"Call Not Upon Mnemosyne"

[Kriemhild]

When Kriemhild ran through the cages, wire rising on each side as if she bolted across the floor of a chasm of confinement, she never forgot where she was and where she meant to go; not with man all around, the scents of panic sharp in her nose, and the horror of the farm visible at a new angle, a glimpse up through the wire at the bellies of those animals still imprisoned. When she managed to bolt from beneath the aluminum roof of the fox shed, though, and freedom came into sight, the old familiar confusion began to creep back in – where’s my cagemate? she found herself thinking; then she would stop short, so that she would not run into the mesh of her cage. A moment later, some sight or smell or sound would remind her of her purpose, and she would start towards the pine copse once more.

Thus, the motley little vixen did not emerge last from the farm – there were less sane foxes than herself, some of them still bawling from amongst the sheds – but she hesitated for a long while on the cusp of the moment, crouched at the base of the farm's fence with nose aquiver as if she could smell the significance of her next steps. A screaming fox, his eyes wild and feet streaming blood, bolted past, and before she could remember why it mattered, she squirmed under the last barrier that stood between her and freedom. She left behind her a clump of fur like the last offering to a hateful god from a martyr squirming free of his obligations.

Where’s my cagemate? Kriemhild spun in place, mouth agape in a terrified pant as she attempted to find her place in the universe. She snapped her teeth against the wire of the fence as if she still stood within a cage, intent on reaching the freedom on the other side. She’d never been inclined to that particular neuroses in captivity, and the unfamiliar pain against her gums awoke her partially to reality once more. She gagged on the metal taste and backed away from the fence, her amber eyes locked on the farm and the activity that boiled around it. Already, though, the madness of the night looked to be calming, the attack of the strange humans as quick and ineffable as that of a lightning bolt. Kriemhild wondered, Where’s my cagemate?

Her tail tucked against her belly, she inched backwards, mind in turmoil. I didn’t even like that fox, she thought, and chased the idea like a cottontail through the convoluted passages of her own mind. The thought knew the terrain better than she; she never did know who she didn’t like. Kriemhild shook her head, but the thoughts would not come together, and the world seemed all apart. She thought that she did not want to go back to the farm, but she knew of no where else to go. She sniffed the air and choked on the unfamiliar scent of pine resin and prairie grass; those natural smells were laid over with rot and decay, but they bewildered her so thoroughly they might as well have been the aroma of unadulterated ambrosia.

[Quen]

The air hurt him.
On the floor, the ugly pit, of the fox-house, the air was made of fire and acid. It scraped through his sinuses and burned his lungs, and chewed with ragged teeth on the broken sore that was once his foreleg. He wanted to resurface, to bob above the stink and the hell that surrounded him.

All he could do, however, was hobble.

Tucking the remainder of his leg up against the filthy fur of his chest in an attempt to stave off some of the agony, his focused his mind--his all-too-sharp mind--on the task at hand. He needed to find a way out.

A brief glance, a momentary meeting of coppery eyes, and Quen knew he had found his guide. As the crazed female charged away, the red fox pushed himself, shoving his legs into quivering motion, and he followed her. She was purposeful, and just slow enough for him to keep from losing her. Occasionally, she would dart forward and go, and the boots would fall like lightning bolts around him, but then she would pause...he would catch up...and they would go again.

Then freedom, or at least what he perceived it to be, yawned above him suddenly in an endless black ceiling. For a moment, he couldn't help but stop and look up. Up into the star-flecked and terrifying emptiness that was the sky. He was shaking all over. It stretched above him and bowed down to meet the line of earth on every side of him, and for a moment he wondered if it was all just a giant bubble, and he wouldn't end up running very far at all before reaching its walls. He couldn't stop shaking.

But his guide was far ahead of him now, and the pain in his leg was setting his brain alight with angry electricity. He needed to keep going.

Keep going...keep up a three-legged rhythm...keep going. Go.

Go. Go...keep going...

"Go!!" He shouted, into the face of his guide, who had stopped, wild-eyed on the other side of the fence. Panic and pain screamed in him, hammering into the sides of his skull until he could see flashes of light keeping beat. As soon as the guide was moving again, he was dragging himself under the fence to follow.

Keep going!!

- Meet Quen -

[Kriemhild]

She became aware of her follower only as he replaced her view of the farm, his panic and his mutilation too-close reminders of what awaited her there, should she turn back. Until he gave voice to his fright, she stared as one mesmerized, but the noise jerked her from her paralysis and tore a primal scream from her lungs, catharsis and a mnemonic: with her throat raw, could she forget again the horror of the farm, and wish even in the bewilderment of freedom to return there? Kriemhild could not make a more rational response to the fox’s command, and after she gulped air to replace that which she had wasted on vocalization, she spun on her haunches and ran for the trees.

Her hesitation had cost her in more than time; unaccustomed exercise made each breath a ragged gasp, the pain no longer so trivial now that she’d lost the first frantic edge of her flight. Her steps faltered, stride shortened, body wracked with shudders as she forced it to perform past its ability. Behind her, she could hear the other fox’s three-beat footsteps, and as they moved away from the farm and the wind breathed into her face, she could smell the rankness of his fear over the other pungencies of the night. His presence gripped her with irrational terror – he’ll catch me, he’ll catch me, her mind chattered, caught in the perception of his pursuit as a grotesque parody of a pup’s game of chase; but even as she feared him, his presence kept her mind locked onto the present.

She did not veer from her path, and soon she found herself mere strides from the pines. When Kriemhild had seen them from the cages and smelled their scent, she had never thought trees were so large. She darted into the copse with a whine whistling in her throat and her tail tucked against her belly. The undergrowth slowed her as it tore at her fur, and she turned her mind to a frantic search for shelter. She recognized nothing as safe, although certain smells triggered instinct-memories more painful than helpful. She scrambled over a fallen log, and when she saw the hollow made by its roots when they tore free from the earth, she recognized the small space as somewhere she might cower while she recouped. The roots twisting up into the air were almost like bars.

The fox squirmed into the hollow, skin quivering at the strange sensation of damp soil, then curled herself into a ball at the back, so that she could watch the entrance of her impromptu cage. The space felt large and empty, although the awful sound of her own harsh breath tried to fill it. Where is it? she wondered, not even aware of what she’d lost. The blankness of her gaze, as she stared at the pines and dirt visible from her position, made clear the barrenness of her mind.

[Quen]

That scream turned his vision white with pain, stunning him for a moment, and his jaw clenched against it. The pain was so much more than the fear then, and it was what drove him forward while the terror attempted to turn his legs to iron and roots, locking him there forever.

He knew how to deal with pain, though. It was so much easier for him to use, than fear. He focused on it, let it tear holes in his consciousness, and soon he could see through those rends and past the blinding white.

His guide was moving again, and so he desperately demanded that his remaining legs do the same.

The trees were not only so much bigger and blacker and sharper than he had imagined they would be up close, they seemed to be getting exponentially bigger as he approached. The loomed and creaked, and he had no reason to believe that they weren't going to come crashing down ontop of him and smash his bones. But, that would be an admittedly better fate than what lie behind him, so he kept going, hot on the tail of his erratic guide.

When the darkly-colored female disappeared suddenly, beyond the trees and vicious tangles of shadow-bushes, the fear came raging back...until the scuffling sounds and acrid ugly smells finally led him into the hollow where she hid.

It was a dusty open cage, and he dove into it more eagerly than he would have ever guessed he would. And he had a new cagemate. She was crazy and unpredictable, but she wasn't Das, and for a moment, he was happy.

Deliriously, discordantly, happy. As he collapsed into the impromptu den with her, he was not able to name where he was, or why. He was only happy, with breathless and content bubbles of giggling, teeth chattering from the pain.

The little fox curled up, oblivious to his surroundings, practically snuggling against Kriemhild, and immediately began to lose consciousness.

[Kriemhild]

Kriemhild bared her teeth to the gum line as the other fox dove into her shelter, but once he’d got inside the idea of driving him out never occurred to her. Of course she had a cagemate – it had always been thus. Furthermore, she knew that to take her frustrations out on him would gain her nothing but reprisal, come another day. She watched him with a cautious eye as he settled – and jerked back when he began to laugh, as only the most mad laughed. The movement bumped her head against the hollow’s tree root roof, and perhaps the blow explained why the realization struck her that they did have reason to laugh, and that it was no sign of lunacy, now. Though terror nipped at their heels, bars no longer caged them.

“Heh.” She could force no other noise from her throat, no questions and surely no kind salutations. Se watched the mutilated fox drift into unconsciousness, then settled back down, the warmth and fur and blood-stink of the male as familiar as a lullaby. His presence soothed her into sleep despite her otherwise bizarre surroundings.


A noise awoke her – a rustle, something unfamiliar that summoned things older than memory from deep in her mind. Her head had raised, ears perked and alert, before she’d blinked the sleep from her eyes. She arose and stepped towards the entrance of the den, unsure why she felt the need to slink forward as stealthily as she could place her paws. Then she saw it: bushy tail twitching over its back, agile paws active in the fallen leaves, head turned away from her. Kriemhild felt saliva dribble from her lips as if the men approached her cage with the daily ration of meat.

She moved without thought, without feeling, so intent and focused that she had no room but for the smell of the rodent and its twitchy prey movements and its watery black eye as it glanced over its shoulder and saw her as she sprang down upon it. It cried out, and its blood flooded her mouth, and her jaws were weak enough that its struggle freed it from her fangs. It flopped to the ground, its eyes glossy but its limbs still moving in spasmodic arcs. Kriemhild closed her teeth over its throat; this time, it made no further movement. She dropped the carcass anyway, and stared blankly at its limp and tattered form for a long moment.

She had killed it, but now she felt rather lost about what to do with the squirrel. It didn’t look like food, although her stomach rumbled in response to its presence, and the taste on her tongue was ambrosial. After a moment of sharp anxiety, Kriemhild gave in to instinct and nibbled at the carcass, unsure of the new textures of fur and gristle and organ meat. The way she crouched over it, fur on end down her back, suggested some inner guilt – but the fox thought of nothing much at all.

[Quen]

Quen was watching her.

He didn't know why or when, or if there had been a break at all between his sleeping and waking moments, but he found himself there now. Standing in the deliriously winking patchwork light of the forest, caught wholly outside his cage of roots, watching the other fox while he balanced on the tripod of his remaining legs.

Why was he outside of his cage, and how long had he been there? The thought sent a shiver of convulsive fur up his spine, and he would have crouched if the movement wouldn't have toppled him over. His eyes were hot and watery, and the stump of his foreleg burned. It had gone without care for an entire night, and that thought was even more frightening than that of his naked vulnerability.

Though, as frightened and bewildered as he was, he couldn't make his mind dwell on anything but the act being committed before him. She was...eating something.

Fur and blood and snarling sounds, laid out there on the leaf litter.

His stomach growled, and pinned itself up against his skinny ribs. Quen was used to the feeling--though the rest of the situation was so very foreign--waiting while the dominant Das ate and grew stronger and smothered him.

He was also used to stealing the last bit of scraps, however, as the only way to fend off starvation. And it happened again, like it used to, his body acting right through the fear and without his approval.

Moving faster than he had thought his remaining legs could manage, he male darted forward and latched drooling jaws onto an extended limb, and hauled himself--and the carcass--backwards. In that same motion, he threw himself around and ontop of it, showing only his back to the female as he hunkered down on top of the mangled squirrel, and dug into it with gulping, gnashing, teeth.

[Kriemhild]

The prey in her mouth constituted her world, copper-bright blood and the strings of gristle lodged between the teeth at the back of her mouth; fangs no longer in use, killing-teeth set aside for the task of consumption. Although, in the labyrinthine confusion of Kriemhild’s mind, the role of consumed and consumer seemed swapped, the dead squirrel braced beneath one of her paws (black fur stained wet and she can feel it sticky between her toes) pulling with its delicate claws at the building blocks of her mind and soul and body, until all that remained was a ravening beast with a liver clenched in its narrow jaws for the first time.

She wailed, a helpless hurting sound, when the other fox tore her prey from her grasp; and when she rounded on him, all of her fur out so she stood in a corona of it, she screamed, thank you, again and again, at the hunched line of his back. Because somewhere between killing and licking the bones clean, she knew she would have let whatever made her herself dribble out like the squirrel’s blood onto the leaf litter. Her confusion, perhaps, might have gone with it, and she would have been another dumb beast like the vermin rats who crept around the kill piles at night and murmured among themselves, calm conversations about the quality of fox meat these days, luscious and red and rotted—

The air smelled of aromatic pine and warm dirt and clean water and the sun’s heat in the grasses outside their little sanctuary of too-tall trees, and Kriemhild clung unthinking to those things before her mind hit the bottom of its sudden downward gyre – there would be memories, down there. She crouched with staring eyes and gagged on her own breath, the sickly sweet stomach-rumbling taste of it. She wanted – she needed water, although she saw no bowls for it, and staggered upright to sniff the air. She ignored the other fox, although it made her shake to see him eat her kill (hers hers hers, but she wouldn’t own that thought), and staggered towards the silver-moon smell of water.

The underbrush and the branches tripped her until she learned to pay attention to her feet; reminded her of twisted broken bars with their grasping twigs. At last the scent of water sparked dizzy want through her mind, but it was accompanied by a strange sound, tinkling like the flow of urine against concrete. Driven forward, she emerged through the trees and looked down upon a trickle of water – just a bit of run-off, Kriemhild wouldn’t know, half a step across and swirling silty brown. She bent down and lapped from it, reverent as from something holy or fearful, until thirst overcame novelty and she drank in earnest. It tasted as different as squirrel’s blood, but it stirred nothing of deep old things from her mind; in blissful emptiness, she soothed her throat and belly.

[Quen]

After he was sated--or what he knew of it anyway, without thinking to gnaw bone and chew fat--he pushed himself up and away from the carcass. He came up for air. Gasping and licking and thrilled, for some very unknown reason. There was some sort of sense of accomplishment about him, in this dizzy heat that he worried was a fever, and smiled toothily up into the air.

Oh, how he was not used to looking upwards. Everything went up and up, so much so that he felt the need to press himself to the ground to keep from falling away from the earth. So, he lowered his eyes, reminding himself to only do so again once he felt more firmly rooted.

His dry grin still in place, a blip of momentary panic, and he quickly hobbled after his cagemate, who was presently struggling to escape.

When he finally caught up to her, it was to find her lapping up some leaking fluid, like the trails of rainwater that once seeped into the corner of his old cage, fetid after picking up every filthy flavor on the way down. This ground-weep smelled nothing like those memories however, and--for a faintly lucid moment--he was glad.

Huddling painfully beside his cellmate, he awkwardly leaned in, meeting her face at the point of water-break with his own. He licked her mouth, where blood and water and saliva mingled, like a plaintive pup licking the jowls of its mother and hoping for vomit. Instinct-addled brain righted itself a moment later, and his lapping tongue found the water, and he drank deeply.

Ribs heaving as he struggled to master the unfamiliar art of both breathing and drinking at the same time--without snorting liquid into one's sinus cavities--he filled his belly nearly to the point of overflowing and washing his breakfast back out. Without a container to run dry, or a competitor to shove you away, it was difficult to tell when to stop drinking. The effort would leave him breathless and staring, reeling from the sick and heavy feeling roiling in his insides, several minutes later.

[Kriemhild]

Kriemhild recoiled in confusion from the feel of a tongue at her muzzle, and stared at the other fox as he drank. He smelled rank with blood and fear, looked as bad as he smelled, and seemed as perplexed as herself; she could not recall his name, or where he came from, or how long ago they met. Careful among the sharp-edged cages of memory, she sat on her haunches and turned her mind to the problem of what to do; she felt strange, almost lucid, with her belly full and the fur of her chin still dripping water. We haven’t introduced ourselves, she remembered, and latched onto the thought.

— But what to do with that? She patted it between mental paws as if she played with a mouse and attempted to remember the protocols of meetings. Kriemhild recalled, faint and dusty, sniffing noses with another fox (a snarl on his lips) but she (his throat drips blood) did not think it had ended well (there are scars beneath her fur). She watched the other fox as he leaned back from the water, peered at the stunned expression in his eyes, and thought, He looks so familiar. Perhaps they had introduced themselves, and the memory had been subsumed under the bloodgoreskinsno.

She gasped, bit at air, shoved forward and stuck her nose in his face, parodied a normal canine greeting – she didn’t sniff, didn’t know to sniff. Before he could reciprocate she minced back a step, shook her head and cleared her throat, and in a voice thick and murky she inquired, “I don’t know your name...?” It emerged from her lips hesitant, a question, and in self-pitying fury she bristled, surged upright, pulled her lips back at him. “Maybe I’ve forgotten but you still should tell me.”

Kriemhild quivered, and stared at him in terror-anger. Her stomach churned, full up with unprecedented things and displeased with all her dancing and emotion.