There, clinging to the bark of the tree not inches from my nose- was indeed a cockchafer. Or, rather, the corpse of a cockchafer. And there was another- and another- in fact, the more I looked, the more of their sad little shells I found.
“No,” I breathed. No. I couldn’t have come so far just to find nothing but death and silence! I looked around the base of the tree and found more dead bodies- and evidence of the little burrows in which they’d lain their eggs. “Please,” I said, hoping against hope to find some trace of Elisa-
“Please what?”
The voice was tiny, and it stopped me in my tracks.
“Please-” I said again. “I’m looking for my daughter.”
“Well she isn’t here,” said the voice, irritably. I honed in on the direction and saw a small cockchafer on a branch not three feet away, its antennae spread in a curiously lopsided manner.
“But she was here,” I said, moving closer. “And I need to know where she’s gone!”
“How do you know she was here?” it asked. It sounded almost… drunk.
“Because the butterfly said a cockchafer flew off with her in this direction. Surely you must have seen them go by, a cockchafer carrying a girl no larger than my thumb-” I held the digit up to demonstrate.
“Oh that fellow,” said the cockchafer, waving a foot dismissively. “Crazy old Stargazer. He’s dead now,” it gestured down to the scattering of carapaces at my feet.
“I don’t care about him!” I snapped. “I want to know what happened to my daughter!”
“Your daughter, eh?” the cockchafer’s head wobbled as it looked at me. “Huh. We all told him she looked like a human, didn’t we? Thin-waisted, leg-lacking, and ugly as the day is long. But no, he kept insisting she was the loveliest thing he’d ever seen. Poor mad creature was already halfway dead when he snatched her, I’ll tell you that.”
“Tell me what happened to my daughter,” I said, fingers digging into the trunk. “Or I will end you.”
The cockchafer gave a little coughing laugh. “Human, I’m already ended! Or hadn’t you noticed the shells of my brethren littering the woods? We were never meant to last so long as I have.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Alright then. I’ll make it so you can’t end, not ever. You’ll spend the rest of eternity dying.”
The cockchafer gave another laugh. “I like your honesty, human. Nasty on the outside, nasty on the inside. You don’t have to threaten me with anything, I’ll tell you free enough. We finally got Stargazer to see sense, and he took the creature back down out of the tree, to release it. Lucky for her he did- he died not an hour later, and none of us would have touched. And then where would she have been? Stuck in a tree, with no way down, because she was too useless to have wings.”
I reached out and crushed the creature between my thumb and forefinger, just to shut it up. A small part of me protested that I could have used it to charge a spell, but the larger part of me pointed out that there isn’t much life-force in a nearly-dead cockchafer, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment