A breath later, and he was back and shaping warnings on his tongue.
It felt impossible that it was already too late.
It was already too late.
The fawn was there.
It was just there, stepping from the shadows into the ring of firelight.
A bad punch line.
A tragedy so complete and absurd it was comedy.
Valentina stood by the fire. Alf and his friends hung about in their loose circle. Green swayed on his knees.
Then, they fell.
Valentina, Alf, Jerome, and Casper tumbled to the dirt with obscene little thuds.
Each of them convulsed on the ground like toppled windup toys and the fawn wasn’t even looking at them. It didn’t even pay them the respect of its active attention.
It was looking at Green.
Green didn’t have a chance to stand before the buzzing disk in the center of the fawn’s head drew his eyes and left him bodiless in the white wastes of an alien blizzard.
He passed long, weightless hours in that featureless nowhere, feeling paradoxically bereft of physical form and somehow soiled. A senseless feeling of urgency gnawed at him, but there was nowhere to stand and analyze it. There was no solid ground. There was no geometry, no motion, no breaths to measure out the time. And if there was a job to do, any job at all, it must be to unmake the galling, hateful thoughts that stained the pale, smooth blankness. The perfect forever. The pristine oblivion. The unbroken winter.
Something shook the world and Green’s consciousness flickered back into his skull just as clods of earth rained down, knocking the fire into a column of sparks and dimming the light.
Catskill erupted from the soil, given speed like thought by the mountains that were his breath and blood.
Green surfaced from a thousand years of deep, frigid water and gasped in a breath.
The wolf was at his side.
Taking hold of a lupine shoulder that rippled like liquid stone, Green hauled himself to his feet.
His mouth tasted like burning plastic. He spat. There was a kick inside his chest as his heart remembered to beat. Then, the horned wolf and Green growled as one.
The fawn didn’t move and already Green could feel too many fingers tapping at his windowpanes, reaching for his mind.
“Hold its thoughts,” Green said.
Catskill took a step forward, the shadows rolling back from his head, a dark flower blooming into a skull. His jaw dropped open in a toothy, wolfish grin, a jagged mountain range of darkness rising on his back like a map of the young Appalachian range a billion years before the first mammal huddled in its den.
The fawn reared back on its hind legs like a ram about to charge, then just stood in defiance of gravity. A bent, luminous figure full of arrhythmic, pulsing motion. Within its head, the too-perfect disk awoke between the dark spots that weren’t quite eyes. The disk shivered and spun, an organ that excreted corruption.
Green felt the oil of the fawn’s thoughts slide from his mind as Catskill began his mental assault.
There was a moment of odd, frozen peace.
He looked at the monstrous wolf standing at his shoulder, the creature who had made his first nights in the mountains a terror, now his brother and his strength.
He looked at the fawn, the first cryptid he had seen at Candle-Fly Camp, the form he thought ghostly and beautiful, an avatar of the ephemeral beauty and mystery of existence.
He looked to Alf and his friends. They were shivering violently, face down among the dirt and cinders. He thought of Mr. Reynard beneath his thin blanket. He thought of the dark, sightless eyes of half-buried songbirds. How long could they have left to live? Seconds?
Beyond the firelight, there was something wrong with the trees. They were slipping. Losing focus. A profound elsewhere was exerting a new kind of gravity on the little clearing. Reality was breaking.
