Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

In Dreams - (Nov 10, Sunday)

The Call comes different every night. Often, it is just a jumble: dark nights, twisted roots and paving, luminous eyes, and disembodied growls. But sometimes it comes through as clear as a signal, and Jakob finds himself thrust into the expansive skull of one of the genohulks that stalks the streets-cum-urban-jungle hundreds of meters below.

He can smell them all: the other predators; their prey; the strange plants with their suffocating polen. The creatures that can manage to hunt at night, down there amongst the foundations of all the MegaDos where there is little hope that the light of the moon would ever reach, they have had to evolve eyes so sensitive that they are virtually unable to hunt during the day. In those dreams, he is gifted a view of The Wild through those hyper-sensitive eyes. The worlds of scent and sound are layed over the seen, and he's left dizzy by the effect of it: as if someone had pried open his mind and grafted in additional dimensions of which he previously knew nothing.

The Wild has done a lot of work towards sanding down and rounding out the ruined world that humans left behind when they shut themselves up inside the MegaDos. Aggressive plant growth has found its way into any nook or cranny that can catch and hold water, and decades of the species of the genohulks defecating and dying everywhere has worked with rain to develop the first fledgling layers of topsoil over all the concrete and asphalt. The lack of anything but diffused sunlight, and the long-ago backing up of the last functional sewers means that most of the rain that falls remains as the moist foundation for a kingdom of mosses and lichens.

On the surface, this has a blanketing effect. The streets below the MegaDos are a riot of life, looking as though someone had done a bad photo mash-up of an urban financial district and a forest floor. The sylvan look to it is deceiving, though. Under all of that moss and loose topsoil is an unpredictable substrate of broken concrete, protruding rebar, and rusted-out cars, waiting like mancatchers to snare a misplaced foot. A human walking in the wrong place could twist an ankle or gouge a calf. One of the creatures of The Wild, bolting up across the wrong moss-covered pile could snap a limb--or several--and become easy prey for the very predator it was fleeing.

These pitfalls are deathly hard to spot in the grey, diffuse thing that passes for day in the Wild. In the unpierceable velvet shroud of night under the MegaDos, they become black holes down which life disappears and is never seen or heard from again. The more opportune scavengers of the Wild will often hunker down in the deepest parts of these holes, and use the throat of razor-sharp rusted metal to tenderize their unwitting prey.

The creatures deft enough to become predators in such an invisibly dangerous world are orders of magnitude beyond any land-based predators that mother nature could conceive before we set to tinkering and upped her evolutionary game. It is into the mind of one of these pinacle predators that Jakob is thrust on the nights when he runs The Wild. In that darkness, he feels faster than light. The thing uses its multiple, taught limbs (he can never tell how many. Four? Six?) to vault across the insulated ruins of the streets without thought, using some combination of those hyper senses to detect possible pitfalls and avoid them. He is a passenger only, and that is a fortunate thing since he could never possibily coordinate this body, which seems composed of angrily-coiled springs.

The things he sees through those preternatural eyes terrify him worse than nightmares. Even with those enhanced senses, much of what he witnesses in the deep dark of The Wild at night are shifting shadows—massive, moving black holes of the largest of genohulks. Things the size of boulders or buildings shifting, moving, closing distances faster than their bulk should allow. 

And the cries of the things. They sound like a symphony of tearing metal and avalanching mountains. 

Ugh. Inspiration waning.