Find Your Wings

Ant Island

Molt flew along for as long as he could, a little too frightened to even touch the grass or the ground now. If neighbors were going to be liars and killers, he had lost some of his trust. Perhaps that was a good thing.... Times were tough now and food was no longer a given. He thought he had lost count of the days he had been lost, but it had to be a quarter of two weeks. He was a lone grasshopper now. It was hard to wrap his mind around that. It was always him and Hopper, one way or another. Hopper was always near, no matter what mood he was in.

He tried, but loneliness was hindering. He was the only grasshopper in this new territory. He wondered how he was going to make a new living here. One thing at a time though, he had to find a reasonable place to rest first. The grass looked like it went on forever before a set of soft looking hills. There was barely any green left for miles. But something else was out there in the distance. A single tree.

Little did this grasshopper know that this tree in particular had crowned a single island in the middle of a dried up river. From afar, it didn't seem all that big but it was home to an ant colony. They were a quaint, peace seeking colony of leaf cutters, that were now feeling like they were the brunt of the sun's intensity as of late. As usual, they thought ahead and gathered flowering seeds to keep safe inside their tunnels in case finding water would become an issue. Even with that, life was becoming harder. Water was scarce but they were managing, but finding food was a threat lately. There were nasty neighbors trying to move in, claiming ground and specific trees. Usually, this happened during the spring when wasps would get forceful and impatient.... Wasps, they could negotiate with without losing hapless workers to their hunger. But now there came a new insect with terrible motives and their Queen demanded a lot. Golden and crimson wasps had been coming close. All the while, there had been ants going missing.

These leaf cutters usually wished other kinds well and would help others, but enough was enough. The Queen of this colony was growing upset. Her daughter, the princess, Atta did not know how to keep these hornets at bay but the colony had been losing random foragers for a month straight. Something had to be done. When the alert was sound, the foraging teams had to be stopped for their own good. They dropped their spoils and just fled into the anthill before it was blocked out. These attacks were random, short lived and very quick. Witnesses to these had been accounted that these attackers were golden, red flyers with dangerously sharp barbs at the end of their abdomens.

Princess Atta rammed her gavel down against the stone to quiet down a council tunnel full of panicked workers and foragers.

"What are we going to do!?" cried one.

"Order! Order!" Atta rose her voice over the constant mutterings and worried conversing among the crowd. "The council has come to a decision that might lessen this fear of the hornets! Now we all know how dangerous it's getting. The fact that we're losing foragers is affecting our rations and the future of this colony."

The stress was getting to the young princess, whose mother was by her side, softly taking her hand the moment her voice began to crack a little.

"But we've been through worse. We survived a severe winter, so who says we can't survive through another summer? What we need to do is heighten our defenses. We can't let them pick us off one by one."

One of the workers eased forth to get a better listen. His blue eyes were bright with worry.

"But there aren't enough foragers to keep up with the rations. We'll starve!" cried a female worker.

"We'll lose even more ants!" countered another from the back.

Princess Atta began to get speechless as she tried to think of a way that could spare more lives. The old Queen took a stand to calm her subjects, having Atta come down.