black mambo [fiamette]

Nagendra was at a loss here. Excited, but at a loss. All the places he’d happened upon were so interesting, so wild! This was no exception. It was unexplainable, really. Before him was a very hilly terrain, interrupted frequently by sudden drops and crumpled earth, like some giant had pummeled the ground. Besides the hills, it seemed rather empty. There was brittle grass, turned dull gold in winter’s wake, and occasionally a few trees. Some of them were toppled, their thick roots vengefully tearing up the earth below. Had there been a bad storm recently? A very strange one, that beat the ground as much as it did the trees? Or maybe the ground was unstable. Nagendra was intrigued.

While he felt that it was probably dangerous to explore as place so strange – someplace he could make neither heads nor tails of – he just had to. Maybe he wouldn’t go too far in. Glancing this way and that with a restless, eager stare, the brown wolf trotted in gaily. First he headed towards the nearest intact hill. It wasn’t tall, and in mere moments he stood atop its nicely rounded crest. From there he could see farther along. There was a downed tree up ahead, the earth ripped out in a sizeable chunk where it had attempted to survive. Near that, there seemed to be a crack in the ground, splitting apart a few feet wide and giving way to fine, crumbling dirt. It was a rather long split,  zigzagging along like lightning across the ground. What in the world had done that?