For https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-406-5-minute-freewrite-friday-prompt-the-end
"The End," Chanbun bounced Basil on her knee as she finished the story.
"What?!" howled Basil. "That's not the end to any kind of story. There were loads of endings in the story. Loads of them, but that's not one. That's just a beginning."
Chanbun chuckled. She reach out for the mug of bitter mead sitting on her hard oak table. It was never too early for bitter mead. It started days as well as it ended them. "That's what life is, kiddo. The endings happen in the middle and the end is a beginning."
"No." Basil knew when he was learning a lesson and he wouldn't have it. Not on a special morning with Aunty Chanbun. Not when he'd had jam for breakfast. She wasn't going to ruin it with a dumb story that ended at a beginning.
"You tell it, then." Chanbun was cleverer than her neffy gave her credit for.
"I will!"
The capybara looked back at her brethren. The rodents had purpose. What that purpose was, they perhaps couldn't easily describe, but they knew they had an important purpose, because the arbiter had been guiding them every step of they way. They were gathering nuts and seeds, and even sometimes whole saplings that they brought back to her and her wife.
The arbiter was so bold. She told the Long Legs to leave them all alone and it did, even though it seemed poised and posed to eat the capybara as she lumbered past. Arbiters weren't supposed to interfere with the natural order of predator and prey, but the capybara wouldn't have been there then if she hadn't been following the arbiter anyways. The Long Legs didn't help them, but neither did she hinder them. She just watched them all pass by.
From ahead, the capybara watched the sea of enthusiastic squirrel faces as they discovered a treasure trove of nuts one of their kind had buried and forgotten about. The arbiter let them all stop... Let them? They could stop and give up any time if they wanted to. She wasn't forcing them to do anything, but she encouraged them all to stop, and she parceled out the nuts for eating. They were mainly acorns, which she'd collected a lot of, but even though she'd collected a lot of that species of nut, she still took a few from the stash and added them in. The capybara couldn't guess what an arbiter who was an elf needed with so many nuts, but she trusted her and even trusted her wife, who smelled like she knew sheep, even though the capybara had never seen her with a sheep.
They finally got the parceling to the capybara. And boy oh boy, these acorns tasted better than acorns usually tasted. In fact, the capybara didn't remember tasting acorns before. She'd certainly eaten acorns before, but she couldn't remember really TASTING them. Oh. Of course, realized the capybara. I've been given access to a little more of my brain power. This is activating my ability to enjoy my senses, isn't it? I'm not just eating these acorns for sustenance. Though they're necessary for that purpose, too. I'm eating them because I LIKE them. I am having some trouble remembering what it was like to be me when I wasn't around the arbiter, though. At least I won't miss it when I go back to being a dumb animal. That's not fair... not dumb, just less... or, to put it positively, more naturally a part of the wild world.
They whole troupe of rodents and their people slept there for the night.
In the morning, rodents and people were damp but warm, having lent their body heat each to the others.
"Today, we enter the town. If they act the way I hope they act, there will be no trouble. But humans are a violent, volatile, fragile bunch. You may defend yourself, but only against an individual who does us intentional harm. If you're unsure, follow my lead." A rat had appointed itself the speaker for the arbiter, and it had a very very very very officious tone. It seemed very very very into its own power trip. Of course, it, like the others, would lose this personality if and when the arbiter stopped lending her strength of mana to them. For the moment, however, it was who it was.
The capybara saw a pillar of chimney smoke through a gap in the trees, white against a blue sky, The orange of the clouds at sunrise almost tricked the capybara into believing they were on fire, and the smoke from the chimney was actually the clouds smoking down. But that cleverness from the arbiter reminded her that smoke went up, not down, and so she knew.
Only a few minutes of walking brought them to the first buildings. There, no one was stirring. It seemed as if this was the part of town that slept through sunrises. There was no way to tell if people were in these buildings or not. Maybe they were abandoned buildings... no, wait, that chimney smoke meant that people had started a fire. They did that to keep warm because they didn't know how to cuddle properly to share body warmth with each other.
The arbiter strode forward, ever forward, and the amassed rodents followed her, some of them clutching seeds and nuts in their cheeks, waiting to find out what they were going to do with them if not eat them.
When they arrived in the center of town, it was clear that the town was not deserted. In fact, Morraw was bustling at a few minutes after sunrise in the center of town. There were dozens of tents under which merchants sat and sold merchandise. Some even offered roasted nuts... were they here just to sell nuts to merchants? That didn't seem like a good use of the powers of an arbiter nor of a squirrel army to the capybara, but it wasn't her job to question the arbiter.
"MORRAW!" the arbiter abruptly cut through the din of sound with her own din. "Cities have had their chance. You have taken more than you are permitted, though. The forest takes back what is hers." With that, the arbiter threw the nuts and seeds she had collected in a wide arc. Her partner, standing at the back of the host of rodents likewise threw a bundle of seeds and nuts, in as scattered a fashion as she could manage dramatically. The rodents who were holding some themselves did the same. Most in a time, a few to slow as each seed or nut sprouted and began growing, thick, long, green, roots that didn't quite make it to the ground tangled some furs on their way down.
Some clever soul had the bright idea to stomp on a seed after he overcame his shock. He found his foot on the outside of a 2 inch wooden tree that grew wider by the instant. It did split his foot in two eventually, but not until his blood had fed the tree.
"Whoops," the capybara heard a voice behind her. It was... familiar.
The capybara, alone amidst this chaos seeming to have heard or seen this woman was both surprised and unsurprised. Surprised because this was the voice of the arbiter, he thought, but the arbiter was commanding the chaos, yelling, occasionally fighting. and this person was standing calmly in the ever-growing forest. She looked different, too. But the capybara was unsurprised because something had been different about this arbiter this time. She'd looked the same and sounded the same as the first time the capybara had encountered her, but she hadn't LOOKED the same nor SOUNDED the same. She'd been missing some essential part of her somehow.
This simple "whoops" was what she'd been missing. The capybara trotted over to the possessor of this voice that said whoops. The young woman who had said it looked down and now said, "I saw you let yourself be used as a pillow once, didn't I? You're kind. I kind of think that's what Jan is missing. She has passion and love, but she's missing a bit of... no, not kindness. mercy? well yes, but more generally understanding. Understanding and restraint. Or at least a willingness to give diplomacy a try. Well, whatever it is, I guess we need to give it to her."
Then the capybara waddled alongside this new old familiar face, or rather, new old familiar speaker, as she crossed through the chaos to Lavender, who, upon looking into her eyes, smiled, as if the burden of dying alone had been lifted from her. Together they waded through the sheep of rodents to Jan.
Janice put her hand on Jan. They both put their hands on Lavender. The trees slowed their incredible growth speeds, though not to "normal" just to "less aggressively dangerous".
Together the three walked into the town hall they bordered the square. It was also the mayor's residence. They were on their way to explain why what had happened was going to keep happening and how the town could either live in the midst of the forest or would find itself on the wrong side of the world.
"You rushed a bit at the end of the end," Chanbun told her little neffy.
"The rest is boring people talking stuff." Basil told her.
Chanbun chuckled as she drank more mead that was bitter. The chuckling made it spill out the sides of her mouth a little. "That makes sense. I find those bits tedious, too. But what happened with Lavender? Did she divorce Jan to marry Janice?"
The little boy shook his head, "NO. Why would she do that? Jan is the coolest. She can fight and do magic and talk to squirrels. No, they're all in love with each other, kind of. Jan and Janice aren't in love exactly, but they complement each other nicely. Their compliments are very nice to each other."
"Ah. Aha." Chanbun leaned back in her seat, "and the capybara?"
"Oh, she lives with them and is sometimes a pillow."
"What about the man whose foot was split in two?"
"Huh? I dunno. Why are you asking me so many questions, Aunty Chanbun?" Basil's voice and face dropped. His eyebrows got a little wrinkle between them and he seemed peeved and frustrated in the second half of the instant that he'd started very proud of himself.
"Oh, I just figured this was the middle. It doesn't seem like an ending yet." Chanbun had begun slicing a summer sausage into bite-sized chunks and feeding it to Coriander's cat, who had taken a liking to the detritus that always seemed to accumulate on mornings when Parsley dropped Basil off at Chanbun's place.
"No, it's the end. The rest is boring stuff." Basil said certain words, His tone belied his uncertainty, though. "What if I say, 'The End' does that make it the end then?"
"It could," Chanbun allowed, "but it might also be the beginning. That's how this story began. It began with the ending of the previous story. So much happens in Morraw."
"Nothing anymore, now it's all forest."
"You don't think anything happens in the forest? After all the treasures we've found in the forest near our place on our own?" Chanbun was letting the cat's rough tongue lick her finger.
"Well, those are different. You put those treasures there."
"Oh, you're a clever one. Well even if I did, doesn't that mean that someone else might be putting treasures in the forest, too?"
"Aunty, can I put Grandmom's cat now?"
"Yes, dear." Chanbun moved her finger from in front of the cat's face slowly, the cat followed the finger and hopped down from the table, down from the chair, onto the floor and to a nice cozy spot where a capybara made a nice pillow for Basil to lean against while he petted the cat.
The End.