The Second Morning
It wasn’t long before we had found what we were looking for – it had more legs than I expected.
The ground seemed to heave beneath us, the autumn mud crawling further up our boots, insects racing to shelter from the rumbling earth threatening at every moment to give way. We knew it was noon, we had been walking since sunrise, but the path we followed had led us to an expanse of woodland so dense it still shuddered with the secrets only night can obscure, each tree too close, too living, it listened to our conversations and passed them on to the creatures lying in wait beyond their leaves.
It’s not that I wasn’t prepared for what I might see, but now that I was here, staring up at the slouching beast, there was something about it that felt revelatory, like centre of the earth had caved open. A structure built from individual stones, covered in moss and markings, scarred by those who watched it sleep.
It was certainly awake now.
Stone shouldn’t bend that way, arching back and forth with every silent breath, shaking the dust of so many years off its spine. I didn’t know if it could see us, if it even had eyes to see, but something about the way it moved, twisting impossibly side to side, made me think we had made our presence known to it. Roots screamed and tore where they had grown over the ends of the bridge, the structure taking its first tentative steps away from its birthplace. Its movements were cautious, logic defying, legs like vines unfurling out from beneath it. How many people had taken shelter from the rain underneath its heaving belly? – I thought – how many had walked across its spine?
Like a calf new-born it stumbled forward clumsily, tripping over chipped and eroded limbs that had held it up for so long and were unused to this newfound freedom. Birds perched atop its mighty back took flight, rustling through the trees so that the forest echoed with quaking voices of expectation, all eyes turned to the young stone creature freeing itself from the ground that cradled it.
I crouched behind a rotting log, not wanting to scare the young beast off. Everything around us seemed to hum faintly, the woodlice near my feet circling the fallen log confusedly, as though thrown off balance by the power of this new presence in their midst. The bridge, now fully mobile, shifting its weight comfortably between its two legs, galumphed its way over to where I hid. I held my breath and – for the first time since we first saw it – squeezed my eyes shut. The ground grew unsteady, and I was overcome with the scent of rotting earth and centuries of decay that fought its way into my lungs. When I opened my eyes minutes later, the bridge – along with much of the ground that lay beneath it - was gone, with no evidence of its existence except for a gaping hole that broke through the densely packed trees behind us.