I plan to write another for this prompt, but in case you were interested, here's the Darting Anvils story.

 

Kal looked at the remnants of the water tower. The stilts had been bashed to rubble. The tank pierced full of holes.

“Ya gotta help.” Glick stared at the trail of rubble leading to his house. “This is your fault.”

Kal sighed. It would probably be another day before most of the anvils got to his house, enroute to Melnik Lake. Another day and there would be little left.

This was not her fault. 

She turned to the pond he’d built at her direction. It was damp mud with a few puddles. She’d been quite clear. “Did you try to keep water in the pond?”

He followed her gaze, but did not answer. 

They’d dug the pond in the bouncing leaves season. Rain was plentiful then. The pond filled. 

But then came the red season and dry waste.

He’d made no effort to keep the pond full when the rains stopped. Or, if he had, he’d diverted the water for other purposes.

New colonists to Koliflori often made fatal mistakes.

Farmers built channels between fields. By controlling which channel had water in it, they used the anvils to clear land and plow for farming. It was cheaper than equipment and required almost no labor once the system was set up.

“How many anvils did you collect?”

“A hundred, I guess.”

Watching for anvils that had come out of hibernation early, she followed the plowed track toward his corral. It wasn’t nearly far enough away. She’d recommended a spot half a kilometer beyond the nuarange grove.

He followed, careful to stay well to one side of the track.

The corral was a mud pit surrounded by a rope, a marker to know where to dump the creatures as they were being collected. They didn’t move much during hibernation.

She counted fifty-four of the gray-green rock creatures. Blunt on the back end, pointed on the other. They looked nothing like the images of anvils from old earth. They were dense and heavy like them, though.

“If you fill pond this afternoon, you may save your house.” The smell of that much water should divert the anvils from Glick’s buildings. The lake was much larger, but farther away.

“Can’t you just haul them past the house?” He followed her to the edge of the corral.

Kal snorted. “Three weeks ago, maybe.”

She cut a three meter stick from a nuarange sapling. With it, she gently touched one of the anvils. It shuddered, then darted ten meters in the direction of the lake. It bumped the trunk of a large tree. 

Crack! The tree came down. 

Twenty years of watching that action, and still she had no idea how they did it.

He backed well away from the corral.

“First they tell you all you need is to homestead for a year and the land is yours. But you don’t learn till you get here that a year is five times longer here than it is on earth. Then they say how easy everything is because it’s a cashless society. But everything is on credit and you are deeper in debt than you ever thought possible.” 

“Do you want to haul water, or build another house?” 

“It’s probably cheaper to haul water. How much do I need?” The look on his face softened.

Without thinking she stepped out of the way of another anvil, darting.

“Yaaah!” Glick jumped farther backward.

Did he think he’d collected all of the wild anvils in the area?

She did a few calculations in her head. “You need about a hundred cubic meters of water per anvil to hold it. Ten thousand should be enough to get started.”

“You’re joking.” He looked straight at her. “Right?” 

Newbs always thought she overestimated.

“How do I get that much water?”

“Contact the fire fighters in Koliflori Port. Tell them to pick up water from Melnik Lake and drop it in your pond.”

Another pair of anvils darted out of the corral.

“It might save your house. I wouldn’t wait too long, though.”

She followed the churned earth trail of the anvils back to the water tower site. Glick was lucky to have realized the problem as early as he did. He still had a chance to do something.