Get onto the sled get onto the sled get onto the sled get onto the sled geT ONTO THE SLED NOW NOW NOW NOW
Great!
There we are, we were! All of us! You can’t listen to that kind of urgency without being commanded, or you get countermanded or commandeered. On! Up! Aboard!
The sleigh was a million cubits tall and five hundred cubits wide and the horses were exactly so. Very proportionate.
“go,” said the man with the extremely confident voice.
And on and on and CRACK and everyone started moving. Inch by inch in tugs, then in short slides, and then on and on and
‘woo,’ said the man with the extremely confident voice.
And everyone else agreed with him, sailing along, gloriously. “WOO!” they said. “WOO-WOO! CHUGGA CHUGGA!”
And why shouldn’t they? They were picking up speed! Over hills and over dales and through towns and over bridges and over houses and over people and on and on and on. Nobody wanted to get off, everyone wanted to get on or at least get out of the way WOOOOOOO! Some people pointed out that the runners were catching fire but they were killjoy pricks and who cared? Take the ramp! Ramp it! Yessssss
I was born around here –>
The sleigh landed with a crunch after the sweet ramp jump and both the runners broke off at the base and started grinding the passengers on the bottom into shreds, which mixed with the snow in a really unsettling and colourful way.
‘better speed up’ said the man with the extremely confident voice.
“YEAY!” hollered everyone who wasn’t being pulped and they picked up their possessions and shoved them into the morass of increasingly desperate bodies beneath them and stamped on ‘em real hard with hands and feet and teeth and furious optimism. “RISING TIDE RISING TIDE WOO WOO WOO”
(Or maybe here?)
“We could probably fix the runners if we slowed down or maybe even stopped” said some joyless fuck who was shoved under the sleigh to many cheers and the applause of all. The whole thing jerked as they went under and a few hanger-ons went flying and hit trees which fell over and stopped living just like everything else.
The sky was curdling like, shit, month-old milk or something? Or clotted cream. Rotten cream cheese? Fuck, who knew! Blood was filling the air and it was getting hard to tell if it was from the spray below or the sky was starting to blizzard it. Also the air was getting colder. Started to boil in your mouth like it was a tea kettle.
KABOOM the left horse’s heart POPPED out of its CHEST just like THAT and shot into the snow like an artillery shell, detonating red snow in a mushroom cloud. The other horse staggered and wheezed and each leg ran in a different direction before the sleigh caught it and barrelled it forwards as it kicked in the air.
Aaaaaaiiiiiiiieieeeeeeeee went the wind, just the wind. Everyone underfoot was extremely quiet, even as the sleigh accelerated. Wow that was a big hill we were headed for. Covered in rocks.
“RAMP IT RAMP IT RAMP IT TAKE US HIGH!” shouted everyone on top and dang they were hard to hear now.
And as the winds circled into a screaming cyclone and the warm slush of bloody snow lapped around my ankles, I found myself saying aloud “maybe we should do something else? Or stop?”
Immediately five hundred eyes were looking at me and I wished I hadn’t said anything because they all belonged to the man with the extremely confident voice, who picked me up in the palm of his brain and said
‘no. you idiot clown moron why would you think these stupid things. you will live out your life as an insignificant component of this extremely unsubtle blind idiot’s metaphor and you will learn to like it.’
“Oh good,” I said. Felt way better after that. Good to know where you stand, especially when you’re ankle deep in ribcages and torn debris. And then the runners caught my foot and dragged me under, where I died very slowly and painfully alongside everyone else who hadn’t already been turned into slushee material.