Medvedev Dmitriy: http://www.proza.ru/2010/12/15/1143
In a valley between the hills, in something like a forest, there was a small bosk, in which lived the crawlers. They crawled through the depth of the thicket, ate fallen leaves and only rarely approached the edge of the forest. In the valley there were several bush-covered islands. Heated debates took place: are there similar crawlers in the other forests, or were “we” the only ones in the valley. The most never left the forest, and only the bravest and strongest crawlers left the cover and reached the bush nearby. According to them there was no one there, because the leaves taste foul and the forest is thin and doesn’t protect from the enemies. And the crawlers had some scary enemies, called the runners.
The runners rushed through the valley, ran over and ate the crawlers, sometimes even pulling them out from the thin growth of the forest edge, or digging out those who were brave and tried to find cover while crossing the valley from one thicket to the other. All the crawlers feared and hated the runners, but there was a legend that if one could crawl to the end of the valley, where the black rocks piled up, then the brave soul will become a runner himself. It sounded very tempting, and there were always a few crawlers found who took off with that purpose. None of them came back, but it made sense: once you become a runner, you can’t fit through the thick forest, besides your kin will scatter at the sight of a runner.
Following such logic, one runner has finally decided to undertake the dangerous journey to the black rocks. He crawled to a nearby thin forest, from there to the next one, periodically digging into the ground each time he felt the ground tremble under the feet of the runners. He was unlucky in finding any of his kind all through the travel, and he decided that the first thing he’ll do after becoming a runner is to find more crawlers like him, even if he’ll have to run across the whole valley. And so he crawled for several days, and there it was, the coveted target.
The black rocks turned out much bigger than what they looked like from his home forest. As he crawled into one of the spacious caverns, the crawler found that the rocks warm his belly nicely, making him want to curl up and sleep. He did just that, without even making it to the opposite wall.
It’s unknown for how long our hero slept, but once he woke up, he found that he can barely fit into the cave in which he fell asleep. Barely making it out, the ex-crawler celebrated the new paws, and he tested them out, running from the cave to the nearest bush. Now a distance that once took him a day he could cover in a minute. The newly-made runner ran from a bush to bush, those that looked like forests to him earlier. A sudden pang of hunger made him pick up and swallow a crawler on the run, but he couldn’t care less. He ran up the hill, to see what’s behind them. And behind them was a perfectly identical valley with bushes and runners, and there were valleys of this sort everywhere the eye could reach.
The runner settled well into the new role and ran the hill-covered valley from the beach to the ravine. The beach was very large, but he steered clear of it, because that’s where the swimmers resided. Those were terrible predators, which could not only swim in the river, but also hide well in the valley, eating inattentive runners. And the runners had a legend going, that if you cross the beach, dive into the water and cross the river, you’ll become a swimmer yourself. Many runners had tried, but no one came back to tell if it’s true. Still, our runner started dreaming to come down the steep wall into the ravine, because there was another myth, that at the bottom of it one could turn into a flier.