Brittle crouched at the mouth of the mossy hollow, watching the row of blinking lights hovering in the air above the tufted sedge grass. The enchanting blue glow was as mesmerizing as it was disconcerting. “Lastar,” Brittle whispered, “I think we’re supposed to follow it.”
“Absolutely not.” Lastar inched closer with his black and white fur bristled. “No one will be following anything. That could be a trail of death, for all we know.”
“Doesn’t look like a trail of death to me.”
“Well obviously. That’s how they get you, Brittle. No one would follow an ominous trail of death if it appeared uninviting.”
He had a point, Brittle conceded. Still, gazing out across the dark woodland floor, watching the gentle bob and dip of the glowing lights as they swayed in the breeze, Brittle couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that they were calling to him. “What do we do then?”
“We wait here until dawn,” Lastar replied. “In all the time we spent in the forest, we never once encountered a forest sprite during daylight. Perhaps the sun will chase them away.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Do you always have to question everything? I don’t know, Brittle. But the best thing to do is nothing. We stay put.” As if to prove his point, Lastar sat on his black and white striped tail with a dramatic thump.
Brittle pondered Lastar’s contradiction. How could the demigod claim staying put was the best option when, by his own admission, he didn’t know anything? Stating this aloud, however, would only prove Brittle’s incessant need to question everything. Brittle moved into a more comfortable position, drawing his timber knees to his hollow chest with a sigh. He may not have agreed, but that didn’t make Lastar any less right. Staying put was the best option. Even if it went against every adventurous bone in Brittle’s wee body.
There was a sudden knock against the tree. It wasn’t a thunder of sound, but the light, polite rap one would expect from a friend at the door. “Excuse me,” a nasally voice called from the outside. “I don’t mean to be a bother, but you’re supposed to follow the lights.”
“Sorry, we can’t.” Brittle pretended he didn’t notice the venomous side-eye his skunk companion was sending his way. Whoever was outside obviously knew he and Lastar were hunkered down within the tree. There wasn’t any sense in acting otherwise.
“Oh?” Dried pine needles crunched softly underfoot as the speaker made their way from around the back of the tree towards the front. “Why’s that?”
“Lastar says the path of lights lead to death.”
“Death?” The nasally voice grew shrill. “Now see here! I worked my trotters off making the master’s trail glow just right. There’s a trick to it, you see. Very difficult. The least you could do is follow it.”
“Where does it go?” Brittle asked.
“To the master.”
“Brittle, so help me,” Lastar hissed through clenched, needle-like teeth. “Not another word.”
Brittle circumvented Lastar’s warning by offering not one word, but three. “Who’s your master?”
“Why Zabel, the Great Forest Sprite, of course.” Both Brittle and Lastar flinched in surprise when a small glowing creature swaggered into view, standing just on the other side of the hollow. Barely surpassing a foot and a half in height, the stranger reminded Brittle of a white, bioluminescent onion. There was a single flowering sprout on its oversized head, atop a body with arms and legs formed from twisted roots.
The onion added, somewhat reluctantly, “She’s the last of the forest sprites, actually. Sort of the reason she sent me to fetch you.”
Brittle wasn’t sure what being the last of the forest sprites had to do with him. Normally he would have asked, but he got the sense Zabel, the Great Forest Sprite, probably didn’t share her master plans with the help. Brittle settled on a different question instead. “And who are you?”
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“Sprig, loyal caretaker of Zabel.”
“Why do you look like an onion?”
“He meant no offense!” Lastar rose up on his back legs and placed his front paws against Brittle’s face, scrambling to cover the bog log beast’s mouth in a desperate bid to stop the next thoughtless question from slipping free.
Like Brittle, Sprig had empty hollows for eyes. A great white light burned inside the onion’s translucent head. It poured out through their round eye holes, illuminating the inside of the hollowed tree as if it were daylight outside. “No offense taken. So long as neither of you try to eat me,” Sprig said with a laugh. “I reckon I look like an onion for the same reason you look like a log, lil beast.”
Brittle considered Sprig’s answer thoughtfully. “A goddess stubbed her toe on your great-great-grandmother?”
“Not in the exact manner, I suppose. My great-great-great-great-great ancestor was a wild onion. Their seed took root near the base of a mystic willow – that’s the magic soul tree of a forest sprite, if you didn’t know. My ancestor’s bulb seeped some of the residual magic, gained sentience, and then went on to produce an entire line of senions to serve as caretakers to the last forest sprite.”
Lastar’s wild eyes darted back and forth across the entrance. He leaned closer to Brittle and whispered, “New plan. On my signal, we run.”
“Lastar,” Brittle chided, “you can’t leave in the middle of a conversation. That would be mighty rude.”
“Now!” Lastar’s sleek black and white body sprang from the hollow, accidentally bowling Sprig head over heels in his wake. Shifting back to his true form, Lastar reached into the tree and yanked Brittle out. The ground whisked out from under Brittle’s cork bark toes as he was lifted into the air and placed on Lastar’s shoulders.
“For peat’s sake, no! Not again!” Brittle seized fistfuls of Lastar’s shaggy wool in fright. He hadn’t been carried in this manner since the first time he and Sir Thomassin had braved the dangers of Stay Away Canyon together. Now, with his feet dangling precariously several feet in the air, Brittle realized his aversion to unnatural heights was as alive and robust as ever. He kicked in protest. “Put me down!”
“Not until we reach the cottage.” Lastar took off at a speed far too fast to be safe. His broad shoulders bumped and jostled so violently, Brittle would have been thrown off had he not been clinging to the demigod’s head for dear life. The forest of shaggy tree forms flew past faster and faster, until the rows of dark pines condensed into a single dark blur.
Brittle glanced over his shoulder and saw the flickering blue lights had been swallowed by distance. Regrettably, that didn’t stop Lastar from running. The demigod continued his breakneck pace, hurtling through the dark forest like a log caught in a raging current. Branches whipped past overhead, ripping at Brittle’s antlers. He ducked lower, huddling helpless against the back of Lastar’s head as he waited for the horrific jostling to stop.
Finally, the demigod’s swift footsteps slowed. His voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper. “It’s not possible.”
Brittle lifted his head, peeking out around Lastar’s curved horns. A twinkling line of lights hovered over the ground before them, painting the bark and lower branches of the surrounding pines in an eerie blue glow.
“Maybe you should attend Sir Thomassin’s next math lesson,” Brittle snapped. “He could teach you a thing or two about circles!”
“I didn’t run in a circle,” Lastar insisted. He adjusted his broad shoulders, shifting Brittle into a more manageable position, before edging several steps backwards. “It’s got to be forest magic.”
“Well, no sense in trying to outrun magic then. You can go ahead and put me d–” The remaining words left Brittle’s mouth in the form of a scream as Lastar picked up where he’d left off, this time hurtling in a different direction than before.
It made no difference. No matter how many times he altered course, changed directions, circled back, the ominous blue line of hovering lights always found them again. Lastar’s stamina waned. His fast footsteps grew slower with each new path he took. Stubbornly, he persisted, barreling through an overgrown thicket of thorny branches, desperate to find the forest’s end. He broke through to the other side in a burst of leaves and broken branches, only to come to a dead stop.
A pained whimper slipped from his mouth as his shoulders dropped in defeat. “This can’t be.”
Lastar had carried them all the way into a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by a tight ring of shaggy pines. A gnarled willow stood proud at its center. Silver lines of light seeped out through the artistic scrawl of cracks and fissures woven across the ancient willow’s bark. The tree’s pendulous branches were long and thick and rustled independent of the wind. Brittle supposed he should have been terrified, but he found the mystic willow hauntingly beautiful – all but the strange black moss that had spread halfway up the left side of the soul tree’s trunk. That part of the tree looked different than the rest. The bark was withered, rotted, and glowed noticeably dimmer.
“I think you were right, Lastar.”
“Of course I was,” Lastar panted, shoulders heaving with each labored breath. He staggered a step forward, struggling to keep both feet firmly beneath him. “About what, specifically though?”
“It was a trail leading to death,” Brittle said, unable to tear his eyes away from the mystic willow. “Just not ours.”