Scruntzz's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

The baby lay in a ditch of black mud and had not cried in two days. Scruntzz did not know his name yet, or that he had one. He knew only the ache in his belly and the wet heat of the ground under his back. When the ache grew sharp, something in his blood answered without asking him. The mud around him churned. A pale, eyeless worm pushed up through the muck, teeth bared, red ooze sliding from its segmented flesh. It crawled to his mouth and let him suck the rot from its skin. He lived another day on that milk. He lived a week on the beetles that followed, and a month on the raptors that dragged rabbits to his feet, and a year on the serpent-people who watched him from the reeds and left fish on flat stones. He never called them. His half-god blood called them for him, the way a fever calls sweat. He was four when the cats came for him. Three of them, long as canoes, teeth the color of old bone. He ran on all fours because he had never learned to stand straight. The blood in him screamed and a mammoth broke the treeline, tusks down, and crushed two cats into the dirt. The third fled. Scruntzz sat in the churned ground and shook, and for the first time he understood that he had almost died, and that something had chosen to save him. The understanding sat in his chest like a second heartbeat. He reached for it. His blood reached with him, and this time he felt it move. The air beside him folded. What stepped out was not a beetle or a worm or a mammoth. It was small and shifting, fur one moment, scale the next, eyes steady. It looked at him and made a sound close to a word. Then another. Then his name, which he had not known he had. It told him the cats belonged to the god-beasts. It told him the god-beasts owned the mud he was born in and the sky above it and the throne at the center of the world. It asked him if he wanted to keep eating worms in a ditch, or if he wanted the throne. Scruntzz stood up on two legs. It hurt. He did not sit back down. He pointed the way the third cat had run and the shifting thing smiled with a mouth it had just made. They walked out of the ditch together, and the mammoth followed, and behind the mammoth the reeds moved with things that had fed him since birth.