Every year, the half-people come.
You have seen them, so I do not need to tell you how ridiculous they look, stunted growth and twisted bodies, little more than a set of hind legs and a head, the body in between barely useful enough to warrant the name. They are big, a giant to any of the folk, but they have never learned how to use their size for anything but to make noise.
Their speech is just as clumsy. They rely on long and warbled strings of noise to convey messages the folk can send across the night with a simple vibration of the throat. I cannot understand it, but I have grown used to hearing it boom across the island.
“Medeltidsveckan, så jävla gött! Göm era döttrar och boskap, för här kommer pråjsarna!”
“Bira bira bira, mjöd mjöd sprit!”
I have come to understand that they come here to play and do mock battle. They play to remember a time of the past, hundreds of moons long gone, far beyond the lives of any lineage of the folk. For all I can see, from the coloured shapes the half-people have learned to somehow claw on walls, that time was sad and dark, where they lived in a manner closer to the folk, with less layers of fake fur, less walls to shield them, sometimes hunting or scrounging for food. But unlike us, they were never good at it. So they died. And clawed each other to death.
They do live a long, long time, the half-people. Probably because it takes them so long to learn from their follies.
So they trot all across this sea-born land. They grin and sing, dance and prance and leap, drink of the water that smells like burning and tastes like urine and cold fire, sleep, eat, make water fall from their eyes, lick each other clean and grind and twist together, not that different from how we do it. But with far less biting. Most of the time.
And the folk watches them from the shadows, just as we do with the half-people who live here for more than just a few nights each year. Just as we have always done with the half-people. They believe we are content to come into the warmth of their walls and sit by their fires. We do that. We even enjoy it. Often far more than we care to show. But if they ever knew that for every folk who sleep in their laps, another pride watches them from the shadows, poised to strike should they ever push us from their laps and hearths with violence, they would never again think us harmless.
At first, I believed they were destructive, seething with hidden rage and hate. Not thanks to any actions on their part, but because of what they always seemed to bring.
For when they come, full of hope, and joy, and expectation, and wonder...
Something else comes through.
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