He awoke with a start when a fly buzzed by his nose. It was morning! When had he fallen asleep? The rain had stopped sometime during the night and the sun was now shining brightly.
He squirmed out of the log and looked down at himself. He was a mess. He was caked in mud from the waist down and bits of bark and moss were embedded in his fur from his time in the log. He tried to brush off what he could, but he would need a good bath when he got home.
Home. He’d been so sure he would never see it again last night. He thought back to the events of the night before. Had it all been a dream? He looked around for evidence that it had actually happened. It didn’t take long. There in the mud where the monster had stood were footprints. They were misshapen and seemed to match the monster’s uneven pace. They came from the northeast to the closest point to the log and then turned away towards the west.
There was no way he was going to follow the monster, but he relatively felt safe in backtracking to see where the metallic beast had come from. Carefully he made his way along. The mud was still quite thick in places and progress was slow. As he walked he noticed that there was no vegetation here, no grass, and no trees. It was a wasteland. He imagined that when the ground dried, it would be cracked.
The desolation stretched ahead of him. A forgotten piece of lore flashed in his mind. Long ago, to the south of Bree, there was a colony that had fallen. Nobody remembered its name now, but so the story went, nothing would grow there anymore. For a time, the surrounding colonies used this place as a dumping ground for broken items. But strange events were said to have happened there and now everyone was afraid to go near.
Everyone except for tinkers that is. More than one fur had reported seeing a tinker heading in the direction of the dumping ground. In each story, the tinker was invariably broken in some way or its spring-core was noticeably winding down. The romantic notion was that they were heading towards the place where all tinkers go to die.
Tinkers. Was the monster he’d seen the night before a tinker? It seemed impossible; a tinker that size was beyond even the most skilled of crafters. Beyond him at any rate, and he considered himself to be among the elite. Though if not a tinker, then what? A moving metallic construct like that had to be mechanical. While he hoped to never again encounter the beast, it tickled his curiosity.
He walked on. There were no discernable landmarks to gauge his location, but he was sure he was close to the dumping ground. He was walking on an incline now. Beyond this ridge then?