If children lived in termite mounds
Get to the tunnels! To the tunnels!
Lukens chewed on a piece of decaying wood. It was damp and crumbly and made his teeth feel achey and loose in his mouth. He’d lost too many teeth lately, he couldn’t risk chipping one today. It didn’t used to matter since new ones would come poking just behind them. But now his grown-up teeth were jutting out like crooked tombstones in his gums, and according to King, no more teeth would grow in after this.
He spat the woody paste into a pile. It was massive—nearly up to his waist—and he was proud of the mealy consistency he’d managed. He turned back to the remaining stack of wood and sighed. So much more to get through. He bit off another rotten chunk and scrunched up his nose. The good news was, it had just the right mouthfeel and fungal content. The bad news? It tasted foul.
“Pack it up, Lukens!” Avery called down from the top of The Mound. She was fifty feet up, at least.
She had her only arm wrapped around a gorgeous new chimney spire made of packed dung and wood glue. She swung around and around it, showing off its sturdiness. She was the best at making chimneys. Her shirt was tied off at the sleeve where she had only a knob left of her other arm. It made Lukens sick to be reminded of what was out there, always hunting them.
“I’m not done yet!” Lukens called back. He couldn’t help but smile up at her. His lips curled up revealing big gapping front teeth and splinters of wood clinging to his gums.
“That’s fine. Just send up whatever you’ve got for today,” she replied.
He packed fistfuls of his soggy wood glue into a barrel and hoisted it up the pulley. A few worker boys saw him struggling with the load and joined in, heaving the barrel up over the many chambers and chimneys and spires and buttresses of their home. It was a cathedral of unimaginable proportions, packed and dried with years of soil and sand and dung and trash. Whatever they could find, really. It housed over 200 orphans now.
Avery caught the overflowing barrel and got right to scooping and packing the chewed up wood over cracks in a lookout spire. The boys stood beside Lukens expectantly. They were small, maybe five years old, with dirt matted into their hair and mandible masks to protect them from the beating sun. Lukens was used to the punishing heat, but their skin was sensitive from spending their toddler years in the tunnels beneath The Mound.
“What’s up, lads?” Lukens looked down at them. “Haven’t you got grubs to forage?”
The littler one stepped forward. “You’re The Glue, aren’t you?”
Lukens cocked his head. “Who’s asking?”
The boys eyed each other, cheeks reddening. The taller one nudged his friend.
“I-I am. It’s just, did you really kill a Night Bat with just your teeth?”
Lukens knelt and held the boy’s gaze. “Did you really help me hoist that 300-pound barrel up without so much as a grunt?”
The boys spoke at the same time, eagerly. “Yes!”
Then the little one added, “But you’re just a worker. Only soldiers kill Bats.”
“Lukens!” Avery shouted down from the spire. Her voice was strangely high. Strained.
Lukens stood and turned away from the boys. He called over his shoulder as he went, “You’re stronger than you think.”
For a moment, so briefly he might have missed it, a shadow passed between him and the sun. Then another. A fluttering darkness.
“Get to the tunnels! To the tunnels!” Avery cried out from the lookout. She banged her skull against the wood gong and sprayed chembottles into the air. Red vapor spilled around her and coated The Mound. Other children did the same, firing off their chembottles and scuttling into The Mound’s vents and chimney holes.
Lukens crawled down a side vent into the main hall. It was packed with orphans, running and covering their ears. Lukens sprinted up and up the spiraling steps through the center of the mound. His heart thundered. He had to reach Avery before the Bat cloud overcame her. He knew what she was like. She would defend her work to the bitter end.
He shoved past children on the stairs. His friends called out to him, but he kept running.
“Lukens! Wrong way, Lukens!”
After an eternity of climbing all 188 stairs, he burst out the top of Avery’s new chimney. It was still damp to the touch and ripe smelling. Avery was shouting on the roof, still banging her head against the gong, summoning the foragers and soldiers back to The Mound from the open meadow.
“Avery!” Lukens shouted over the hollow vibrations and shrieks of Night Bats overhead. The sky was darkening. Long, hideous humanoids with black, leathery wings descended over The Mound.
Avery sprayed red vapor into the air again. Her lookout was littered with empty canisters.
“Avery, let’s go! Everyone’s inside!” Lukens shouted. He clutched his ears to block out the Bat shrieks.
“They’ll claw up the roof!” She cried back.
But he was stronger than her, and there was no time to argue. He grabbed her around the waist and tore her away from the gong. Before she could yank his hair or sink her teeth into his shoulder, he dumped her down the chimney vent and watched, satisfied as she tumbled down the staircase within. She’d be fine. Some bruises were a better fate than this.
A Night Bat swooped down, so close Lukens could make out its reddish lips and long-fingered wings. He was about to drop back into The Mound and drag Avery down into the tunnels when something caught his eye far below, in the meadow.
There they were, two little boys, mandible masks tight to their faces and baby teeth bared, charging right into the cloud.
A freewrite inspired by Fantasy Prompt #14
Time: 90 minutes
Song of the day: Adiemus (This song is so good it makes me feel physically ill.)
Fantasy Prompt #15
Let’s write together. I love reading your creations.
Find a comfortable space
Set your timer for 20 minutes
Sink into your imagination
Remember: It is safe to write from the depths of your soul
A seemingly irredeemable villain changes everyone’s minds about them. Suddenly, they are beloved again. What did they do? Is it a true expression of goodness, or are there evil intentions?
What’s new in Writerland?
Hello my beautiful campers. Today I set a lifetime word count record: 1011 words in 90 minutes. Let me be the first to say, word count is not a good measure of quality, but I’m celebrating nonetheless.
I also wrote this sentence in my fantasy novel, which I like very much: Soil crumbled into the sinkhole like ants spilling into the split of a fallen fig.
If you haven’t noticed from my fantasy stories, I’m enamored with desert things — bugs, plants, colors, sand, Mad Max, The Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado. If reincarnation is real, I’d like to throw my name in the hat for stick bug. I swear if you also throw your name in the stick bug hat I will see you in court. I'm so serious.
Another new installment: I’ve been toiling a great deal about my use of AI art. I know how many of you feel about AI art. And I understand.
The truth is, I love bringing my fantasy worlds to life with AI. It’s completely captivating. The process delights me. It’s the same feeling I get from developing film—this giddy anticipation. Will these photographs really capture the feeling of the moment? It’s a treat. And as a fantasy writer, I know I’ll never find images of children wearing leather bug mandible masks in the public domain. (Though I know there are many wonderful gems to be found.)
Anyways, today I scrolled through about 20,000 works of public domain art before I found the ones above. Given the energy costs of Google searches, image browsing, and recoloring images in Figma, I’m certain that my public domain search consumed far more energy than generating 100 AI images. But I’m also a fantasy writer, not a genius. And of course, there are many more arguments to be made against AI art beyond energy consumption. (It’s ugly, it’s stealing, it’s going to destroy the world. I worry about these things too).
I’d love to know what you think of it all. And I’m so very grateful you are here and open-minded enough to listen to me in the middle of my processing of a very sensitive thing. In the name of real art, here’s some of my design work lately. The comments on this brought me so much joy.
Love, laugh, live by the Sword,
Madeleine
I feel similarly about AI. Landing on the image that captures the atmosphere of my fiction is SUCH a feeling. It's a great tool for generating concept art that lends a hand to the storytelling - I stand by that.
I don't see it as "stealing" because what it's actually doing is "learning" which honestly? Scarier. Haha! But it's here and it's not going away. I've always been of the belief that part of the artist's task is to embrace emerging technology, experiment with it, and report their findings. We're deep in the experimentation phase, and will be for some time. So we should play. AI is a gray area, and I know it triggers a lot of people. But I also feel like a lot of the pitchfork-wielders are very quick to copy-paste arguments they see online, which might inflate what actual negativity there is surrounding AI use.
I think, as long we continue to use it as a tool and not as a creator, we can steer its development into a human-supportive (not human-replacing) direction. We gotta do this collectively though, but I am the hopeful type. Also! Might help to simply indicate the image is AI-generated and what software it's generated on? Sometimes I like to share the prompt I used. (Again, also figuring this out as much as you are!)
Sorry for the mouthful, but I'm excited to have people to discuss this with, heh.
ok but why does the decaying wood sound like a fun lil treat