Apoterasis

Sample Below:

The Town at the Edge of the Abyss

As a kid, I never used to be scared of the Monster’s Maw. Sure, I never went out at night, and sure, I knew better than to light a candle by a window, but I just didn’t believe in my heart that my home could be as dangerous as everyone said it was. Our town was called ‘Sunflower Ridge’ because of the happy yellow flowers that covered the hills, and every morning I woke up to a sea of blonde heads all bobbing at me gently from across the valley. The hills that hid our homes were so full of sweetgrass that the air smelled like candy, and our beautiful goats with their long white hair did nothing but eat their bellies full all day. It was a lovely place to live…so long as you stayed up on the ridge.

My best friend, Colin, was named after the god of the sun, and the name fit. He was as blonde as the sunflowers, with freckles like seeds all over his brown cheeks. We played ball in the upper regions of the Maw, kicking a sheep’s bladder full of wool back and forth across the valley. I liked his laugh, and he liked my many blue-black braids, and I was pretty sure that we would get married one day. Curious and fearless, he was even less scared of the Maw than I was, and I often 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 Maw had a funny kind of twist to it, where as soon as you reached wherever you thought was the lowest point, 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 a bottom that we would never find, but I’d never been very good at listening.

Sometimes our game took us all the way down to the shurtle village, where their domed huts of straw and mud blended in with the rising sides of the valley. The shurtles were a peaceful kind of monster, looking like 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 Maw. It was dangerous, they signed. We’d been told that many times before, but the sun on our shoulders made us feel invincible, and we never paid them much mind.

One day, Colin caught the scent of roasted nuts on the wind. We followed the smell down past the shurtles to where the valley became so deep that it made no sense to call it a valley anymore, and it became more of a canyon. The looming walls cast shadows down over us, across the path, onto a great disk of smooth stone which looked like a plate for a giant. It was covered with wonderful foods: loaves of toasted nut-bread and a whole smoked goat just sitting there getting cold. 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 Maw’s floor was steeper here, and when the ball got away from us, it rolled, rolled, rolled out of sight. Colin kicked it last, so he ran down to fetch it while I sat on the edge of the offering plate and drizzled honey from a pot onto another nut roll. The light dimmed around me as the sun dipped down over the canyon wall. Colin didn’t come back. I licked my sticky fingers clean then hopped off the plate. I ventured down the path, calling his name, until I made another turn around another bend and saw the giant silhouette of a froate blocking the path.

The froate sat on its heels—its knees bowing out to either side of a bulbous torso—but it was twice as tall in that posture as a man at his full height. Its lanky arms had two elbows apiece, and each hand ended in eight webbed fingers. Its back, covered in long, slimy black hair, was hunched away from me at first, then it turned its long snout to the side and lifted a limp, humanoid form up to it.

I froze. I couldn’t breathe. The froate blinked one buggy, yellow-and-green eye. Its pupil was a wide rectangle, focused on me and its meal both at once. We watched each other as it sank its teeth into Colin, tore off a chunk of him, chewed, and swallowed. Then it blinked again, turned away, and the spell was broken.

I turned and ran. I fell, scrambled back up, and kept running all the way back to the sunflower fields.