The Wooden Legs

The children lead Lee by tugging on his fingers, pulling on his clothes, pushing his back, all the way forward to outside the town, back onto the dusty path Lee had found himself travelling on three times now.

Everybody was silent, not a single person speaking throughout the entire trip, unlike all the previous times where chatter was abundant and there seemed to be no shortage of topics to discuss between all of them.

When they were all a good distance away, one of the children, A-Lang, who had only introduced himself before, stopped everybody.

"Here. You can sit down if you like, our legs aren't gonna hurt," he advised Lee, waving his arms a bit as he did so.

Lee refused, shaking his head to indicate so, and looked back to the town.

The one, singular house, that contained the young mother and her son, was not visible from where he stood from the outskirts of the village.

A sudden, cold wind blew through Lee's body, causing him to shudder from the unexpected temperature drop, and he crossed his arms over his chest to keep himself warm.

The world around him then began to glow, everything from the speckles of dust on the path, to the shimmering leaves on the surrounding trees, to the now almost silver wood of the buildings. Everything radiated that same moonlike essence, and Lee felt as if he was bearing witness to some sort of miracle.

He looked up towards the night sky, seeing the that the moon also had become brighter and gave off more light, the various craters of its surface almost vanishing, removing their shadows from the orb that hung above to maximise whatever efforts the floating rock was making to illuminate the night sky.

And then all of a sudden, a loud groan and creaking noise began emanating from both the town and the village.

Lee swivelled his head around from side to side, trying to keep an eye on both sights to try and see what an earth could possibly be happening.

He decided to ultimately keep his focus on the village, because it was both closer and as it was just easier to see what was happening.

Lee watched as the buildings closer to the lake began to rear their heads upwards, the stilts of their foundations pulling out of the ground and becoming longer and longer in length.

It looked as if the stilts were the legs which carried the wooden structures, extending outwards, stretching and becoming mobile the longer that their load stayed in the moonlight shining down on them.

The smaller buildings looked as if they were having an easier time reanimating back to life, unlike the older, and larger ones that creaked and groaned like the joints of the elderly, with the tell tale noise of wooden beams snapping as some parts of their bodies were simple unable to be picked up.

Lee watched one of the larger homes split into two, leaving behind a rectangular section of what was once a whole complex.

The abandoned rooms and portions of homes looked like unclosed and toppled over boxes strewn on the ground without purpose and almost nonsensically, with no real obvious reason for them to be there, if not for the other parts of the bodies that they once formed that were now walking away from them, leaving them abandoned.

The walking buildings loomed over Lee and all the other ghostly children around him like giants. They towered over the forests, and dwarfed the moon above in scope and size.

All of them moved on one singular path towards the giant pit that was the lake.

As they emerged the shores of where there was once water, they began crouching down and slouching, making their way inside by first lowering their legs as far as as they could go, before letting themselves fall inside, their backs scraping down the rock face and being slowed down because of it.

The laws of gravity and momentum didn't seem to particular matter to the buildings which seemed to settle and rest at the bottom, near the entrance towards the underworld and the swirling pillar of light that was emitted from it.

Lee made his way towards the edge to look down into the pit, and watched several buildings stack on top of each other and make a behemoth of a tower.

Lee looked back to the remains of the village that he had seen and began making comparisons between the silhouette of what the village once looked like and now.

No longer did the settlement resemble a pile of stacked crates, but rather as mountain that had one significantly steeper side than the other, the entire village stretching towards one particular direction and suffering all because of it.

The home with the yellow, flickering lights was no visible, conspicuously unmoved, unlike all the other of its kind around it.

Lee looked over back to the children that had given him their names and asked," Can I go back and check on them?"

A-Cheng hesitated first, looking to all the others around him, before nodding a few times hesitantly.

Lee thanked him wordlessly, before making his way into the village.

The buildings were beginning to slow down on their path, and a few of them looked as if they were beginning to pant from the exhaustion from walking.

They began to settle down and to sit once more on the earth, content and making their own indents to sink into the new plots of land that would become their new home.

Not all the buildings that walked managed to reach the lake in the short time that they were alive, significantly more of the structures only managing to make a few steps towards the lake.

The ghosts of the adults of the village seemed to keep wandering around aimlessly, with only a few of them walking to the lake and descending down to the moved village below.

The children, however, stayed on the path, outside it all.