Chapter 13: Herons

Once supper was over Violet helped clear up and then retired to her room. She felt warm and full and more than a little sleepy. Settling down onto her bed, Violet ran her hands across the soft, cushiony surface of her quilt and had to fight a sluggish urge to lie back, snuggle the covers around herself and simply forget her plans with the cat.

But of course she couldn’t do that.

Strangling the temptation where it lay, Violet looked away from her bed and the warmly lit oasis that was her room. Outside, the sun had already dropped out of view behind the trees, leaving a purply blue glow that cast everything in a strange, blurry half light.

Violet gathered her things; her rucksack and blankets and lantern, then went for the window. Even as she eased it open, taking pains not to make any noise, she found her eyes drawn again to the bloody sigil the cat had drawn on the glass.

Wetting a pair of fingers, Violet scrubbed the symbol into a reddish smudge and felt better for having done it. The cat wasn’t the only thing that could have made use of it, after all.

Then she stepped out into the night.

Violet shut the window behind her, then looked out across the fading topography of her garden. She had an overpowering urge to squint, as though that would somehow make things clearer, but the last of the color was nearly gone from the sky, a scattering of stars like icy coals already beginning to poke holes through the inkiness of the firmament.

There were crickets chirping, Violet could hear a few out by the ash-pit, which had gone inky and featureless in the dark. She took a deep breath and made herself think calm thoughts. This was a familiar place, and even a familiar time. She’d been out in the night at times darker and much more dangerous than this. But though the reassurance calmed some of the sharper splinters of uneasiness piercing the corners of her anxious mind, Violet could still feel a great cold ball of dread seated firmly in the very center of herself.

She’d been out in her garden, sure, but it was still her garden, open ground within easy dashing distance of her bedroom window.

The forest would be different.

Violet had been edging forward even as she tried to reassure herself, but stopped dead just short of the rail fence that bordered her garden. Her mouth was dry and she could feel her heart thudding in her chest, each beat a fearful exclamation that knotted her insides ever tighter.

Above her, tiny squeaks and high pitched squeals threaded the air, borne on near silent wings. Bats. And ahead of her, in the trees…?

A shiver rolled through her, almost painful in its intensity, and Violet went for her lantern, juggling for space in her arms between it and her sigil. Finally, finding a comfortable arrangement, she hunched her shoulders and stared ahead of herself, into the night. But even as her fingers closed on the crank Violet felt a sudden soft weight slide from the space across the back of her shoulders and come to a rest atop her rucksack.

For a half second she thought, nonsensically, that a pillow had just dropped on top of her, but the weight was wiry and very much alive.

“You shouldn’t use your lantern. Not here.” The cat said.

Even as the leading edges of her mind realized what had happened, Violet still felt a shudder roll through her, instinctive and terrified, a sharp little yip of fright pushed from between her lips as she tried to jolt in all directions at once. The lantern dropped from her fingers and landed with a thump in the grass.

The cat rode out her panicky spasm, settling more comfortably atop her rucksack, soft fur brushing the back of Violet’s neck. Its tail wound gently around her throat, like a living necklace.

Violet turned a half circle, trying unsuccessfully to look behind her, to where the cat was. She touched the cat’s tail with the tips of her fingers.

“What are you…?!” Violet started to ask, then cut the question off with a sigh, figuring that it probably didn’t matter.

Instead she looked down to where her lantern lay on its side, just short of a fencepost.

“Your neighbors would have questions if they spotted a mysterious figure slinking off into the woods.” The cat said, then slipped off of Violet’s rucksack and down to the ground, its progression silent and silky smooth.

Violet rubbed at the underside of her chin, where the sensation of fur still lingered.

The cat was right, she saw that now. She was still within easy view of several homes, and while they probably couldn’t see her as she currently was, if she were to suddenly turn on a very bright light….

Still, a grimace wormed its way onto her face.

“It’s dark,” she complained. “I won’t be able to see anything once we’re in the woods.”

“I will.” The cat said, and Violet felt its tail brush against her fingers. For a moment she was confused, unsure of what the cat wanted her to do, then it all became clear. The cat was offering its tail to her in the same way that a fisherman might throw a rope to a drowning comrade.

Violet took a gentle hold of the cat’s tail. It was soft beneath her fingers, yet filled with a wiry, flexible energy that surprised her. The appendage twitched and curled under her grip.

Feeling a little better, Violet ducked between the rails of her garden fence and and edged into the woods, grass brushing against her knees, a chilly nighttime wind caressing the back of her neck. She found her eyes drawn back to the glow of the village, but soon enough it was swallowed by the trees and Violet found herself enveloped by a deep and penetrating darkness. It robbed even the half rendered dimness of its presence and Violet felt a new tightness constrict her chest.

The forest’s dark was old in the same way the color at the center of the demon had been, cold and filled with nothingness at its very core.

Violet knew, in the back of her mind, that the trees were still around her, behind the dark, everything was, but that suddenly seemed impossible to verify. But for the ground beneath her feet Violet thought she might as well have been suspended in the middle of a vast and uncaring void.

Very suddenly the cat doubled around, twining between Violet’s ankles and rubbing one cheek across her shin. She could feel its whiskers tickling her skin.

“Take a deep breath.” The cat said.

Violet blinked, staring down to where she knew her feet were. Slowly, her night baffled eyes managed to put together the very vaguest impression of a cat, an irregular shape standing out from the darkness, studded by the glowing presence of two big silvery eyes.

“Do as I do,” the cat instructed, just as patient and firm as before. “Breathe in, hold your breath for a three count, then exhale very slowly.” With that it took a demonstrative breath and nudged the side of Violet’s knee, prodding her to do the same.

Violet took a shivery breath and made herself count, though the numbers came in a jittery burst that hardly felt appropriate. She gritted her teeth and ran over them again. One…two….

The cat exhaled with a sigh and Violet did the same, though her effort came out as more of a gasp. She looked down to see if the cat had any more instructions and was suddenly surprised to realize that she could see the very dimmest outlines of its teeth, white and sharp. The cat was grinning at her.

And she could see other things too, blurry and spectral, as though she were peering through a heavy fabric veil. Ahead of her, past the cat, Violet could see the ghostly outlines of trees.

Her eyes had adjusted.

And above her, through the many tiny gaps in the canopy overhead, the very palest edge of the Glow’s blue light was becoming visible. Violet watched it for a long moment, until she felt a bit steadier, then looked back down at the cat.

“Shall we continue?” It asked.

Violet nodded. They forged on.

It wasn’t long before Violet began to hear the gentle rush of the river cutting through the other noises of the night. Curling in with it came cricket song and the occasional croak of frogs. And there, through the thinning veil of trees before her, she could see the delicate azure light of the Glow rising in curling panes from beyond the horizon.

The river itself was an inky ribbon winding across the space in front of her, deep and somehow empty in its vastness. There were thick stands of reeds and cattails framing the water and as Violet drew closer she felt the cat hook a pair of claws into one leg of her pants, pulling her to a stop.

Past the reeds came a sudden barking croak, almost chattery in its fragmentation. Violet took a sharp step back, nearly tripping over the cat. Her heart skipped a beat.

“What…?” The word was high with fright and followed by nothing else.

Yet the cat remained where it was, not a single strand of fur displaced. Violet looked from it to the reeds, disquieted but unsure if she was supposed to retreat or not.

The noise came again, but lower this time, like a person coughing. Again Violet felt a little shiver of dread roll through her, but she held her ground.

“Stay where you are,” the cat said, voice low and even. “And be very, very quiet.”

Violet did. And though the croaking, barking hiss echoed from the reeds another few times, it came no closer and slowly declined in volume until all Violet could hear was a disgruntled sort of shuffling, then a little splash as whatever had made the noise began to head away.

“What was that?” Violet whispered. Her hands had gone into fists around the sides of her notebook, the sigil aimed into the reeds.

The cat said nothing.

Again Violet stared uncertainly into the shallow, reed choked water that bordered the river flow, but this time she caught a flash of movement and heard a slow, careful shuffle as something big moved through the muck.

“Steady.” The cat reminded her, its paw returning to brace the side of her knee.

The source of the movement was a sharp slice of blue-green glow that seemed to hang just a few inches over the water, like the blade of a knife suspended in midair. It bobbed and shifted, movements smooth and practiced.

And it wasn’t alone. Violet could see other slashes of light moving through the reeds, all keeping a careful, studied distance from one another. Her mind tried to work, to process what this could possibly be, but the important synapses had all frozen, stunned by the unpleasantly alien appearance of what she was viewing.

The lights were weirdly soft and defied any easy definition, Violet found her eyes wanting to slide away from the glow they emitted, like she was trying to pin down a soap bubble. And yet the blade-like lights were not the only source of illumination amongst the reeds. Entire nebulae of smaller luminescent speckles and splotches moved in their own sequences, less smooth than their larger compatriots.

Slowly, Violet settled into a sitting position, trying to puzzle together what she was seeing. The lights, large and small alike, seemed impossible scattered, like a handful of phosphorescent salt thrown across a table cloth.

Yet….

Where the glowing knives moved, they each attracted a following, there was a sequence amongst what had initially appeared to be impossible chaos. Where one splotch of blue-green light moved, others followed, helping form a strange, incomplete silhouette, something living.

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“Herons.” Violet said, and what pieces were still missing fell immediately into place. The glowing blades were beaks, sharp and fierce, and from there Violet could put together a curved neck and slender body perched upon spindly legs. The herons, outlined as they were by drips and drabs of incomplete luminescence, had a nearly cadaverous appearance, hunched and with their wings pulled tight against their backs.

Each bird stalked forward in its own careful way, slipping gracefully through the reeds, paying no attention whatsoever to the two observers perched at the edge of the water.

“They aren’t…dangerous, are they?” Violet kept her voice low and hushed, loathe to disrupt the herons. If they were to pull themselves straight then each bird would be about as tall as her, their needle sharp beaks perfectly at eye level.

The cat only smirked.

“Maybe if you’re a frog.” It said.

Violet nodded slightly but felt a little bit relieved all the same. It had never occurred to her that birds could get so large and she observed the silent hunt for another moment before glancing down to the cat once more.

“Do all herons glow in the dark?” She asked.

“No.”

“…How come these ones do?”

“Why do you think?” The cat asked, but its words had the air of a genuine question, like it was inviting her to make a serious guess.

Violet shrugged.

“I don’t know.” She said.

The cat tossed its head, unimpressed.

“You are stunningly unimaginative for someone so easily scared of the dark.” It said.

“That’s mean.” Violet grumbled.

“Prove me wrong.”

Violet wanted to say something about how truth and meanness had nothing to do with one another, but instead blew out a breath and looked back to the herons. But for the turquoise hue of their phosphorescence they might have been an extension of the Glow that lanced through the skies beyond the river.

“Are they…electric?” She asked at last.

The cat was silent for a contemplative moment, then shook its head.

“Not in the way you mean.” It said.

“Then how? I don’t want to guess anymore, can’t you just tell me?”

The cat gave her an unamused look but Violet only folded her arms.

“Alright,” it sighed. “…Have you ever combined vinegar and baking soda?”

Violet blinked, not quite sure where her feline companion was turning the conversation.

“…Yes. It made a bunch of foam and my mother got angry at me.”

“Sometimes the combination of two disparate elements can cause a reaction. The light over there is the same, only rather than foam there is a faint glow.”

“How do the herons know how to do that?” Violet asked, newly curious.

“They don’t. The light is external, something that’s not part of them at all.”

Immediately Violet thought of the oak log she’d cut firewood from the previous day. The log had been its own entity, but growing all along its sides had been huge, pale mushrooms like lumps of melted candle wax. The luminescence on the herons had to be the same, like a plant or some tiny cluster of creatures too small to be seen but for when they were all lit up.

“It must be tough for them to sleep with so much light right next to their eyes.” Violet noted.

“They don’t mind,” the cat said. “Now watch, the one over there is about to make a kill.”

Violet followed the cat’s gaze to one of the nearer herons, which had suddenly gone still, all but for its beak, which rose like an executioner’s blade before streaking back down into the water with a little muted splash. When it straightened back up, it had a black, wriggling something speared on its beak.

The cat laughed with delight and admiration, while Violet could only wince. Streamers of liquid, water and blood intermingled, splashed across the heron’s chest, where its feathers had puffed up in triumph, but amongst that dark fluid were runnels of blue-green glow.

Violet blinked and looked again, but she had not been mistaken, the color was washing off of the heron’s beak, dripping down the sides of its curious, curved neck even as it executed a sharp shake of its head and broke its prey’s back.

Tiny, iridescent puddles had begun to form in the water around the heron’s feet, streaky and small. It was all being fouled by blood, Violet realized, and had to look away.

“If I was to be anything other than what I am,” the cat said in a tone strangely near to dreaminess. “I would very much like to be a great blue heron.”

“…They put the lights on,” Violet said suddenly, the realization rising to the top of her mind like the bubbles in a pot of boiling water. “They put all of the lights on themselves.”

The cat nodded slowly and looked away from where the heron had begun to pull apart its catch, the view now mercifully darkened.

“And the water isn’t glowing,” it observed. “Which means that wherever the herons got their luminescence from, it’s downstream.”

Violet looked quickly from the cat to the herons and back.

“Could we look for it?” She asked.

The cat put on a slow, satisfied smile and nodded.

“The source won’t be hard to find,” it said. “Now follow me and look for a glow.”

They had only gone ten or twenty meters down the riverbank before Violet saw more glowing movement ahead of her. But this time it was not attached to anything living, there were no herons around. Instead, the streaks and blue-green streamers of light she saw were drooling into the river from a scratched up patch of mud on the edge of the water, being carried slowly downstream by a gentle current.

The light unfurled as it went, sinking further into the silty flow until it was too diffused to be easily visible. Yet somehow Violet knew it was still there, the light it threw off was registering with her mind somewhere, even if her eyes couldn’t exactly see it.

The sensation of seeing without seeing was weirdly similar to how it had felt to listen to the bees and though a part of her wanted to sink further into that sensation and see where it led, Violet shook her head sharply and looked away from the water.

The disturbed patch of mud was just as dark as the surrounding riverbank and Violet squinted at it, quietly confused. Was the glow trapped underneath a layer of normal earth?

But before she could wonder for any longer, the cat trotted forward and turned a neat circle in front of her. For a moment there was nothing, the cat moving purposefully across ground so dark it was nearly invisible, then there were patches of light neatly formed into paw-prints upon the mud. They glowed with a sudden, fierce illumination.

“Oh!” Violet exclaimed, voice bright with genuine surprise. She’d seen the light on the beaks of the herons and in the river’s flow, but this was so much brighter and more intense than either of them.

Cautiously, she stepped forward and drew a little arc through the mud with the toe of one shoe. Immediately the disturbed ground lit up, each crumb of shifted earth glimmering with an internal energy.

Shifting her notebook under one arm, Violet found a stick and drew patterns in the soil, ever more delighted as she spangled the earth with her very own Glow. She drew her sigil, a little picture of her house, a facsimile of the cat with an appropriately sly smile….

The cat squinted down at the last drawing, whiskers twitching, suddenly curious.

“Is that me?” It asked, and sounded almost surprised.

Violet nodded proudly, but even as she reached out to add additional detail, the light from her earliest marks was beginning to fade, the mud going dark once more.

She paused, watching it go, an uneasy tightness constricting her chest.

“It’s going away.” She said, alarmed.

“Of course.” The cat answered, finding a dry place to sit down.

“But…why’s it doing that? It stayed bright when the herons had it on.”

The cat began to give her a rather familiar look of annoyance, like she was being ignorant on purpose, but it quickly amended the expression, eyes turning instead to her rucksack.

“Consider your lantern. You have to turn the crank for a while before it lights up. This stuff is the same, you have to agitate it in order to get a response.”

“Agitate?”

“It responds to motion. Watch.” The cat trod across its old path and once again there were paw-prints glowing in the mud.

Violet nodded slowly. The herons had been moving around on their hunt, opening and closing their beaks. Those had been small motions, but still clearly enough to keep their activities illuminated. Carefully, she reached her stick out and retraced her sigil. Some patches where the lines intersected were now a bit blurry, but the symbol remained recognizable.

“What is this stuff?” She asked once her drawings were again bright and new.

The cat considered.

“An algae, or maybe some variety of fungus. You can find it most places with running water, or along oceanside beaches. I’ve seen waves lit bright as the sun.”

“You’ve seen the ocean?” Violet asked.

“An ocean, but yes.”

“There are more?”

The cat’s gaze slid away from her and back down to its own paw-prints. The oldest of them were already beginning to fade.

“This stuff is different than what’s in the ocean,” it said. “Be sure not to touch any to your lips unless you’ve got a quiet place to be for a few hours afterwards.”

“What?”

The cat only laughed and turned away, leaving her alone with the glowing mud. Violet drew another few marks through the illuminated earth, then straightened up and tossed her stick into the river with a splash, starting after the cat.

“Where are we going now?” She asked.

“I’m going to show you how to find a good campsite. Pay attention.”

Violet promised she would and shook the disparate questions from her mind as best she could. They remained though, just beneath he surface, like bubbles clinging to the bottom of a kettle mere moments from boiling.

The cat had seen an ocean. Violet knew, conceptually at least, what that meant. An ocean was like a river but bigger. But when Violet looked to the water she was now leaving behind she could see the other side. And though the night left the surface of the river inky and impenetrable, she could tell herself that there was a bottom.

To envision a stretch of water so vast that no person could see all the way across, and so deep that it was black even under the brightest light…a part of her recoiled but another, even as it felt the same instinctive terror, wanted to know what lay beyond that veil of crushing darkness.

Violet let her eyes pass from the river back to the forest ahead. And though she thought about taking out her lantern and dispelling the dark around her, she did not. She had the cat, and she had her sigil.

Unless she found herself in a place away from the icy light of the stars and the reassuring flicker of the Glow, she didn’t think she would need it.

The cat’s path took them away from the river and into a part of the forest Violet had not seen before. As they walked, cutting through bushes and along shallow, eroded ravines that still held the barest memory of depth, Violet noticed the cat pausing every so often, examining the treetops with a shrewd, calculating gaze.

“What are you looking for?” She asked.

The cat returned its gaze to the earth, then smiled.

“The stars are lovely tonight.” It said, then kept moving.

Violet paused to examine the stretch of branches the cat had been most focused on but saw nothing, no bats or birds or lurking demons, only leaves made silvery and strange by moonlight.

“What am I supposed to look for in a campsite?” She asked, hurrying after the cat.

“I expect your standards are probably different than mine,” the cat said thoughtfully, “seeing as how you’re carrying a small mountain on your back. I would ordinarily advise that you find a tree hollow or a cave, but your things would never fit in such a snug space, so we shall have to settle for a clearing.”

Finding a clearing took longer than Violet expected, the cat winding its way through the trees, taking her in what felt like a series of slowly widening circles. Every so often she stopped to run her hand across the trunk of a tree, finding where the moss grew thickest. She thought they were heading in a westerly sort of direction based upon those feelings, but couldn’t be sure. Not when it was so dark.

But just as Violet was about to ask the cat to stop so she could take a break and maybe orient herself more thoroughly, the trees opened up in front of her and the cat drew to a halt.

The clearing it had selected was small and narrow, its far end butting up against a lichen streaked boulder. Violet looked up into the sky, now clear and uninterrupted above her, tracing the delicate, wavering panes of azure Glow with her eyes.

It felt good to be away from the more impenetrable dark of the deep forest, though the clearing itself was still drenched in shadow.

“Are we camping here?” Violet asked.

“Tell me what you see, the characteristics of this place.” The cat said in lieu of a more direct answer.

Violet turned a circle in place. The clearing was flat and open, the ground soft and dry beneath her feet.

“It’s…open,” she said at last. “I could see a demon coming if it came after me. And the ground is flat, so I’ll be comfortable.”

“And you can keep your back to that boulder,” the cat pointed out. “When you’re camping in the woods you must either make it so that you can defend your camp or flee from it in a moment’s notice. Since you are not very fast, I think you would be better off attempting to mount a defense.”

Violet nodded slowly and tried not to let that new twinge of vulnerability gain any traction within her. It was true, she wasn’t especially fleet when compared to the cat or many of the other creatures that doubtlessly called the forest home.

Taking off her rucksack, Violet settled against the boulder, just as the cat had suggested. The stone felt cool and reliable against her shoulders, a scraggly bit of soft lichen tickling the back of her neck. Tugging her rucksack closer, Violet began to unpack.

It was quiet in the clearing, even more so than the forest had been. While walking she’d heard the whisper of wind passing through the treetops, the gentle creak of branches and trunks and the shuffle and squeak of nocturnal animals.

She couldn’t hear any of that now, it was as though the open air between her and the trees had swallowed the sounds up entirely. Again Violet found her gaze drawn to the reassuring sight of the Glow. But it didn’t feel quite as bright now.

It hadn’t been very long since she’d rather confidently predicted that she wouldn’t need her lantern for anything, but Violet found her fingers closing tightly around its base as she removed it from her rucksack. It wasn’t that she was frightened or anything, she told herself, but it would certainly be easier to set up camp if she had a bright and consistent pool of light to work with.

Then she could go gather wood and stones and build herself a cheery little campfire. It was just a pity she hadn’t brought any of the leftovers from supper. None were especially suitable for roasting over the flames, but that didn’t seem like much of a deterrent.

Maybe some other time….

And the light would make the eerie silence just a little less suffocating.

Violet turned the crank, her eyes narrowing in the sudden glare as the lantern’s filament glowed white hot and the shadows in the clearing, formerly soft and fluid as spilt ink, suddenly recoiled like iron filings fleeing the approach of a negatively charged magnet.

And the silence suddenly became very still. Because it hadn’t been silence, Violet suddenly realized. There had been a noise to it, soft and indiscernible enough that she hadn’t taken notice until it was gone. It was like the hum that came off of the streetlights when they were lit up, omnipresent enough that it eventually faded into the background.

But now the silence that wasn’t silence had gone. And from the tops of the trees surrounding the clearing, Violet saw a great many small shapes begin to shift and move.