Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the southern sea, endlessly lurking in the greenish waters and only rearing its head once a year, is a giant rock.
It’s not an ordinary rock, though hardly anyone would mistake it for one. In its bowels there burns a fire, one that feeds not only on coal, but on fresh, dripping meat. It will not allow this fire to ever burn out, it will do anything to satisfy its eternal hunger.

There’s a creature, a strange creature no other animal has ever seen. It looks almost like a whale, but whales are solid, tangible animals; this creature, however, is unstable, its skin melting and moving around like mud after a three-day rain.
Every once in a while, it swims up to the Hungry Rock, opens its formless mouth to reveal a lifeless body of a small animal inside, and gently lays the little thing onto the cold stone. Then it swims away. No one has ever seen where its lair is, if anywhere.

The small animal is then taken in by a mole. At least, out of the whole animal kingdom, this warped, distorted beast resembles a mole most of all - but its front limbs are much longer than a mole ever should have, its body is thin and fragile, and its fur, if it ever had any, has long fallen off. It’s blind, like all moles, and inspects the tiny creature with its limbs and sensitive nose.

If the creature is too small, too veiny, too bad-tasting, the mole throws it into the raging sea right then and there. Otherwise, it cradles the cub in its front limbs and shambles deep into the narrow passages within the rock. There it takes care of every little animal it has ever collected, fattens them up, makes sure their meat is juicy and fresh enough for the fire in the Hungry Rock’s belly, and then…

What happens then, few animals know.
But there is at least one - a tiny kitten, with a short, thin tail and grey fur that looks almost blue in the dim lighting of the rock’s innards. His front paw has a shackle on it, which he himself cannot tell where he’d gotten; if his memory was still intact, he’d know that once upon a time, in another world, he used to live in a tiny metal cage, and this shackle is the only thing he kept from that time…
But no animal that ends up in this world remembers anything about the past. From the moment you put your paw on the soil of the Nowhere, you belong to it only.

The kitten has managed to outsmart the warped mole, to escape into the lower levels of the Hungry Rock. But now, he starts to wish he’d never come here - the lower caverns are spacious, but flooded, still water making everything around him cold and damp. Not to mention the smell of rotten algae and decomposing fish…
His fur is wet, clinging to his skin uncomfortably, he tries to shake or lick the water off, but fails. He resorts to jumping from log to log, clinging to the thin sickly trees that somehow grew there - anything to not touch the water, where he’s already seen more than a few leeches about his size.

And he’s heard a roar, too. He doesn’t know which animal it belongs to, but that only makes him more terrified; after all, moray eels normally don’t roar, right? This one does, the giant, old, rotting moray eel, which has been eating half-decayed fish for decades on end - and oh, how fresh is this kitten, how tender and juicy his meat…
He sneaks past the eel while she’s sleeping. He doesn’t want to be eaten, isn’t that the fate he’s trying so hard to avoid? His fur would stand on end, if it wasn’t so wet, and he’s cursing the Hungry Rock in his thoughts. After all, it’s not just him who’s trying to survive - he knows there’s been other little animals, and all of them suffer as much as, if not more than, he does.

There, above him, tiny claws are scraping against the cold stone. It’s dark around the little animal, but then she takes the firefly into her teeth - and it becomes clear that she’s a fox, a scrawny fox cub with dirty yellow fur.
The firefly is a friend of hers - or at least, that’s how she would classify it. In reality, she caught it once, tore off its wings, and put it into her fur to light her way. Foxes are awfully resourceful, after all.
So now she’s crawling through the inner workings of the rock. Through the narrow wet passages, that seem to be awfully small for the creatures that inhabit this lump of stone. What could be the purpose of—

Oh.

She sees them.
Tiny little things, even smaller than she is. With grayish-white fur and a skittish attitude.
Mice.
Of course. Of course. They must be the ones who gradually, day by day, gnawed at the rock, making passages where only they could fit, to hide from the predators of the Hungry Rock.
She thanks them, in the only way a fox could thank a mouse - by not eating them, but instead lightly nuzzling them. Some of them, she even plays with, using her barely alive firefly.

It’s all she can do, really, to not eat them. To not give in to the instincts. Last time she ate, it was a half-eaten pinecone, thrown to her by a little squirrel - the kindness given to predator by prey surprised her enough that she took the meager gift without complaint, even though usually she’d never eat a pinecone, what is she, a chipmunk?
She craves meat, fresh, juicy, dripping with blood. Distantly, from her previous escapades, she knows that the same hunger is shared by the Rock itself and by its inhabitants. But she’s yet to meet the rest of them.

When she does, she will forget about being a predator, at least for the time being - because she will be prey. Prey to the unseen beast living in the pile of stones and rubble that accumulated in the mole’s lair. Prey to the butchers of the Hungry Rock, two giant bears, that take bodies of all animals that are given to them and tear them apart, to dissect the skin and bones from the meat. Prey to the hungry, bloated hogs, that stumble blindly into the rock’s open maw and eat, eat everything they can see, meat and fish and the pale grass that grows in the cracks of the stone.
And above all that, her hypnotic purr resonating through the whole rock, lies a puma - a mountain lioness, in other words; part of the Hungry Rock as much as it is a part of her. She looks into a puddle of water, muddy and almost non-reflective, and purrs, grooming her silky fur.

What can a tiny kitten, or a fox, or indeed a squirrel, do against the monumental lump of wet stone that calls itself the Hungry Rock? What can they be other than another little portion of meat for the eternal fire that keeps the rock alive? It cannot sustain itself only on the coal that the mice provide it with, out of fear for their own lives - it needs meat, forever, always, in a cycle that has gone on since this world began, since the first predator hunted and ate the first prey.
Or perhaps, there is another reason why such violence exists in this place between places? After all, other worlds have animals hunting animals, too, but always for survival only - never for the sole purpose of killing and eating and consuming.

Such thoughts echo in the head of the fox cub, who crawls through the mole’s impressive collection of nuts and feathers and skulls and all kinds of trinkets from outside. She ponders the overarching reason - mainly because she knows what it is.
She’s been there. In the Pale Forest. The twisted, leafless trees, the fog, the rain. The animals, faceless and scentless, and the black rock on the horizon.
She calls it a rock in her thoughts, because no wild animal can ever comprehend what it is. A tall, black, perfectly rectangular thing, with a strange opening near the ground - a creature from a more civilized world would’ve called it a door. It looks like it didn’t come from this Nowhere, because that’s the truth - it’s alien to this place, to the little fox, to the—

No. She will not think about him. She cannot - something in her stops her from remembering him too clearly. The same something that tugs at her stomach and tells her to go and hunt for some meat, once again, not caring that the last time led to her being caught.
So she does exactly that.
Firefly in teeth, ears raised, eyes focused on every single detail, the fox makes her way through the Hungry Rock. She has the same goal as every animal in history - to survive.

But not everyone reaches this goal.
She will.

Chapter Text

There is darkness inside the little fox.

She wasn’t born with it. It latched onto her like a parasite, took over her instincts, sucked the soul out of her - though she herself hardly knows what a soul is. To her, it’s just what separates living prey from dead, delicious meat. She knows all too well, though, that she herself is dead meat to most of this world’s animals.
Most.

There are others, of course, just like her. Little animals, weak and fragile. She has seen her fair share of them in the Hungry Rock’s stone intestines, but before that, she faintly remembers meeting some, too. And if she had just remembered more clearly…

One time, a pup woke up in a forest.

He knew almost nothing about who he was and where he was going. He only knew that he was in the wildest part of the woods, with thickets so coiled and thorny that his skin would be torn off his muscles, and that many other little creatures had been lost there. He had short, brown-grey fur and a worn collar with no name on it. A regular, nameless little puppy.
Nothing unusual.

He traversed the Wilderness, alone, only going in one direction because he feared that he’d get lost otherwise. And then, he saw it - the lair, built crudely from dirt and piled-up logs, with some additional rooms being dug underground. So large that the beast who built it had to use entire fallen trees for it.
He’d seen the beast before - only barely, but that was enough. 
A giant, shabby, stout old wolverine, whose fur was so long and tangled it obscured its face - but still, when it was enraged, the pup could clearly see its bloodshot eye, its foaming mouth and its teeth, so sharp they pierced into its own gums and made dark blood trickle down its chin.

There, in the lair, in a part of it that was dug out amidst roots and rocks, he smelled someone else’s presence. He saw an empty nutshell being absentmindedly rolled around in circles on the stomped-down dirt floor, making a hypnotic sound. He saw her - a small, malnourished creature, so dirty and shaggy that he couldn’t even determine what species she was.
He knew one thing, though. If this creature is in the wolverine’s lair, it’s only a matter of time before she dies a gruesome death.
So he took a stick that was lying nearby into his teeth and broke the tree roots that isolated the little creature from the rest of the lair.

What the two of them did afterwards is history. Impaling the wolverine on a sharp stick it itself put into the ground to keep away potential rivals. Crossing the lake on a fallen log and cautiously noticing the strange glowing ripples in the water, that grew increasingly apparent the closer they floated to the Pale Forest.
She remembers, of course she remembers, the Tangle - because there’s no more fitting word to describe it, a place full of twisted vines, big dry trees and yellowish grass, inhabited in part by these horrible little beasts that she now knows were hyenas. They were more active than normal hyenas, though - instead of waiting for her to die, they threw a big rock onto her, mistook her unconsciousness for death and tried to eat her.
She remembers also who saved her from them.
No matter how she tries, she can’t forget him - his smell, his fur, his revolting collar; something about collars is always revolting to wild creatures, even if they have never seen one before. The tiny, scared barks he would let out to warn her of danger. How he looked at her - scared, but intrigued - when she found a place with clean enough water to wash all the dirt off her, revealing her yellow fur and foxy smell.

She can’t forget him, but she wishes she could.
Because the Pale Forest is more than just bare trees in silvery-blue fog, more than just forest creatures with warped, wrinkled heads and no smell. It’s also the puddles of water scattered around, not any normal water - it’s glowing, with a bright white light, like the moon, but much more… acidic.
She doesn’t know it, because she’s never drunk it, but this water is sweet-tasting, even to animals who by nature cannot taste sweetness; it makes you drink more and more, forgoing any other water. And at first you lose all instinct but to drink this glowing water, then your eyes start turning as white as its glow, then your fur begins turning paler and thinner, you lose your scent, your face, until you can barely be recognized as an animal anymore. You have no eyes, no nose, your ears are pressed flat against your head with no intention of ever raising, and the only thing left on your face is your mouth, a gaping, toothless and tongueless, fleshy orifice fit for nothing but slobbering and endlessly sucking in the sweet water.

And sometimes, just sometimes, if you stare at this water but don’t drink it, you see - and smell - something inside.
A figure of an animal, made even more terrifying by how… normal this animal looks at first glance. A pair of ears, a canine snout, four legs, a tail… except the legs are unnaturally long and seemingly have each more than one knee, the tail is rigid and unbending, and the dulled dark grey fur is so neatly trimmed that it becomes clear this animal is not a wild one.

What first caught the attention of the little fox, however, was that the creature, the wolf, was collared.
She paid it no mind at first, though the sight of the dark stripe around the wolf’s neck disgusted her - hiding from it was much more important at the moment, and saving the pup from it was twice so. She pulled him out when he’d already stuck his head inside the white glow, then they ran away, and she’d forgotten about the collar.

But then came everything she’s trying to remember, but fails, everything she’s been subjected to inside the thing she, for lack of a better-fitting concept in her worldview, calls the Black Rock.
Then came the torturous eternity inside, and the escape, and the flurry of contradictory instincts that is the pup. The fleshy surroundings, the chaos, the attempts to put the metaphorical two and two together - and the horrifying realization that made the bile rise in her throat.
Holding his paw in her teeth, like so many times before - they did this so often that his paw was slightly bleeding - her eyes were fixed on his neck and the disgustingly artificial stripe of worn, light brown material. A thing she’s never seen on an animal prior to meeting him, and one she’s seen in close, too close proximity, when the jaws of the warped wolf closed around her body.

There are no such coincidences, she thought. Even a wild animal knows that.
And separated her aching jaws.

She hardly knows what consequences it had or will have, because she hardly remembers that instant at all. She clearly recalls everything before that and everything after that, but the collapsing bridge and the purple lighting inside the black place are almost wiped from her memory.

Maybe it’s for the best.
Little cubs shouldn’t think about such things anyway. They have their whole life ahead of them.
At least, normally they do.

The fox curls up in a corner, after having provoked the cave’s ceiling to collapse and bury the warped mole underneath it. The dark blood seeping under the rocks smells disgusting. Even in her hunger, she will never eat this meat.
She didn’t want to recall the Pale Forest. Really, she didn’t. But a certain trinket she found in the mole’s collection resurrected something in her primitive memory - because this weathered stripe of soft, light brown, blatantly artificial material was horribly familiar.
No matter how she sniffed it, she couldn’t get a smidge of his smell - so either it has spent a long time underwater or in other scentless places, or it was just a different collar altogether. But that didn’t matter. It was familiar, and the fox didn’t like that.

She left it where she found it and crawled on past the mole, trying to scrape her claws against the stone ledges as quietly as possible. The firefly glowed in her teeth. Nothing mattered besides surviving.
And it still doesn’t, so after some time of hiding in the corner, she hesitantly crawls out and jumps into a narrow lichen-covered mice-made passage. The other side of it smells vaguely of meat, and though it’s clear that the meat is veiny at best and moldy at worst, it’s not out of question that there might be some fresh prey there.

So she goes onward.
And all the unpleasant memories… they can wait.

Chapter Text

Tap.

The sound of claws on stone.

Tap.

The wolf takes slow steps out of the Tower. It knows it’s a tower.

Tap.

It doesn’t need to turn its head to know what’s going on around it. The glow of the water is its eyes, letting it see through all of Nowhere. Right now, it’s looking into the empty - for now - expanses of the Tangle.
It’s a dry area on the edge of the Pale Forest, with giant brown vines creating a natural labyrinth, with trees not tall but big and thick, and just a few of such trees can induce a feeling of being indoors - and the wolf actually knows what “being indoors” means. It’s been in that state for an eternity, after all, kept on a leash like a…

Like a dog.

Something ignites in the wolf’s brain at this thought, but dies out before it could recognize what it was. Its face doesn’t move a muscle as it steps in and out of a puddle of glowing water and ends up in the Tangle.
Immediately, its nostrils register a strong smell of decaying food, and its ears silently stand up at the distant sounds of barking, wheezing and shrieking. It has never liked the hyenas - these noisy, chaotic scavengers - so it goes in the opposite direction.

Tap.

Claws hit dry, solid ground, so unlike the grass of the Wilderness and the mud of the Pale Forest.

Tap.

The bone configuration in the wolf’s body is so unlike a normal wolf that a stray hyena, seeing it, yelps and runs back into the maze of the thick brown vines. The wolf doesn’t know its own anatomy, but it understands that, at the very least, it has no ribcage, and twice the normal amount of knees. It doesn’t care. It never does.

Tap.

It walks, slow and unflinching, past a giant snake. It knows the snake, it knows that the Tangle is its territory, and the hyenas are there only for as long as the snake is not hungry. They fear it and hide in the vines from it, but the vines are the snake’s territory most of all.
One bulging reptile eye focuses on the wolf, but the snake does nothing - everything fears the way this beast moves, looks, smells. So distinctly alien, from the unnaturally bending legs to the darkened, worn collar on its neck. The snake stares at it for a second, before its long rubbery body retracts back into the vines.

The wolf pays it no mind. Its goal is not the snake; it can eat all the hyenas in the area or get eaten itself, it’s of no interest to the wolf. It’s not even the only giant snake in Nowhere, though admittedly the other one is very far away. Either way, it’s just another creature, and the wolf ignores it.
Instead, its goal is the smell of two little animals, both canine, completely unlike the hyenas of this place. They have no place in the Pale Forest. Further still, they have no place in this world. They will die anyway, either by someone’s fangs or their own clumsiness, but leaving the dirty work to someone else is unlike the wolf.

Though… the wolf itself has long stopped pretending that its actions, its preferences, its behavior, are its own.
Everywhere around itself, it hears faint buzzing sounds, like a mosquito’s wings - it knows it’s called “signal interference”, but no other animal does. Every waking moment is full of dull purple lighting, almost unnoticeable but omnipresent, so much so that it’s hard to tell whether those moments really are waking.

And right now, this buzzing and this light want only one thing: the little cubs.

Even if they traverse the Tangle unscathed - and that, considering the hyenas’ love for leaving their uneaten prey on the vines and waiting for it to fall onto someone, is very unlikely - there’s still the place that most animals just call the Fallen Tree; but just calling it a fallen tree is like referring to a decayed, rotting corpse as “feeling unwell”.
It’s a hollow, dark place, enveloped by threads of sticky caterpillar silk, full of strange creatures that can hardly be called creatures anymore: often there’s only the head left of its original body, or a paw, or a tail, or nothing at all. The rest is replaced by whatever was lying around - sticks, rocks, moss… and everything is held together by the same sticky, gooey substance.

There is nothing pleasant in the enormous, bloated caterpillar that is the source of all this gluey secretion; nor in the characteristic smell of drying blood and other bodily fluids; nor in the tree’s hollow branches, dark and rotten and full of insects. It’s lit up only by the puddles of glowing water that drips in through the bug-eaten holes in the tree’s bark, and the only reason the animals here aren’t the same as in the Pale Forest is because most of them don’t have a mouth to drink this water with anymore.
Still, the wolf sees the Fallen Tree through these puddles perfectly well, and it knows that if the two little beasts ever enter it, they’ll die by themselves.

But why not try to kill them anyway?
Besides… something in the sour, meaty smell of the tiny fox makes the short hair on the wolf’s back stand on end.

The wolf enters another puddle, glowing bright against the brown darkness of the Tangle, and views the sandy, muddy bank of a shallow river. It separates the Tangle from the clearing where the Fallen Tree lies, and by that clearing starts the Pale Forest itself.
But what truly matters is that here is where the wolf could smell, through the puddles and the ever-seeing eyes around itself, the scents of two scared little animals - and indeed, there they are, inspecting every rock and every tree, trying to find something to help them survive.

They will have to run very fast, then, thinks the wolf.

It tries to exit the puddle, but— something about the little pup, innocently staring into the rippling white water, with his head in it completely, stops the warped beast in its tracks. It cannot explain why. It stays in place, keenly aware of the collar on its neck and almost feeling the leash attached to it.

The pup - or rather, his projection into the other side - runs, in slowed time, towards the wolf, and another step, and another, he’s almost in its jaws, when…
When the sharp fangs of the little fox grab him by the tail and forcibly pull out of the puddle.

The two cubs run away, the fox clearly afraid of the puddle - well, they do say that foxes are smart. The wolf is left inside, thinking - why couldn’t it go out? Why couldn’t it exit the puddle and close its long jaws around the pup? What is there about this tiny, shabby-furred creature, with eyes so dark they make the glow of the water even brighter?

It does not lament its failure - all laments in its mind were suffocated eternities ago. It merely turns around and returns to its rightful place - a room, yes, it knows what a room is; in the room is nothing but purple lighting and a stake in the center, with a leash tied to it.

Tap.

Its claws tap on the Tower’s hard floor. Not metal, nor stone, nor wood, the material is unheard of in any world.

Tap.

Periodic little sounds, almost hypnotic even to the wolf itself. It walks along the hall, each step marking a new second of warped time, and then enters the room.

Tap.

It sits down by the wooden stake, paws together, front legs perfectly straight. Ears raised, eyes closed - or are they open, and just very narrow? Even the wolf itself doesn’t know - it hardly needs eyes in the first place, after all.
The leash attaches itself to its collar with a disgusting fleshy sound, as if it was not a rope but something’s intestine - perhaps it is.

Dull, purple lighting. No sight, no sound, no smell. Suffocation.

The wolf tunes in to a puddle hidden inside the Fallen Tree, and through it, its nostrils are filled with the little pup’s scent.

The wolf has waited for countless eternities. It can wait another night.