Watch enough movies and you think fantasy worlds are full of horse-equivalents and pseudo-dragons, when in fact the most common denominator creature-wise are rats. It doesn't matter where you are, or where you hope to be, because one thing will remain constant; the presence of those pesky varmints termed "rats". Big or small, fat or skinny, they will appear in every world, in all manner of shape and form.
As a worldwalker, Pallas was used to the unshakable feeling of being watched. In the unseen cracks between world, in the slips of darkness and rifts between each universe, the rats lurked. They slithered through the places no others could reach, they dominated the worlds of death and depravity. The only other creatures to rival the rats were cats, but when a lone cat found themselves in one of those little pocket, they were besieged by a mass of furry bodies, screeching, claws and teeth. Plenty of cat-skeletons lay discarded on the paths Pallas walked.
His original world wasn't overly pleasant, and not the one he would have picked given a choice. But it was his home nonetheless. Though he preferred other worlds and their far more charming systems, he belonged to this one. Certainly he could visit those more fantastical places, but he could not stay indefinitely.
The world he belonged to was one where rats were dirty vermin, often populating the sewers. They elicited all manner of shrieking when venturing into the open where people could see them. They were small creatures, not viewed all that highly. Pallas found all of that...
Droll.
In other worlds, rats were large, violent creatures, commanding whole swaths of swampland or serving as the bogeymen of the night. On his earth, they were... Unimportant. Inconsequential.
It was just so boring.
Because he was a worldwalker, Pallas was a vital asset to his country's intelligence organization. They had him patrol the paths between worlds, searching for signs of incoming incursion. Sometimes they asked him to reach deeper, to find the things unseen that had happened and had yet to be. It was all very dull to Pallas, as he had been walking worlds his entire life. He wanted, for once, to be the one given a gun and told to go after a bad guy. Instead he sat at a desk until someone wanted him for a task.
Unimportant. Inconsequential.
Often, Pallas felt it was just him.
Him and the rats.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)