7

Sentience

A week or so after this battle, when Wilykit's ribs didn't hurt so much and Wilykat's bandages were off, the two went back to the forest. The air was a bit chilly, as it was autumn, and the skies threatened rain. but weather was never much of a deterrent for the two wily kittens, and the umbrellas that Snarf had insisted they bring sat unused, strapped to the ends of their spaceboards.

As they approached the village, Wilykat suddenly slowed, and frowned. Noticing, his sister also slowed to match his pace. "What?"

"The village..." he said. "It seems different. Look! That mist that was creeping over most of the village..."

Wilykit squinted and flew slowly forward. They her eyes opened wide. "It's out more! It's covering more of the town!" It was true, too. In the weeks the twins had not gone there, the mist had slowly crept further from the forest, and more of the buildings in the abandoned town had been engulfed in its smothering embrace.

"I don't like it," Wilykat said uneasily. "And look...I don't remember al that underbrush being there, it-it's like the forest's expanding or something."

Wilykit and Wilykat were now right up near where they usually landed, but neither was getting down off their boards. "Maybe it is," Wilykit said softly, gazing into the mist. "That...maybe that's why they started leaving, because the forest was slowly creeping into the village, like it was reclaiming the land or something."

Wilykat shivered in the cool air. "Wilykit, don't say things like that! You're gonna make me never want to come here again." He already didn't want to come here, but the curiosity was stronger at the moment than the fear. There was a silence, and then he sighed. "Okay...let's go in. I-I guess we should start looking in the houses that were more in the forest."

"Yeah."

It was not so bad at the very first, as although the mist was everywhere, and the grasses and undergrowth was spreading, the houses were still intact, and it was clearly not a part of the main forest. Yet. But the farther in they went, the more and more the greenery was dominant. "Th-this is the last I go to," Wilykat declared, looking nervously at a house that was half covered in a light green ivy. Part of it was so obscured in fog that it was invisible from where they stood, and there were parts that were crumbling off to be covered in grasses and tangled roots.

His sister didn't contradict him, as she was feeling pretty touchy herself. Hand in hand they crept closer to the house, and from where they now walked they could see others behind this one. Others that were mostly, and then completely covered with vines and ivy, and where the trees and grasses were growing around it. A few had broken windows, where a branch had grown or fallen, and Wilykit shuddered to think that the woods wee creeping inside the home as well.

There were areas in this home that the twins had to avoid, because the floor was crumbling too much for them to want to risk it. But it did not matter much, because this was one of the homes that had been abandoned and there was little to look at. There were things here, some books and things, furniture, but most of the essentials were gone.

"Guess whoever lived here took everything with them," Wilykit mused, looked at the desolate rooms. "The house isn't that big to begin with though...and there's not a lot of stuff here. It looks like just one person might have lived here."

Wilykat nodded. "Only one bedroom, you're probably right." The boy said, glancing into a bedroom with broken floorboards at its door. He was looking over the books, hoping to find some that he could read. But so far into the forest, most of them were so damp that they crumbled when he tried to pick them up. Of course "crumbled" was a bad word, it indicated lack of moisture. Squelched might have worked better, because the sodden pages on some of the volumes were pulp rather than pages, and slimy with decay. "That's disgusting," Wilykat complained when he tried to handle a book and the it left gooey pieces of itself on Wilykat's fingers. Fighting an urge to gag, he wiped it off on a set of curtains. But these were moldy also and did little in the way of cleaning.

Wilykit was peering into the kitchen, and suddenly yelped. Looking up in alarm, Wilykat ran to see if she was all right. The girl nodded. "Yeah...I'm okay...it's just that a chunk of wood fell down my tunic when I stepped through the door." She was in the process of taking the clothing off and shaking it vigorously as she spoke.

The little chunk of wood seemed to be moving in the odd light of the cabin, and when they looked closer, they were both disgusted to see that it was. Tiny insects, the likes of which neither had ever seen, crawled about within. "Oh man, Wilykat, are there any in my fur?"

Normally Wilykat would have laughed at Wilykit's squeamishness, but he felt much the same way. He looked carefully, brushing off the loose bits of wood and few of the bugs. "Not anymore," he said, his lip curled.

Shaken, Wilykit put her tunic back on, making sure it also was bug-free, as Wilykat ventured a little farther into the kitchen. This room was far towards the back of the house, and Wilykat could not see the back half of it, except in little bursts of clear air. The window was broken in and rotting around the edges, and there were the vines they had seen o the outside creeping in. As Wilykat watched, one of them twitched, and he caught a glimpse of it through the mist.

Her eyes widening, Wilykit caught her brother's arm. "Don't go in there!' she cried, staring hauntedly at the room. "Don't...don't touch that mist...look what it's doing to the house! It's like it's eating it alive!"

That a house could not be alive made no difference, Wilykat knew exactly what she meant. The boy shuddered, and drew back. "I...don't think it'd hurt me...I mean we went in the forest." He swallowed hard. "But you're right, I don't want to look at it anymore." He shook his head. "Did you look in the bedroom?"

Wilykit shook her head. "No, there'd a big open place in the floor...I guess it goes down into the cellar. I don't even want to go into the cellar..."

"Me neither...let's see if we can't get in the room without doing that, though."

The gap was not too wide, only long, and the twins saw that they should be able to leap it easily enough. Wilykat went first, and the floor creaked in protest when he landed, even as light as he was. He watched anxiously as his sister went next, having a bad feeling down in his gut, too late to stop her from jumping.

He had not been in error. As he began to lunge forward, the girl landed, and screamed in alarm aw her foot broke through the rotten floor, and through the ceiling of the lower level. Wilykat's eyes popped wide open and he ran to her, stopping a foot away so he didn't send her crashing down. He grabbed her arm as she frantically used the other one to push herself up. Her other leg was still above the floor, and had it been nearly anyone else it likely would have been broken from being forced in such a position. But the young felines were very flexible.

Still, she winced upon putting weight on it when she was finally extracted from the hole. And then she looked at it. Her thigh, almost all the way up, was covered in whitish-gray beetle things with bulging eyes...they lived between the floor and the ceiling below. She screamed in revulsion and began slapping at the to get them off of her. Wilykat grabbed a blanket form the bed and began brushing them off as well. When they were gone, both twins instinctively grabbed each other around the waist and stood there shaking for several minutes.

"Let's go," Wilykat said in a small horrified voice.

But after a moment, Wilykit shook her head and stood straight up, disentangling herself from Wilykat's grasp. "No," she said, her voice shaking but resolute. "If I'm gonna go through all that I'm gonna have a look through the room."

Wilykat nodded. He admired his sister's bravery often, he just didn't admit it. Not always, anyway. He looked around the room, seeing little but the furniture (which he supposed might have been too heavy to take) and a few items of clothing scattered on the floor. But then his eye happened on something at the far end of the room, near the window. This one was closed, but the vines covered it, and the mist swirled against the glass. It almost seems mad, Wilykat thought. Mad that it can't get in. He gulped and hurried over there to pick up what he had seen, and to hurry back with it.

The item ended up being the only book left in the place that was still readable, and he saw why when he had it in his hands. It was covered tightly with some kind of plastic wrapping.

"What's that?" Wilykit asked.

"It's a book...that someone sealed up...I wonder if it was just forgotten." Wilykat frowned. "I mean if someone's gonna go through all the trouble to protect it like this, it;s probably somehting important."

Wilykit looked around nervously. "Let's find out at the Lair, I want out of this creepy place."

The boy nodded. They were a bit reluctant to make the jump across the hole again, but if they didn't they'd be stuck, and the thought made them both shudder. But they both made it without crashing through, although the floor creaked again, Wilykit said they'd been dumb to even go in there, as old as it was. The whole floor could have collapsed, and they could be trapped there under the rubble, in the cellar that probably hadn't seen sunlight for hundreds of years.

Almost as she said this, there was a shattering of glass in the bedroom. The twins both cried out and looked back, their eyes wide with terror, and Wilykat knew that the forest had managed to finally destroy its obstacle. They ran.

Both young explorers were out of breath when they got back to the Lair, but they entered their room from the back, and used the stairs rather than the lifts. Once there, they sat on Wilykat's bed and looked eagerly at the book. Wilykit jumped up to get some scissors to cut the heavy plastic the book had been protected with while her brother reached under the bed for his Thunderian book.

After taking a few moments to rid the book of its sleeve (which took longer than they expected), they opened the book to see a very neat, legible script in the Thunderian alphabet. It seemed slightly different also, some of the letters written in a altered style "I bet she's a teacher," Wilykit said.

Wilykat frowned. "Who?"

"The woman who wrote this diary." Wilykit grinned. "Only teachers ever have this neat of a handwriting."

Wilykat laughed. "It might not even be a 'she'," he said to her, opening his Thunderian book. "Okay, let's get this thing translated."

Wilykit nodded. "Okay...this one is...oh it is a guy. It's a man's name, anyway. Lynx-O. He must have been there towards the last. The date is hundreds of years after that last journal." She paused, and then laughed as Wilykat turned the page. "No wonder the letters are weird. Tygra should be happy. This is really helping with my Thunderian."

This one did not take nearly so long to translate. At the end of the night, the book lay closed on Wilykat's bed, and both twins felt stunned. "Lynx-O" had written only events in his life that were important to him, not everyday life, which would account for the brevity of the journal. There were a few good things in there that made the twins smile. The birth of a bengal friend's baby, born perfectly normal. A little neighbor child, a little cougar that he was almost a grandfather to coming over to visit for a couple of days from the other side of the village. A few amusing occurrences that Lynx-O deemed interesting enough to write down.

But those that were not light-hearted were very dark indeed.

The first was five pages in.

The warriors are getting worse. Every day it seems like they become more and more aggressive. There are more and more reports of them harassing, sometimes even striking villagers, and yesterday the leader of the hunting party nearly beat a man senseless for accidentally walking into him. The village council disciplined him of course, but that did not change the fact that the poor man had to stay in the healer's clinic for nearly three days and was many more healing. The scientists of the village are trying very hard to see why they have changed so much. There are rumors around the village that the forest is changing them, that there is some kind of evil spirits inside. It may sounds like superstitious nonsense, but there seems to be little else in the way of explanation.

The next such entry was dated three weeks after that.

Today was the last straw for the elder council. Jagrr, the hunter leader, struck a little girl today, when he and his men came back with their meat. Apparently the cub had done no more wrong than asking them what they had caught. Jagrr snarled and struck her with his fist. The cub was only four years old, and he broke her nose. He seemed about to strike her further when one of the adults living on the street saw and intervened. Jagrr has been exiled from the village, and left the village cursing. He fled into the mist woods. The talk of evil in the forest has caught the interest of the elders, and they have had the scientists and students of the village out studying it.

"Man, what a jerk!" Wilykit exclaimed. "Big man, hitting a little kid!"

Wilykat nodded and read on.

A day later was this:

There has been talk of leaving the village and finding a safer place. The scientists of course say that this is a rash move, and that we should not go through the trouble and trial of moving until they had something conclusive about the forest. Those who want to leave argue that it may be months or even years until they figure out what it wrong with the forest, and we all could be raving lunatics by then. My opinions tend to run with those who wish to leave. A large group of us have been speaking for a while now of breaking off on our own and moving to start over.

A week after that:

There was a great crashing in the woods tonight, while most of the village was asleep. I was awake, feeling too uneasy that night to sleep, and I myself saw a great meteor in the sky, falling right for the forest. Two hunters out in a party were killed instantly, and two more came back with horrible burns all over their bodies. The rest were unharmed, and had to carry the injured ones back. I asked to be a part of a party that went to investigate the site of the meteor, and my request was granted. I almost wish I had not gone. The meteorite was not large, but had killed everything within twenty yards of it. The trees had been burned black, although I guessed that the mist kept them from catching fire. There were twisted, charred bodied of the poor creatures caught in the blast zone. Many of us took ill after being so close to the cursed thing. It was made of pure Thundranium.

"Thundranium!" the twins exclaimed together. Wilykit shuddered. "Nasty."

The last chilling entry of the journal was dated almost a month and a half after the meteorite crash. The light-hearted entries dwindled greatly since then, as the children had been kept inside more and more often by their worried parents, and even grown men did not venture out often.

We leave today. The elders did not want us "abandoning" the village, and a few of the Hunters have actually tried to physically "persuade" us from going. But we leave, anyway. Today they saw Jagrr again, after all these months, but he was nearly unrecognizable. He was nude, and filthy. His mane had grown over his face, giving him the look of a wild man, and he crouched on all fours like a small child. He raged into the town and killed two citizens, ranting in a snarling voice that we were intruders and needed to be culled, before the warriors came and put him down. They killed him.

I will leave this diary here so that someone finding our town might know what has happened, and be warned. I believe in my heart that this town is doomed, and even if it is not, it has been hurt and soured beyond salvation by the evil mists of the forest. The scientists don't even come back anymore from the forest half the time, for days on end.

I will be traveling in a hover car with little Pumyra and her parents, and the bengals that live down the road from us...and hopefully it is not too late for us.

I will pray that it is not.

ThunderStrike, Wilykat turned to his sister, his face radiating sheer horror. "W-Wilykit...that creature that attacked me in the forest..." he swallowed hard. "It was Thunderian!"

Part 8: Thundranium

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