Storm Season | Shelha Series 2 | ✔

Fire Night

Loki crouched as still as a stone in the low, grassy underbrush, all senses locked on a rustling ahead. The creature was shelling a seedpod with deft movements, oblivious to everything but its task. It bent down to grab another pod, and Loki pounced. He was getting good at forest hunting.

Hefting the catch in his jaws, Loki trotted back to a grove of different trees in the middle of the tree-ferns. One low-branching behemoth made a staircase into the canopy. Loki reached the leaves in two bounds and set his prey down on a bough. "Whipper?"

Only silence replied. Loki threw a glance around in case he was about to be ambushed. Right, seventh senses. He tuned into his and scanned the grove.

It was empty. Loki swallowed back a sudden punch in his gut. Try farther.

Whipper wasn't farther either. He was nowhere in the nearest six tail-lengths, the limit of Loki's range. Or at least, nowhere alive. Loki scrambled around the grove. Thank Shelha, Whipper was nowhere to be seen. He found the Forester's most recent scent and followed it as far as he dared along a branch. He squinted through the leaves ahead. There were clawmarks on the closest tree-fern trunk. Whipper must have been fleeing something to have tried taking to the branchless tree-ferns. But fleeing what? Something worth mention, or just more of those carnivorous flying-squirrel-like thingies that infested these tree-fern forests? If it was the latter, Whipper would be leading them away before returning to the grove.

Loki settled down to eat and wait. He must have drifted off at some point, because when he awoke, it was to find the grove in the middle of a bog. Whipper wasn't back. There was not a profanity in the world that captured what Loki wanted to say.

The best course of action here was always to start moving. Loki climbed as high as his nerves would allow and located the distant squiggle of the river. He and Whipper had followed it once, but they had never found the end. Whipper had guessed that segments kept getting transported back upstream, which depending on when you thought about it was either endlessly frustrating or funny. But if you followed it, you were at least guaranteed more river up or downstream, and it was an escape route, and it had food. Loki had never understood why more species didn't live in rivers.

The bog was treacherous to cross, full of sinkholes and small, camouflaged snakes. Loki reached the plain on its other side and struck out river, because normal compass directions had no bearing here. The dry stumps of once-gigantic trees rose around him. He wondered where their top halves had gone. The ground was bare.

Many of the stumps had cavities in them, and some were quite hollow. Loki checked one for spiders, then tried it out. It was quite snug. He cast about for twigs and, finding none, drew a small triangle in the dirt in front of it.

It was only when he began tripping over roots that Loki realized the land was getting darker. The orange glow over distant, plant-based landscapes was fading like a dying coal. Ahead, there were no plants. The blackness coming in across the plain was absolute.

Loki located the closest tree hollow. He had scarcely taken a step towards it when there was a flash behind him. He spun around. A breeze stirred, laced with a faint smell of rotten eggs. Loki stood still. To his left, a second flash. This time he was quick enough to see the tail of the yellow flames that sped through the air. They reached the end of their gas tendril and burned out, then leaped to another and flared again. A heartbeat later they were gone.

Across the plain now, fires were igniting, flashing and vanishing. Loki dove into a tree stump as a flare the size of a tree canopy multiplied outwards towards him. He turned around to watch the lights. One curled up a stump, leaving no scorch mark in its wake. There were sheets and ribbons; bright, radiating spiderwebs; and whole tangles of tiny threads. Lights scattered like startled minnows and sparkled like fireflies. Up in the sky, gas sheets made shows like northern sky-vines. The show carried on for what must have been most of a day and half the night. Loki finally fell asleep.