Common

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity... "

"...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Darwin angled her head, staring at his offered nose like it was some kind of puzzle that needed puzzling. After a pregnant pause, she poked her whiskery, smoke-colored nose at him, inhaling loudly. He didn’t smell offensive, and therefore that meant he was safe. Darwin had no reason to doubt the honesty of smells. Either way, she took a step forward, eyeballing him curiously (if he tried anything funny-!) as she did so.

“Your granddam sounds like a smart lady,’ said Darwin, looking around Solomon as if she expected said grandparent to materialize behind him. Apparently not.

“Imagine meeting giant bees,’ she exclaimed, her voice overcome with excitement again. She fell silent, caught up in imagining the bees and wondering if and how something so gigantic to cause Earthstomps could fly. Darwin wasn’t big on mythos, but that seemed like the only explanation…

“Maybe it’s a good thing you're here now, Neala… it sounds like you escaped just in time!” It didn’t occur to Darwin that maybe the smaller mare didn’t want to be separated from her family, even if they may have faced certain death.

She decided now was as good a time as any to interject her own story, or at least part of it. She wouldn’t include the tortoises, though. They were her secret, and they’d asked her to keep it.

“I went swimming one day off the mainland. You see, I’d found a massive parrotfish--so big you could hear him munching on coral from above the waves--and he took me out into deeper water, eventually leading me here.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it did omit several key points…

And no one but her would be the wiser.

DARWIN | | | | | | | |