[i]Khur-kheeeeeee. Khur-kheeeeeee.[/i]

The familiar crowing of a ridgehorn rattled off the walls, sent little spills tumbling down their edges. They weren't like the walls shared with the mountains back home—rigid, jagged, glassy-black, always brooding in their God-given shapes—these walls came with stripes of color. Color they left on your fingers, your blankets, anything you touched to them. They crumbled away with even the careless brush of a shoulder; a shoulder which the Tsercheg slopes would've flensed open without care. And that corner of the girl's arm wasn't the only place where they had marked her: below her ankles. Past her wrists. It was strange feeling sadder for the walls than the people inside them. They seemed like they wouldn't last very long. Then where would people live?

Then again, the girl suspected she would come to feel nostalgic, soon, for the ruddy dust staining most of her from the knees and elbows down. The land's brownish-red, like dried blood, also stained the bottom-side of her rawhide blanket, but that only meant the blanket would be her journal of sorts. She'd seen people scratching a system of symbols into thin pieces of wood to remember their travels, but why would someone need to learn any of that when the earth remembered for them? Maybe the next place the girl visited would have white walls, or sulfur-green. Those colors would paint themselves over this place's brownish-red as she laid the blanket down to sleep in them. Soon it would be a tapestry of all the places she had slept in, enriched with all their clays and soils and mosses.

[i]Khur-kheeeeeee. Khur-kheeeeeee.[/i]

Khurkhee was still in the room somewhere, but he sounded angry. Wondering if some happy creature had brushed up beside him hoping to make friends again, only to writhe and curl as the poison set in, the girl shrugged herself out of her shaggy cloak and crawled in the direction of the screeching. Khurkhee spooked easily. He'd have more friends if he could only learn that not everyone was scary. Like the one with the bushy tail, and the one with the humped back. Sometimes they gave her what they called "candy," little glass balls which melted in the mouth and gushed sweetness into it. They said they'd be giving everyone a feast today, too! They'd probably have some worms to give Khurkhee if he wasn't so mean to everyone.

The ridgehorn frog was in the corner, definitely tussling with something. He had it in his mouth and spun from his back to his belly to his back, kicking, thrashing it across the ground. The girl hurried to free it, but Khurkhee held on tight, trying to gum and gnaw his way through its supple skin. She held up the bag of dream-worms, now damp with frog saliva; he must've been able to smell them through the leather.

"Let go, Khurkhee," said the girl, trying to wrest him away without hurting him, but he had latched himself fast to the bag. "Ugh. Bad frog!" When he eventually let go, he loosed a squeak so furious it bounced from one side of the room to the next, and sent another spill of sandy powder down from the corners.

Somehow Bogavhaana hadn't woken yet in all this commotion. She only stirred to her other side, still jutting her hip into the air, the rest of her spooling onto the ground. On that ample hip, however, was a rawhide sheath, containing a knife with a bone handle and a knapped black blade.

"You really want some worms, huh?" asked the girl to the frog. Creeping over to the woman, her footsteps a barely-perceptible pat-a-pat on the pliant dust, she took the knife from its pouch. "Okay. Let's go find some."

It was cold out here despite the sun, and the vents protruding from this red ground. None of the earth's heat moved through the soil of this place like through the black glass; in fact it stole heat, if anything, sapping the girl through her feet. The others seemed comfortable enough, but those from the Black Shelf (as they called it) were goosebumped and shivering, always shivering, always swaddled in as many hides as they carried along with them.

The plants didn't mind. They carried on in their jellied green way, so it must've been warm enough for the locals, if not some of the intruders. They also didn't complain when the girl picked out a hardier species, put the glass knife to two of its branches and hacked them off. She put Khurkhee down only when he promised not to go far, then sat in the sun beginning to whittle these sticks into the tool she needed: a sort of musical instrument, played by dragging one stick along the other after they had both been filled with notches. She scooped small wedges of wood from the sticks, making sure there were sharp corners to catch the "bow," and when the thing was finished she stuck it into the dirt and began to play. The notches were bleeding a blood-colored sap—it was sap, right?—but the branches seemed rigid enough to play on.

It was an ugly song, this scraping, knocking, wood-on-wood cacophony; but uglier for the worms, who mistook it for rain battering the surface, seeping down, drowning them in their tubes and tunnels. Sure enough, they started wriggling out from underneath the leaf litter; the crisscrossed blanket of dead twigs; the vaguely fetal fruits, burst from their sacs and rotting underneath the fresher buds; the worms even evacuated the fruits themselves, popping from the bulbous little heads, the ridges which looked like arms and legs curled up against emaciated bodies, purplish skins.

There were spiny, striped, yellow-black worms, undulating rhythmically toward higher ground (the wall of the hostel). Ones with prongs in front, either for snatching prey or feeling seismic tremors deep from within the earth's fires. There were furry ones, glistening with the morning's dew, and hairless pale ones, leaving trails of slime where they crawled. Khurkhee swiveled when he heard one, and took a moment to watch and choose. Then, with a lash of his tongue, he dragged his first taste into his eager, glistening-pink mouth. Smack, smack, smack, swallow, lick.

With her forearm getting tired, the girl stopped bowing just to watch her friend eat. When he had his fill, and the rest of the worms on this spiny, dry ground were free of the wrath of Khurkhee for at least an hour, maybe she'd snatch up a few of them, too.