The Oddity in the Hills (part 1)

Everybody knows, in a general way, that the finest place in the world is wherever you are going, if you want to leave, or wherever you're from, if you want to return. It is rare to find a place where you are currently perfectly happy, because you rarely realize you were happy until something changes and leaves you lightly bereft.

There were once - and likely, still are, as this is not an old story - hills that rolled from gold to green, their idyllic roundness broken only by the typical things: clasping trees, tenacious shrubs, and, perhaps, quiet rocks. If you wandered far, you might be surprised by little brooks that would occasionally appear, only to vanish again into rivers the earth had swallowed centuries before. Hares and voles frolicked through tall flowers, aware and yet unbothered that they were under the hungry eyes of fox and hawk. Birds circled and fell, dipping and swooping and feasting until they, too, became the prey.

In this simple land, these singing hills, you could find a community…of sorts. Gossips, busybodies, jack-a-napes - every sort of sort could be found in these hills. Quiet but catty, brash yet demure. Quick to offend, quicker to recant it when the other took offense, and frequently just as quick to forgive. It was a normal place, a herd where nothing out of the ordinary happened. A place that prided themselves on their normalcy, prided themselves on having found the “correctness” of the world. Of course no rabbits lived on the hills, of course no fish lived in the brooks, of course no one remembered when they’d last seen someone new, or whether time was passing, or why the cabbage roses always bloomed.

It would be a mistake, of course, to say that every member of the community - the herd - was perfectly happy. There was no need to strive for happiness, especially when one’s happiness might come at another’s discontent. If anyone knew, the gossips would peep about the number who wondered if there was happiness to be found elsewhere, but no one was willing to disrupt the group’s peace and security.

On one sunny day in May, a day just the same as the day before (and should have been the same as three days after), the hares stopped and noticed the watching fox and hawk. Some might note that they were, rather, noticing someone new, but we all know that there is never, ever anyone new, and - oh. Well. Apparently, on this day, there was.

He was handsome - a brown deep enough to drown your mornings in and softened by patches of creamy white. Strong and elegant, a body that was used to moving and could tell stories about the distance he’d traveled in its lines. Green eyes filled with mirth took in the landscape - the hills, the trees, the voles, the herd - as though the entirety of the world was a joke, but this was no laughing matter! This was a community of good, upstanding citizens, who bickered but never fought and smiled but never loved. There was nothing about their contented lives to laugh at, but that’s what he seemed intent on doing.

While the all hares immediately noticed - the voles were much slower on the uptake, as they were so very short and the flowers were so very tall - the members of the herd realized he watched them in pieces. One or two, then more, then many, until a whisper could be heard, crackling through the air like a wildfire. There was no need for someone new, especially not one who looked to want to smile. Once the whisper burned through the lot of them, silence fell, absolute to those who were so used to the normal noises of the hills that they no longer heard them. For his credit, the handsome stallion didn’t make another move, merely standing and watching and, perhaps, silently laughing.

Slowly, so slowly, life came back to the hills - a vole had ran into a hare, spooking her into a giddy gallop to relieve the tension carried in her body, and the community breathed a sigh of relief to remember that yes, of course, we have no rabbits here. The world is the same, and normal, and fine, and the stranger must not matter. If he mattered, then, perhaps, individual members of the herd mattered, and that would change the entirety of the world. And maybe, just maybe, it would mean that they had always individually mattered and they should never have settled to live this way at all.

They went back to rushing about, and if they were a little too frantic, a little too “I really must be off,”, well… who would say? They all were, and so no one was, and everything was correct.

Everything, except for one small eddy in the stream of bodies, a snag in the vein of acceptable communal mediocrity. At its heart was a mare, striped and splashed and a lovely gray, with eyes the color of ice. Mandella had noticed the noticing, had felt the tension cresting into a “I promise that I’m walking” rush above, but she could not follow it. While she knew the area itself near-perfectly and knew the movements of her companions well enough to navigate without help, her unseeing eyes lent little support for unpredictable change. Slowly, carefully, like a leaf trying to leave a whirlpool, she edged in a direction that held less noise and, likely, less movement.

Finally surrounded by nothing more than one of the hidden brooks, Mandella sighed, counting slowly until her heartbeat was at a trot rather than a gallop. She had never known sight, and rarely found issue when everyone did as everyone always had done, but she had little practice with responding to chaos, and responding differently than everyone else was simply not done. She couldn’t admit that there had been a moment and more of terror, that her mind was still racing as to what she didn’t know had happened, that she still wasn’t okay.

“That was odd,” a warm voice spoke, nearer than she would have liked, but it was a distance she would’ve expected to accept from almost anyone. She hadn’t heard him approach over the thunder of her heart nor the water, and it was only by pure force of will that she didn’t shy away from him. “Do you know what happened?”

She shook her head, leaning away from him slightly. She hadn’t noticed if she knew the voice, because, well, of course she did! She knew everyone, and there was no one new - if they sounded different, they must simply sound different. “Perhaps they saw a storm coming?” she said, trying to be helpful. She couldn’t feel any change of natural energy along the air, so it seemed unlikely, but any other option was nigh unthinkable. 

He made a noise that intoned doubt, and she fought the urge to bare her teeth against him. “Hmmm… I don’t believe that there is even a cloud in the sky. But perhaps those who live here understand the weather better than I!”

“It doesn’t feel like a storm,” she admitted before his words caught up to her and it felt like the world was spinning on without her. “You - you don’t live here?” She couldn’t control the ascending pitch of her voice, and it was nearing a squeak by the time she finished. “I’ve never met someone who doesn’t live here. I didn’t know there were people in the world who did not live here.” If she had really been thinking of her words, Mandella would likely have realized that of course there must be others, for her herd was very small.