic I am hopelessly greedy for knowledge. I frowned, and thrust my head forward.

“HÖRRU!”

She jumped to her – feet? – and pranced backward, letting out a little yelp. “Wh-what are you doing!?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I'm shouting at you to make you stop staring at me, obviously.”

A slight tinge of frustrated red covered her face. “I noticed that, you trollop,” she said with a snort, throwing her head like a horse and sending her green hair flying.

“So why are you asking, if you already know the answer? Speaking of answers, there's quite a few of those you have to give me. So, Changeling, if that's what you call yourself. Talk. What the hell just happened? I mean, I'm pretty sure you were... dying, right there.”

Her eyes widened for a moment, before turning away from me. “I got better,” she mumbled, crossing her forelegs and lying down again, staring off in the distance.

I followed her gaze briefly – the sun had just gone into cover behind the mountain to our west, leaving us in relative darkness in its shadow. Turning back, I raised an eyebrow at her (I know, I do this a lot) until she looked back at me. “Oh, fine! But you're not going to like it.” I kept staring at her, and she growled slightly before continuing in a strained tone.

“Changelings are empathivores. We acquire sustenance by absorbing astral energy from nearby creatures. Sentient lifeforms produce astral energy in the form of emotions naturally, which we then convert to the various substances our bodies need to function.”

I kept staring at her, and raised my other eyebrow. (There is a slight difference to the expressions involved, as well – my left eyebrow is more of an “are you serious” eyebrow, while my right eyebrow conveys something more in the way of “what the hell are you talking about” when raised. It's complicated, trust me.) She groaned. “Look! Is it that hard to understand? Your soul emits emotions when you feel them, and we eat them! It's not like you do anything with them anyway!”

I took a few moments to try and process what she'd just said. I would've rejected the idea straight away, if not for the fact that it made perfect sense. As it was, most concepts of what I like to call my “primary” view of the world had been completely thrown aside, in favor for the much less rational ones harbored in the “secondary”. Usually, I keep that side of my head for when I'm writing, or formulating wild guesses on plot outcomes for some of the less realistic TV series I watch.

A few seconds passed as I forced myself to accept that insanity was now the norm, had an internal debate on whether I should record all this and write a paper on it, decided to postpone the decision and finally took a deep breath.

“Right! While that obviously seems physically impossible or at least stupidly unlikely, it does seem to make sense. So you feed off people's emotions.”

I had, much due to the internal debate, switched over to the rather overdone Oxford accent I have at times. This resulted in a pair of raised eyebrows from the Changeling, as I continued my theoretical ramblings.

“And that means what? You can't survive on your own? You need sympathy to live? Other certain emotions? That does seem hideously impractical.”

I took a pause to look at her, trying to gather my now erupting thoughts. The world mostly governed by the laws of physics I knew had been replaced by something that obviously disregarded plenty of them and had its own ideas for everything else, and my head was in uproar trying to catch up. I was about to go on, when she suddenly blurted, “Love.”

An awkward silence went through the air for a second or two, before she spoke up again. “Love is our primary source of energy, and the only one we can't be without. We require a multitude of different energies to function, but love is the only one we need to stay alive. We can also synthesize all other vitemos from it.” A pause. Then, grudgingly: “Naturally, it is also the most troublesome by far to come by. It hardly grows on trees...”

I gaped for a second or two, before responding. “Wow. Seriously, that is so cheesy I can feel the fat clogging up my arteries. They should call you Queen Cheddary of the Cheeselings.”

In my mind I could do nothing but wonder what sort of evolutionary chaos this sort of species could've arisen out of. If they even had evolved.

“I am not called–that! I am Queen Chrysalis, sovereign of the Hives, and you shall mock me no further!”

She stood up, and her voice became slightly distorted, splitting into two separate tones. Her wings ricketed as they started beating furiously, and she soared into the air briefly. She reared up on her hind legs, and suddenly her horn started glowing fiercely, burning with a greenish flame. This, I admit, scared the shit out of me – it was much like as if someone had magically produced a ray gun out of thin air. I had virtually no idea what the horn could do, but all too many fanciful, horrible guesses.

The fire became a blinding flash of light, that lit up the valley in a bright green that overtook the shadowed sunlight. I could barely make out her silhouette as I shielded my eyes from the brilliance, but after a few seconds the glaring light suddenly faded and became nothing but a dim aura against the back of my hand. I uncovered my eyes to take a look.

Chrysalis was back on the ground again, her wings flapping sporadically and filling the air with their crickety sound. Her horn was still shining, but it was little more than a glow now. She was staring at the ground, and the rocky ground bore faint lines of green fire, drawn across its moss-strewn surface.

By this point it was hard not to assume she'd made those. I sincerely doubted there was any sort of physical reason for a shining horn to draw bright lines of green fire in the quite incombustible ground. There was the possibility that it produced some sort of morbid lighter fluid-like substance and that the horn served to ignite it, but that seemed too far-fetched even for this place.

That left only one answer, which served as the final cornerstone on the grave of my laws of nature.

Magic.

I shivered slightly as she let out a heavy sigh, and hung her head deep down. “I can't do it,” she said, the secondary tone still present but barely audible. “I'd probably doom myself to a slow death if I did, but I can't bring myself to even pretend trying.”

Probably expecting my confusion at this point, she walked up to me. The sadness on her face was nigh impossible to miss, but there wasn't any of it in her voice when she spoke up again. “Hunter, I...need your help. We all do. The swarm wanes in its hunger. And I believe even our presence is preferable to the unending loneliness of this wasteland you'd face otherwise.”

She placed one of her forelegs on my shoulder – impressive flexibility for a quadruped – and looked me in the eyes. “Feed us.”

-/-/-/-/

In the end, all I felt was a bit of asphyxiation that came on sporadically as I performed my little mental exercise, and an ever growing exhaustion that intensified as the minutes went by. That may well just have been sleepiness coming on though – I'd been awake for hell knows how many hours, and performed feats of endurance more fit for an olympian than an aspiring physicist all the while.

After some fifteen minutes of meditating and trying to hold on to various flickers of positive emotions, my trance was broken by a tap on my shoulder. I opened my bleary eyes slowly – I could just about feel the little brush of melatonin that my body managed to produce surging through my blood, urging me asleep – and was met by a smiling face. Not Chrysalis, but one of the minions – hivelings, she'd called them – with its enormous fangs glistening with a lavender sheen. “Don't overdo it,” it said in a cricketing, feminine voice, before turning around and walking off, chitin clattering against the ground.

I glanced in the direction it headed. Chrysalis was on the ground a few meters away surrounded by a bustling green-black mass of hivelings. Most of them were already revitalized and were flying around scouting or just milling about; a few were still standing motionless in a tight-pressed circle around the queen, however. I got to my feet and walked over, to see what she actually did to feed them.

The closest comparison I could think of was a pack of vampire puppies drinking their mother's blood. There were hivelings attached to most every inch of Chrysalis' legs, puncturing them with their fangs and leaving a myriad of cheese-like holes behind. It was no wonder she wasn't standing up – her legs were in absolute tatters. There was no blood, but all of Chrysalis' lower body had taken a distinctly lavender tone, just like the one I'd seen on the fangs of the hiveling that had waked me up. Thinking about it, I realized it was also the same color as her tears had been – which made sense, if she was to transfer the “emotional energy” or whatever it was they lived off, since that was pretty much what had happened when I drank them. I think.

She gave me a rather reserved look when I came close. The nature of the feeding itself made it look quite morbid to me, but its shape aside it was pretty much alien breast-feeding in action. I couldn't bring myself to look away from the fascinating sight, but I gave her a brief nod. It was fairly obvious she was uncomfortable, but hey, so would I be if my minions were eating my legs.

“Are you feeling well, hunter?” She said at last, after perhaps a minute of rather heavy silence only punctured by the gnawing and cracking sounds of hivelings biting into her chitin and flesh, and the cricketing noises from the wingbeats of the airborne parts of the swarm.

I grinned at how absurd that question sounded, coming from her. “Well, slightly out of breath and sleepy as hell. Not sure how valid that question is though, seeing the shape you're in...”

For the first time since I met her, Chrysalis blushed. Her face went from black to a dark crimson, in a fashion much more extreme than the human expression I was used to. “Oh, silence,” she said, turning her head away.

A few seconds later, the last hiveling departed the little groove worn into the sparse vegetation that covered the ground she'd been lying on. Chrysalis splayed out her limbs and stretched herself like a cat, and in an instant the lavender color faded from her legs, replaced by the black chitin that covered the rest of her. Within moments the holes started closing up, and after half a minute or so of my gaping wonder at her regeneration, only a few of the larger ones on and just above her hooves were left.

Chrysalis gave me a puzzled look as she stood up. “What? You didn't actually believe I was crippling myself feeding my subjects, did you?”

I wasn't sure what to answer, so I said nothing. Eventually, she rolled her eyes and went on, shaking her mane out as she took a few steps on her half-new limbs. “You'd do best to sleep. We'll have much distance to cover tomorrow, I believe, and from what I've heard, feeding changelings has a certain...effect on ponies and such.”

She frowned, giving me a long, hard look, as if she just remembered I was, to her, an alien of sorts. “While you're certainly not a pony, you'd best prepare for it anyway. I'm told it has similarities to the aftereffects of alcohol consumption.” I grimaced – there were many reasons I hardly ever drank, but taste, cost and hangovers were the three top contenders. “What exactly are you called, hunter? I imagine you're not actually a yeti.”

A yawn overcame me as I was about to answer, and my jaws cracked as I bared my own (quite formidable, at least by human standards) fangs to the world. Once the blood rushing through my ears quieted down, I shook my head and settled my eyes against hers.

“I'm a human. My name is Martin Winter, and I am a human.”

Soon after, I dug down into my backpack and retrieved my rain gear, along with most of the clothing I'd brought. I didn't have any tent – we'd split 2 over the team, and none of them were mine – and though the hivelings had lit a (green) campfire in the middle of the valley to warm things up, the dew had come on heavy and made most of the ground a cold, damp and wet place. In other words, not one to put my sleeping bag on.

I laid my jacket and pack cover on the ground, right by the eerie light of the bright green fire. The hivelings were settling down all around me, their chitin and wings clicking and cricketing from every angle. I unpacked my sleeping bag and rolled it out on the impromptu sleeping mat I'd made for myself, after which I kitted myself up with 2 extra layers of clothing on top of the 2 I already wore. Finally I grabbed a spare undershirt, and tied its arms around my head – secured fast over my ears it blocked out some of the noise from the camp, but more importantly it would keep them warm.

I unzipped the sleeping bag with some difficulty – moving was pretty difficult with all the extra layers! – and positioned it as properly as I could atop the jacket and pack cover underneath me. Finally satisfied, I weaseled myself inside its warm nylons, and laid down.

The sky was a bright blue still, although the light was rather weak with the sun shadowed behind the mountain to the west. There were a few clouds running past now, and they were small, spindly things that dashed across the sky quicker than any airplane I'd seen.

At least the skywinds were westerly, which made us leeward with the mountain in the way in case they decided to drop down; a windy, damp night without a tent wasn't a prospect I was looking forward to. Hell, I was lucky enough it was still clear and calm where I was. If there's one thing you can be sure of when you're on high altitude, it's that you can't trust the weather. Sure, Sarek is worse than most places due to its rather special geography, with cold winds blowing in from the north Atlantic, and I had no clue what this would mean for wherever I was at the moment. Still, I had a hunch, and it wasn't a good one. Last year we'd camped the first night outside an abandoned shed by the road, hiding the tent behind it to protect ourselves from both bypassing people and the 30m/s winds.

If things got stormy tonight, I'd be fucking screwed.

Sighing, I gave the sky an angry look before pulling the undershirt over my eyes, fighting my thoughts before they eventually settled down and let me try to sleep.

Before I nodded off, though, I felt a slight impact on the ground beside me. Lifting my blindfold a bit, I lift my head up to see Chrysalis staring into my eyes; the vivid, green orbs of her own slightly translucent in the twilight.

“You are a strange creature, human,” was all she said before lying down beside me. A slight warmth spread through my body, and I thought I could see a hint of green light coming from the mouth of my sleeping bag as I put my blindfold back on.

Chrysalis was soon followed by most of the swarm, and I thought I recognized the one who'd waked me before lying down right by my feet. I imagined it must've looked like some sort of freak herd of alien black sheep, warming their hideously unprepared shepherd as he slept through the night.

With my unruly thoughts too tired to be coherent I eventually drifted off into sleep, with my backpack on one side and Chrysalis on the other – and everywhere else, the swarm.