Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 139
139
The pine needles were cold and prickly against her palms, wet with a mixture of ice melt and blood. Her fingers were numb. Everything was numb.
"Why?" she whispered to herself for the hundredth time, staring up at the wall of fire. "Why!?"
She could still feel his kiss on her lips. It had been so sudden... a little bit awkward at first, but so sweet and honest...
I don't want you to go through the same thing I did...
She could still feel his hand slipping away. The light, whispery feeling of the bandages she had so carefully wrapped, loop by meticulous loop, brushing past her fingertips as he leapt through the towering flames.
The last time she ever touched him.
I'm sorry...
One moment he was there, the next he was just a shimmering shadow on the other side of the flames, quickly enveloped by many others. The sounds coming from that other side... They didn't just tear through her ears, they tore through her very heart. Those otherworldly growls, those sickeningly wet smacking sounds of teeth slamming shut on flesh, the crack of bone and the patter of blood striking the ground like rain. But worst of all, the screams. Layla never knew there could be so many different screams in one place, overlapping with each other, fusing together into one, single cacophony. Screams of anguish. Screams of anger. Screams of pure insanity. Screams of sorrow. Screams that sounded like crying. Screams that sounded like laughter. But a single scream stood out from them all, at least for her.
Danado's scream. A scream of pure, undiluted pain, riding the currents of all those other sounds, and then... nothing. As if he had just disappeared, leaving behind only these bloody footprints in the sand, marking his journey from the centre of the circle to the blazing edge.
Layla kept asking herself why, but the answer was as plain as these spots of blood beneath her shivering hands, the footprints he had left for her... for her sister... for her mother and father... for her whole family. He had seen through her fake smile right from the very start, had seen the tears that no one else could.
The only way for him to keep his promise... was to break it first.
Layla covered her mouth and nose in an attempt to lock the sobs away, but they came regardless, tearing through her body in convulsive waves. Her breath was warm against her icy palms.
"Hold the line, damn you!" one of the defenders shouted at his comrades. "Don't let them through!"
The healthy Wolves were still trying to maintain a defensive ring just inside the flames; strong warriors doing their very best to protect their friends and families from the monsters their own people had become, but they were fighting a losing battle. The night had dragged on too long. The blizzard had sapped them of too much strength. The gaps of empty space between them were constantly growing larger and more numerous as Wolf after Wolf stumbled away from the inferno, too hurt and too tired to fight any longer. But those weren't really gaps of empty space at all. Far from it. They were sections of fire, tongues of flame reaching up and up and...
What in the name of...?
Layla craned her neck and stared, open-mouthed, at the pillar of fire slowly climbing up against the black backdrop of the sky, tears spilling down her cheeks, completely forgotten.
Twelve strides up, the pillar began to widen. It was like watching a gigantic flower of fire sprouting from the ground and bursting into bloom. The illusion was made all the more perfect by a gentle sway, as if the wind was pushing against it.
And that's when Layla realized what she was actually looking at. The outside Wolves, the crazy ones, had set fire to one of the forest trees. The pillar was the trunk, and the blooming flower was the branches.
Layla watched this spectacle, completely transfixed. The higher the flames climbed, the more pronounced the sway became. She had known they were surrounded by trees on all sides, of course. She had heard their creaks and groans and had seen the black line the canopy formed against the mountain, but in the absolute darkness of the night, they were no more than amorphous clouds of shadow. To see one of them lit up this way, a blazing torch in the sky, was a sight of incomparable beauty, as well as mind-numbing terror. The blizzard screamed through its branches, waving back and forth. The sound it made was like the roar of a dragon straight out of a child's bedtime story, mingled with the low, groaning crack of wood under immense strain.
Another pillar of fire began to rise up beside the first and, mere seconds later, a third sprouted from the ground. Pines and cedars and beech trees, one by one, all going up in flames.
From her spot down on the ground, looking up at this monstrous display, there was no distinction between the wall of fire and these blazing pillars, these lines of fire rising straight up into the sky. From this angle, it was all too easy to imagine that they were all connected, that they were all the same fire, as if the wall, in its desire for bloodshed, was growing teeth.
In a way, she was right.
A loud chopping noise broke through the shouts and growls and a shuddering ripple rose through the tree from the bottom up, through the trunk and into the flaming branches. It came again a moment later, a hard wooden thunk, almost lost amidst the constant beat of the drums. It happened again and again, a steady heartbeat, and the infernal torch shuddered each time, like a severed limb that wouldn't stop twitching and spasming, desperate to keep on living even though it was already dead.
Leaves broke free of the immolated canopy and whipped away into the night, tiny spots of orange against the pure black sky. Larger branches snapped off entirely and dropped straight down, bouncing and rolling off the lower limbs before smashing into the ground amidst crazy yelps of glee and excitement.
Deep groans, splintering cracks, louder and louder, louder even than the ghostly chopping, each one sending another convulsive ripple through the blazing tree.
"By the Cora, look out!"
With one last crack that seemed to split the very earth asunder, the tree began to fall, and all Layla could do was watch.
It was slow, that was the thing. It was so unexpectedly slow, as if it wasn't beholden to the same rules of time like everything else. Its boughs bent in the opposite direction of the fall, like a paintbrush being dragged across a black canvass. The flames trailing out behind it were the paint, a furious orange and yellow, shooting off embers and sparks of light.
"Moooove!"
The defenders leapt out of the way just as the tree fell through the wall of fire with a tremendous crash. Plumes of flame shot outward in a double spiral of smoke and shadow.
From the other side of the wall, the drums were picking up speed.
And so was the chopping.
Layla watched, completely frozen, as more and more of those fangs of fire began to rise into the night sky, sprouting up seemingly at random.
"Another one! Look out!"
A tall, thin pine started its slow descent, trailing smoke and flame. The top third, bent back by its own momentum, smacked into the carpet of pine needles like a whip, barely ten strides away. It was so close Layla actually felt the vibrations thrumming through her knees and up into her ribcage. Flames licked at the branches, causing the snow to slip free in mushy clumps, hissing and steaming.
Wolves and Foxes were running all over the place, trying to get away from this latest horror from the sky. The oil lanterns had been bad, but this was like a hundred of them put in a line.
"Run, Kano! You've got to move!"
"Where!? There's nowhere left to go, you fool!"
"Just anywhere, come on!"
More red and orange flowers were sprouting up, growing beyond the wall of fire. Four, then five, then six. Soon, it was like a flaming crown rising out of the earth.
Layla was completely paralysed, staring up at those glowing spikes. She couldn't move, she couldn't speak, she could barely breathe. But then, somewhere nearby, a sound broke through to her. The crying of a small child, horribly familiar, stabbing through her heart like a jagged thorn. She knew that sound. She had felt those same cries against her breast not an hour ago.
"Tio?" She stood up amidst the chaos, nearly tripping and falling over her own unsteady feet. "Tio!"
Someone bumped into her, nearly knocking her down. Layla didn't even get a look at his face.
"Tio!"
A Wolf came sprinting by, his eyes wide with panic, and Layla had to step aside smartly to keep from getting trampled. Her back hit someone else, who rudely shoved her out of the way.
"Move! Move!"
She was getting shoved and jostled from side to side like a pebble in a prospector's sieve. Faces kept streaming by, there and gone, Wolves and Foxes both, all of them eerily similar, all of them caught in the grips of panic, trying to get away from those pillars of flame before they came crashing down.
"Tio! Where are you!?" The crowd finally thinned and Layla burst out into the open, gasping for air, and there he was, a tiny little Wolven boy with dark brown fur, standing all by himself in the middle of this chaos. One chubby little arm was up over his eyes, as if to block out all these scary sights. The other was up near his cheek, halfway curled into a fist and desperately trying to wipe the tears away. His entire body hitched with every gasping sob. Ropes of snot ran from both nostrils.
"Tio! I'm coming! I'm -"
An ear-splitting crack reverberated through the frigid air, stopping her dead. She looked up...
If you need me, just yell and I'll come running, okay?
A cloud of fire was descending from the sky, roaring through the blizzard winds like a monster, complete with glowing, yellow eyes and jagged, burning teeth. There was no curve that she could see, no paintbrush bending back against the black canvas of the night sky, and the reason for that was simplicity itself. There was no bend because she wasn't looking at it from the side. She was looking at it straight on.
If you need me...
The light spread across the ground, shrinking Tio's shadow down to a tiny black spot beneath his feet.
"TIO!!"
... I'll come running.
Tio lowered his arm and looked up just as Layla scooped him into her arms. His face was hot against her chest, but not as hot as the dragon's breath coming down on top of them.
As Layla dove through the air, time slowed to a crawl. She saw the light flowing across the ground in a molten pool of gold, seeping into all the tiny cracks and crevices, marking every pebble, every pine needle, every grain of sand in a stark, black outline.
Tio looked at her, his dark brown eyes like mirrors, filled with fire, just as the light came crashing down.
The mouth of the dragon, slamming shut, swallowing them whole.
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