Apoterasis

Sample Below:

The Town at the Edge of the Abyss

It wasn’t as terrible as you’d think, growing up next to the Monsters’ Mouth. It was rather beautiful, really. We called our town ‘Sunflower Ridge,’ because of how the hills were covered in happy yellow flowers. Every morning, I woke up to see a sea of blonde faces all bobbing at me gently from across the valley. The hills were so full of sweetgrass that the air smelled like candy, and our beautiful goats with their long white hair ate so much that they only ever laid around lazily. It was a lovely place to live, so long as you stayed up on the ridge.

I had a best friend, Colin, who was as blonde as the sunflowers. He had freckles all over his cheeks and a laugh like a bell chime. We played ball in the upper regions of the Mouth, kicking a sheep’s bladder full of wool back and forth across the valley. I liked his laugh, and he liked my black-blue hair, and I was pretty sure that we would get married one day. He loved being outside, so even though I had terrible allergies, I let him drag me down the hills to play. The later we played, the more the ball would roll and bring us down with it, like a tide, deeper into the valley.

The Mouth had a funny kind of twist to it, where as soon as you reached wherever you thought was the lowest point in the valley, you’d look around and find another bend in the path, and another lower point further on ahead. We were told early, and repeatedly, not to go looking for the bottom, because we’d never find it.

Sometimes, our game took us all the way down to the shurtle village. Their domed huts of straw and mud blended in with the sides of the valley as they rose up at steeper angles. The shurtles were a peaceful kind of monster, looking like some kind of sheep-people with bushy white fur all around their faces. They never said a word, but only used a wordless gesture-speech to communicate. They waved at us when we came by, but gestured severely not to continue further down into the Mouth. It was dangerous, they signed.

We were eight years old when Colin caught the scent of something on the wind that smelled like roasted nuts. We followed the smell down past the shurtles to where the valley started to become so deep that it made no sense to call it a valley anymore, and it became more of a canyon. There, we found a big disk of stone, like a plate for a giant, covered with wonderful foods. It had loaves of toasted nut-bread and a whole smoked goat just sitting there. Shurtle nut-bread was a wonderful treat for us, so we took a roll each and ate crunchy bites while we kicked our ball back and forth across the slope.

The Mouth’s floor was steeper here, and when the ball got away from us, it rolled, rolled, rolled far out of sight. Colin was the one who had kicked it, so he ran down to fetch it while I sat on the edge of the stone plate and drizzled honey from a pot onto another nut roll. The light yellowed around me as the sun dipped down over the canyon wall. Colin didn’t come back. Once the yellow turned orange, I jumped off the plate and ventured down the valley, calling his name.

Down the path, I saw the silhouette of a giant. It sat on its heels, but was twice as tall in that posture as a man would be at his full height. Its knees bowed out to either side of a bulbous torso. Its arms had two elbows apiece, and eight webbed fingers at the end. Its back was turned to me at first, covered in long, slimy black hair. It turned its long snout to the side and lifted a limp, humanoid silhouette up to that snout, sunk its teeth in, and tore out a bite.

I froze. I couldn’t breathe. I dropped my nut-roll. The froate blinked one big yellow-and-green eye at me, with a black pupil that was blocky like a goat’s. I took one of my hands and dug my fingernails into the other elbow as deep as I could. I pierced through to blood, and the sudden sensation of pain brought me back to the present. I turned and I ran. I fell. I scrambled back up. I kept running…all the way back to the sunflower fields.

Colin was never seen again.