The World Walkers: Oonagh: A Pregnant Pot

[k_a_webb]

This is easily the weirdest story I’ve written. Written for LJ user ysabetwordsmith’s prompt: the story of the pregnant pot.

One pot started walking. The fae got scared of the clay they were using and stored everything else they’d made, because they didn’t know what was going to happen. It was understandable. As a race the fae were terrified of anything they couldn’t control. If they knew that Athare was sentient they’d probably have left the world behind, but Athare understood the fae better than they understood themselves. Any changes Athare made were done over time, so they looked like natural evolution, and the fae never suspected anything.

It was the other races who realised that life clay was useful. They insisted that that fae took their pots out of storage, because a pot made from life clay could do anything. At first the fae resisted, but eventually, unhappily, they gave in, although none of them would go anywhere near the store. When the door was opened Oonagh was glad they hadn’t. Five pots had been made. She’d expected that the one that moved wouldn’t be on the shelf. She hadn’t expected there to be more than five pots.

The floor was covered in shards of pot. As Oonagh stepped into the room she tried her best not to stand on them. Six pots were walking around, each carrying another pot, looking very much like they were taking the pots to put in spaces on one of the shelves. Most of the shelves were full with a mix of different pots. Biting on her lip she looked around the room, trying to work out what had happened. It wasn’t until she noticed a seventh pot, walking towards another pot that looked… She tilted her head to one side, unable to believe what she was thinking. The pot looked pregnant.

Carefully Oonagh stepped towards the pots, trying even harder not to stand on any of the pots shards. If they were what she thought they were she didn’t want to stand on them. She wished she could simply ask the pots what had happened, but that was impossible because they didn’t have mouths, even though they were obviously more magical that the fae thought they were. Kneeling down she watched as the pregnant pot… It could only be described as giving birth, although it was very different to a mammal giving birth. While she watched she wondered why the pots didn’t give birth to eggs rather than live young, which was a very strange thought to have.

When she tried to describe what she’d watched it was the hardest thing to do. The mother pot seemed to literally squeeze the baby pot out of it’s clay. Oonagh had never seen anything like it before and she was certain she didn’t want to see anything like it again. It took almost half an hour for the baby pot to be fully formed, much smaller than the mother pot, which was when the walking pot took it over to a shelf she hadn’t noticed before. On it were twelve baby pots, each one a little bigger than the one before.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.