A Piece of Sky

ALL WHO WANDER ARE NOT LOST

It was the sort of night that makes one want to hide beneath their bed covers...

KA-BOOM!

The thunder woke a little red hen who had been nesting peacefully in a small lean-to abutting Farmer's work shack. A flash of lightning illuminated a white hen beside her.

"Grania, did you hear that?" asked the red hen.

Grania stirred and tucked her head beneath her wing groggily. "Go back to sleep Rós."

Rós turned her head in the direction of a distant rumble. "Grania, I heard something."

"It was only thunder." Lightning flashed again.

The little red hen blinked. She ruffled her feathers and begrudgingly nestled back down.

BOOM!

Rós was on her feet at once. "That was no thunder." She looked at the other chickens who did not seem to be bothered by the storm, and wondered how they were not hearing this. She took a hesitant step toward the edge of the lean-to.

Rumble, rumble.

A crack of lightning illuminated a distant hill beneath a black and purple sky. A circle of trees there swayed. I don't remember them being there before, Rós thought. She looked back to the other hens. "Grania." She clucked softly. "Grania, I'm going to find out what the noise is. Come with me."

Grania smoothed her wing. "Rós it is the middle of the night, and it is only thunder. No one is awake but you. Now go to sleep."

Rós cocked her head from one side, then to the other. "It's not thunder." She stepped from the shelter of the lean-to, into a gust of wind. She blinked, staring at the hill in the distance. "There's something out there."

***

Far away on the hillside, a dark force loomed. The trees shook and shuddered before him. Nurgal, the Lord of Decay, held between his viney, spindly, clawed fingers a single golden acorn. "This. This is the answer to our problems. For too long man has pushed back against us, cutting us down, burning us, ruining our beautiful world for their own expansion. No more! I call upon you, tree folk of the Summer Isle, to take a stand against them."

The trees trembled before Nurgal. Their leaves shivered against one another, like the sound of sheeting rain. They swayed in resistance. It is wrong to harm others.

Nurgal, who billowed out clouds of darkness around him, growled. "No. It is they who wrong you. Turn against them before it is too late!"

The trees groaned and creaked, rousing Nurgal's agitation. He roared like thunder. "I bring you life when you are faced with death, and you choose death. We can make the world green again. Choose life. Fight!"

A shock of lightning reflected in the surface of the golden acorn. The seed pulsed in Nurgal's fingers. He stared at it as another flash of light illuminated his twisted horns, set atop the writhing roots and vines that formed his face, and hollow, black eyes. The answer to all of his problems, the power to change the world, rested in the acorn.

The way you seek to win is wicked. What you wield is sacred. One of the trees knocked the acorn from his hand.

The seed spiraled through the air, carried on a gust of wind, to the audible raging of Nurgal.

***

Rós had moved quickly over the land between the farm and the hill, for she did not want to get caught in the full gale of the storm. The closer she came to the group of strange trees on the hill, the more she awed. A swirling mass of purple clouds lingered over the trees. Lightning flashed out of the black, void-like center. Rós shivered when she looked at it.

Any ordinary hen would have cowered at the base of that hill as she listened to the trees creaking, felt the ground quaking from the rumbles above, and watched those branches claw the sky as though of their own volition.

It was I, the acorn, tumbling through the stormy night, that ensured Rós would never be an ordinary chicken ever again.

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