Tribes of the wasp rider.., p.1
Tribes of the Wasp Riders: A Post-Apocalypse Fable First Chronicle, page 1
Tribes
of the
Wasp Riders
A Post-Apocalypse Fable
First Chronicle
A.C. Foster
Copyright © 2025 by A.C. Foster
This story is a creation of the author’s imagination and is only intended for entertainment purposes. Occasional references may be made to actual historical persons or events however, their involvement in this work of fiction is just that, fictitious.
No part of this book may be used, copied or reproduced without the written permission of the author except for selected passages as is customary in critical reviews and commentaries
One’s and Zero’s Publishing
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9987348-5-9
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
EPILOG
1
Awareness. The world. I was before. I am again. These were my first thoughts. This is my purpose. There was nothing before now. Air to breathe. Warmth from the sun. A sky above. Earth below. Touch. Taste. Hear. These thoughts, these sensations, I knew they were not new things discovered. They were old things never experienced. Walking. Learning how legs moved, how balance came. Each instance of my awareness brought a hundred new understandings of things required to know. I fell and learned to stand. I closed my eyes and thought and in doing so, became a sentient being. I moved again. It was the intended way. I knew this not by thought or direction. It was something understood. Not an instruction. It was an intent. Going meant there was a destination and destination meant I had an origin. I stopped walking, closed my eyes on a world I did not recognize yet understood it was reality. The world was a place and I was a part of it. Looking into this new awareness of place and structure, nothing was understood. A great blankness surrounded me; of things I would know but didn’t yet.
I dusted sand off my hands. Sand, a type of dirt, and looked down to watch the grains fall back to where they came from. My body was naked. Why was that? Had I removed my clothing? I tried to recall what I was wearing or should be wearing, but all I could see in my mind’s eye was a fog of nothingness. Was this a beach? The sand was dry and powdery and white as sugar.
Sugar. Something sweet, a taste I understood even though I had never experienced it.
The fog that surrounded my awareness was still there, but as I noticed the world around me, it became thinner; more gossamer.
Trees. A forest. A sky with no clouds. Water beside me. A lake of cold water reflecting bright sunlight into my eyes.
I kept walking. It wasn’t an instruction, to walk. It was something different. A purpose. It was a purpose inside me although I did not know from where this requirement to move came from. Sounds came to me. Birds. Leaves rustling in a breeze. Small waves washing upon the shore. A buzz of unseen insects. Interpretations of these sounds registered inside me. I knew them for what they were, even though never had I heard them before.
There were questions I needed to ask myself, but I didn’t know what they were. My hand rubbed my face. I was clean shaven realizing with that touch, until that moment, I had no idea whether I was shaved or bearded. Touching my skull, I felt smooth skin. When I looked down my body, there was no hair at all anywhere. I stopped walking again. My chest was heaving, sucking in great lungfuls of air. Was it fatigue or excitement causing my heart to pound in my chest and my lungs to labor? I turned to look at my footprints. The sand looked like it was marked by the passage of a giant ant across a monstrously huge pile of spilled sugar. The ant’s marks, my marks, stretched on and on along the shore of the lake for as far as I could see. I looked at my ant tracks in the sand.
Origin lay in that direction. Should I go back?
No, the directive or feeling, the desire to go did not lead that way. There were no words telling me this. I did not know words.
Destination.
I turned away from the way behind and kept going the way I was before. Forward.
Was I hungry? No. Had I eaten? I didn’t know. Was I thirsty? My mouth was dry, but I remembered no thirst.
The lakeshore fell away behind me as a thousand new understandings planted themselves in my awareness. Every step, I became a more sentient being.
I wandered searching, trying to determine why I had this feeling of destination. I went in no particular direction. I had no direction to choose. All I knew was my purpose was not to stay where I was.
I came upon a path worn smooth in the earth. Other feet made that path. Go that way, something inside me said. Find…something. Find what? A difference? Purposed for being? Did not all sentient beings have a reason to exist?
The path ran along the sides of trees with trunks so large my arms couldn’t reach halfway around them. Giants they were stretching high and tall above me. Their leaves made a shadow of the earth; an earth beneath my feet that changed from white sand to gray black dirt. My path through the forest grew steeper. The lake vanished far behind me. Distance. Another thing experienced. I don’t know how long I walked along that forest path. Time itself was not part of my awareness. When the path at last leveled out at the top of a hill, I found myself in a meadow. The track I followed was not so distinct as it was before. Waist high plants with yellow and black flowers at their tops pulled and scratched at my legs. Something pressed itself into the bottom of my foot. I felt pain. A new sensation I didn’t know before. It was a thorn. I needed something. My brain struggled to find the words. I would know the words. Eventually. They were right there, the language I need to use, but that part of this new awareness hadn’t formed inside my mind. Not yet.
Something whistled. Not a bird sort of whistle and not really a whistle at all. More a whirring sound. I had no more thoughts about what whirring sounds meant before strings, some kind of cords attached to small rocks wrapped and tangled themselves around my legs.
“Got it,” a voice filled with triumph yelled from somewhere.
I heard more whirring right before more cords with small stones wrapped themselves around my arms and chests.
“Me too,” a second, different voice yelled.
Run, this newly sentient part of my awareness said. Run now. This is death discovered.
I lurched forward, my legs wrapped in a knot of cords, and fell face first into the yellow and black flowers.
I wanted to make sounds. To scream, to make sounds of warning or of fear but I didn’t know how such things were done. Stand. Get up. Untangle myself and prepare for…what? I didn’t know. When I managed to get to my knees, something, a blow, struck me in the middle of my back. I was once more face first in crushed yellow and black flowers. My arms were yanked behind me by someone. Something, more cords, was wrapped around my wrists. I couldn’t free my arms. Hands pulled at me, then rolled me over onto my back. I tried to yell again, but I couldn’t make the sound.
A being stood above me with eyes filled with amazement and something else. Pride? Satisfaction? Some unexplained part of me knew this thing looking down at me was the same species as me; that I was seeing something belonging to this world in the same way I did. It was also sentient. Another being joined the first. I looked from one to the other and back again. Some part of my awareness knew they were younger than me even though I was experiencing my first instances in this thing known as existence. I also knew this was incorrect. They could not be younger than me, and yet they were. Smaller than me, too. Shouldn’t that give me an advantage? I struggled, pulling at whatever was holding my wrist behind me, but my hands couldn’t work their way free. The beings stood where they were looking at me as I struggled; waiting for me to tire of the fight before they came closer. I looked at their clothes, leather and furs, the words coming into my awareness. They had blonde hair worn in complex braids under some kind of animal hide covered in red fur. Fox fur. I remembered the animal. A fox was a kind of dog. Close fitting leather leggings ran up their thighs. Each wore an identical leather vest tanned to a dark brown with a row of looped laces closing the front. The loops were far enough apart that behind them, inside the vest, I could see the swell of breasts. Not beings. That wasn’t the correct description although they were beings. Female humans. That was it. The opposite of me.
I listened as they spoke to each other.
Words.
I had no knowledge of words and yet, listening to their speech, I understood their meanings. There was something else, my eyes told me. Something I was looking at, but my brain didn’t understand completely.
“Are you the same?” I tried to say, hearing the question inside my head but not able to speak the words aloud. No, not the same. That was the wrong word. Twins. That was the word. “Twins,” I said, in a voice only I could hear. The one on my right spoke.
“See, I told you.”
They carried bows. The one who spoke kept an arrow resting on the string. The bows were taller than either female and made of a wood so dark it was almost black. I saw quivers of arrows with gray and black feathers. Bows. There w
“You were right. It is one of the cursed things and a big one. Look at the size of it. What’s it doing here?”
“Wandered off maybe?”
“Wandered off from where?”
The twin shrugged. “Who knows? What are we going to do with it?”
The other one pulled something dark and pointed from a belt wrapped around her waist. Stone, I realized. Stone that was shaped and pointed and set into a handle made of bone or polished wood. A thing like that was something used for cutting. Pain came from cutting. I remembered the thorn. Pain. The stone knife would make pain only far worse than what a thorn could do.
“I know what I’m going to do. I want my trophy,” the twin with the knife said. “My bolo caught it first.”
She dropped on top of me, her knee pressing hard against my chest.
“By two seconds,” the other said.
“Two seconds is two seconds. The trophy is mine. I’m going to be famous.”
I started to kick and thrash. With the bolo wrapped around my legs and my hands bound behind me and this female kneeling on my chest, there wasn’t much I could do.
“Be sure to cut it off as close to the base as you can,” the one still standing said. “Do you need me to hold its legs?”
“No, I’ve got it.”
I felt a hand wrap itself around my manhood and pull it out away from my body. I screamed a loud, soundless scream.
“Get it all,” the one standing said, using her fingers in case her directions were misunderstood. “Cut right along—”
The weight on my chest was gone. The woman kneeling on me jumped completely away from me. I looked at her hand, saw the stone knife in one fist and didn’t see the severed remains of my manhood in the other.
The twins looked at each other, looked at me twisting and turning amongst the yellow and black flowers then back at each other. One of them dropped her bow but didn’t seem to realize it.
“Under its cock,” the one without the knife in her hand said. “Those aren’t supposed to be there. Are they supposed to be there?”
The other one said, “Not possible. It can’t. Everyone knows this.”
She knelt on top of me the same way the other one had with her knee holding me flat against the crushed flowers. I felt her hand on my manhood, pulling and moving it up and down, left and right. I jumped and kicked with my bound feet when she pulled hard on my testicles. I felt a new kind of pain then. One sharper and deeper than that of a thorn in a foot.
The woman stood up. The one with the knife was nodding her head.
“Jewels. Both of them are there.”
She held out her hand, palm up, and fingers partly curled like she was holding a large stone.
“Sister, it has its jewels,” she said with something near to awe in her voice. She looked up at the cloudless sky as if searching for an answer in the blue expanse above her. “We aren’t going to be famous. We’re going to be a legend.”
The other one nodded, shoved her stone knife back into her belt and said, “I’ll get the horses.”
2
This was thirst. Like pain from the thorn or fear of the stone knife, I had a new awareness in me. My mouth was open, and I was gasping for breath. I wanted water. Vast amounts of water. My legs ached from the effort of trying to keep up. I had to keep to their pace. I had no choice. The two leather cords around my neck made certain keeping up wasn’t an option. It was a life or death requirement. Strangulation by being dragged by horses would be worse than the pain in my legs or the thirst. The cords chafed at my throat but were not so tight as to take away my air. At least not so long as I matched their speed. One cord led to the horse and rider on my left. The other to a different horse on my right. The twins, for that definitely was what they were, exact copies of each other, rode their horses just slow enough so that I could run between them without being choked beyond a reasonable amount. If I fell, the cords around my neck would strangle me until the horses stopped and I could get up again. I only fell once. I wouldn’t do it again no matter how much my thirst or how badly my legs ached. How far did we go like this, me running between the pair of them? I had no real measure of distance during this part of my existence, but it seemed like a great way to me. Certainly farther than my walk from the lake to the field of flowers. The horses took me through a stream that soaked me with water but never a drop was I able to drink. We kept going through brush and trees. My legs burned with the effort of keeping up. I didn’t look around me anymore. I was too tired. Even when I heard more voices, different ones than the two riding on their horses, I didn’t look up. The ground beneath my feet changed again. It was level now and mostly dirt with little hills every few steps whose only purpose was to make me stumble and nearly fall. I didn’t dare fall. If I did, I wasn’t sure I had the strength to rise again.
The cords jerked me forward. The horses never slowed.
I was going to collapse. My strength was gone. Did the riders intend to drag me to death? Were they waiting for me to fall and not get up?
Others were with me now. People ran beside me, calling questions and shouting words I couldn’t yet understand. I wanted to look at them; to see if they were being dragged to their deaths, too, but looking up was now beyond my strength.
We stopped. I sank to my knees in the dirt. I didn’t look up. I didn’t look at anything. I just tried to breathe.
“Open the gate,” I heard one of them shout. “The gate. Quick.”
Sounds. A horn blowing. Voices shouting. Some of the voices beside me. Some shouted from a distance.
“Up.”
I recognized the voice of the twin. The cord around my neck twitched. I managed to get to my feet before the horses started moving. They moved slower this time. I didn’t have to run, and I didn’t have to stumble over little dirt hills anymore. The ground beneath my feet changed to wood as the hooves of the horses made a clattering sound I hadn’t heard before.
I felt shade. Cool, blessed shade.
The sun’s warmth was gone from my back.
I heard laughter. I knew laughter, although I had never laughed.
The ropes around my neck stopped their constant pulling. Once more, I sagged to my knees. No more. I tried to say the words out loud, but the sound wouldn’t come. I couldn’t go anymore. No farther. I looked up to try and tell them I didn’t understand. I had no awareness of why they did this. I saw faces looking back at me. Not copies of the twins. Different faces. Old women with hair turned gray by time. A little girl sucking her thumb looked at me from behind her mother’s legs. There were women in leggings like the ones the twins wore, women in woolen smocks that stopped above their knees. Women who wore vests with the complicated laces and women who wore wraps of cloth around their waists and nothing covering their breasts. I was surrounded by females of every age. I saw at least forty or fifty. Maybe more. It sounded like a hundred voices were all around me. New words were shouted instantly becoming part of my understanding, although I had never heard them before. A gate closed on hinges that squealed. Saddle leather creaked. The voices kept talking. Too many new words for this new awareness to process all at once.
“Why did you bring that in here?” a new voice shouted. “And on the day of the visit of all days.”
I wanted to see who said those words, but all I saw were multitudes of faces all talking at once. Fingers pointed at me. Many elbowed each other to get closer.
Get away, I wanted to say, but still, no sounds could I make.
“Proctor,” I heard one of the twins say, “it, you won’t believe us.”
“Drag it back to the forest,” the voice called Proctor said. “It looks half dead already.”
I felt half dead. More than half.
“Let the ravens have it,” the still unseen Proctor voice said again. “Take it far enough away so we don’t smell the corpse.”
Ravens. A bird with black feathers. I knew this bird although I had never seen one. It was an eater of dead things. No, I tried to say, but the sounds wouldn’t come.
“We caught it. It is ours,” I heard one of the twins shout. “We, my sister and I, we claim the right of capture.”
This must have been funny to the women gawking at me because I heard laughter. I couldn’t see the twin anymore, but her horse was standing a few feet away. I could smell the animal’s odor. Beyond and around the horse were more human legs. Many pairs. Some went barefoot like me. Others wore soft shoes that went no higher than their ankles. Others were wrapped to their shins in animal hide.
