He checked in on his devils. The wolf. The acorn. The feeling that his new world was a sinister joke at his expense.
Hey, assholes.
They were there, but they too were shifting. They were becoming less like a devouring fire and more like difficult terrain, the hard features of a landscape Green had begun to map. He found a place to stand and a guide to stand with him.
Maybe this isn’t about escaping something.
Maybe it’s about arriving somewhere.
He chuckled and wiped his eyes.
He felt silly with fatigue.
Valentina strolled back into his exhausted mind and communicated with a look.
Notes.
I need to make notes while it’s fresh in my mind. Also…I think I may pass out.
The moon was still high in the sky. He suspected this meant there was still a lot of night left to pass.
He went back to work.
Inside the cabin, it felt hot and stuffy after the cool night air. The feeling made Green’s eyelids heavy.
In his notebook, he filled two pages with short, simple sentences capturing every detail he recalled.
That done, he twisted the knobs to shut off both lanterns and fed a log to the stove. He watched a jack-o’-lantern smile of firelight from the iron door’s air vents color the wall. The smell of the earthen floorrose up like a lullaby in the warm dark and he surrendered to its comfort.
Near Green’s campsite, a great horned owl hooted her claim over her long-established territory.
On a mountainside six miles to the west, an ancient thing that had tasted Green’s blood chased prey it could not catch.
In the dream, Green was a quadruped taller than the trees on the mountainside. There was his campsite. His abandoned car beneath its tarp. The distant glow of Dancer’s office sign.
His triple-jointed legs were finger-thin and picked their way between branch and bough with the steady precision of a watchmaker.
He flowed over the forest. His body, a glass orb carrying moonlight like a dish of milk, was a pearl sliding along the autumn canopy. He was a thing of pure sight, his borrowed luminescence shining wherever he looked, shepherding the shadows from his path.
There was no question about his purpose. He searched for the horned wolf, for the dangerous secret that had told itself to him alone, unasked.
How could you search for a thing that had only been found once?
No. It hadn’t been found. It had shown itself.
Something white as magnesium fire darted below, like a spark arcing between the tree trunks. The glass fawn. Always fleeing. Always pursued. Between the trees. Between the worlds. Forests and fens. Oceans and continents. Our world and its native elsewhere space.
Green halted. The miniature moon of his body hovering above the steeple of a shaggy spruce.
There is the prey.
Where is the predator?
The fawn leapt and darted away, a cape of tree shadows following behind it like a bridal train.
A motion nearby pulled Green’s focus.
There, seated on a soft patch of nothing, the horned wolf regarded him from behind a mask of dry bone.
