“Why does it… how is it…?” began Commander Zideo, asking all the right questions. He’s a very inquisitive dude. It’s one of his more endearing qualities, and there are many. Man I like that guy.

I was just really glad to know that the glowing human English words in the night sky were visible to the humans and not just me. (Being a dog is a major exercise in empathy. You never know if something you’re seeing is part of the spectrum of light that humans can’t see, or if they’re seeing something that’s in the part of the spectrum you can’t see. I knew this cat once who used to sneak in through the grates of our fence and stare at things I couldn’t see. I was never sure if she was messing with me, or what. If so, I didn’t get the joke.) He whipped his head back and forth from the sky letters, which Helmgarth was just pointing at. He was in some kind of weakened state, kneeling and pointing.

The letters pulsated with light, never making a sound. They faded after some time, and then I did hear a new sound. It was far off in the distance, in the air somewhere. It reminded me of a wasp wings, and the way they’re super clunky and barely made for flying, so they make that uneven, buzzsaw rasp all the time. Poor creatures. But it also reminded me of the tremendous beasts that would pass over our house sometimes, roaring metal dragon birds that a little kid in the neighborhood called an “ayo pwane,” and which I later deduced from Lisa’s conversations are like massive cars with wings. One of the dogs in the Howl Network said he had even been swallowed up by one, then later ejected from its bowels, safe in his protected crate.

I picked out two big sounds and a number of smaller buzzes as well. All rickety and misaligned. The humans had not not heard it yet, so I wanted to tell them. But usually, when you want to tell humans something, you have to use your inside voice. Because if you use your outside voice, they can easily become irrationally angry. For me, if someone barks, it’s like: “Hey! This is something that needs your attention!” But humans tend to think, “Is what I’m doing being interrupted by this bark?” and they get mad and put you in your crate for a bit to compose yourself.

I didn’t want to bark right behind them and get them upset. But I wanted them to know. So I sort of hurfed. Dogs, you know what I’m talking about. Humans, you might need an explanation: hurfing is when we want to bark, but we don’t want to upset you, so we sort of bark under our breaths. Ringing a bell? If we could say, “Excuse me,” then we would, but this is the closest equivalent in canine communications.

It didn’t get their attention. Helmgarth was gesticulating and saying, “Do you know what this means?” and looking at Commander Zideo with astonishment.

“No,” said Zideo. “I definitely do not. And I have a lot of questions!”

So I hurfed a little louder. “Shh,” said Zideo. He still thought I was just being bothersome, and didn’t get the picture.

“Her majesty must be informed,” said Helmgarth. “Perhaps she has seen it as well…”

I turned up the volume and hurfed twice. “Not now, bud,” said Commander Zideo. “Who is her majesty?”

Then I could see the spots in the distance, a half dozen black shapes in the night-blue sky. They still didn’t see them, so courtesy went right out the window. I trotted up between the two and started barking at the thing. I really pulled the stops out. I hate doing that, but when a swarm of unidentified flying objects are approaching, sometimes you gotta bark.

Thankfully, the humans got the message. They looked where I was looking, and they started hearing the deep buzzing sounds. “Is that… bugs?” asked Zideo. “Or planes?”

Helmgarth leaped to his feet, not an easy task when you have a humongous backpack filled with stuff. “They’re here,” he said. “They’ve found us.” He looked very afraid. I’ve seen scared humans before, usually because I barked, but still. This was definitely a scared human face.

“Who found us?” asked Commander Zideo.

“The Empire of Sorrow,” said Helmgarth. “We must go at once.”

Commander Zideo ducked out his lips, thoughtfully. “They don’t sound too bad,” he said. “Can they tell us what the heck is going on?”

Helmgarth gave him a look of fear, as though the idea itself could harm him. He gripped Commander Zideo’s shirt sleeve, and I growled a warning that neither of them seemed to notice. For a second, I was certain I was going to have to bite this guy.

But he seemed afraid for Zideo. “The Empire of Sorrow is searching for their prince so that he can lead the invasion.”

“Okay?” said Zideo. He did not know what to do with that information. “Do you know the lost prince? Can you return him? Are you him?” He took a step back, a serious look coming over his face. “Am I the lost prince?”

Helmgarth motioned back to the two pancakes that had now disappeared. “You destroyed him when you landed in this realm.”

Being a Streamer, which is someone who makes faces into a big glowing rectangle for a living, Commander Zideo is really good at making peculiar faces. Just then, he made one that just completely encapsulated the idea of “Woops” without even having to say it out loud.

“Come!” said Helmgarth, and he did his best to run towards the dark treeline, which was more of a trot.

With every step, his burden caught just a little bit of air, and then flopped down noisily, a rhythmic impact that tugged his shoulders toward the ground each time. I myself was torn: I didn’t know enough about our surroundings to find a safe place to hide. I felt like the trees were better cover from the flying things, but I couldn’t in good conscience just lead the most iconic, handsome, eloquent human of the modern era into a dark wood without knowing what was in there. What kind of wildlife did they have in this place? My ears twitched, catching the squeaks and hoots and clicks and grunts from the forest.

What choice did I have? It was one unknown against another. The fact that the buzzing things in the sky were coming this way decided it for me. Let’s get away from those. I voiced my assent, and caught up to Helmgarth quickly.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

We had made it most of the way across to the edge of the woods (and I was surprised to notice that there was a very defined edge, a clear delineation where the trees began), and now I could finally see that this was no simple forest. In the Airy Zone, there are not a ton of wooded areas. But when Lisa takes me to the dog park for the biweekly convening of dogs, sometimes I see them off in the distance. A couple times she even took me on a walk there. Leashed though I was, I explored as much as my lead permitted and sniffed an endless variety of plants and peed on a dozen types of trees. This forest had the same variety cranked all the way up. I don’t think I saw two trees that were the same. The tall pointy ones with the needle leaves that look like fur, the broad-leafed ones with half their leaves turning an autumnal yellow, the straight-trunks and the crooked-trunks, even the ones you’d expect to see on a beach with the big hairy fruits and the massive crescent fronds. It was a lot to take in. Helmgarth halted very suddenly, and I turned to see what he was looking at.

My human hadn’t moved.

The buzzing flying contraption was here. It roared overhead with its malformed, spinning insect wings, little more than circular blurs over its wide, flat body like an ugly stingray. (Yes, dogs know what stingrays are! All it takes is one human to leave one book laying around, and whichever dog finds it is going to report everything in the next neighborhood Howl.) The fat stingray wasp thing set down beside the road, and opened what I am going to call its mouth. Out of the mouth came a bunch of humans dressed in black with white masks, and they yelled at Commander Zideo. I turned and began running back to him.

“Guys, listen,” he said. “I’m new here and I have so many que-” Only he didn’t get to finish what he was saying, because a big, lumbering shape standing in the open mouth of the fat stingray bug caught his attention. There was a flash of light, and the ground beside Zideo was suddenly on fire. Or, blackened, as though it had been on fire while ago, like when Lisa had company over around a fire pit in the back yard a couple times a year. The ground here was charred in the same way, and I probably don’t have to tell you that sent me into overdrive. They were shooting some kind of weapon at my human! I lost it. I started giving them the real business, barking like there was no tomorrow. This confused the men in masks, almost like they had never seen a dog before. But I couldn’t see the look on their faces, because they all wore that white mask, so they all looked equally sad.

Well the barking and the flash of light must have gotten his attention, because Commander Zideo started running toward me. Humans, man. Their survival instinct doesn’t always work, and I’ve found that sometimes I have to share mine with Commander Zideo.

We ran together toward the trees, where Helmgarth waved us toward him in a panic. More bolts of light came out from behind us, charring the ground and spitting up dirt by our feet. Helmgarth looked really worried, and that made me worry too.

One of the big, weird fruits burst in a flash of light as we crossed into the forest, splashing us with sizzling hot fruit juices. A puff of singed leaves floated to the ground. “Go,” said Helmgarth, and into the forest we went.

I took one look back from the edge of the woods. The bug-wings on the stingray stopped spinning, and I could see they sprouted from a vertical axis like flower petals. I’m not overly versed in human science, but I’m going to call them “propellers” since that’s what they seemed to do for the fat stingray. Other human-shaped people dropped down out of the night sky with smaller, higher-pitched propellers sticking off their backpacks. The soldiers, for that must have been what they were, convened and talked to one another, but ignored the bulky human shape that stood on the stingray’s mouth and had fired its strange weaponry at Zideo. Although it had the shape of a human, there was something distinctly not human about it. The slow, intentional gait, perhaps. The other humans, moving quickly, waved at it to come down the ramp and join them. They all pointed toward the woods where we were. The other humans’ voices were downwind of us, and muffled by their masks.

The woods swallowed us up, more wholly than I swallow one of Lisa’s beef patties left on her plate when she leaves the room to take a call. We hurried, but at first it was to no place in particular–only away from the buzzing fliers and the not-quite-human spouting fire at us. It seemed to me like a bad idea to try to get ourselves lost if we were going to try to un-lose ourselves again, but nobody asked me. Commander Zideo followed Helmgarth, but Helmgarth was just glancing backwards for any disturbed leaves or bent branches, and altering course. Pretty soon, there was thick forest to all sides, and with no sign of immediate danger, we slowed to a walk.

“Do you actually know where you’re going?” asked Zideo.

Helmgarth cleared his throat. “Well… we have a destination, if that is what m’lord asks.”

“So basically,” said Zideo, “we’re lost.” Good ol’ Zideo. He just tells it like it is! You gotta love that about him. Candor, honesty, not beating around the bush. In my mind I was envisioning a trophy for him that was a sort of golden cup inscribed with “Human I’d Most Want To Be Lost In A Forest With.” Maybe the cup could be filled with dog treats, too. Normally I would never dream of sharing a dog treat given to me fair and square with a human… but for Zideo, I might. That’s just how great he is.

“Potentially,” said Helmgarth. Then, after a long, quiet minute: “Perhaps.”

Zideo suggested that we just pick a direction and stick to it until we found ourselves outside the woods, which was very pragmatic, if you ask me. But Helmgarth replied that it was a devious and inherently untrustworthy wood, and desired to confuse us. Zideo corrected him. “You mean, it’s designed to confuse us.”

“Not exactly,” said Helmgarth. “Begging m’lord’s pardon.”

We walked in silence, or what passed for it. The forest was a nonstop performance of movement and sound and smell. Creatures trilled and swung from branches, shrieking at us and retreating into the patchwork canopy. There was a sense of something… not primal, but primordial. The forest felt untouched, un-tinkered with, un-passed-through by man or dog. Every tree, rock, leaf and bug radiated with potential. The forest was patternless and uncanny, vibrating with its own chaos. All I can really tell you, coherently, is that it was becoming… well, yeah, just that. It was becoming.

Listen, I’m going to run out of words from time to time. It’s in my nature. English isn’t my first language. Language isn’t even my first language. I’m a dog, and I’d say my vocabulary is pretty strong, all told.

Now that we were no longer fleeing for our lives, I watched Helmgarth a little more closely.

He was a many of far too many smells, as I have said, and I mentioned his unintentionally shaggy and relatively boring hair and clothing comprised of different browns. But something else dogs are good at is reading someone by their gait.

That’s a human word of course, but many humans don’t know it. It refers to how someone walks, which can tell a lot about their disposition. Helmgarth walked with a limp in his right leg that he was constantly trying to suppress. When he put weight on it, he was avoiding pain by trying to get the stride over with as fast as possible, but avoiding the appearance of pain by trying to even it out and conceal the limp. Already hiding something, are we, Mr. Leather-sweat?

What can we learn from this? I will spell it out from my human readers, as the canine readership has doubtless already done these calculations: This is a many who is weighed down by voluntarily carrying something, and constantly challenged by pain at every (other) footfall. What fire drives a man squeezed by the pincers of pain and encumbrance? It was plain to see that he was looking past the immediate, his eyes alighting on some pleasant and meaningful possible future. And when they took in Commander Zideo, they factored him into it.

Yes, I would have to keep my eye on this one. The safety of the most venerable human of all time had become my entire world. Zideo’s wellbeing was all that mattered.

And that’s when Zideo disappeared off the side of a ledge we hadn’t realized was there. Where he had been a second ago, I could only see a puff of disturbed leaves flittering to the ground. “Aaaaahhh - ow - aaaaauuugh - oof- aaaaahh - OW,” said Zideo, somewhere through the foliage.