Pick One

The ground had turned soft. The sludgy, cling-to-your-legs kind of soft from winter’s end, only aided by recent beaver activity, flooding previously dry lands. Rain had helped, and the sun had followed, baking the surface enough to crack open dried streambeds and forests alike. Where once the world had been frozen and brittle, now it crumbled beneath claws with satisfying give.

Gwenn was already halfway buried. Dirt flew behind her in wide sprays, her thick forelimbs shovelling through loam as her head bobbed with each energetic thrust. The noise was almost rhythmic. Scoop, toss, huff, repeat and from the look in her eye, she wasn’t about to stop soon. Her tail wagged with excitement, silt coated her snout, and she hummed in delight every time her digging claws hit something that wasn’t dirt.

Raze sat on a higher ledge, lounging with one leg propped up and the other hidden beneath his body, only a short distance away not to get hit in the crossfire of soft sediment thrown around. His expression hovered somewhere between disinterest and reluctant patience, but not cold enough to reveal the boredom he felt. The cryolophosaurus was a lean blade of a thing, dark where Gwenn was light, sharp where she was stubby. He blinked slowly, watching her carve a trench into the ground like a particularly enthusiastic mammoth.

“Are you actually digging up roots,” he spoke up and cocked his head to the side, “Or just looking to find the bottom of the world?”

Gwenn snorted an amused chuckle without turning, thinking he was jesting. “Neither! Just wait!”

“I am waiting,” he whined in a drawn-out tune, threatening to lean into a pout. “The only thing happening right now is you digging yourself a trench.”

Gwenn ignored his commentary for now and merely kept shoveling away at the ground. She has seen others do the same and wanted to show her carnivorous friend what can be found in the dirt. If she was just lucky enough to find the loot.

Before her companion thought of another quip, she let out a thrilled “Ha!” of triumph and nudged something out of the earth. A smooth geometric shape, half-covered in mud and debris but unmistakably not a mere stone or bone. A rough, cloudy hunk of quartz, large as a melon, catching sunlight in shy shimmers as she nosed it closer to him.

“See?” she said, proud and grinning. “The dirt’s full of these!”

Instead of speaking up immediately how unimpressed he was, Raze rose from his sprawl, just a tad curious now despite himself. He paced closer, eyes squinting at the dull shimmer of the pale chunk of crystal. Tilting his head to one side then the other, he inspected the mineral. Then he scoffed, something resembling a disappointed huff rather than something with venom.

“It’s just a rock.”

“It isn’t just a rock,” Gwenn was quick to disagree, nudging the chunk of quartz forward once more. “It’s shiny, kinda like treasure, and makes a nice gift. It’s like finding buried sun.”

“Like finding buried sun,” Raze mouthed mockingly, but a faint smirk smuggled itself on his face. The fact that she meant it as a gift for him flew right over his head. “You’ve been spending too much time around streambeds and not enough watching your flanks.”

“Well…” She started and sat back in order to give him a look. She wasn’t quite offended, but simply amused how stubborn he has proven himself. “If you don’t want it, it just means I get to keep them all.”

“All? You’re not going to dig up any more of those, are you?” His tone was sceptical but tinged with curiosity. That’s ridiculous. There can’t possibly be more chunks of oddly angular crystals right beneath the surface. For what reason?

She didn’t answer with words. She flung her shoulder back into the dirt and resumed digging, claws scraping, tail wagging side to side. Now on his feet, Raze circled the pit as she worked, muttering under his breath about ridiculous hobbies and misplaced enthusiasm. But then she pulled up another piece of shining mineral. This one was rough, a tint of red, and half-embedded in clay. Jasper, perhaps. And then a lump of smoky grey with veins of white. A third, a fourth, little things with reflective surfaces beneath the mud, none of them perfectly clean or perfectly cut, but all catching light in ways that made Raze’s eyes linger.

She shoved the not-rocks onto a pile toward him with her beak, her smile never leaving even under the patches of dirt speckling her face. “Pick one.”

He blinked at her. “What?”

“I wasn’t serious when I said I’ll keep them all,” she chuckled. “Pick one. Or two.”

“I don’t have a need for rocks.”

Gwenn tilted her head with theatrical thoughtfulness, and a sigh. It's hard to tell if she pitied him, again, or was just fed up that he doesn’t play along. “You’re not supposed to eat them, Raze. They’re not useful, okay, but they are very pretty.”

Raze narrowed his eyes, suddenly more thoughtful than suspicious, but that didn’t stop him from retaliating as usual. “I won’t hold onto them anywhere. Where am I supposed to keep them? If I carry them around I am asking to get mugged-”

“You don’t have to carry them around. I am not bringing all those back to my herd either,” she cut in before he could bury himself in excuses. Creeping closer, she gave the minerals a nudge with her front limb, sending a few smaller ones rolling off the pile towards him. “Take one just for now. What catches your fancy? Which one do you like the most?”

He grumbled, his claws absentmindedly flexing in the air as if he could grasp an answer out of it. Then he stepped forward. Looking between the muddied rocks, he nudged a red-streaked stone with his snout and scooped it toward himself. “This one seems fine.”

Gwenn beamed immediately. It was a simple, pleased grin, one she wore more often than not, but it made her practically glow regardless.

The afternoon wore on like that. Gwenn dug, pausing now and then to unearth new glimmers of colour beneath the soil. Raze lounged, sometimes inspecting her finds, sometimes flipping them lazily into piles. Eventually, he tried digging too, thanks to Gwenn relentlessly egging him on. He shuffled through the dirt awkwardly at first, then with a little more focus once he hit something glassy and green that caught his eye. Gwenn, watching from her shallow pit, cheered him on with loud whoops, but he eventually resigned, saying that he’d leave the digging to her.

As the noon moved on and the dirt hardened under the sun’s scrutiny, it was time to stop for the day. The two sat side by side in a ring of half-cleaned gemstones and minerals, many still dirty, some set in clumsy arrangements. A few traded hands, and though Raze never admitted it, he kept two tucked behind a fallen log before they left, just in case.

The red he picked and the green he found.

(1189 words according to google docs)