To check out all the great entries this week, check out the link above, curated by Bradley Ramsey & Leeron Heywood
Welcome to the Atlas, Friends.
I was quite excited by this prompt. It felt full of potential, and importantly, given the consistent nature of this February Flash Fiction challenge, like it had the makings of a piece I could make a bit shorter.
It was not to be. My final draft was 1700 words, now reduced to 1490.
Despite that, I am very happy with where this ended up. I think it's quite a unique spin on the idea. Let's go to the green archipelago.
The great green archipelago was a sight to behold. A cluster of emerald islands perched upon the deep blue, each distinct and with its own claimants. The community was whole, friendly, and loud.
In the distance a new leaf erupted out of the waters, untouched and terrifyingly far away across the open water. A fresh new lily pad, unclaimed.
Three were summoned by the elders, all coming of age at the same time. Two boys, Fenton and Friar, and Fenton’s sister Feenah.
This was their chance. To claim a pad all of their own. To brave untold danger and become an adult in their own right, with standing in their community. What’s more, the difficulty of claiming this pad would ensure their legacy as brave frogs.
At the edge of the elders’ lilies, Fenton and Friar waited patiently for the start to be announced, applying mud paint to their skin in terrifying patterns that signified their heritage and their prowess. Feenah did not appear, and so they assumed she had backed out.
‘Understandable’ Fenton thought. She had little chance against either him or his cousin.
A mighty croak from the eldest bullfrog was the signal. It echoed across the community like a rumble of thunder in the sky. Fenton and Friar launch themselves out across the lily pads, their legs pumping harder than they have ever gone before. The race had started and there could only be one to claim the prize. The thwack of their bodies as they landed from one pad to another created a steady beat with which the onlooking frogs all took as their song to cheer them on.
Go. Go. Go!
As the boys got further out, the gulf between pads grew wider, the air and water grew cooler, and the sky became more exposed. The canopy receded, stripping away their shade. The blazing fire in the sky prickled their skin with intensity, but neither of them dared to enter the water for too long, not with the maw of the dread beast lurking in the cooler waters.
A shadow passed them from overhead. Its black cast was deeper and darker than they had ever known before. Looking upwards, Friar was shocked to see birds circling up high in an endless void untouched by the fringes of the leaves he had known as a child. Dragonflies raged overhead. Their wings hummed with an intensity that rattled his bones and shook his soul. Their electric colouring was a stark reminder of the dangers that they faced as they moved further away from the safety of the main archipelago.
Fenton paddled frantically as he made the leap into the water to swim the awful distance to the next available pad. His legs were already pumping as hard as possible when two shadows appeared in the deep. He started pushing even harder, his legs and feet shouting at the water to give him more purchase, more speed.
One of the shadows resolved into a shape he had only heard about in children’s stories. A great abyss opened up in the heart of the shadow, a circle of death in the skin of the water where nothing could survive. The king koi was here and he knew then that his time had come.
With eyes only for that whirlpool of blackness, he was encouraged to even greater athleticism. Suddenly he found his front legs gripping the edge of the next row of Lily pads, a small highway of green that would save him for now.
Breathing a deep sigh of relief, and plastering himself upon the jade surface of this haven, he took a moment to rest. But there was too much to lose by staying still for long. Despite the shaking of his muscles, he picked himself up and moved forward, achingly at first, but soon the movement became fluid again.
Friar caught up alongside him, and they raced. Friar, between breaths spoke to him briefly.
“Did you see it, the king Koi, the stories are real!”
Fenton nodded and gave his cousin a blink of acknowledgement.
Together they passed the great titans, careful to avoid their attention for too long. Yellow webbed feet churned the water beneath towering feathered hulls. Wings that could snap the air in two cast long, deadly shadows. If you were to get on the wrong side of one of these behemoths, it would be your end.
The last challenge met them both at the end of the highway of lilies. They reached the outermost edge of the archipelago, a place neither of them had ever ventured to before. Few ever did, knowing full well the dangers.
The water was wide open and went out towards the horizon in an unbroken line that seemed infinite, the only break in that vastness was their goal. It sat in the water so far away, so unfathomably distant that it seemed neither one of them could ever hope to make it. But they had to try, for the glory of their colony, for the glory of the archipelago, and for the glory of their own lineage.
“If neither of us make it...” Fenton croaked to his cousin, “I hope we meet again as tadpoles in the shade of the mangrove.”
“Good luck dear friend.” Friar whispered back.
With a cry that would have terrified a gnat, they launched.
They hit the water with a splash, with the grim determination of a duck taking flight. This was the dead zone. The true deep. Here, there were no roots to hide amongst, no shadows to mask their passage. They were specks of green on a canvas of endless, terrifying blue.
Fenton kicked until his legs burned with the fire of a thousand suns. Beside him, Friar was flagging, his strokes losing their rhythm.
“Push!” Fenton bubbled underwater, though sound meant nothing here. “Push for the pad!”
The distance was agonizing. Three yards. Four. An eternity of seconds stretched out. The water grew colder, pressing against their ribs like a vice. Just as Fenton’s vision began to blur, his outstretched fingers brushed against something slimy.
A stem.
With their last reserves, they clawed at the algae-slicked rim, heaving their weary bodies over the edge to collapse onto the surface. It was firm. It was dry. It was glorious. Fenton rolled onto his back, gasping for air, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped moth. He looked over at Friar, who was face-down in a puddle of dew, but alive. They had done it. They had crossed the abyss. They were the crusaders of the Colony, the mightiest of the Marsh.
Fenton stood up on shaky legs. He puffed out his throat sac, preparing to let loose the bellow of claiming, a sound that would echo back to the archipelago and cement their legends forever.
Crunch.
The sound stopped Fenton cold. It wasn’t a roar of any predator he had ever heard. It was more familiar. It was the distinct, wet snap of a chitinous exoskeleton being crushed by hungry jaws.
Fenton and Friar turned slowly toward the center of the massive leaf. There, lounging in the shade of a pristine lotus flower, sat Feenah. She was perfectly dry. Her skin was vibrant, her mud-paint unsmudged. She swallowed the last leg of a particularly fat horsefly and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“You two took your time,” she croaked lazily.
Fenton’s throat sac deflated with a pathetic wheeze. Friar’s jaw hit the leaf.
“Feenah?” Friar whispered, his voice cracking. “But... the Abyss! The King Koi! The Feathered Titans! How did you survive the surface?”
Feenah blinked, looking at them as if they were tadpoles who had forgotten how to swim.
“I didn’t go on the surface, you flybrains,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the water. “I swam along the bottom. The thermal current runs straight from the Elders’ log to this stem. It took five minutes. And there are no birds underwater.”
Fenton looked back across the terrifying, miles-long stretch of water they had just nearly died crossing. He looked at his burning legs. He looked at Feenah, who looked fresh enough to swim there and back again twice over.
“The bottom,” Fenton repeated dully.
“Less drag,” Feenah noted, stretching her legs.
“Now, are you going to stand there panting, or are you going to help me defend our pad? I think I saw a dragonfly scouting the perimeter.”
Fenton looked at Friar. A silent camaraderie passed between them, the shared realization that their glory would only be understood in the context of Feenah’s incredible intelligence. Perhaps the three of them together could command this furthest outpost.
Fenton sat down beside her. The leaf bobbed gently, big enough for three.
“We claim this land,” Fenton murmured, his voice lacking the thunder he had planned, but carrying a newfound wisdom. “In the name of... clan Feenah.”
“And snacks,” Feenah added, spotting a mosquito hovering to the left. “Don’t forget the snacks.
From the Cartographer’s Desk
I loved writing this because it reminds me that struggle is often just a matter of perspective. To Fenton and Friar, this was a life-or-death odyssey. To Feenah, it was a commute. To us, it is a paddle.
A Question for the Comments: Are you a Fenton (taking the hard, glorious, dangerous route) or a Feenah (finding the thermal current and getting there withj zedro effort)? Let me know below.
If this little hop brought a smile to your face, please Restack it so others can join the race, and bookmark this post. It helps my whimsical stories enormously if you do.