Categories > Books > Redwall > The Wicked Ground
Chapter Three
The Ruddaring lay at anchor only a short distance from the Mossflower coast, bobbing gently in the calm of cool waters before storm season. The Ruddaring, despite its outposted position, was no ship of war. Rather, the solid wooden vessel served almost as a lighthouse at night, with a lantern kept shining in her crow's nest, and as a pleasant gatekeeper by day, welcoming friendly ships from neighboring lands and politely questioning that rare vessel that appeared as if it might have less than honest intentions. But in the coolness of the morning, with the first strata of colors creeping up from behind the sea, their element of surprise lost as they reflected in the deep dark water, the Ruddaring was little more than a mere buoy, playfully swaying along with the ocean's peaceful whims.
Leika Lutrovna was the master of this vessel, and though she knew full well that no ships would come to call at this time of day, she lay half awake in her bunk. The otter's eyes were partly lidded and she was not yet clear on whether she was still saving the naval battle of the century in her dreams or if she was really staring, encased in blankets, at the dark wood ceiling, the soft waves outside rocking her like a child.
Leika's eyes opened fully as a low rumbling pealed through the air and the ship started rocking profoundly on the opposite axis from the one on which the waves usually carried it. With that, the otter was on her footpaws in an instant. She grabbed her yellow raincoat from a hook on the door and leaned forward as she pushed her way outside, expecting to be battered by a brashly early spring storm.
She lifted her eyes at the permeating dryness she met upon opening he door, and they were met only with blue. Blue sky, completely clear of clouds and even free of the usual circling seabirds on their morning huts. Blue water dappled more frantically by the sun as it rose and fell in peculiar waves that seemed to move from the shore to the sea rather than the other way. The thunderlike rumbling persisted in the aural background, but there was no storm in sight.
Leika squinted and bit her lower lip in a frown, rubbing her eyes and again wondering what was dream and what was reality. Ultimately, the otter decided that she'd best write this all in the Ruddaring's log at any rate. If it were real, the appropriate records would be there later, and if it were a dream, she'd wake up again later to another blank page.
Balance secure despite the rocking of the deck, Leika Lutrovna retuned to her cabin and began to write.
-----
Brother Andreas was also up early writing. The Recorder liked to rise with the birds -the wild and more primitive beasts who took to singing as an early herald for the rising sun. Except this usual wake-up call had gone missing this morning, and the marten was only carried into a state of waking when the first vanguard of sunrays crept over the ledge of the Gatehouse window. Andreas pulled himself out of bed and dressed leisurely, his pointed ears turned to the absence of sound out his window.
In fact, he liked to do his recording work in the morning precisely because there was less noise to reckon with He'd have a night's rest to distill any notable events from the previous day into succinct and sometimes clever words, without the clamors of the coming day forcing a need to record even more before the first bit was done. But the birds were a constant and their absence provided so absolute of a silence that Andreas was not able to apply full attention to his work.
The marten dangled the nib of his pen just over the smooth clean page, his head and ears straining forward as if to make something out in the silence. When that something finally came, it was not a soft chirp or the gentle breath of wind in the trees, but rather an enveloping roar, as if the train, fueled by pure thunder, had broken free of its tracks and was ripping through the sky. With the sound, Andreas was thrown forward and backward and forward again in his chair. He reached one paw toward the vibrating desk in a futile aim for support. The pen nib in his other paw came down on the recordbook and zigzagged manically up and down until the pushing from below snapped a leg off the chair and the marten tumbled to the trembling floor.
Books tore loose from the shelves and pelted the Recorder that had so cared for them. Despite the assault from above and below, Andreas pulled himself to his footpaws by the doorhandle, threw the door open, and stumbled outside, only to be tripped up by the angrily growling earth itself. Eyes wide and teeth bared in sheer panic, Andreas scrambled away on all fours. Ripples of rising and falling soil crashed against his shins, belly, and chest, bruising, scraping, and at last knocking the wind from the marten's lungs.
He managed to turn himself sideways in order to move with the rise and flow. Looking to the side as he gasped for air in this screaming world, he could see the whole of Redwall moving up and down, cracks opening and shutting again in the sandy masonry almost as if the building was shimmering. But a shimmer is a function of light, and this spring morning was as bright and clear as any other, the sky entirely unaware of the earth's wrath.
Even when the breath returned to his lungs, Andreas remained unable to move, held in place for fear of the forces beneath him and transfixed by the image of the wall and his Gatehouse spilling over in a cascade of red dust, stone, and books.
-----
It is one of the oldest mole expressions on record that a bad premonition is felt through the digging claws. While relevant expressions exist for other species, this unique feature of moles coupled with their innate good sense caused other creatures to pay heed to this utterance.
Elsinore had used this expression many times. Often these occasions were not entirely dire and often they only turned out to be things that seemed bad in Elsinore's eyes alone, but she'd said it regardless of severity and regardless of the fact that she had never actually felt these things in her digging claws. Usually, they were pangs of second-guessing or caution that popped into her head after some thought. Occasionally, things would hit her in the gut, an immediate sinking and churning at the suggestion of something that sounded as if it could have no good outcome from the very beginning. And sometimes, it would come straight from the heart, an increase in beats-per-minute stemming from something that inherently troubled or excited the mole to her very core.
This time, Elsinore felt it in her digging claws, and all entirely in earnest. The Foremole Skoilkull was heading a crew of able diggers to clear the path for a new rail line running from Redwall to the mountains south of Salamandastron, and morning was the best time to start work. Elsinore had just shoved her claws into the dew-softened earth when she felt a series of light vibrations crawl up her arm like the shaking of a tuning fork. Perplexed but morbidly curious, she shoved the other paw's worth of claws in next to the first.
Later in life, Elsinore could never recall for certain whether she deliberately removed her digging claws from the earth in the sense of impending doom or whether this doom had already arrived and had shoved her out on its own accord. Either way, the mole tumbled backwards like a black furry bowling ball badly aimed down the alley of the unfinished railway cut.
The earth that the moles knew so well had become a writhing monster screaming in two voices at once, a low primal growl and a high shattering shriek of hard edge against hard edge. The soil beneath Elsinore's struggling form grew soft and spongelike, rainwater from days past expelled back to the surface. Elsinore scrambled with her full capacity of energy, but those sage digging claws gained no holds in the strange suspension of soil and water. The ground pulled down as it flailed about, somehow grimly deliberate in its spasms.
Elsinore swore later in life - and some of the other moles confirmed it by their own recollections - that she could see the trackbed ahead being pulled to the right before the further-softened freshly dug dirt piled in on the mole crew.
-----
A high and melodramatic shrieking emanated from Cavern Hole, different enough in register from the earth's growling, the splintering crashes of shattering stonework, and the twin bells rocking madly in tandem that it could still be heard. But this time, the sound was not coming from Crysantema. The squirrel soprano had passed out cold when the first wave of shaking had sent the entire contents of her wardrobe and dressing table flying across the room with nearly enough force to turn fabric into shrapnel.
No, this string of screams came straight from the mouth of Enruso, exercising his falsetto register far more than he ever had in voice lessons and masterclasses. The stoat sat upright in his bed and clutched his pillow tight across his chest like a security blanket, but with more claws involved. His eyes were wide and tears of terror streamed down his broad face, parting his fur and aiding the flow of drool from the corners of his gaping mouth.
Maestro Liedswelt, his own paws shaking far more than just from what the earth was providing, stumbled toward the stoat, leaving the squirrel against a shelf that had already fallen.
"My voice, my voice!" Enruso shrieked with much volume. "It's ruined my voice! I am done for! The muses of all arts chose now to say that I have not done their bidding, and they have wrought this one me, and I shall never be able to sing again!"
Liedswelt placed his paws on Enruso's shoulders, and the two moved up and down together with the earth's throes. "You're shouting," Liedswelt shouted. "Try to sing!"
The stoat opened his mouth and emitted a low gravely croak. He shook his head in dismay, but the marten glared at him, with no spectacles as a safety barrier between his eyes and their target. Even with the natural world going mad around him, Enruso knew that look and opened his mouth again, the brazen notes of the previous night's interrupted aria spilling flawlessly from his spittle-flecked lips.
The look of profound relief that crossed Enruso's face was cut terribly short by a high creaking, twisting, splintering, crashing from above. The tumbling clang of the Matthias and Methuselah bells suddenly became far more erratic, the climaxed in a momentous collision of brass against stone floor, resounding as if the waves through the earth had picked up enough civilization to make their own music.
Enruso sprang from his bed and ran, nightshirt billowing out behind him. Liedswelt scooped the still-unconscious Crysantema into his arms and followed, half blind without his spectacles and only certain of which way was out based on the daylight streaming in with ironic cheer through a newly-opened gap in the wall.
-----
Rakarde had made quite an investment in the greystone house by the River Moss. As a junior officer in the Northern War, he had earned quite a commission from the government, and with peace achieved, the fox had decided to put that commission into an idyllic home for himself, his wife, and their adolescent son. It was not a big house, but it was spacious enough. The exterior stones had been harvested from the same River Moss that now ran some fifty yards beyond the house and the interior was artistically laid out with natural and carved woods of all available colors. It was the perfect blend of outdoors and indoors, and aside from his family themselves, Rakarde regarded it as his finest investment.
The tall stone chimney was the first victim, scattering into its component parts and raining stones all over the grounds almost the instant the churning and shaking began. One could say that practicality had been laid by the wayside for the sake of artistry here, but the sudden awakening of the earth into a mad and senseless fit is not the kind of occasion that qualifies under normal preventative practicality.
Rakarde's sabre and uniform were flung off the wall against a heavily solid shelf of books. The hardwood floor beneath the shelf creaked and groaned as if it were being strangled, while the shaking that crept up through the walls and support beams served to more rapidly warp the floor planks. Crouching down low for balance, Rakarde and his mate Kinth scooted from the room, clasping each other's forepaws tightly as they ran down the twisting and buckling staircase.
Still moving as one creature, Rakarde and Kinth aimed toward their son Merritt's room on the first floor of the house, but the ground had other ideas, and the volume of the terrain's snarling was compounded by the percussive horror of stone after stone piling in on each other. With no time for tears, the two foxes dove out the front door as the rest of the house compacted itself.
When the little avalanche ceased and the roar of the ground beneath them seemed quiet in comparison, Rakarde and Kinth looked up from their prostrate position on the flexing forest floor. Merritt stood before them, unharmed, but the young fox was only a speck against the active background. The River Moss tossed violently between its banks and the air above them, thrashing as if the river itself were the fish that had been removed from its waters. The river foamed and roiled draconically in the early morning light, fascinating and terrible together.
Merritt continued to stand and watch, his own posture defiant and barely wavering at the spectacle. Or at least until the river took a capricious turn to the side, splashing down out of its banks and sending water rushing toward the young fox before leaping into the air again. Just as instantly as this great tumultuous motion began, Merritt was lying down and shaking, pressed tight between his panic-stricken but still-comforting parents.
-----
The Redwall Infirmary was in shambles. Glass bottles and tubes spilled out of unsecured wooden cabinets and shattered, the shards dancing with the waves of the floor, their chemical and herbal contents mingling in a noxious mess that served only to add to the fear of the unknown that hung heavily in the room. Empty cots were overturned as easily as if they were toys in a dollhouse, and occupied cots, no matter how sick the patients had felt previously, quickly became empty as the sick found the strength to try and outrun the un-outrunnable.
The head of he Infirmary, a mouse called Charity, ordered that her staff should find the balance to escort as many patients out as they could handle, but this gallant resolve broke down spectacularly as the Abbey walls took to crumbling, and the collapse of the bells clanged the death toll for any form of order and efficiency.
And in all of this, Jacinth remained in her cot, even expression and relaxed posture entirely at odds with the teetering of the entire building and the land on which it was built. Aetantim the ferretmaid, pushing forward on her knees, approached the singer's bedside and tugged anxiously at one of the loose paws, a wordless insistence to come along.
Jacinth placed her other paw on Aetantim's, everything about her posture, from the softness of those paws to the serene and placid smile on her face. The mousemaid moved in tandem with everything else in the room, for certain, but the extra motion on her part was minimal. This calm was unnerving to Aetantim, as if she needed further jolts against her nerves. Jacinth was just too calm, too steady, too deliberate in her inaction to be blissfully unaware. Aetantim could read a sense of inevitability all over Jacinth's face.
Everything continued to lurch and groan, and Jacinth, her expression unchanged, suddenly shoved Aetantim backwards toward the stairs, a strong push for such a small mouse. The ferret gasped and streaked down the stairs, her claws leaving tracks in the wooden banister that kept her descent from being a freefall. She continued stumbling forward through the widened space that had once been the great doors. Behind her, the Abbey succumbed to another push from below and the whole roof caved in with momentous grinding and tearing, filling in the Great Hall and taking most of the upper floors with it.
-----
And the earth kept roiling, rumbling, and shifting, waving in regular pulses, maybe even dancing as accompanied by its own terrible music. Such instantaneous spontaneities are transfixing, ending proper perception of time even with all their activity. Mere seconds inflate to hours by status of importance in memory, and some seconds are as clear as if a steady wind keeps them free of dust, while others are as jumbled as the piles of wreckage that accumulated throughout Mossflower.
And the walls kept falling, creatures kept running, and the earth kept moving.
The Ruddaring lay at anchor only a short distance from the Mossflower coast, bobbing gently in the calm of cool waters before storm season. The Ruddaring, despite its outposted position, was no ship of war. Rather, the solid wooden vessel served almost as a lighthouse at night, with a lantern kept shining in her crow's nest, and as a pleasant gatekeeper by day, welcoming friendly ships from neighboring lands and politely questioning that rare vessel that appeared as if it might have less than honest intentions. But in the coolness of the morning, with the first strata of colors creeping up from behind the sea, their element of surprise lost as they reflected in the deep dark water, the Ruddaring was little more than a mere buoy, playfully swaying along with the ocean's peaceful whims.
Leika Lutrovna was the master of this vessel, and though she knew full well that no ships would come to call at this time of day, she lay half awake in her bunk. The otter's eyes were partly lidded and she was not yet clear on whether she was still saving the naval battle of the century in her dreams or if she was really staring, encased in blankets, at the dark wood ceiling, the soft waves outside rocking her like a child.
Leika's eyes opened fully as a low rumbling pealed through the air and the ship started rocking profoundly on the opposite axis from the one on which the waves usually carried it. With that, the otter was on her footpaws in an instant. She grabbed her yellow raincoat from a hook on the door and leaned forward as she pushed her way outside, expecting to be battered by a brashly early spring storm.
She lifted her eyes at the permeating dryness she met upon opening he door, and they were met only with blue. Blue sky, completely clear of clouds and even free of the usual circling seabirds on their morning huts. Blue water dappled more frantically by the sun as it rose and fell in peculiar waves that seemed to move from the shore to the sea rather than the other way. The thunderlike rumbling persisted in the aural background, but there was no storm in sight.
Leika squinted and bit her lower lip in a frown, rubbing her eyes and again wondering what was dream and what was reality. Ultimately, the otter decided that she'd best write this all in the Ruddaring's log at any rate. If it were real, the appropriate records would be there later, and if it were a dream, she'd wake up again later to another blank page.
Balance secure despite the rocking of the deck, Leika Lutrovna retuned to her cabin and began to write.
-----
Brother Andreas was also up early writing. The Recorder liked to rise with the birds -the wild and more primitive beasts who took to singing as an early herald for the rising sun. Except this usual wake-up call had gone missing this morning, and the marten was only carried into a state of waking when the first vanguard of sunrays crept over the ledge of the Gatehouse window. Andreas pulled himself out of bed and dressed leisurely, his pointed ears turned to the absence of sound out his window.
In fact, he liked to do his recording work in the morning precisely because there was less noise to reckon with He'd have a night's rest to distill any notable events from the previous day into succinct and sometimes clever words, without the clamors of the coming day forcing a need to record even more before the first bit was done. But the birds were a constant and their absence provided so absolute of a silence that Andreas was not able to apply full attention to his work.
The marten dangled the nib of his pen just over the smooth clean page, his head and ears straining forward as if to make something out in the silence. When that something finally came, it was not a soft chirp or the gentle breath of wind in the trees, but rather an enveloping roar, as if the train, fueled by pure thunder, had broken free of its tracks and was ripping through the sky. With the sound, Andreas was thrown forward and backward and forward again in his chair. He reached one paw toward the vibrating desk in a futile aim for support. The pen nib in his other paw came down on the recordbook and zigzagged manically up and down until the pushing from below snapped a leg off the chair and the marten tumbled to the trembling floor.
Books tore loose from the shelves and pelted the Recorder that had so cared for them. Despite the assault from above and below, Andreas pulled himself to his footpaws by the doorhandle, threw the door open, and stumbled outside, only to be tripped up by the angrily growling earth itself. Eyes wide and teeth bared in sheer panic, Andreas scrambled away on all fours. Ripples of rising and falling soil crashed against his shins, belly, and chest, bruising, scraping, and at last knocking the wind from the marten's lungs.
He managed to turn himself sideways in order to move with the rise and flow. Looking to the side as he gasped for air in this screaming world, he could see the whole of Redwall moving up and down, cracks opening and shutting again in the sandy masonry almost as if the building was shimmering. But a shimmer is a function of light, and this spring morning was as bright and clear as any other, the sky entirely unaware of the earth's wrath.
Even when the breath returned to his lungs, Andreas remained unable to move, held in place for fear of the forces beneath him and transfixed by the image of the wall and his Gatehouse spilling over in a cascade of red dust, stone, and books.
-----
It is one of the oldest mole expressions on record that a bad premonition is felt through the digging claws. While relevant expressions exist for other species, this unique feature of moles coupled with their innate good sense caused other creatures to pay heed to this utterance.
Elsinore had used this expression many times. Often these occasions were not entirely dire and often they only turned out to be things that seemed bad in Elsinore's eyes alone, but she'd said it regardless of severity and regardless of the fact that she had never actually felt these things in her digging claws. Usually, they were pangs of second-guessing or caution that popped into her head after some thought. Occasionally, things would hit her in the gut, an immediate sinking and churning at the suggestion of something that sounded as if it could have no good outcome from the very beginning. And sometimes, it would come straight from the heart, an increase in beats-per-minute stemming from something that inherently troubled or excited the mole to her very core.
This time, Elsinore felt it in her digging claws, and all entirely in earnest. The Foremole Skoilkull was heading a crew of able diggers to clear the path for a new rail line running from Redwall to the mountains south of Salamandastron, and morning was the best time to start work. Elsinore had just shoved her claws into the dew-softened earth when she felt a series of light vibrations crawl up her arm like the shaking of a tuning fork. Perplexed but morbidly curious, she shoved the other paw's worth of claws in next to the first.
Later in life, Elsinore could never recall for certain whether she deliberately removed her digging claws from the earth in the sense of impending doom or whether this doom had already arrived and had shoved her out on its own accord. Either way, the mole tumbled backwards like a black furry bowling ball badly aimed down the alley of the unfinished railway cut.
The earth that the moles knew so well had become a writhing monster screaming in two voices at once, a low primal growl and a high shattering shriek of hard edge against hard edge. The soil beneath Elsinore's struggling form grew soft and spongelike, rainwater from days past expelled back to the surface. Elsinore scrambled with her full capacity of energy, but those sage digging claws gained no holds in the strange suspension of soil and water. The ground pulled down as it flailed about, somehow grimly deliberate in its spasms.
Elsinore swore later in life - and some of the other moles confirmed it by their own recollections - that she could see the trackbed ahead being pulled to the right before the further-softened freshly dug dirt piled in on the mole crew.
-----
A high and melodramatic shrieking emanated from Cavern Hole, different enough in register from the earth's growling, the splintering crashes of shattering stonework, and the twin bells rocking madly in tandem that it could still be heard. But this time, the sound was not coming from Crysantema. The squirrel soprano had passed out cold when the first wave of shaking had sent the entire contents of her wardrobe and dressing table flying across the room with nearly enough force to turn fabric into shrapnel.
No, this string of screams came straight from the mouth of Enruso, exercising his falsetto register far more than he ever had in voice lessons and masterclasses. The stoat sat upright in his bed and clutched his pillow tight across his chest like a security blanket, but with more claws involved. His eyes were wide and tears of terror streamed down his broad face, parting his fur and aiding the flow of drool from the corners of his gaping mouth.
Maestro Liedswelt, his own paws shaking far more than just from what the earth was providing, stumbled toward the stoat, leaving the squirrel against a shelf that had already fallen.
"My voice, my voice!" Enruso shrieked with much volume. "It's ruined my voice! I am done for! The muses of all arts chose now to say that I have not done their bidding, and they have wrought this one me, and I shall never be able to sing again!"
Liedswelt placed his paws on Enruso's shoulders, and the two moved up and down together with the earth's throes. "You're shouting," Liedswelt shouted. "Try to sing!"
The stoat opened his mouth and emitted a low gravely croak. He shook his head in dismay, but the marten glared at him, with no spectacles as a safety barrier between his eyes and their target. Even with the natural world going mad around him, Enruso knew that look and opened his mouth again, the brazen notes of the previous night's interrupted aria spilling flawlessly from his spittle-flecked lips.
The look of profound relief that crossed Enruso's face was cut terribly short by a high creaking, twisting, splintering, crashing from above. The tumbling clang of the Matthias and Methuselah bells suddenly became far more erratic, the climaxed in a momentous collision of brass against stone floor, resounding as if the waves through the earth had picked up enough civilization to make their own music.
Enruso sprang from his bed and ran, nightshirt billowing out behind him. Liedswelt scooped the still-unconscious Crysantema into his arms and followed, half blind without his spectacles and only certain of which way was out based on the daylight streaming in with ironic cheer through a newly-opened gap in the wall.
-----
Rakarde had made quite an investment in the greystone house by the River Moss. As a junior officer in the Northern War, he had earned quite a commission from the government, and with peace achieved, the fox had decided to put that commission into an idyllic home for himself, his wife, and their adolescent son. It was not a big house, but it was spacious enough. The exterior stones had been harvested from the same River Moss that now ran some fifty yards beyond the house and the interior was artistically laid out with natural and carved woods of all available colors. It was the perfect blend of outdoors and indoors, and aside from his family themselves, Rakarde regarded it as his finest investment.
The tall stone chimney was the first victim, scattering into its component parts and raining stones all over the grounds almost the instant the churning and shaking began. One could say that practicality had been laid by the wayside for the sake of artistry here, but the sudden awakening of the earth into a mad and senseless fit is not the kind of occasion that qualifies under normal preventative practicality.
Rakarde's sabre and uniform were flung off the wall against a heavily solid shelf of books. The hardwood floor beneath the shelf creaked and groaned as if it were being strangled, while the shaking that crept up through the walls and support beams served to more rapidly warp the floor planks. Crouching down low for balance, Rakarde and his mate Kinth scooted from the room, clasping each other's forepaws tightly as they ran down the twisting and buckling staircase.
Still moving as one creature, Rakarde and Kinth aimed toward their son Merritt's room on the first floor of the house, but the ground had other ideas, and the volume of the terrain's snarling was compounded by the percussive horror of stone after stone piling in on each other. With no time for tears, the two foxes dove out the front door as the rest of the house compacted itself.
When the little avalanche ceased and the roar of the ground beneath them seemed quiet in comparison, Rakarde and Kinth looked up from their prostrate position on the flexing forest floor. Merritt stood before them, unharmed, but the young fox was only a speck against the active background. The River Moss tossed violently between its banks and the air above them, thrashing as if the river itself were the fish that had been removed from its waters. The river foamed and roiled draconically in the early morning light, fascinating and terrible together.
Merritt continued to stand and watch, his own posture defiant and barely wavering at the spectacle. Or at least until the river took a capricious turn to the side, splashing down out of its banks and sending water rushing toward the young fox before leaping into the air again. Just as instantly as this great tumultuous motion began, Merritt was lying down and shaking, pressed tight between his panic-stricken but still-comforting parents.
-----
The Redwall Infirmary was in shambles. Glass bottles and tubes spilled out of unsecured wooden cabinets and shattered, the shards dancing with the waves of the floor, their chemical and herbal contents mingling in a noxious mess that served only to add to the fear of the unknown that hung heavily in the room. Empty cots were overturned as easily as if they were toys in a dollhouse, and occupied cots, no matter how sick the patients had felt previously, quickly became empty as the sick found the strength to try and outrun the un-outrunnable.
The head of he Infirmary, a mouse called Charity, ordered that her staff should find the balance to escort as many patients out as they could handle, but this gallant resolve broke down spectacularly as the Abbey walls took to crumbling, and the collapse of the bells clanged the death toll for any form of order and efficiency.
And in all of this, Jacinth remained in her cot, even expression and relaxed posture entirely at odds with the teetering of the entire building and the land on which it was built. Aetantim the ferretmaid, pushing forward on her knees, approached the singer's bedside and tugged anxiously at one of the loose paws, a wordless insistence to come along.
Jacinth placed her other paw on Aetantim's, everything about her posture, from the softness of those paws to the serene and placid smile on her face. The mousemaid moved in tandem with everything else in the room, for certain, but the extra motion on her part was minimal. This calm was unnerving to Aetantim, as if she needed further jolts against her nerves. Jacinth was just too calm, too steady, too deliberate in her inaction to be blissfully unaware. Aetantim could read a sense of inevitability all over Jacinth's face.
Everything continued to lurch and groan, and Jacinth, her expression unchanged, suddenly shoved Aetantim backwards toward the stairs, a strong push for such a small mouse. The ferret gasped and streaked down the stairs, her claws leaving tracks in the wooden banister that kept her descent from being a freefall. She continued stumbling forward through the widened space that had once been the great doors. Behind her, the Abbey succumbed to another push from below and the whole roof caved in with momentous grinding and tearing, filling in the Great Hall and taking most of the upper floors with it.
-----
And the earth kept roiling, rumbling, and shifting, waving in regular pulses, maybe even dancing as accompanied by its own terrible music. Such instantaneous spontaneities are transfixing, ending proper perception of time even with all their activity. Mere seconds inflate to hours by status of importance in memory, and some seconds are as clear as if a steady wind keeps them free of dust, while others are as jumbled as the piles of wreckage that accumulated throughout Mossflower.
And the walls kept falling, creatures kept running, and the earth kept moving.
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