D: L&L - Part 26 | Narrator: Feast or Famine

The miniature metal men had not even seen the shadows move before it was too late.  They were focused on the ice and snow of the pass, focused on the screech of the wind off the cliffs, focused on the black behemoth looming before them.

The shadows had crept out from between the very stones that formed the castle walls.  Like ghostly demons, they came on over the grimy, gray snow like a pack of wolves.  Warm mist from their broad nostrils plumed under the cloud-shrouded moon, the branches of the dead wood casting eerie shadows across their path.

Their target was true, the scent pure.  It wasn’t oil and grease they tracked.  It wasn’t the sound of moving gears or shifting metal.  It wasn’t the tramp of small feet in failed unison over packed snow and rock.  None of these things were detectable to the black shapes as they came on over the ice, racing to gorge themselves.  As they neared the little army, the scent that drove them, the very essence they fed on, grew stronger and stronger, emboldening them to propel themselves faster and let loose their shrill cries of hunger.

Such a feast could not be remembered in recent years.  The pass, once well-traveled after the passing of the Powerful One, was eventually abandoned to ice and snow.  The shadows were their own worst enemies as word that the passes of Kiamo Ko were truly haunted and fraught with peril trickled down to the flatlands below.  The blue-skinned Winkies had turned to Kumbricia’s Pass far to the south as they had during the time of the Powerful One, leaving the castle’s environs choked with desperate hunger.

Before long, they didn’t venture out of the fortress, keeping to the deep sub-basements and dungeons, ferreting out the small animals that happened into the black voids.  But this meager sustenance was never satisfying, the hunger of the shadows never satiated.  Always there was the memory of the glorious meals from days gone by, the screams of the dying an aria of terrific terror.

When the little TikTok platoon had tramped to the edges of the Haunted Forest, that heady scent permeated the air again, wafting succulent through the dead branches and over the towering walls of Kiamo Ko.  Nostrils flared and tongues lapped at the luscious aroma, promising a mighty banquet if only they would venture beyond the walls again and devour it.

At a gallop, they burst through the castle walls, black on black, shadow of a shadow, to the edge of the wood where the tiny men converged, and when they burst on them screaming their songs of despair, the little toys trembled and spilled their exquisite bounty of fear into the air, a feast of unnatural horror.