Lucid Waking

The House of Animalia

        The forest was unusually dark for that time of day. The clouds prevented any light from shining through, so the shadows on the ground were thicker than they would be during any other mid-day. The air smelled fresh and a faint sound of thunder carried itself on cold wind. Even the main clearing—nicknamed “The Eye” for its location in the center of the forest—was a dark bluish-gray. A rabbit darted across the clearing, followed closely by a young man dressed in green and khaki camouflage. His boots made deep indentations in the ground as he ran after the bounding rabbit. As he reached the edge of the clearing, there was a gunshot and it echoed through the trees amidst the caw of birds. He let the rabbit bound away as he grabbed a low branch and swung upward into the curtain of foliage. He heard shouting nearby and then the thump of feet on the cold ground. The party stopped and examined the ground, following his footsteps until the edge of the forest where they stopped. He prayed they wouldn’t look up.
        “Damn it,” a soldier swore quietly. He turned back towards the clearing where a few more men were standing around looking into the darkness. “The tracks just disappear.”
        “He’s got to be in the tree,” another said.
        “Or he was just careful about his tracks going in.”
        The branch just above the last large branch the escaping soldier was standing on was entangled with another branch from a neighboring tree. If the higher branch could support his weight, he could easily swing to a second tree without touching the ground and get farther away from the search party. He closed his eyes and focused on the second tree. Reaching up, he quickly swung from one branch to the other without a crack of protest from either tree.
        “He’s not up here,” the first soldier to speak said. Voices of disbelief followed and he saw the men look up into the branches of the previous tree. Thunder grumbled and the sky got darker.
        “We’ll just say he turned into a bird or a mouse and we lost him,” the leader said. “I don’t want to continue the chase in the rain and if we don’t get back soon we’ll get caught in it.”
        There were a few grumbles of agreement and the search party went back the way they came through the forest. When the soldier in the tree couldn’t hear them any longer, he got down from the second tree and breathed a sigh of relief.
        “That was quite smart of you,” said a singing voice from above him. He looked up to see a swallow glide down from the top branches to the ground.
        “Thanks,” he said.
        “Why were you running?”
        “They were afraid I was the cause of bad luck.”
        “Don’t they know any member of the house of Animalia is lucky to have around?”
        “Well, when you’re in a war and your luck starts getting worse once your new recruit Jonah starts, you’d get a little suspicious. Not to mention he can talk to animals and change his shape.”
        The swallow snorted as much as it could and hopped onto his shoulder. “I never understood humans.”
        Jonah laughed. “Neither do I.”
        When he finished his sentence, the rain came down in bucketfuls upon the leaves of the trees. The swallow flew off of Jonah’s shoulder to rest inside a trunk of a tree and avoid getting wet. He started to continue away from the clearing but then turned towards the center of it listening carefully for noise other than the rain. There was a soft patter among wet leaves coming from the northern side of it, but the noise was getting softer, not louder. Finally, with a flash of lightening, a silver wolf stepped into the clearing and sat on its haunches.
        Jonah knew the wolf was blind, yet he still hoped the larger-than-life animal would turn and look at him with its milky blue eyes. He stepped towards it, waiting for the echoing voice to go through his head, but Jonah had almost put a hand on a shimmering flank before it spoke.
        “Hello, little one.”
        Jonah smiled. “Hello, Argent.”
        “I thought you wanted to fight for your kind.”
        Jonah sighed. “They don’t understand.”
        “Hmph. I thought not.”
        “I need help hiding—”
        “You do not, little one. You can hide better than I on your own. You feel betrayed and disappointed and you want protection. It is not my place, Jonah, to help you regain your trust.”
Jonah paused and tentatively put a hand in the silver fur. “Where do I go?”
        “You speak to Hawk and Falcon. As for where you go, it matters not. You will always find a way.”
Thunder rumbled overhead drowned out by a succession of gunshots not far off. Jonah jumped backwards and almost fell, but the great silver beast merely turned its head calmly towards the noise. Jonah was on his feet in an instant, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn and run, although he knew he should. His hands shook as he held them out in a fighting stance. The silver wolf stood where he was for an instant before bounding out of the clearing the direction opposite that it came. Shouts echoed from the path ahead and it took no time for Jonah to spin on his heel and sprint towards the direction of the oak tree where Hawk and Falcon lived.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Fantasy, Fiction Prose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.