Pooh Bear and Friends in 'Gold From Outremer'
One day, Twitchlet was in his hole, crouched over the solid gold chamber pot that his grandfather purportedly brought home from the crusades, when a great tumult was heard outside.
Nearly overturning the pot in his agitation, Twitchlet shrieked "we're under attack!" But Pooh, who had been planted in the corner the whole while, was as unmoved as a week old cowpat.
"Nonsense, if we were under attack, somebody would have raised the alarums!"
Twitchlet could not fault this muddy display of logic, although he was prepared to give it a fighting try. But just then, the wall of the hole burst inward, spraying tree roots and unmentionables all over Pooh and Twitchlet (who squirmed like a blind otter being born into a tub of grease).
What was this hulking mass that had disturbed their home? Pooh and Twitchlet had never seen anything like it, with its great proboscis like a fat snake made up of thousands of yards of stitching, and its legs like massive tree trunks. The thing eyed them from the one side of its head that pushed through the gaping rent in their palace, before emitting a fearsome bellow. Its proboscis snaked out and fondled Twitchlet briefly, causing him to go into paroxysms of panic, before it, with a horrid grinding like a galleon caught in the grip of a typhoon, slowly righted itself and withdrew into the harsh daylight above.
It was only then that Pooh and Twitchlet realised that the tree-serpent, (for so they had mentally catalogued this monstrosity) had a rider attached. A red ferret from distant regions, some remote cousin to the regular ferrets who infested this stretch of the Great Old Woods.
Cursing and whipping his steed, the ferret demanded they hear the news that the Emperor was dead.
"The who?" Pooh enquired, a clot of thick brown squeezing through a rent in his hide made by one of the intruding tree-roots. Outside on the road, dozens more of the same beasts stampeded past, their riders whipping them into a foaming frenzy. Some rode aloft on elaborate palanquins like canopied thrones. About their feet scuttled more ferrets, and other creatures, unknown to Poohs' and Twitchlets' provincial eyes.
No answer was forthcoming, for the rider, as anxious as his comrades to press on ahead of time itself, like a fisherman outrunning a tsnumani of shit, had departed.
Pooh and Twitchlet were left to repair their hole as best they could, which was to say not very well at all, since both were constitutionally lazy. In the end they decamped to their young friend Christopher Robin's hole, and ate all his honey in an effort to calm themselves. Robin, who was very wise for a boy of 12, albeit an incorrigible liar and thief, imparted more news of the day's uproar that he had picked up around the way. Or perhaps he had just invented it out of whole cloth.
The Emperor, whom none of them had ever heard of, nor had the faintest inkling of their location within his dominions, had died some years before. Centuries, perhaps. This, apparently, was just the first of many waves fleeing the scene of that downfall like expanding ripples upon a pond struck by a falling collosus. How far away was the Imperial core, none could guess. Maybe it used to be closer. Or maybe they had been incorporated during one of Pooh Land's lost weekends, which nobody could ever seem to recall afterward.