After sitting in silence, briefly jotting a few more lines in his diary, while Etelka rustled around in her cabin, she returned and sat back down next to him.
“Baroness, I know that the reason for this quest for the ring is so that you might use it to communicate with those things in the Great Black Forest that we fought off.” Pool harbored a memory of a pitch black night when Baba Yaga’s Hut, having been damaged and blown off course made an emergency landing in a broad clearing amidst ancient ruins. During the night, monstrous things, ape-like but somehow different came at the airship, which was resting on the ground.
Shots were fired and several attacking beasts were killed. Miss Tagore fought off an incredibly large one and ultimately drove the remaining ones to retreat.
The following morning they company investigated, finding the corpses of the fallen. The first impression is that their attackers were somehow a cross between a gorilla and a dog or wolf. They possessed the physique of a gorilla, though tending toward hairless. The neck was longer and less thick than that of a gorilla and was mounted with a head, structured so as to belong to a bipedal organism, with mouth and eyes perpendicular to the spine, rather than in line with it.
The head was sized like that of a gorilla, but having a much longer snout. A short-snouted wolf head, with a heavy brow, little hair and small, though still canine ears.
Miss Tagore, Nila, was the one that had interacted with…fought with the leader (clearly the leader). She had returned from the field, as typical, speckled with blood.
The leader (#### had called it the goblin-king, a fairytale character) had used some manner of mind-control to convince Nila that she had both injured it, then that it had injured her. None of this is certain from their first encounter, because Nila had been the only one to really interact directly with it, and had been the only one to have actually fought it.
The decision to go back came to Etelka slowly over the next few months. She wanted to know what these creatures were. Not at all human, but despite their animal appearance, they possessed an intelligence. Once the decision was more or less final, she had to have a means to communicate. This meant going back across the ocean to N’Aurelia to find a ring lost in a vast swamp.
“Pool, it is my opinion that those things as you refer to them, are sentient beings, strangely overlooked throughout history, perhaps lost to folktales, as so many other things have been.”
“I will have Baba Yaga’s Hut prepare for a return voyage at the captain’s convenience,” she said.
Work in progress. Mistakes and misspellings are present. This is a very rough draft. Copyright 2021 Ion Fyr
#science fiction #fantasy #steampunk #writing
Ion Fyr 