Digger soared back and forth along his section of the
southernmost border of flarefox territory. He guarded the edge where the open
plains ended and a forest began. The long shadows cast by the trees under the
light of his fiery wings creeped him out, just a little bit.
“Don’t panic,” he
thought to himself. “No one has bothered us from this forest in pretty much
forever. Certainly no one will on my first night. That’s why they send the
newbies to patrol here. It’s the quietest portion of the desert.” Still, he
couldn’t help but think of all the horror stories he’d heard about this
particular forest. Rumors of all kinds of bloodthirsty monsters filled his
mind: prowling, three-headed wolves, ever-hungry panthers, and even more
unspeakable beings. Get ahold of yourself,
he thought. You didn’t join the border
guards just to chicken out on your first night. Still, it might not be a bad
idea to land and dim my wings. It’s hard to see into a dark forest when you
have a bright light on your back. My nose is a lot better than my eyes, but it
can’t hurt to be able to see as well. He landed and shrunk his wings to
their smallest state—little more than a spark.
Now that he was on the ground, he kept moving at a trot to
keep himself warm. He kept his nose to the air, sniffing for anything strange.
His large ears twitched constantly. So many smells flooded his nose that it was
hard to pick them apart, but he knew that with time he would learn to
differentiate them. He’d already come here a few times on training missions to
familiarize himself with all the scents and sounds.
Eventually he did start to smell something . . . different.
He couldn’t make it out at first, but it quickly resolved itself into the scent
of other flarefoxes.
Now why did it take me
a moment to realize that? He thought. My
nerves must be more jumbled than I realized. Jumbled enough that I’m sitting
here thinking about it, rather than calling out to them to find out what they’re
doing in the woods in the first place. Probably a couple of dumb kits on a
dare. Except . . . it smells like one of them is injured.
“Who goes there?” he called out loud. Who goes there? Really? I sound ridiculous. “Don’t you know that
these woods are dangerous?” he called again.
“Tell us about it,” a masculine voice said. Two foxes exited
the woods, one supporting the other, who was dragging and injured back leg. “We
had a run-in with . . . well, we aren’t sure what it was. He got his back leg
torn. I cauterized it with heat from my wings once we got away, but he’s too
shaken up and in pain to fly. Oh, my name’s Songe, by the way. And this is
Spark.”
“Oh my goodness,” said Digger. “We’d better get a healer to
look at your friend and make sure there’s no further damaged beyond what you
cauterized. Then we may need to talk about what attacked you. Did it seem like
a wild best, or is there any chance it was something more sapient? Someone that
might be planning to attack us?”
“It smelled like a plain old bear,” said Spark. “We had our
wings at little more than sparks so we wouldn’t start the forest on fire, so
really, any wild animal could have mistaken us for a snack. We didn’t have them
lit enough to scare anything off.”
Digger gave them a weird look. “You do realize you can
control any fire you create with your wings, don’t you? You should be able to
keep from burning the forest down. “The other two just looked at each other,
and Digger shook his head. “Never mind, let’s just get going.”
