Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
There is a sound. A sound between a roar and a glug. The sort of primeval sound that nobody has ever heard and yet everybody instantly recognizes as pure danger. The wood beneath my feet starts to vibrate and dance. I leap back just as the bridge splinters, and a beast rises from the waters of the bog. It is leviathan in size, it is green and scaly, and it has the most terrifying two golden slits of pure loathing in its yellowed eyes.
The caprine buck who was trying to kill me does not have the same chance to jump back. He was not at the end of the bridge. He was right in the middle, and then he was thrown up into the air with the force of the troll’s appearance, grabbed around the midsection by a single hand, and bitten in two. He doesn’t have a chance to make a sound as it dies. There’s no screaming or flailing. There’s just being, and then very suddenly, not being.
I run. I run with the speed reserves only someone fleeing for their life has at their disposal. The world turns into a blur of bridges and bog. I can hear the troll roaring behind me, and the sound spurs me on. It took me at least an hour or two to come this far into the bog, but I leave it in what feels like under fifteen minutes.
I burst out into the sunshine, solid ground, grass and….
Aw, fuck, it is still following me, and I can no longer keep running. I am exhausted and on the verge of physical collapse. I suppose I am going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is how my life ends. I am going to be eaten, and it is all my fault.
The troll stands at the edge of the bog, also panting and out of breath. I suppose trolls must be largely sedentary. The energy it must take to drag a body as large as that from the muddy grip of the water must be, well, I can understand why he eats bucks whole with those sharp fangs of his.
“Wait,” he says. “You dropped this.”
He hands me back my bag. It is covered in slime and goo, and I doubt the contents will ever be the same, but the gesture is more than kind.
“Thank you,” I say, astonished. “This is so nice of you.”
“I am nice,” the troll says. That statement would hold more weight if he didn’t currently have bits of buck spread down his front, fur and a trace of horn sticking out the corner of his lips as if he downed the beast as a snack. He sees me looking and wipes his mouth with the back of his massive, scaled hand, then grasps the horn which he proceeds to use as toothpick on some of the most devastatingly sharp and white teeth I’ve ever seen.
“You’re not a pest,” he says, conversationally. “You’re a human.”
“Yes!” I say, surprised. “I am a human. I didn’t know you knew humans.”
“Everybody knows humans,” he says. I guess everybody does actually seem to know what humans are. Nobody on this planet has seemed to be surprised by me at all.
“This area is not safe for you,” he says. “Where are you staying?”
I swallow. I don’t want to lie to a troll that I just saw eat a buck alive. But I also don’t want to take a troll back to Gruff’s house, in case he eats Gruff, and all his goats, including Strumpet.
“I…er…”
The troll takes a knee in front of me. This allows him to look at me more closely. Not quite eye to eye, but with fewer yards between our respective ocular sites. It is like seeing into the soul of a true beast. I don’t know what he truly is, or how he knows what I am. A creature that lives in a bog on a distant alien planet should not have any concept of humanity.
“How do you know what I am?”
“I’ve met humans before. Didn’t like them. Ate them.”
“Oh.” Hard not to worry that he’s going to stop liking me, then. I’m not sure how to be likable to a troll either, so that’s a little concerning. For now, I think if I just try not to look too edible, that’s probably a good start. “Well. Uhm.”
“Where were you living? I can smell a buck on you.”
“Do you eat all bucks, or…. Because…there’s some where I was and I think they’d prefer not to be eaten, and also some goats, and I like them, generally, when they’re not trying to bonk mine into oblivion, so.”
His eyes narrow, and his big troll brows execute a thick maneuver of disapproval. His face is more like geography than flesh. “I am not hungry, human.”