* * * * *
Once Arbid started talking, it was difficult to make him stop. The problem was, nobody understood him. They understood the words, but not the way he was using them. He tried to explain what he saw, what he had done, how it had worked—but they just looked at him and shook their heads. “Strange boy,” they said.
“Don’t you see it, Papa?” he had said. “All the pretty strands of color? The patterns they weave together? See this one?” he said, pointing at nothing in particular and running his fingers through the air as if he were feeding wool into a loom. “It’s a pretty blue, and it runs through the sky with little threads branching out all over the place. This one,” he added, cradling the fingers of his other hand like he was picking up a bucket of water, “is a rustic brown and stays close to the ground, often burying itself into it. Now,” he added, moving his hands as if he were braiding his sister’s hair, “if you weave them together and pull—“ it looked like he was pulling on a non-existent rope, one that seemed to offer quite a bit of resistance—“you can make a little dust devil when you let go.” He spread his hands, fingers splayed as if he were releasing the rope, and, as if on cue, a slight breeze rustled through the cabin, lifting dust from the dirt floor and swirling it around like a tiny dust devil.
Now, if it had been anyone other than Arbid, who had never once spoken before that day, who always stared into nothingness for hours on end, who was his mother’s favorite though she denied it, his father would have tried to smack some sense into him. But it was Arbid, and he was talking, even though he was talking nonsense, and there was a dust devil in the cabin, and the windows were shuttered and the door was shut. So, his father didn’t smack him. His mother didn’t faint, again—although she thought hard about doing so. And his siblings stared at their strange little brother, their mother’s favorite, wondering what they should do. Then Arbid grinned, and they backed away from him.
Then something hit the cabin wall hard enough to knock the mud plaster loose from between the logs.
“By the gods, Arbid—“
But Arbid wasn’t smiling anymore. He was looking into the nothingness that so fascinated him, looking at the point where the thing had hit the wall, looking through the wall. “Ugly colors,” he muttered. “Bad colors.”
Then they all heard it. Something was in the clearing, something big, and it was throwing things.
Arbid’s father did what any woodsman would have done: he grabbed his axe and went to the door to see what was there. “Ogre!” he half-gasped, half-shouted before turning to command his family to stay put. Then he stepped outside, screaming “Go away you foul beast!” He punctuated this command by waving his axe about him in a threatening manner.
It was a big ogre, at least a head and a half taller than him, but his family—
He stepped forward, and the ogre growled “Grgldrgrd. N-Drgrd!”at him as it approached.
“Get away!” Arbid’s father cried, menacing the creature with his axe. “Scat, you foul beast!”
But the foul beast didn’t scat. Instead, it came at him, and—
That was when Arbid’s father noticed the stench.