Categories > Books > Redwall > The Wicked Ground
The night cloaked Salamandastron like a deep blue blanket of the softest possible fibers, wrapping around every crag and edge of the old mountain and fairly well concealing the dark rocks from being visible as part of the nocturnal landscape. Its presence was only discernable at all if one knew where to look for a darkness without stars. Standing too close to the looming fortress served to block out its visible existence yet again, the solid rock face giving the impression of a heavy overcast night.
To the contrary, the soft rolling sand dunes that lay before Salamandastron itself were well visible in the starlight from above and reflected off the ocean. What was a soft dusty tan in the daylight became a peculiarly warm blue gray under the cover of night, almost luminescent as a strand between woods and water.
Two hares leaned against one of the dunes, the tan of their fur and the matching drab of their uniforms making them as hard to distinguish from the dunes as Salamandastron was against the sky. They had been there for quite some time and had given up all pretense of erect military posture as the wee hours of morning marched with more discipline toward the dawn.
At around three in the morning, the bigger of the two hares finally uttered the underlying thought that they had been skirting around in their discourse and complains the entire night. "Blast it all, Hayward, why'd old Winfield choose to leave us, his most loyal and true of officers, behind while he tottered off to Redwall for that bally party, wot?"
The smaller hare, who had been occupying himself by drawing lines in the sand with his big toe, looked up and shook his head. "Beats it all if I knew, Walden. They've got the ships out there to watch the coast and every other creature 'cept for us is off at that same bally old party. There'd be nobeast left to attack us, but if one wanted to try, who's to say even the most gallant of hares, such as the present company, should hold up?"
Walden snorted and waggled a droopy ear at Hayward. "I beg to differ, with all due respect, old chap. Do you not recall my gallantry in the Northern War and my subsequent ruthless completion of the drills at camp? I was a machine of war, and of the utmost elegance!"
Hayward smirked, his own eartips raising slightly along with his brow. "If my own eyes were not deceptive in the heat of battle, you were flailing about like a child's spinning top, catching foes on that sabre of yours by sheer luck and just as lucky that you'd run out of bullets and couldn't be misaiming that pistol at your own comrades, eh wot."
A low sound started in the back of Walden's throat and spurted out into a dry laugh. They'd had this conversation many times before. Hayward persisted to smirk and resumed work on his toe-in-the-sand artistic magnum opus.
An indeterminate amount of time went by, filled with much shuffling and twitching and the occasional outbreak of humming or whistling followed by an eventual thwack. Suddenly and silently, Salamandastron was illuminated softly from behind, dark and angular against a sheer shimmering white-blue pulse. It hung there for several seconds before dissipating upwards and leaving the sky as dark as it was before.
Hayward nudged Walden. "I say, it's doing it again."
Walden barely looked back. "Should be bally well getting used to it now, shouldn't we, wot? If those aliens were going to spring on us, they'd've already done it before giving themselves away right out with the first time they flashed at us."
"Aliens?" Hayward sputtered, his voice particularly loud against the quiet predawn. "I do say, that is a choice fabrication if I've ever heard one! That hell-or-high-water fur-and-fang steel-and-shot battleplan of yours has right well addled your brains!"
"I'm full-on serious!" Walden asserted. "Can you see any other reason? Got some other idea that makes any more sense? Come on, old chap, outdo me! I dare you!"
Hayward cast a long glance toward the looming dark bulk of Salamandastron before responding, a certain rigidity in his ears, "What if it's going to erupt again?"
"What?" Walden sputtered right back, flecks of moisture spraying from his mouth into the air in an attempt to one-up Hayward's reaction. He jabbed the smaller hare lightly in the ribs. "Erupt?"
"That's right," confirmed Hayward, the sound playful banter ebbing away from his tone. "It's a volcano, or it was, but it's not done anything so far as anyone remembers. Who's to say? Who bally well knows for sure?" He crossed his arms over his chest and dragged his toe straight through the picture he'd doodled earlier.
Walden tsked, flexing his knees until he was at eye level with Hayward. "You're serious, aren't you, wot? Come on, if there were still lava in it that could possibly come shooting out, d'you really think our forefathers really could have been living in there along with it for centuries and then some?"
Hayward merely shrugged and the conversation petered out, leaving the two hares to watch in exhausted silence as morning drew nearer and nearer and daylight came closer to relieving them from their posts.
Hayward's hypothesis had been far more correct in principle than Walden's was, though neither hare had any way of knowing this. Neither Walden nor anybeast he had ever met had ever had a run-in with extraterrestrial, but Hayward had merely misidentified the feature on which strain had been building toward a breaking point over the centuries.
The terrible growling started to emanate from the ground under the hares' footpaws at the instant the last brushstrokes of sunrise faded to cheerful blue. Yet neither Walden nor Hayward were able to notice that particular alignment, as at the same instant a huge force of damp sand stuck them from behind as forcefully as if it were a wave of water and dragged them downwards. But sand is far harder to work against than water is, and the attempted freestyle strokes of the two hares would have left them in the middle of the dune had the dune not persisted to act like water and suddenly leave them, sandy and shocked, in the trough of the wave. Their sputtering was now for the sake of air rather than for the sake of buffoonery, and as they looked up to try and put a name to what had just happened and what was still happening, they could see a whole succession of ground waves roiling inevitably toward them from inland.
Part of the military training at Salamandastron is preparation for chaos at sea, so the hares knew to place themselves parallel to the crests and troughs in water, allowing the water to bob under them and opening the way for a horizontal swim to safety. They hazarded a guess that the same principle would be their only chance with these madly vibrating waves of sand. In the constant rising of falling of parts of the ground against others, Walden and Hayward were fortuitously able to pull themselves onto a solid chunk of volcanic rock that, while it was still shaking and shifting, at least had no potential to engulf them alive.
Stranded as if on a raft in the middle of a hurricane, the hares could only cling to each other in dire need of consolation and stare out at the hostile environment. Walden, facing inland, had an unobstructed view of the seemingly endless stream of waves coursing through what had always previously been comfortingly and undeniably solid ground. Hayward, facing out to sea, saw those same waves transfer with much foam and froth from land to water, assertively pushing the churning waters away from the shore rather than allowing them to passively lap up on it.
Smaller chunks of rock detached from and ricocheted off the face of the great fire mountain, pelting the shifting sand and roiling water. The natural structure of the mountain, however, made it more immune to the troubles caused by the sister of the forces that had brought it into being, and while the interior rooms quickly became a series of jumbled messes, the great fortress itself staid off the thundering cataclysm.
Walden and Hayward had no idea how long they clung to each other and to dear life on that rock, but the moment the shaking shuddered itself out and the growling faded until the hiss of the agitated water could again be heard against the beach - and only then, the moment they could be steady on their own legs, the hares broke into a full run on the path toward Redwall. The badger Winfield was there, and the nature of the savagery that had just enveloped the two sentinel hares and their fortress needed to be disclosed to him post-haste.
To the contrary, the soft rolling sand dunes that lay before Salamandastron itself were well visible in the starlight from above and reflected off the ocean. What was a soft dusty tan in the daylight became a peculiarly warm blue gray under the cover of night, almost luminescent as a strand between woods and water.
Two hares leaned against one of the dunes, the tan of their fur and the matching drab of their uniforms making them as hard to distinguish from the dunes as Salamandastron was against the sky. They had been there for quite some time and had given up all pretense of erect military posture as the wee hours of morning marched with more discipline toward the dawn.
At around three in the morning, the bigger of the two hares finally uttered the underlying thought that they had been skirting around in their discourse and complains the entire night. "Blast it all, Hayward, why'd old Winfield choose to leave us, his most loyal and true of officers, behind while he tottered off to Redwall for that bally party, wot?"
The smaller hare, who had been occupying himself by drawing lines in the sand with his big toe, looked up and shook his head. "Beats it all if I knew, Walden. They've got the ships out there to watch the coast and every other creature 'cept for us is off at that same bally old party. There'd be nobeast left to attack us, but if one wanted to try, who's to say even the most gallant of hares, such as the present company, should hold up?"
Walden snorted and waggled a droopy ear at Hayward. "I beg to differ, with all due respect, old chap. Do you not recall my gallantry in the Northern War and my subsequent ruthless completion of the drills at camp? I was a machine of war, and of the utmost elegance!"
Hayward smirked, his own eartips raising slightly along with his brow. "If my own eyes were not deceptive in the heat of battle, you were flailing about like a child's spinning top, catching foes on that sabre of yours by sheer luck and just as lucky that you'd run out of bullets and couldn't be misaiming that pistol at your own comrades, eh wot."
A low sound started in the back of Walden's throat and spurted out into a dry laugh. They'd had this conversation many times before. Hayward persisted to smirk and resumed work on his toe-in-the-sand artistic magnum opus.
An indeterminate amount of time went by, filled with much shuffling and twitching and the occasional outbreak of humming or whistling followed by an eventual thwack. Suddenly and silently, Salamandastron was illuminated softly from behind, dark and angular against a sheer shimmering white-blue pulse. It hung there for several seconds before dissipating upwards and leaving the sky as dark as it was before.
Hayward nudged Walden. "I say, it's doing it again."
Walden barely looked back. "Should be bally well getting used to it now, shouldn't we, wot? If those aliens were going to spring on us, they'd've already done it before giving themselves away right out with the first time they flashed at us."
"Aliens?" Hayward sputtered, his voice particularly loud against the quiet predawn. "I do say, that is a choice fabrication if I've ever heard one! That hell-or-high-water fur-and-fang steel-and-shot battleplan of yours has right well addled your brains!"
"I'm full-on serious!" Walden asserted. "Can you see any other reason? Got some other idea that makes any more sense? Come on, old chap, outdo me! I dare you!"
Hayward cast a long glance toward the looming dark bulk of Salamandastron before responding, a certain rigidity in his ears, "What if it's going to erupt again?"
"What?" Walden sputtered right back, flecks of moisture spraying from his mouth into the air in an attempt to one-up Hayward's reaction. He jabbed the smaller hare lightly in the ribs. "Erupt?"
"That's right," confirmed Hayward, the sound playful banter ebbing away from his tone. "It's a volcano, or it was, but it's not done anything so far as anyone remembers. Who's to say? Who bally well knows for sure?" He crossed his arms over his chest and dragged his toe straight through the picture he'd doodled earlier.
Walden tsked, flexing his knees until he was at eye level with Hayward. "You're serious, aren't you, wot? Come on, if there were still lava in it that could possibly come shooting out, d'you really think our forefathers really could have been living in there along with it for centuries and then some?"
Hayward merely shrugged and the conversation petered out, leaving the two hares to watch in exhausted silence as morning drew nearer and nearer and daylight came closer to relieving them from their posts.
Hayward's hypothesis had been far more correct in principle than Walden's was, though neither hare had any way of knowing this. Neither Walden nor anybeast he had ever met had ever had a run-in with extraterrestrial, but Hayward had merely misidentified the feature on which strain had been building toward a breaking point over the centuries.
The terrible growling started to emanate from the ground under the hares' footpaws at the instant the last brushstrokes of sunrise faded to cheerful blue. Yet neither Walden nor Hayward were able to notice that particular alignment, as at the same instant a huge force of damp sand stuck them from behind as forcefully as if it were a wave of water and dragged them downwards. But sand is far harder to work against than water is, and the attempted freestyle strokes of the two hares would have left them in the middle of the dune had the dune not persisted to act like water and suddenly leave them, sandy and shocked, in the trough of the wave. Their sputtering was now for the sake of air rather than for the sake of buffoonery, and as they looked up to try and put a name to what had just happened and what was still happening, they could see a whole succession of ground waves roiling inevitably toward them from inland.
Part of the military training at Salamandastron is preparation for chaos at sea, so the hares knew to place themselves parallel to the crests and troughs in water, allowing the water to bob under them and opening the way for a horizontal swim to safety. They hazarded a guess that the same principle would be their only chance with these madly vibrating waves of sand. In the constant rising of falling of parts of the ground against others, Walden and Hayward were fortuitously able to pull themselves onto a solid chunk of volcanic rock that, while it was still shaking and shifting, at least had no potential to engulf them alive.
Stranded as if on a raft in the middle of a hurricane, the hares could only cling to each other in dire need of consolation and stare out at the hostile environment. Walden, facing inland, had an unobstructed view of the seemingly endless stream of waves coursing through what had always previously been comfortingly and undeniably solid ground. Hayward, facing out to sea, saw those same waves transfer with much foam and froth from land to water, assertively pushing the churning waters away from the shore rather than allowing them to passively lap up on it.
Smaller chunks of rock detached from and ricocheted off the face of the great fire mountain, pelting the shifting sand and roiling water. The natural structure of the mountain, however, made it more immune to the troubles caused by the sister of the forces that had brought it into being, and while the interior rooms quickly became a series of jumbled messes, the great fortress itself staid off the thundering cataclysm.
Walden and Hayward had no idea how long they clung to each other and to dear life on that rock, but the moment the shaking shuddered itself out and the growling faded until the hiss of the agitated water could again be heard against the beach - and only then, the moment they could be steady on their own legs, the hares broke into a full run on the path toward Redwall. The badger Winfield was there, and the nature of the savagery that had just enveloped the two sentinel hares and their fortress needed to be disclosed to him post-haste.
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