Custom Twilight Priggle
Mole
Once upon a time, on the edges of Bluebell Wood, there lived a Witch. The Witch was not good, or kind, or even very clever, but a Witch she was nonetheless, and as many a Witch does she desired a familiar. Because she was cruel and unkind many of the creatures of the wood ignored her, and those that did not the Witch found fault with.
Mouse’s paws were quick, but too small.
Cat was wilful and too lazy.
Toad was no help at all.
However, while the Witch was not very clever, a Witch she was nonetheless, and she resolved that if the nature of the animals was not to her pleasure her magic would make it so. But it is not so easy to change the nature of a thing.
With her magic she bound a scrabbling mole, and plucked his stiffened form from the wet grass.
With her magic she forced him to a human form, and raged when she could not completely conceal his nature.
He was a Kenneth, and he was imperfect.
He was slighter than other males he observed; paler, with dark, dark eyes that were wholly black and captured his world in dull, coloured shadows and blurs of light. Yet it was his hands that caused the Mistress to rage and despair: human-like to the wrists, then the tendons and bones jutted sharply against his flesh on the back of his hands. His fingers were too short, ending at the first knuckle and then sprouting into long, hard, bone-white claws that were the length of his hand again.
They were strong, and sharp, and they were good for nothing that Mistress wanted.
They were strong, and sharp, and imperfect.
The nature of a thing is not so easily changed, and the Mistress would colour every inch of his flesh with a stiff switch in her bitter rage, and then colour it again when her efforts to fix him changed nothing.
‘Imperfect,’ she’d mutter, as she threw a dark glance his way.
‘Imperfect,’ she’d bemoan, when he tasted ingredients for his tongue to determine what his eyes could not.
‘Imperfect,’ she’d brood, as she took his hand in hers and broke the first two fingers with detached ritualism.
But while the nature of a creature may not be changed, its circumstances might.
Several years passed and the Witch grew no kinder nor more patient. Until one day, she brought the Mole to a clearing in the middle of the woods, far from her little cottage, and cast him from her service with nothing more than the clothes on his back.
The Mole felt no joy at his relief from servitude, for his memories of anything else were fragmented and half-forgotten; buried by the Witch’s magic and the passage of years. Instead, he hoped her mood would pass with the storm, and sat in the mud and the cold and the rain for her to return.
As the evening drew into night, the little Mole huddled in on himself and shivered. And the little Mole, who had never wished for anything, wished for nothing more than to hear a friendly voice in the darkness.
A memory of pain.
Another time, another curling worm drawn by the drumming of the rain caught clumsily in his claws.
Pain dancing across his knuckles, the prize falling to the ground forgotten. A hand twisting in his hair-fur and pulling his head back to meet an angry gaze.
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ a voice seething with rage, the rod of hickory hovering in his peripheral vision clutched by a trembling hand, ‘you may be imperfect but you’re still more than an animal. You’ll remember that if I have to beat it into you.’
Kenneth dropped the worm and watched it slowly disappear into the grass as hunger twisted at his stomach.
He must have been here for some time. Evening had drawn into night, and then into morning. The mud that had been slick and wet against his palms when he first squatted down had long since dried and begun to flake away. Yet any reason he conjured to move or seek shelter was quickly banished by the fear that the Mistress might return for him. She would be furious were she to return and find him absent, and with nowhere else to go he instead clung to his disbelief that she would have abandoned him completely.
She would return in time, Kenneth told himself, and ignored the violent shiver that had begun to rack his body with each gust of chill wind.
‘Hallo, Mole, old chap!’
The voice seemed to come from far away. Kenneth looked to it from the corner of his eyes, though otherwise remained still and unmoving. A hooded figure sauntered towards him, raising a hand in greeting. Though his manner was nothing but friendly, Kenneth stiffened. Prickling unease ran down his spine, and unconsciously he began to scrape at the mud with his claws: small, nervous movements. A fox! A voice inside him cried, a fox, a hungry fox!
‘Moley?’ the voice again, enquiring this time.
Kenneth looked up properly, his neck twinging in protest at the movement as he blinked drops of rain from his eyelashes. Slowly, he examined his surroundings before turning back to look at the fox. ‘Who are you talking to?’
‘Why, you of course!’
The fluttering voice in his mind seemed as uncertain what to make of the fox as the fox did of him. ‘I’m a Kenneth,’ he said simply, ‘not a mole.’
‘Didn’t think you fellows troubled yourselves with names! We live and we learn, apparently.’ There was a lengthy pause. When it became apparent that Kenneth was not going to ask for his name in turn, the fox cleared his throat and flicked a gesture that was half-salute, half-flourish. ‘Foxworthy; current Captain of the Fox-Legion - among a great many other things - at your service.’
The little voice suggested that one should spend as little time talking to a fox as possible, but curiosity hushed it. ‘What is the Fox-Legion?’
‘Goodness, you moles really do keep your heads stuck in your burrows, don’t you?’
‘I’m not a mole.’ Kenneth repeated, a little louder this time. The fox barely seemed to notice the interruption, though he also did not answer the question. His head was tilted, and he appeared to be studying him.
‘Mole,’ the fox cleared his throat, a noise half-way between a laugh and a snort slipping out as he did, ‘Kenneth… Let me have a proper look at you, would you?’
Kenneth tensed again as the fox took a step closer, but otherwise allowed his scrutiny. The fox crouched slowly beside him. At this distance, Kenneth could see him more clearly. Brown eyes stared back at him, crawling over his face as though searching for something, and he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
Where Kenneth’s hair was plastered to his forehead and cheekbones by the rain, his thin shirt soaked through; his trousers and uncomfortable, pinching shoes splattered with mud, the fox was bone-dry. His hood was pulled up, but such had been the ferocity of the rain that it surely would not have protected him entirely. He also smelled funny, Kenneth noted, nose wrinkling. Not unpleasant, but no natural scent that he would associate with a fox. A faint aroma of plums lingered in the air about him.
The fox’s eyes slid from the sharp, imperfect claws, and then to the long, white scars that marked his forearms and hands. His tongue clicked again. Louder this time.
‘Tell you what, Moley, why don’t you come with me? After all… you don’t have anywhere else to go, do you?’
‘But Mistress-’
‘Oh, don’t worry about her,’ the fox’s smile twitched wider, and once more his eyes flicked to the claws and the scars. ‘I’ll pay her a little visit later. Have a little talk… spin a little story… ask a riddle or two.’
Kenneth considered the offer. There were not many other options to weigh it against. The fox was a strange one; he gave an odd emphasis to some of his words and looked at Kenneth in a way that made him feel exposed in a way entirely different to that of predator and prey – as though the fox could see everything about him and had only asked questions to answers he already knew.
‘Alright,’ he said.
The fox beamed, and clasped him by the shoulders, hauling him easily to his feet. Kenneth could feel warmth soaking through the cotton where the fox clutched him – a warm, comfortable heat that seemed to spread from the fox’s palms to his entire body.
Once he was standing, the fox slipped about him so that he had only the one arm about his shoulder, leaving his other hand free to make another flourish. ‘It’s settled then! Now, are you ready?’
Kenneth considered the dirt path before them. He had to lift one foot and then the other just to pull them free of the mud. His shoes were hard leather, tight and uncomfortable. He disliked walking any significant distance in them. ‘Yes.’
‘Splendid!’
The world went white. Kenneth could feel himself being buffeted by a strong wind, and the arm about his shoulders gripped tighter when he instinctively trembled. Briefly, he caught the scent of ripe pears; then it was gone, and with it the muddy winding paths of Bluebell Wood.
‘Well, here we are, Moley,’ Foxworthy made a grandiose gesture at their surroundings with one hand, and clapped Kenneth’s shoulder with the other. ‘The secret city of the Rebel Legions. You’ll like it, I hope, it is underground after all.’
The stone and dirt walkways below them heaved with a multitude of animals. Rats scampered towards the north-west, beady eyes and brown and black coats flitting from shadow to shadow. A little above them, two hares bounded north, one lean with short black fur and a bobtail sticking out the tails of his grey and brown coat, the other a hare by nature only, and bearing an elaborate hare mask to match his nature to his appearance. A badger cut a stark figure in black and white in the midst of a group of weasels’ brown and white. A flash of orange and white above them heading east marked the Fox-Legion as present.
‘No one will mind my being here?’ Kenneth asked at length, his voice seeming small in the vastness of the hall.
‘Of course not, old man!’ The grip on his shoulder tightened again, causing him to tense almost unconsciously. The fingers loosened immediately, and the fox instead settled for patting his shoulder repeatedly. ‘You’ll have my personal recommendation – that holds sway. One way or the other.’
‘It’s so busy here,’ Kenneth said distantly, barely taking note of the fox’s reassurance. He had drawn in on himself again, wrapping his arms loosely about him and scraping his claws against the fine, white scars that covered his flesh and drew the fox’s eye in a dangerous way, ‘there’s so many animals.’
Foxworthy beamed. ‘Consider them in terms of legions, and if you’ve met one you’ve met them all, which in certain lop-eared circles is one too many – but I’ll give you the run-down. There’s we foxes, of course (and vixens). Then there’s Badger-Legion, Weasel-Legion, Bear-Legion, Hare-Legion,’ this last he said with a note of distaste as he ticked them off his fingers, ‘and Rat-Legion. Rat-Captain’s alright, though even for a rat his tail’s a sorry looking thing.’
‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’
‘Oh, nothing, but you must agree, Moley, that rats do have quite uncomely tails.’ With a gleeful swish of his own tail, he added, ‘a hairless tail – imagine!’
Kenneth looked at Foxworthy’s large, fluffy tail. For some reason, this observation filled him with a sense of absence, as though reminded of something he lacked. He did not comment on this. Instead, he asked, ‘why do you dislike the rabbits and hares?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the rabbits,’ Foxworthy replied lightly, ‘excepting that half of them haven’t half a brain between them, and the rest are too clever by half.’
Kenneth might have pressed further, but the next moment Foxworthy pressed him on, starting forward and pulling Kenneth along with him before his legs had entirely caught up.
‘Come along Moley, I’ll introduce you to everyone. Oh, and don’t worry, you’ll be safe here. We have an ‘agreement’ in place – the Legion will not devour itself, if you catch my meaning.’
Kenneth looked again to the teeming hordes around them, and the hunters that darted along the walkways. ‘Surely you can’t enforce that.’
‘Oh, believe me,’ the fox’s smile was wide, and his teeth were sharp and white against the darkness, ‘I do.’
Once upon a time, in a city far below the ground, there lived a great many animals. The animals were not necessarily good, or kind, and some were not very clever, but legion they were nonetheless, and as legion they protected their own. When the Fox brought the Mole to live among them he thought for a time that the Witch might still return for him, yet always did the Fox bid him to cast aside such thoughts as the Witch had cast aside him.
Though they never reached the Mole's ears, there were whispers among the rats and the weasels that a little cottage on the edge of Bluebell Wood lay mysteriously empty; abandoned yet preserved perfectly within. The mice of the Rat-Legion recalled that there had lived a Witch who was cruel and unkind, while the rabbits pricked their ears and twitched their noses and gossiped amongst themselves. And no ears pricked higher than those of the Jackrabbit, who had no time nor need for gossip. His eyes sought the Fox, and whatever he saw there he did not share, but from that day forth the magic that had bound the Mole began to wane as though the Witch's powers had weakened.
No longer was he forced to a human form, and could instead switch between his forms as he desired. No longer was his own nature an imperfect enigma.
And if, in the weeks that followed, the Fox had an extra spring to his step and a dark glint in his eye one could say that perhaps the only nature the Witch should have worked so hard to conceal was her own. For a legion might not devour itself, but as legion, it will devour as its nature demands.
Kirin
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