With a wide smile on your face, you slide down the ropes from your bedchamber at the top of the lighthouse, this day as always marvelling at how smoothly your miniscule mass can pass through the air. The interior has been compartmentalised into areas for your personal rest, a stockpile of food supplies, an exercise room, workbench and all the mod-cons you could assemble from the debris you've managed to gather.
Daylight beams happily through the window-hole you carved for observation, and you pause briefly to look outside. What a lovely day!
You touch down on the hard surface of your ground floor, a large construction of snail-shell that you pressed down as a protection against any insect that may otherwise have tunnelled up through the soil into your sanctum. The door through which you exit is equally secure, although your attempts at hinges are crude at best. Your hope is that the small holes that require opposable thumbs to open fully will keep any monsters outside.
You breathe the air of the garden freely, staring up at the budding growths of vegetables, once tiny things, now competing with the grasses in an effort to see which could make you feel more tiny.
You settle your tools at your belt and your pack on your shoulders, striding off on another expedition. Birdsong trills from somewhere above, and you raise a hand to shade your eyes, scanning for the silhouette of the creature.
There had been a time you'd have been scurrying for cover at the mere thought of a bird spotting you and swooping down, where you'd thought that a night-time expedition would be safer.
That all changed those weeks ago, the first time a bird attacked.
You'd been walking through the garden much as you are now, only with nervous twitches of the head at every small sound or movement in that alien jungle.
Then the bird's call had rung out across the landscape, and like a rabbit in headlights you'd frozen, terrified to your core by the thought of some vast, predatory bird snatching you in its beak to die in an instant.
Indeed, there it had been, blotting out the sun with its wings as it dived toward you. You could do no more to identify it than say it was some form of sparrow, a small, insignificant creature at the best of times, and rather a humiliating creature to be devoured by.
Your brain had been screaming at your body to run, even though you knew you could not outdistance that monster. Even the fleeting feeling of hope that running may have offered was denied by your traitorous legs, paralysed by primal terror. What a way to go, you'd thought, cursing yourself for the foolish thought of surviving this tiny! Idiot!
In the moment before that bird hit you, a vaster, silent shadow sprang from stage left, smashing into the sparrow and saving you. Released from the spell of fear, you fell onto your ass and turned you head to witness your saviour.
Luna had struck the sparrow with a single, mighty paw, breaking its wing and leaving it twitching and twittering helpless before the cat. You stood in awe of the dark protector that has swooped in at the last second to save you. Luna turned her head to look over her shoulder, green eyes focussed directly upon you. Had she... had she wilfully done this to save your life? Did you have a guardian angel watching out for you, a third of a mile tall cat with protective feelings?
She turned from you and ducked her head, jaws opening wide. A single bite of those immense teeth, a shattering sound across the landscape, and the bird's struggles ceased. Just as effortlessly, that head rose again, prey held tight. Luna looked across at you once more, those vast eyes narrowed ever so slightly, as if to tell you once again 'this isn't about you'.
But she had acknowledged you. She clearly knew you were present, alive and thinking. Her motives hadn't been so pure as to act to keep you alive out of kindness, however. No, she'd used you, had you stand out here as bait to lure the bird. That you survived was just a happy coincidence, meaning she could re-use the trick again in the future.
With her meal secure, Luna returned where she had come, abandoning her tiny, oblivious accomplice. Just to prove her domination over you, the merest demonstration of her power, she had walked right by you, one of her paws going so far as to land directly before you. It had somehow been even scarier than the bird, witnessing such a humungous appendage annihilate the ground directly before you in perfect silence.
She'd been gone an instant later, but the intended impression had been left, that you should be grateful for her aid, but not to take it for granted: you only lived so long as Luna found you useful.
It had been a sobering thought that day, but now you can look back and smile. Since that day, birds have been less frequently seen preying upon the garden. In addition to increasing your safety, it led to an increase in the amount of insect life in the area, creatures that you yourself can prey upon.
That's not your mission today, of course. No, you're out to gather a few vegetables. Or rather, scraps of vegetable leaves. You're intrigued to see if you can identify the plant by eating the greens before you plan out a tunneling expedition to carve a true prize from what lies beneath the soil.
As the day lengthens you take a swig from your canteen. With hunger rising, you even unwrap a snack to chew on while you march. You still find it funny how much like chicken the meat of a sparrow tastes.
On that fateful day, you had thought to hunt down some insects for meat, but the bird's attack had driven them all into hiding, and you'd spent a fruitless morning chasing after shadows. You'd had no plan of attack, no tactics to use back then. It was in utter dejection that you'd headed back to your base, wondering how you were going to stave off starvation any longer.
The carcass rotting before the lighthouse had seemed like a gift from the gods.
You'd run across to it in disbelief, wondering if you were experiencing a mirage. As you'd gotten closer, you recognised the mangled heap as the remains of the sparrow, a few scraps of feather hanging from its bones.
Luna had been thorough in her feasting, picking it mostly clean, but to someone of your size there was still an abundance of riches present. With eager steps you'd swiftly scaled a wing and begun carving steaks free. With it so close to your base, it would've been easy to gather supplies for a long time!
Luna had known what she was doing when she left that there. This had been no offering to a superior, but scraps given to a subordinate. She still wanted you to live, and you were welcome to pick over whatever bits she deigned to offer for your part in her ruse. It was humiliating, but in the interests of tiny survival you had cast aside the thought that you were being treated as a pet by a cat.
No, you'd merely set to cutting meat free and running it back to your lighthouse, fully planning to spend the afternoon stripping it entirely of food and building materials.
You snap out of your reverie as you reach your destination. You had marked it by the large, empty snail shell that sat between two promising vegetable growths, and while this is indeed the place that is not the shell you saw yesterday.
It lies shattered into pieces, scattered across the soil of the garden. Thoughtlessly shattered beneath the tread of a massive monster, when to you it was itself an invincible structure. Once again, without even being seen, Ashley has proved her supreme dominance over this world!
Of course, when you had seen her up close, that dominance had been utterly undeniable. It had been during your harvesting of the sparrow, as you had been packing away another bundle of meat, far away from your timetable of beginning on plucking feathers.
The ground had quaked, growing in intensity as the titan closed. You'd gone to your entrance, thinking to continue your work while Ashley did her gardening.
Instead, you'd frozen in the doorway, unable to process the size of the boots that stood either side of the lighthouse, rising up seemingly forever.
In the beforetimes, when you yourself had been a giant, you stood some nine inches taller than your neighbour. And yet, at that moment, she was a two and a half miles tall goddess blotting out the sunlight, throwing your formidable stronghold literally into the shade.
"Oh, Luna," she'd said, her voice a proclamation blasting louder as she stooped mid-word. Her form grew even greater as her knees bent, and she descended from on high. "When will you learn not to leave these messes in the garden?"
Her gloved hand had lifted the entirety of the great sparrow corpse from the ground, dropping it into a bag as she stood again. One boot had pressed deep into the earth before she strode over you, crushing footsteps shaking your home as much as your confidence.
For then you had realised, as much as Luna may provide, Ashley could take away. It was one thing to live in the shadow of a non-malicious cat, but quite another to have an oblivious woman holding absolute power over your fate.
It's a lesson you repeated to yourself every time you came across evidence of the goddess's passing - like right now. It does present an opportunity, though - smaller shards of snail shell are certainly easier to transport for you, and the material is very strong and useful for many projects. Is it worth abandoning project vegetable leaf to grab a chance to gather some?
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author