Hey, everyone. Dosu offered for me to read his fanfic, and I intend to, but I also offered if he wanted to see a snippet of something I wrote up yesterday. I haven't decided to put it into my fic yet, mostly because this is way farther in the story than what I've firmly established so far, but you know what? I haven't had anyone read anything I've written in about three years. I'm interested to see if my prose and story flow holds up, even if it's just for this short snippet. It's in as complete a form I can allow it to be at this stage: I'll need to write the rest of the story to fill in all the skips. It stops abruptly at the end on purpouse: I'm interested to see if people would really be interested in hearing what happens next. This is, again, a very small part of a much larger story-- I expect it to be a project that will last a few years. I still have a lot of work to do. In the mean time, since everyone was so kind in their greetings, I'll leave this out as a scrap that may or may not make it into the final product. Thanks. And don't be too cruel on my horrible spelling and grammer! Remember: this was just the result of a fruitful brain storming session. That's why it severly lacks polish and is filled with place holder phrases. Also keep in mind this isn't even part of the main plot: just a side story I've been flirting with. Okay, I think I've appologized for it enough. Here you go.
(The Land Before Time: the Deadly Passes. Untitled segment of Unnumbered Chapter. 02/03/12)
Ruby tapped her fingers together, listening to the tiny percussive sound of her finger tips knocking together. A simple, soothing sound from a simple, soothing motion.
She was so nervous right now. Her body felt like warm slush.
Mr. Thicknose gave her distant look, as if he were weighing something in his head.
“… I…Well, I mentioned the name ëThe Eastern Sharptooth’ to my friends,” Ruby admitted.
“Oh, Ruby,” Mr. Thicknose groaned.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!” Ruby insisted. “I-it just slipped out!”
“Ruby, you know Littlefoot and the other four all migrated from the eastern wall, I know you know,” the Thicknose said with an irritated sigh. His eyes were moving everywhere but Ruby’s face. That was somehow worse than glaring at her. It made her feel like he wanted nothing to do with her.
“People from the east take the story of ëThe Eastern Sharptooth’ incredibly seriously, Ruby. They believe it. Many of tell me that they’ve known people who’ve died to this creature. I’ve met some people who tell me their husbands and children have been killed by ëThe Sharptooth’óthis is exactly why I didn’t want you to mention this to your friends!”
Ruby’s jaw felt weak. She was telling herself very hard not to cry. To cry would be to show that she really wasn’t capable of handling this sort of ëadult’ information. It would signal to Mr. Thicknose that telling her anything else would simply be a stupid risk on his own part.
Mr. Thicknose’s gaze finally seemed to soften, although he wasn’t looking at Ruby. He was looking at a featureless patch of ground to her left. The wrinkles in his face relaxed.
“You know… I once went to Mr. Threehorn to ask him more about ëThe Sharptooth’, you know. I was fascinated by how seriously people took this story that, quite frankly, seemed more like a ghastly fairy tale than fact.”
His brow furrowed. Ruby’s eyes twitched over to featureless soil he was looking at. He seemed somewhere completely different right now. Suddenly, Mr. Thicknose’s gazed snapped back towards Ruby, like a bolt of sky fire. She flinched. He looked rather pale.
“Do you know what he said to me?” he asked.
Ruby shook her head without really guessing. She had no idea what Mr. Threehorn would say about ëThe Sharptooth’ other than maybe a confirmation that he was fake or ëno match for a threehorn’.
“He said to me,” Mr. Thicknose began, licking the dry bastions of his thick lips, “That if I dared going around asking people about ëThe Sharptooth’, he would personally break my legs.”
“He-… What!?” Ruby uttered hoarsely, her eyes as large and round as tree sweets. Ruby had seen Cera’s father get angry more often than she cared to count. She had seen him get aggressive, swear out loud, and even get into fights. But she had never heard Mr. Threehorn ever utter anything so horrible.
“And he meant it too…” Mr. Thicknose said, turning his eyes back towards the featureless patch, back to whatever place he was off in his own mind. “He looked… terrified... when I asked him…”
Ruby stared at him, a hand rested lightly on her chest. Her feathers were ruffled. She couldn’t really help it. She had come here expecting to get yelled at and instead found out that the toughest, most cynical dinosaur she had ever met feared this creature so much that he would threaten to break another person’s legs over merely talking about him.
She opened her beak slightly, then closed it again, and then forced herself to open it again with an inhale of breath. “Mr. Thicknose,” Ruby said shakily, watching to see if he’d look her in the eye again. He did. “I only ever told Ducky, and… when I did, all she did was stare at me and tell me that he can’t hurt anyone anymore.”
The teacher nodded. This time, he allowed his eyes to connect with her’s. “’The Sharptooth’ supposedly died in the Deadly Passes, during the Great Drought seven cold cycles ago. That was all I could really gather. No one apparently knows how or when or why. Just that he’s dead.”
“Who was he?” Ruby asked. “Please, Mr. Thicknose, who was this Sharptooth? Why were people so terrified of him? What is the story?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve gathered,” he said, “In the hopes that it will give you a bit of perspective on why this is a story that eastern folks are so very sensitive about.”
The lava bubbles murmured gently, forming rustling against each other. The glow of the fire rocks reflected in both Mr. Thicknose’s eyes and her own. She felt searing hot air waft against the cheeks of her face as her back bore the brunt of the night’s chill.
“This time I need the most solemn of solemn pledges that you will not utter a word of this to anyone,” Mr. Thicknose whispered in an urgent tone. “Not to your friends, not to strangers, not to anyone. Promise me that whatever you hear tonight will not leave this fire circle.”
Ruby gulped, and nodded faintly. “… I-I wouldn’t want to tell anyone even if I wanted too,” she said nervously. “I promise, Mr. Thicknose. I really won’t say a word about this.”
He gazed at her for moment, eyes glazed by the light of the lava, before giving a single, curt nod.
Then, the thicknose pinched a bit of dirt in the digits of his forepaw and let it fall into the fire pit, where it whisped up into a faint line of smoke.
“Mr. Threehorn wasn’t the first person I had asked about the story,” he said, his eyes following the faint plume of smoke as it continued to rise. “I did find a few easterners before him who were willing to share all that they knew. I’ll start by saying, Ruby, that stories about particularly monsterous sharpteeth are not at all uncommon. The ëFire Sharptooth’, the ë Giant Belly-Dragging Hopper’, and the ëDinosaur Killer’ are all just some of the more famous ones. Even our own local beast, Red Claw, has stories told about him from places far away. Some have strong evidence to support their validitiy, while others are almost certainly made up.”
“Now, the story of ëThe Eastern Sharptooth’ is hard to validate because people in the west have very little reason to go to the east. It’s common knowledge that the lands on the east side of the Wall of the World are harder to live on than over here in the west. There are fewer valleys--certainly nothing like the Great Valleyóand water and food are scarcer. I can’t think of anything that would make going there worth a five cold cycle trip around the wall, or a jaunt through the Passes.”
Mr. Thicknose gazed over towards the great wall for a moment. Ruby’s gaze was fixed on Mr. Thicknose.
After a moment, Mr. Thicknose turned his head back to Ruby.
“This creates a problem when trying to prove or disprove some of the stories that make it over the wall.”
“I don’t really understand,” Ruby said.
Thicknose nodded, turning his eyes towards the lava with a thoughtful look. When he returned, he wore a pleased smile. “Well, let me put it this way. Let’s say your buddies Hyp, Nod, and Mutt go off to make trouble over near the Razor Rocks, and then come back and say that they saw a flying polka-dotted longneck on the other side of the rocks.”
Ruby put a hand up to her mouth to stifle an urgent giggle. Mr. Thicknose nodded. “Well? What would you say to them?”
“I’d say that sounds pretty ridiculous,” she snickered.
Mr. Thicknose raised a forepaw. “Ah, but you couldn’t really disprove them unless you go out and search the other side of the Razor Rocks, could you? And true, not everyone is as apt to make up stories as those three, but Ruby, some stories have such a strong pull for some people that they believe them whole heartedly without the slightest shred of proof. And whether they’re right or wrong, is taking a trip over the Razor Rocks really worth finding out?”
Ruby’s smile faded, and she shook her head. “I don’t think it would. That’s a lot of trouble to go to find out if a story that silly is true or not.”
“Exactly. So, I guess what I’m trying to get through to you is that, no matter how much the easterners insist it’s true, we have no way of really confirming this story.”
He paused to wet his lips and give a series of small, dry coughs.
“Alright. Now, the story of ëThe Eastern Sharptooth’, or, as the easterner’s like to call him, just ëThe Sharptooth’.”
Ruby nodded, feeling a growing excitement fill her chest.
“So it starts like this: about one and a half cold cycles before the Great Drought began out east, a single black sharptooth appeared in the area just next to the eastern entrance of the Deadly Passes. Sharpteeth aren’t as common out east as they are here in the west, but by all accounts they aren’t uncommon by any measure. They’re certainly common enough over there that folks normally didn’t bother keeping track of whether a sharptooth was a regular or a new arrival. But this particular sharptooth was different. He immediately stood out from other sharpteeth in the area because of his size. They say he was taller than an adult longneck.”
“Taller than an adult longneck?” Ruby repeated.
Mr. Thicknose said with a tiny shrug. “Well… taller in the sense that he was higher than shoulder height, I’m guessing. I find it hard to believe that sharpteeth can even get shoulder high, but I’m certain that they don’t come taller than a longneck at head height. But the point is, this sharptooth was big. But that wasn’t all that made him stick out to the herds in the area. This large black sharptooth also seemed to have a rather strange choice of prey: He’d attack flatteeth whenever he got the chance, but he also seemed perfectly willing to prey on other sharpteeth.”
“That is strange,” Ruby muttered, frowning. “I only ever hear of sharpteeth doing that if they can’t find anything else to eat.”
“That’s because sharpteeth aren’t easy to killóeven for other sharpteeth,” Mr. Thicknose said. “They prefer to attack us flat teeth because we aren’t as built for fighting as they are. This sharptooth, it seemed, didn’t mind the extra hassle. Then after about a week after he was first sighted, they started to make some… well, some discoveries, in the forests near their grazing areas. Here’s where the story starts to diverge from the usual stories I tend to hear about monster sharpteeth.”
He licked his lips again, and took a deep breath. “So apparently this unusually large Sharptooth wasn’t eating half the things he killed.”
Ruby cocked her head questioningly.
Mr. Thicknose gave a humorless smile.
“The bodies that the easterners think he did eat tended to never be seen again. Most of the other bodies, however, were dragged out to very conspicuous locations, uneaten but…”
He paused, and even over the glaze of the fire light, Ruby saw sudden wariness fill his eyes. She gentely cleared her throat.
“…Uneaten but what?” Ruby asked.
Mr. Thicknose said nothing for a moment. He looked over his shoulders, as if worried that someone would be around to overhear, and then he leaned in closer to Ruby over the fire light. When he finally spoke, it was in a tense whisper.
“Uneaten, but mutilated. They’d find bodies with their jaws torn out, and bodies that had looked like they had had their torso’s snapped in half. Some with no eyes and some with their intestines turned inside out.”
He took a moment to pause after saying this, and quietly regarded the look of revolted horror that was on the young fast runner’s face. Ruby pulled a hand to her mouth, her wide eyes flickering over the somber looking old thicknose’s face.
“He… what?” she choked. “W-why?”
“I asked everyone who was willing to tell me this story that very question,” Mr. Thicknose said calmly. “No one had an answer, other than the standard monster reason: he was evil and heartless. One woman who had told me this story used a word that really stuck in my memory. ëMalevolent’, she said. He was a malevolent entity.”
Ruby simply stared at Mr. Thicknose, breathing shallowly. She placed a hand on her chest to steady her breathing. The old teacher seemed to notice this.
“Are you alright, Ruby? Is this going further than you wanted to hear?” he asked. Ruby blinked, and let her eyes rest on the glowing pool of lava. She took a moment to very seriously ask herself if this really was more than she had bargained for. She had expected to hear a scary story, but this went way, way beyond the fun little scary stories that were told around a campfire. Then she remembered the look in Ducky’s eye. That hesitant, grim look that held fear and certainty. ëShe knows something…’
“No. I’ll just keep thinking and thinking about it if I didn’t hear the rest,” Ruby stated, looking back up.
Mr. Thicknose looked a tad disappointed at this response, but he nodded in understanding.
“Okay. Your call. Now, where’d I leave off?” He smacked his lips a little, scrunching up his face with a look of concentration. Shining buzzers flickered on the periphery of Ruby’s vision. She usually loved seeing them; right now, the extra movement outside of her field of vision just made her all the more nervous.
“… Ah, yes. So, here was this large, black skinned sharptooth that showed up out of the blue. He’d kill sharpteeth just as happily as he did flat teeth, and half of what he killed he mutilated and put out in places where folks were very likely to see it. They knew it had to be the black sharptooth that was doing this because they weren’t just finding mutilated flat teeth: they were finding sharpteeth as well. They all had the same bite patterns, they victims were all from areas the black sharptooth had been sightedóthere was very little question of who was doing this. Now, these bodies kept showing up for a short while before something else strange happened. All the other sharpteeth in that area disappeared. Just-”
He slapped his forepaws together in a loud clap, making Ruby jump.
“Gone. According to the story, this black sharptooth was killing other sharpteeth so often that the sharpteeth were even more afraid of him than the flat teeth. They knew this black sharptooth was deliberately targeting them. He was too big for any of them to fight, and the few who tried would be sent back to them as mutilated bodies. So, all the other sharpteeth decided to run as far away from the area as possible.”
Gentle crackles arose from the lava pool. They were a simple sound. Soothing. Not unlike the sound of fingers tapping together.
Ruby looked at Mr. Thicknose tensely as he continued.
“Now that there were no longer any other sharpteeth, this one sharptooth became the only carnivore in the area. That’s how he got his name: ëTHE Sharptooth’. The ONLY Sharptooth. And soon as the other sharpteeth were gone, this one sharptooth had all of the flat teeth herds in the area all to himself.”
Mr. Thicknose paused smack his tounge against the roof of his dry mouth in an attempt to wet it.
“He’d kill so many people so violently and with such impunity that the flat teeth found him worse than all the sharpteeth he had scared away combined. They had no idea what to do. He had gone from an unusually large sharptooth that had shown up one day to a veritable plague.”
“Didn’t the flat teeth try to get away?” Ruby asked.
He nodded.
“Apparently, yes. After more and more people began disappearing and more mutilated bodies were found, they quickly began to understand that this sharptooth was, as the one lady put it to me, a ëmalevolent entity’. Something abnormal and alien. They had wanted to flee, but the area surrounding the eastern entrance of the wall of the world was one of the only fertile areas for miles and miles. The area beyond that had been growing drier and drier as time went on, forcing the herds there to hug the eastern entrance as closely as they could. It was the beginnings of the Great Drought, and the idea of traveling anywhere that didn’t hug the wall of the world seemed almost suicidal. So they stayed, and tried to deal with this one sharptooth as best as they could.”
A particularly large bubble in the lava popped loudly, causing both of them to turn their eyes down at the lava pool. Both were silent for a moment, letting their eyes rest on the lava pool.
“… So what happened next?” Ruby asked.
The thicknose looked up. “He terrorized the local flat teeth for an entire cold cycle, and there didn’t seem to be anything anyone could do about it. Anyone who went out to fight him would be found the next day under a tree as some gruesome, disfigured corpse. The people in the east aren’t united, like we are here in the valley. They stick to their own kind, and when The Sharptooth came, they stayed even further away from folks different from themselves.”
“Why?” Ruby asked. “Wouldn’t working together work better than working by themselves?”
“Like I said, Ruby. It’s a different world out east,” he said simply. “Even so, they were united to their own kinds, and some herds did try use indirect means of getting rid of him. The woman who kept referring to ëThe Sharptooth’ a ëmalevolent entity’ told me that said that her herd once tried to kill him by baiting him near a steep cliff and pushing him off.”
“…And?” Ruby asked.
“And… she said it worked. They lured him, and they managed to push him. He survived.”
Ruby raised an eyebrow. “He survived a fall off a cliff? How high was the cliff?”
Mr. Thicknose smirked. “The woman said it was about the same height as the thundering falls, give or take.”
Ruby actually scoffed. “That’s-”
“Impossible?” Mr. Threehorn suggested, nodding his head. “It certainly is, but that’s not all. Not only did he survive, but he managed to make it back up in three jumps, leaping from rock to rock. That would be mean he’d have to be jumping about as high as his own height. And Ruby… this woman believed this. She told me she saw it, and I looked into her eyes and she believed it.”
The smoke from the fire pit got a little thicker, whisping out in plumes about as wide as her wrist. They smothered some of the light.
“And that wasn’t all. The story goes that ëThe Sharptooth’ seemed to show up in places they least expected. Even broad daylight, he’d could sneak around so effectively that he invaded areas that were normally impregnable to sharpteeth. At night, they’d see his red eyes and white teeth peering out of the forests, or from the caves. And even when they saw him, at night, no one seemed to be able to get away from him. If he was spotted, herds would try to leave the area only to walk right back into him further down. By day he’d be roaring, chasing, and clawing at herds, but at night he’d be silently stalking them, plucking unfortunate individuals right out of their herds or their sleeping spots, only for their bodies to be found the next day. So, this went on and on and on, until folks almost became used to ëThe Sharptooth’. Like I said before: this lasted about a cold cycle before something even deadlier came to eastern wall.”
“The Great Drought?” Ruby asked.
Mr. Thicknose nodded. “Exactly. As horrible as ëThe Sharptooth’ was, the Great Drought killed thousands. The land dried up, and all the green food withered away. The easterners knew they needed to move to survive. They didn’t have that many choices: they could go further east, or they could hug the wall and travel north or south, which wasn’t all that well known, and hope for the best. And then there was the final option.”
The Thicknose gave a thin smile, and slightly tilted his head. “Guess.”
Ruby didn’t even need to. “They decided to go west. To the Great Valley.”
“Yes. And out east, the Great Valley is something of a legend, for very similar reasons on why the story of ëThe Sharptooth’ is a legend over here. No one is willing to go through the passes without a good reason. Well… hunger and thirst are as good a reason as any, I suppose. The herds in the area waited for the recent season of hatchlings to become strong enough and able enough to travel with their parents, and then, all at once, every flat tooth herd headed towards the dreaded deadly passes, hoping to make it west.. But right as most of the herds were reaching the fork between he many passes, another catastrophe struck. The Great Eastern Earthshake.”
“I remember that earthshake. I could feel it all the way over here.”
“Everyone could. From what I heard, it made a fissure about a quarter of a mile wide. The herds were now all funneled into one of the intermediate passes. As luck would have it, it was the Flooded Pass, which had run dry along with the rest of the east. It was about as safe to cross as it would ever get.”
“So… what happened to ëThe Sharptooth’, then?” Ruby asked.
The old man shrugged. “Well… no one knows for sure. He was apparently right there when the Great Earthshake happened. In the chaos, everyone was too busy running away to really look to see what happened to him. Some say he died in the earthshake. Some say he followed the herds into the passes, and one of the hazards killed him. That’s really all there is to say. For all intensive purposes, the Great Earthshake marks the point where he disappeared off the face of the earth. And that, Ruby, is all I know about the monster known as ëThe Sharptooth’.”
“Do I believe it…” Mr. Thicknose said slowly, clucking his tongue thoughtfully. “ Some parts I do. The core of the story seems perfectly plausible. I don’t have much trouble believing that a particularly large and fearsome sharptooth did appear in that area around that time. I’m hesitant in believing that he was really as tall as a longneck, but it’s still within the borders of plausibility, to me. They say that this one sharptooth starts killing off other sharpteeth and putting their mutilated bodies up for display. I think it’s probably this reason why this story frightens people from the east so very badly. That’s a dark, disturbing kind of behavior, and even other sharpteeth would be horrified by something like that… but I’m prepared to believe that this large sharptooth could have been deeply disturbed. There are some sick people in the world, Ruby. There’s no reason to believe there wouldn’t be a few sick sharpteeth, too, if not more. With just those two facts being within the realms of believability, you can sympathize with easterners on why ëThe Sharptooth’ would have been so terrifying.
Now, as for scaring off ALL of the sharpteeth in the area with this behavior? No. I don’t believe that. Sharpteeth, particularly ones out east, are not that easy to scare away from such a fertile hunting ground. What I think really happened is a far simpler explanation: the sharpteeth knew the Great Drought was coming, and they simply left for other hunting grounds while they still could. If this one sharptooth was disturbed enough to mutilated corpses and kill for the sheer pleasure of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if he elected to stay behind simply because he was to mentally ill to really care about an oncoming drought. Now, do I think he was the only sharptooth to stay? No, because again, sharpteeth are very reluctant to leave areas that are filled with prey. I think it’s likely that only the biggest and toughest of all the sharpteeth stayed, and with a few large sharpteeth spread out over a wide area like that, I would be surprised if people began mistaking them all for the same sharptooth. Remember, Ruby: some of ëThe Sharptooth’ victims ended up getting mutilated, but other simply disappeared, like normal sharpteeth victims do. Those, I’m guessing, were dinosaurs who got eaten by the other large sharpteeth in the area.”
Ruby looked on. The Thicknose smiled.
“So in short, Ruby, do I believe that an unusually large and mentally ill sharptooth existed around the eastern side of the wall? Yes. I’m willing to believe that, and considering how afraid people are, I feel like I have no choice but to at least believe that much. But do I believe this one sharptooth was capable of feats like surviving falling into canyons, jumping up massive ledges, sneaking past entire herds in broad daylight, and causing so many deaths as to be considered ësupernatural’? No. That, I think, is simply people’s fear warping their senses. The description they provided of this sharptooth certainly seems like something out of a nightmare, though isn’t it? An enormous, black sharptooth that’s so difficult to see in the dark that the only way you can tell he’s there are by the blood red eyes and mouthful of gleaming white teeth?”
The smoke thickened further, largely obscuring Mr. Thicknose from Ruby’s view. And for a moment, in the thick of the smoke, she could easily see it. She could picture a floating pair of demonic eyes and a wide, malignant grin of razor sharp teeth, standing out in black of the night. She could almost grasp what it would have felt to see something like that peaking out of the trees at a grazing herd, or standing under the shadow of a rock as he stalked a lost child. It was a silent, murderous image that suddenly made those words too potent for comfort.
A malevolent entity. Something unnatural and alien. A monster.
She shivered, ducking to the side to look around the smoke.
“That’s… uh… quite a story, Mr. Thicknose,” Ruby said shakily, and tried to give a weak smile. Mr. Thicknose nodded slightly.
“It is. You remember what you promised me, right? You won’t repeat this story to anyone, nor will you go around asking questions about ëThe Sharptooth’ to anyone out of the east. Understood?”
Ruby squeezed her own arm, and nodded. “I understand… Mr. Thicknose? Can I ask you question?”
The old teacher tilted his head. “It depends.”
Ruby looked back to the smoke, almost expecting to see those red eyes and white teeth peering back at her. “Why would you tell me the whole story when I already broke my promise before?”
Mr. Threehorn raised both eyebrows. For the first time since he began his story, his old, kindly smile returned. “Because, Ruby, I know what it’s like to be curious. I was exactly like you when I was your age, and I know how alluring a secret story like the Eastern Sharptooth can be. That kind of curiosity is a greater asset to you than I think you really know… But at the same time, I don’t want it to get you in trouble. With your active mind and thirst for knowledge, I knew you’d be less likely to get in the kind of trouble I got into by just telling you what you wanted to know.”
He began to lumber up to his feet, his old joints cracking loudly. He groaned, muttering some inaudiable complaint before straightening up. Ruby smiled. She had always liked Mr. Thicknose. No matter what everyone else in the valley said about him, she thought he was one of the smartest dinosaurs she had ever met.
“You’re a good girl, Ruby.”
“Mr. Thicknose?”
“Hmm?”
“When I mentioned the eastern sharptooth to Ducky, she
