The Striders

20250529

Prompt from DailyPrompt.com

It was a dangerous thing, living so close to… Them. The Striders. Whatever they touched changed. Impassible walls sprouted, holes you couldn’t dig out of appeared without warning, and those cutting webs were everywhere.
“We should have left when they first appeared on the horizon.” The elders bemoaned, shaking their heads and scrubbing their ears. Always followed by a million excuses why they hadn’t.
And now it was too late. Miles of rock and stinky tracks stretched further than you could travel in two days.
Acorn sniffed at the air outside the burrow. Trying to shift through the many Strider and Barker scents and figure out how old the most recent was.
Then Stripe pushed past and brazenly lolloped into the open.
“What are you doing?? I think there’s a-”
“It’s that old spotty one.” Stripe’s tone dripped disinterest. “He never tries to chase anyone. And his Strider never takes him off the leash anyway.”
Acorn shook his head. Stripe’s father has escaped from Striders, and Stripe seemed to think that made him an expert on the mysterious, fickle creatures. No matter how many close calls he had, he refused to accept that nobody could understand them.
Like, he insisted that Striders weren’t immortal; that they grew old and died. Even when the elders pointed out particular Striders who’d been passing by the warren regularly since time immemorial, Stripe refused to listen.
He was going to end up crushed by a Roarer or torn apart by a Barker, one of these days.
As if to prove this point, Stripe paused his nibbling and announced “I’m going down to that garden. Want to come?”
“‘Garden’? You mean… inside the walls?”
“This one has a hedge. Easy to get in and out.”
“What about Barkers?”
“The Striders there don’t have Barkers. And they put out food for me.”
“What? Why?”
“Dunno.” Stripe’s disinterest was bewildering.
Acorn huffed, exasperated. “You’ve got your father’s bad blood, for sure. You’ll end up back in a box!”
That earned him a snoutful of claw. “Humph! Moulder here squabbling over the same pissed-on clover patches, if you want. Everyone knows we can’t go on like this. You’re all just too cowardly to admit it.”
“W-well, what else can we do? You want to risk your tail dodging Striders and Barkers and Foxes?”
Stripe was silent for a moment. His whiskers trembling furiously.
Finally he spoke. “I’m trying to figure them out. Some of them… some of them I swear are almost animals. They listen. They try to understand.”
“Striders? Animals?” Acorn snorted. “Next you’ll try and befriend Roarers!”
“No. Those aren’t animals.” Stripe’s words were slow. Deliberate. “I think… I’ve seen Striders go inside the Roarers. I think Roarers are dens. That move around.”
“Dens that…?”
Acorn had always wondered what led to rabbits being captured by Striders, rather than killed. Now he was wondering if it was this madness, or if the madness was the result of being trapped with such bizarre creatures.

Prompt was “Write a short story where humans are the mythical beings”.
[Yes, Watership Down was a childhood favourite of mine. Though I did toy with a story from the perspective of a house spider. But those being solitary made it difficult to figure out the framework.]