Categories > Books > Redwall > The Wicked Ground
Chapter Six
Had the clocks been functioning and had somebeast been calm enough to think to look at them, the observation could have been made that the shaking had lasted precisely one minute and seventeen seconds. However, none of the clocks survived to tell the tale; even those which had not been knocked over or crushed by other wreckage had their gears wrenched out of working order with the first great jolt. The clocks that had remained solid in it all could at least testify that the earthquake had set across the breadth of Mossflower at eighteen minutes before seven o'clock in the morning.
The newly-still spring air shimmered red-gold around the lightly-swaying trees surrounding Redwall Abbey. The effect was produced by the climbing morning sunlight catching on the yellow road dust and the small particles of pulverized red sandstone that had been cast into the air by the earth's convulsions. It was a truly otherworldly light, the strange castoff of a devilish magical spell designed to distract from the trickery that had been wrought. Though mere trickery would have been an enviable alternative to the reality that came further and further into focus as the curtain of dust was carried upward and outward by the calm spring breeze. At first, faint edges were drawn together out of pinpoints in the crowded air, next connected into polygons, and then extended back into three-dimensional spaces.
But those three-dimensional spaces were entirely alien to the battered creatures who at last felt safe to raise their heads and see what nature had brought upon them. Their eyes all drew to one point, a jagged spire of two former walls meeting at a right angle, extending upwards to a severed point, then sloping down, brick edge by broken brick edge, to meet with a jumble of less-fortunate rubble. Outlines of arched windows accented this surviving bastion, though they were the only familiar features of the vaguely-square architectural shell, aside from the sickeningly unmistakable sandy red hue. The rest of the Abbey had mostly been pulled into the central space between the former walls, though some fragments had been cast dozens of meters from their source, some had sagged deeper into the ground, and some had been pulverized into the fine dust that pervaded the atmosphere as thoroughly as fear and the premonition of yet-indescribable loss did.
Those who had made it out of the Abbey invariably trained their eyes upon its remains. Those who had, for whatever reason, remained within its confines no longer had the capacity to do more than lie there, glazed and clouded eyes blind to the living world. For all its apparent life, the earth had no discrimination between what was richly filled with historical and contemporary life and what was just brick and mortar, or between what was another splittable rock versus what was a creature with dreams and goals.
The survivors surrounded the remains of Redwall in little clumps, groups that had fled together, or just beasts in desperate need to be closer to another life with so many death throes happening around them. The infirmary workers Charity and Aetantim were together with some of their patients. Ruta, the visiting badger general Winfield, and several Salamandastron hares crouched not far away, the Abbot of Redwall conspicuously absent from their circle. Similar clusters became apparent to each other by the slow propagation of dazed and frantic whispering. The sound carried through the restored stillness quite well, though it seemed to go unspoken that a mutual fear of setting the earth against them one more barred them from producing too loud of a sound wave.
One upright figure passed among the clumps of refugees, his tall but wide silhouette obscured of some detail by the diffuse dust in the air, but still the first figure clearly back on his footpaws. Yet there was no sense or defiance or normalcy whatsoever about Enruso. There seemed to be no reason why the stoat tenor was not crashing into things as he wandered, clad only in his nightshirt, about the devastated landscape. His face stretched into a fixed look of bewilderment, features standing out as if they'd been enhanced by stage makeup, Enruso's muttering was to himself, or perhaps to the whole world: "What a place. What a place this is..."
Andreas was also without a group with which to speculate, but unlike with many of the other beasts in the vicinity, a strange sort of resolve was etched under the layer of horrified disbelief that was more readily identifiable on the marten's face. Too sore to push himself up on his footpaws, Andreas remained more secure on all fours as he aimed for the stricken gatehouse archive that he had abandoned to its fate.
Though the books were dirty and lay several shelves' worth thick on the ground, the sliding rocking collapse of the room had laid them down (with the exception of the top few, which had been relocated to unrecoverable places) in roughly the chronological order in which they had been shelved. Andreas managed a weak smile at this discovery before plunging into the pile. At first, the marten made an effort to lay each salvaged volume in a neat pile, but he became more and more haphazard with the placement as he continued to not find what he needed. It was not until he had dug practically to the bottom layer that he located what he had almost worked himself into a frenzy over - two carefully-rebound older volumes, the current recordbook, and the small black personal notebook.
Clutching the precious volumes to his chest with one arm, Andreas attempted to climb out three-pawed from the little cavern of books into which he'd dug himself. As he neared the top, though, the books against which he was supported jerked out from under him. The marten fell backwards and quickly scrambled against what appeared to be a more stable pile, curling himself around the liberated volumes as the slide proved itself to be more sinister in cause than just a reaction to the marten's bodyweight.
The second round of deep growling was just as unexpected as the first, on the principle of lightning strikes and single locations. But with earthquakes, striking a different place often comprises moving the first place closer to that different place. It was a fortunate thing that the escapees from Redwall were still hunched close to the ground and away from structures, no matter how skeletal, as the terrible waves overtook the countryside for a second time.
-----
Moles are designed to spend time in the subterranean world, free of light and short on air. Yet a deliberately-dug tunnel is an entirely different case than being unwillingly enclosed in a shifting mire. The minute and a quarter of the mainshock was just below the threshold of what Elsinore could bear, an the seconds required to dig out of the unfamiliar imprisonment in familiar material used up the last burst of oxygen. Elsinore gasped raggedly to reinflate her lungs, then looked around in a survey of the scene.
Skoilkull had also extracted himself from the ground and was wordlessly scratching into the dirt in search of the rest of his crew. The temblor had effectively undone all the work that the railroad crew had put in, leaving a filled-in and rippled surface on the former trench. Elsinore, even considering her more formal study in the nature of soil and rocks, hadn't the faintest inkling of where to start searching out engulfed teammates, but she followed Skoilkull's lead and equally wordlessly began redisturbing the recently-disturbed dirt.
Several snouts and sets of digging claws poked through the ground on their own last dregs of momentum and were promptly assisted by Skoilkull, Elsinore, and any other crew members feeling able enough for the work. But as two minutes wore to five and to eight, the probability of finding more survivors decreased radically.
Digging claws still sensitive, the moles anticipated the second shock enough to clear the filled-in track for ground with grass. Again, the earth thrashed beneath them and again, the roaring filled their ears, though this time they were privy to the visual of the ground waves. Thirty seconds was enough of that for Elsinore, and when it faded as the mainshock had, her seasick greenness was enhanced by the knowledge that five surviving moles of nine was the definitive total. This consensus also required no words, and the defeated moles turned to report their misfortune to Redwall.
-----
Merritt's immediate comment upon the conclusion of the mainshock was that he could just as well have made it through on his own. The young fox's tone, however, was quite indicative of the opposite, even as he unwrapped his arms from around his parents. In some circumstances, Rakarde and Kinth could have found this mixed message irritating, or perhaps even humorous, but in the present case, they were simply grateful that their son was able to blow them off at all.
In the eight and a half minutes between foreshock and aftershock, the two adults approached the devastated house paw-in-paw, struggling with thoughts of avoidance versus considerations of inevitability as they surveyed the quake's handiwork. Merritt loped as casually as he could pretend to be toward the River Moss. An empty riverbed lay between the young fox and the river itself, and based on the direction in which the fallen leaves were traveling in the displaced stream, it was easy to make the still-startling conclusion that the water was flowing in the opposite direction from normal. Merritt was quite taken with this phenomenon until the water lurched violently back into its banks and resumed its prior manic dance, the same waves propelling Merritt to seek refuge in his parents once again.
The already structurally decimated stone house was even further reduced to a shapeless mound of river rocks within those thirty seconds. With no hope of recovering anything within, neither material items nor a normal life, all three foxes were struck even more dumbly than after the first shock. It was Merritt who took the first steps out on the path toward Redwall. Unwilling to continue exhibiting weakness as he felt he had been doing, the young fox took it upon himself to be forthgoing where his pale and grieving parents could not. Rakarde and Kinth did not pick up that particular fragment of subtext, but they understood the directional message and followed.
The trio of foxes, dazed though they were, took reasonable speed down the path. While it had never been the smoothest of roads, its surface had become further rippled, warped, compressed and folded in the course of so little time. But they tripped and stumbled along even over its new state without a true break of pace until fifteen minutes later, when a third convulsive outburst emanated from the ground below.
-----
In under half an hour, the citizens of Mossflower centered around the empty husk of Redwall Abbey had gone from experiencing the same type of unexpected three times to anticipating the next occurrence in every move. A dislodged tree branch would succumb to gravity and large clusters of creatures would crouch over with their forepaws protecting their necks. A precariously deposited stone would topple to where entropy preferred it to go and Enruso would lapse into the death scene of one of Lascala's earlier works. Now that the ground had so forcefully asserted itself three times, the impression of an inescapable circle of fate was shared in groups, too scared to move, but speaking louder as they knew volume had no bearing on seismicity.
Andreas found it more difficult to extract himself from a pile of heavy books than it was to pull other books out of such a pile. The marten had acquired a sizeable collection of bruises and papercuts, though these were vastly preferable over injuries that would have undoubtedly been inflicted by a chunk of rock whose fall was broken by a set of 200-year-old record volumes that Andreas had never previously regarded as being terribly useful. Still tenaciously clutching the four volumes against his chest, though they felt heavier and heavier with each new impediment, the Recorder of Mossflower Country teetered away from the crumbling remains of Redwall Abbey.
He knew he'd reached a suitable spot for his work when the third aftershock merely (to think that it could ever be considered as "mere"!) growled and moved the ground, still a visible attack but with shallower waves, without piling anything on top of him or slamming him from below. Easing himself into a seated position once the waves had passed, Andreas tiredly but diligently cracked open the oldest of the four volumes, tired eyes searching the long ago for instances more closely related to the present than the date on the volume would initially suggest.
But those by Redwall were solely thinking of the immediate future by this point, the immediate past still too fresh to comprehend but still illuminated intensely with indications that it was not yet over in terms of consequences. Their sense of present was suspended between the terrors of past and future, just as unsafe as a predicament as the one with the earth itself, And yet when the now-familiar subterranean snarling and convulsing picked up for the fourth time, they felt fully justified in their strange temporal suspension, as they had at least seen this fragment of future in advance.
-----
Hayward and Walden ran. Even when the railroads were not incapacitated, the footpath and carriage road between Salamandastron and Redwall was still a wide and well-traveled one. The distance was not small, but it was not by any stretch outside of the realm of the hares' training. Of course, this was no normal run. There are some things to which literal training to "take things in stride" does not apply, but when those things happen in sequences, they can still be assimilated into some bizarre semblance of routine. The first aftershock was just as terrifying as the initial earthquake for certain, but the hares remembered what worked the first time, and as they moved southeast and away from sand as the aftershocks decreased in magnitude, the threat of engulfment became less of a specter over the run and those strides were easier to take.
In fact, the largest obstacle on their run thus far had been spatially fixed at the time of the encounter. On all previous more leisurely jaunts along this road, it had gone directly from Salamandastron to Redwall, but this time the hares came upon an abrupt dead end, freshly broken dirt meeting a row of solid old trees. Walden, never one for subtlety, persisted in running through the unbroken forest in what he assured Hayward was the correct direction. But Hayward did not follow so simply, and Walden returned to the edge of the path, pushing his companion to follow him. Instead, mystified, Hayward pointed off to the right. Their interrupted path did indeed continue on toward Redwall, only it had been diverted linearly by nearly twenty feet. The riddle at once solved and made more perplexing, Walden and Hayward cut over to the extension of the path, continuing toward Redwall come hell or high land.
-----
Garlock ran. There was little precision in the ferret's gait as he zigzagged over the broken path as if those terrible furrows had become sentient and were chasing him, but he ran nevertheless, just as much trying to distance himself from the devastation in Darkhill as he was running to reach Redwall. He wasn't going to leave that image alone, not hardly, but with the ground persisting to be less than solid and stable at unpredictable intervals, thinking of the scene at all was to think of himself within it.
At each aftershock, Garlock flung himself onto the nearest treetrunk and screwed his eyes shut, preferring the stronger shaking to the possibility of seeing ground cracks. But roughly an hour and a quarter after his departure, when a fifth shock still managed to catch Garlock off his guard, he attached himself to a tree that had been substantially weakened by the previous four. With his eyes shut as ever, the ferret did not even realize he was falling until the trunk met the ground. It fell away from the path, and the angle at which it fell came mere inches from pinning Garlock's left arm and leg between it and the forest floor. Blood dribbling from a self-inflicted hole in his lower lip, the ferret skittered like a child fleeing closet monsters back to the path, pattern more erratic but speed more intent than before.
-----
Just like creatures throughout the ravaged and shattered woods of Mossflower needed to readjust themselves and their outlooks following the temblor, so did the earth itself. It had been content in its dormancy, moving only when centuries' worth of stress finally crossed some unknowable threshold, and now that sudden relocation required some acclimation. The ground sought to settle into a comfortable new spot, trying one alignment, finding it unsatisfactory, shifting again, and so forth, seeking the most natural position in which to rest.
The adjustments became smaller and smaller, perhaps finickier and finickier. The visible ground waves were the first factor to disappear in the uncountable string of aftershocks, followed by the decrescendo and morendo of the low growlings, until the shakings themselves became short jokes, then momentary wobbles, then little flickers that were only apparent to one watching for signs of motion in leaves or scattered pebbles.
For a full day and a half after the initial earthquake, with few exceptions the surviving citizens of Mossflower County could only sit and wait for the next punishing blow, and even when the aftershocks diminished to a level that allowed betting on when the next one would occur or weakly attempting humor in the predicament, the lingering worry of another large shock was enough to induce motionlessness to the point of even forgetting to eat. One could almost see it as overcompensation - a stillness of life to contrast the great upheaval of the crystalline, a lack of consumption of the land's fruits as the land had consumed so many products of civilization.
Had the clocks been functioning and had somebeast been calm enough to think to look at them, the observation could have been made that the shaking had lasted precisely one minute and seventeen seconds. However, none of the clocks survived to tell the tale; even those which had not been knocked over or crushed by other wreckage had their gears wrenched out of working order with the first great jolt. The clocks that had remained solid in it all could at least testify that the earthquake had set across the breadth of Mossflower at eighteen minutes before seven o'clock in the morning.
The newly-still spring air shimmered red-gold around the lightly-swaying trees surrounding Redwall Abbey. The effect was produced by the climbing morning sunlight catching on the yellow road dust and the small particles of pulverized red sandstone that had been cast into the air by the earth's convulsions. It was a truly otherworldly light, the strange castoff of a devilish magical spell designed to distract from the trickery that had been wrought. Though mere trickery would have been an enviable alternative to the reality that came further and further into focus as the curtain of dust was carried upward and outward by the calm spring breeze. At first, faint edges were drawn together out of pinpoints in the crowded air, next connected into polygons, and then extended back into three-dimensional spaces.
But those three-dimensional spaces were entirely alien to the battered creatures who at last felt safe to raise their heads and see what nature had brought upon them. Their eyes all drew to one point, a jagged spire of two former walls meeting at a right angle, extending upwards to a severed point, then sloping down, brick edge by broken brick edge, to meet with a jumble of less-fortunate rubble. Outlines of arched windows accented this surviving bastion, though they were the only familiar features of the vaguely-square architectural shell, aside from the sickeningly unmistakable sandy red hue. The rest of the Abbey had mostly been pulled into the central space between the former walls, though some fragments had been cast dozens of meters from their source, some had sagged deeper into the ground, and some had been pulverized into the fine dust that pervaded the atmosphere as thoroughly as fear and the premonition of yet-indescribable loss did.
Those who had made it out of the Abbey invariably trained their eyes upon its remains. Those who had, for whatever reason, remained within its confines no longer had the capacity to do more than lie there, glazed and clouded eyes blind to the living world. For all its apparent life, the earth had no discrimination between what was richly filled with historical and contemporary life and what was just brick and mortar, or between what was another splittable rock versus what was a creature with dreams and goals.
The survivors surrounded the remains of Redwall in little clumps, groups that had fled together, or just beasts in desperate need to be closer to another life with so many death throes happening around them. The infirmary workers Charity and Aetantim were together with some of their patients. Ruta, the visiting badger general Winfield, and several Salamandastron hares crouched not far away, the Abbot of Redwall conspicuously absent from their circle. Similar clusters became apparent to each other by the slow propagation of dazed and frantic whispering. The sound carried through the restored stillness quite well, though it seemed to go unspoken that a mutual fear of setting the earth against them one more barred them from producing too loud of a sound wave.
One upright figure passed among the clumps of refugees, his tall but wide silhouette obscured of some detail by the diffuse dust in the air, but still the first figure clearly back on his footpaws. Yet there was no sense or defiance or normalcy whatsoever about Enruso. There seemed to be no reason why the stoat tenor was not crashing into things as he wandered, clad only in his nightshirt, about the devastated landscape. His face stretched into a fixed look of bewilderment, features standing out as if they'd been enhanced by stage makeup, Enruso's muttering was to himself, or perhaps to the whole world: "What a place. What a place this is..."
Andreas was also without a group with which to speculate, but unlike with many of the other beasts in the vicinity, a strange sort of resolve was etched under the layer of horrified disbelief that was more readily identifiable on the marten's face. Too sore to push himself up on his footpaws, Andreas remained more secure on all fours as he aimed for the stricken gatehouse archive that he had abandoned to its fate.
Though the books were dirty and lay several shelves' worth thick on the ground, the sliding rocking collapse of the room had laid them down (with the exception of the top few, which had been relocated to unrecoverable places) in roughly the chronological order in which they had been shelved. Andreas managed a weak smile at this discovery before plunging into the pile. At first, the marten made an effort to lay each salvaged volume in a neat pile, but he became more and more haphazard with the placement as he continued to not find what he needed. It was not until he had dug practically to the bottom layer that he located what he had almost worked himself into a frenzy over - two carefully-rebound older volumes, the current recordbook, and the small black personal notebook.
Clutching the precious volumes to his chest with one arm, Andreas attempted to climb out three-pawed from the little cavern of books into which he'd dug himself. As he neared the top, though, the books against which he was supported jerked out from under him. The marten fell backwards and quickly scrambled against what appeared to be a more stable pile, curling himself around the liberated volumes as the slide proved itself to be more sinister in cause than just a reaction to the marten's bodyweight.
The second round of deep growling was just as unexpected as the first, on the principle of lightning strikes and single locations. But with earthquakes, striking a different place often comprises moving the first place closer to that different place. It was a fortunate thing that the escapees from Redwall were still hunched close to the ground and away from structures, no matter how skeletal, as the terrible waves overtook the countryside for a second time.
-----
Moles are designed to spend time in the subterranean world, free of light and short on air. Yet a deliberately-dug tunnel is an entirely different case than being unwillingly enclosed in a shifting mire. The minute and a quarter of the mainshock was just below the threshold of what Elsinore could bear, an the seconds required to dig out of the unfamiliar imprisonment in familiar material used up the last burst of oxygen. Elsinore gasped raggedly to reinflate her lungs, then looked around in a survey of the scene.
Skoilkull had also extracted himself from the ground and was wordlessly scratching into the dirt in search of the rest of his crew. The temblor had effectively undone all the work that the railroad crew had put in, leaving a filled-in and rippled surface on the former trench. Elsinore, even considering her more formal study in the nature of soil and rocks, hadn't the faintest inkling of where to start searching out engulfed teammates, but she followed Skoilkull's lead and equally wordlessly began redisturbing the recently-disturbed dirt.
Several snouts and sets of digging claws poked through the ground on their own last dregs of momentum and were promptly assisted by Skoilkull, Elsinore, and any other crew members feeling able enough for the work. But as two minutes wore to five and to eight, the probability of finding more survivors decreased radically.
Digging claws still sensitive, the moles anticipated the second shock enough to clear the filled-in track for ground with grass. Again, the earth thrashed beneath them and again, the roaring filled their ears, though this time they were privy to the visual of the ground waves. Thirty seconds was enough of that for Elsinore, and when it faded as the mainshock had, her seasick greenness was enhanced by the knowledge that five surviving moles of nine was the definitive total. This consensus also required no words, and the defeated moles turned to report their misfortune to Redwall.
-----
Merritt's immediate comment upon the conclusion of the mainshock was that he could just as well have made it through on his own. The young fox's tone, however, was quite indicative of the opposite, even as he unwrapped his arms from around his parents. In some circumstances, Rakarde and Kinth could have found this mixed message irritating, or perhaps even humorous, but in the present case, they were simply grateful that their son was able to blow them off at all.
In the eight and a half minutes between foreshock and aftershock, the two adults approached the devastated house paw-in-paw, struggling with thoughts of avoidance versus considerations of inevitability as they surveyed the quake's handiwork. Merritt loped as casually as he could pretend to be toward the River Moss. An empty riverbed lay between the young fox and the river itself, and based on the direction in which the fallen leaves were traveling in the displaced stream, it was easy to make the still-startling conclusion that the water was flowing in the opposite direction from normal. Merritt was quite taken with this phenomenon until the water lurched violently back into its banks and resumed its prior manic dance, the same waves propelling Merritt to seek refuge in his parents once again.
The already structurally decimated stone house was even further reduced to a shapeless mound of river rocks within those thirty seconds. With no hope of recovering anything within, neither material items nor a normal life, all three foxes were struck even more dumbly than after the first shock. It was Merritt who took the first steps out on the path toward Redwall. Unwilling to continue exhibiting weakness as he felt he had been doing, the young fox took it upon himself to be forthgoing where his pale and grieving parents could not. Rakarde and Kinth did not pick up that particular fragment of subtext, but they understood the directional message and followed.
The trio of foxes, dazed though they were, took reasonable speed down the path. While it had never been the smoothest of roads, its surface had become further rippled, warped, compressed and folded in the course of so little time. But they tripped and stumbled along even over its new state without a true break of pace until fifteen minutes later, when a third convulsive outburst emanated from the ground below.
-----
In under half an hour, the citizens of Mossflower centered around the empty husk of Redwall Abbey had gone from experiencing the same type of unexpected three times to anticipating the next occurrence in every move. A dislodged tree branch would succumb to gravity and large clusters of creatures would crouch over with their forepaws protecting their necks. A precariously deposited stone would topple to where entropy preferred it to go and Enruso would lapse into the death scene of one of Lascala's earlier works. Now that the ground had so forcefully asserted itself three times, the impression of an inescapable circle of fate was shared in groups, too scared to move, but speaking louder as they knew volume had no bearing on seismicity.
Andreas found it more difficult to extract himself from a pile of heavy books than it was to pull other books out of such a pile. The marten had acquired a sizeable collection of bruises and papercuts, though these were vastly preferable over injuries that would have undoubtedly been inflicted by a chunk of rock whose fall was broken by a set of 200-year-old record volumes that Andreas had never previously regarded as being terribly useful. Still tenaciously clutching the four volumes against his chest, though they felt heavier and heavier with each new impediment, the Recorder of Mossflower Country teetered away from the crumbling remains of Redwall Abbey.
He knew he'd reached a suitable spot for his work when the third aftershock merely (to think that it could ever be considered as "mere"!) growled and moved the ground, still a visible attack but with shallower waves, without piling anything on top of him or slamming him from below. Easing himself into a seated position once the waves had passed, Andreas tiredly but diligently cracked open the oldest of the four volumes, tired eyes searching the long ago for instances more closely related to the present than the date on the volume would initially suggest.
But those by Redwall were solely thinking of the immediate future by this point, the immediate past still too fresh to comprehend but still illuminated intensely with indications that it was not yet over in terms of consequences. Their sense of present was suspended between the terrors of past and future, just as unsafe as a predicament as the one with the earth itself, And yet when the now-familiar subterranean snarling and convulsing picked up for the fourth time, they felt fully justified in their strange temporal suspension, as they had at least seen this fragment of future in advance.
-----
Hayward and Walden ran. Even when the railroads were not incapacitated, the footpath and carriage road between Salamandastron and Redwall was still a wide and well-traveled one. The distance was not small, but it was not by any stretch outside of the realm of the hares' training. Of course, this was no normal run. There are some things to which literal training to "take things in stride" does not apply, but when those things happen in sequences, they can still be assimilated into some bizarre semblance of routine. The first aftershock was just as terrifying as the initial earthquake for certain, but the hares remembered what worked the first time, and as they moved southeast and away from sand as the aftershocks decreased in magnitude, the threat of engulfment became less of a specter over the run and those strides were easier to take.
In fact, the largest obstacle on their run thus far had been spatially fixed at the time of the encounter. On all previous more leisurely jaunts along this road, it had gone directly from Salamandastron to Redwall, but this time the hares came upon an abrupt dead end, freshly broken dirt meeting a row of solid old trees. Walden, never one for subtlety, persisted in running through the unbroken forest in what he assured Hayward was the correct direction. But Hayward did not follow so simply, and Walden returned to the edge of the path, pushing his companion to follow him. Instead, mystified, Hayward pointed off to the right. Their interrupted path did indeed continue on toward Redwall, only it had been diverted linearly by nearly twenty feet. The riddle at once solved and made more perplexing, Walden and Hayward cut over to the extension of the path, continuing toward Redwall come hell or high land.
-----
Garlock ran. There was little precision in the ferret's gait as he zigzagged over the broken path as if those terrible furrows had become sentient and were chasing him, but he ran nevertheless, just as much trying to distance himself from the devastation in Darkhill as he was running to reach Redwall. He wasn't going to leave that image alone, not hardly, but with the ground persisting to be less than solid and stable at unpredictable intervals, thinking of the scene at all was to think of himself within it.
At each aftershock, Garlock flung himself onto the nearest treetrunk and screwed his eyes shut, preferring the stronger shaking to the possibility of seeing ground cracks. But roughly an hour and a quarter after his departure, when a fifth shock still managed to catch Garlock off his guard, he attached himself to a tree that had been substantially weakened by the previous four. With his eyes shut as ever, the ferret did not even realize he was falling until the trunk met the ground. It fell away from the path, and the angle at which it fell came mere inches from pinning Garlock's left arm and leg between it and the forest floor. Blood dribbling from a self-inflicted hole in his lower lip, the ferret skittered like a child fleeing closet monsters back to the path, pattern more erratic but speed more intent than before.
-----
Just like creatures throughout the ravaged and shattered woods of Mossflower needed to readjust themselves and their outlooks following the temblor, so did the earth itself. It had been content in its dormancy, moving only when centuries' worth of stress finally crossed some unknowable threshold, and now that sudden relocation required some acclimation. The ground sought to settle into a comfortable new spot, trying one alignment, finding it unsatisfactory, shifting again, and so forth, seeking the most natural position in which to rest.
The adjustments became smaller and smaller, perhaps finickier and finickier. The visible ground waves were the first factor to disappear in the uncountable string of aftershocks, followed by the decrescendo and morendo of the low growlings, until the shakings themselves became short jokes, then momentary wobbles, then little flickers that were only apparent to one watching for signs of motion in leaves or scattered pebbles.
For a full day and a half after the initial earthquake, with few exceptions the surviving citizens of Mossflower County could only sit and wait for the next punishing blow, and even when the aftershocks diminished to a level that allowed betting on when the next one would occur or weakly attempting humor in the predicament, the lingering worry of another large shock was enough to induce motionlessness to the point of even forgetting to eat. One could almost see it as overcompensation - a stillness of life to contrast the great upheaval of the crystalline, a lack of consumption of the land's fruits as the land had consumed so many products of civilization.
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