Movement Two — What the World Sends to Stop You

He found, instead, a fly.

It was, by any reasonable measure, the least significant thing he had encountered in longer than he cared to think about — a single fly, ordinary in every visible respect, hovering in the middle distance of a stretch of Something he'd wandered into without any particular destination in mind, doing nothing more remarkable than flies generally do. He noted it the way you note anything too small to matter, and kept walking.

The fly did not let him keep walking.

It moved to intercept him — not the erratic, purposeless drift flies are known for, but something closer to a maneuver, deliberate and oddly considered, positioning itself squarely in the space he had been about to occupy. He stopped, mostly out of surprise rather than any genuine concern, and looked at it properly for the first time.

It was mounted on a pig.

He would spend a very long time afterward trying to decide whether that detail made the situation more or less absurd, and would never fully settle the question. The pig was ordinary in every respect except that it was, somehow, being ridden — a full-sized, unremarkable pig, trotting in tight, businesslike circles beneath a fly so small that its position atop the animal's back should have been, by any law of scale Caedmon had ever encountered, meaningless. It was not meaningless. The fly sat the pig the way a soldier sits a warhorse, upright, alert, and in its front two legs — or whatever passed, on a creature this small, for legs capable of gripping anything at all — it held a trident.

The trident was not scaled to the fly. It was scaled, if anything, to Caedmon himself, three tines of dark, unhurried metal rising a clean body-length above the insect's minuscule frame, wielded with a confidence that had no business existing anywhere in the same sentence as the word fly.

"I'm going to need a moment," Caedmon said, out loud, to no one, because there was no one else present to hear the plain astonishment in his own voice.

The fly buzzed. It was, unmistakably, an aggressive buzz — the sound of something working itself up rather than simply existing — and the pig beneath it broke into a full charge, closing the distance between them with a speed that pigs, in Caedmon's admittedly limited prior experience of pigs, did not typically possess.

He stepped aside. Not out of any real fear — he could not, if he was honest, locate a single genuine flicker of fear anywhere in himself at the prospect of a fly on a pig with a trident — but out of the specific, bewildered caution you extend to something you do not yet understand, the same caution that had kept him alive and strong across centuries other souls hadn't survived. The pig thundered past him, missed by a comfortable margin, and wheeled around for a second pass with a determination that seemed, if anything, to have sharpened rather than dampened.

"I have not," Caedmon said, still to no one, backing a step further away, "done anything to you."

The fly did not appear to accept this as relevant. It leveled its absurd, oversized trident at him with what could only be described, however impossible the description sounded even as he thought it, as intent, and the pig charged again.

This text was taken from NovelFire. Help the author by reading the original version there.

He tested it, cautiously, the way he tested everything new — a small, careful press of the strength Something and Nothing both now bent around without argument, aimed at the space between himself and the oncoming pig, meant to do nothing more than slow the charge enough to think clearly. It should have worked. It had worked, without fail, against considerably larger threats than this one, across more centuries of testing than he could easily count.

The pig did not slow. If anything, the pressure he'd exerted seemed to glance off the whole absurd arrangement — fly, pig, trident — the way water glances off something that has decided, for reasons entirely its own, not to be wet today.

He stepped aside again, more sharply this time, genuine confusion beginning to edge into what had, until a few moments ago, been simple bemusement. He tried a second, firmer test of his will against the fly directly, the same reach he had used, more than once, to still an opponent mid-motion long enough to end a fight before it properly began.

The fly did not still. It banked, mid-air, with a precision that had no business belonging to an insect of its size, and came at him from an angle he had not accounted for, trident lowered, the pig beneath it screaming — actually screaming, a high, furious pig-shriek that Caedmon would remember with considerably more unease than the trident itself — in what he could only interpret as pure, committed rage.

"What is wrong with you," he said, to the fly specifically this time, ducking beneath a swipe of the trident that came close enough to part the air near his ear with an audible hiss, "precisely?"

The fly did not answer, because flies do not answer, a fact that did nothing to make the entire increasingly ridiculous encounter any easier to process. It circled, regrouped, and charged a third time, the pig's small hooves striking the ground of Something with an impact that felt, disproportionately, far heavier than an animal of its size should have been capable of producing.

He tried, once more, to reason with it — not out loud this time, but with the same quiet, patient pressure he might have used on a frightened stranger, an attempt to simply ask whatever passed for the creature's understanding to stand down. He felt, distantly, something answer that reaching, the way he'd felt the pig's charge glance harmlessly off his will a moment before — not resistance exactly, but a kind of total, mechanical indifference, as though whatever he was actually negotiating with had no ears turned toward him at all, only a single, borrowed purpose it had been handed and intended to see through regardless of what the fly itself might otherwise have wanted from an ordinary afternoon.

He briefly, seriously, considered simply killing it, and dismissed the thought almost as quickly as it arrived — not out of any particular mercy toward insects, but out of a plain and growing suspicion that killing this particular fly, mounted on this particular pig, wielding this particular trident, might turn out to matter more than it appeared to, in ways he had no way yet of measuring. He had learned, across a very long life, to trust that suspicion whenever it arrived this specifically. It rarely arrived for nothing.

Caedmon did the only thing that occurred to him as genuinely sensible, after a life spent making very few genuinely undignified retreats: he left.

Not fled, he told himself, stepping backward through the fabric of Something with the ease his own strength afforded him, putting real distance between himself and whatever this had been before it could escalate into something he'd have to explain to himself later in less flattering terms than undignified retreat. He did not run, exactly. He simply declined, with what dignity remained available to him, to continue being chased across an otherwise unremarkable stretch of existence by an armed insect riding a screaming pig.

The last thing he saw of it, glancing back once before the distance closed fully between them, was the fly, still mounted, still upright, trident still raised, watching him go with what could only be described — however little sense the description made even to the man thinking it — as satisfaction.

He did not understand it. He would turn it over, more than once, in quieter hours afterward, and never once arrive at an explanation that felt remotely adequate to the strangeness of what he'd just survived.