Elf and Bear: Panic

 

Once outside Thornbriar began to trudge his way deeper into the woods, his visit to the Doctor already forgotten in his continued anger at the bear.  He walked along muttering, making telling points to passing trees or asking rhetorical questions of the sky.  All around the woods deepened and the light grew dimmer and dimmer as the evening drew on.  He went over ditches and through vast undergrowth, through oceans of ferns touched red by autumn under the black pillars of trees, heedless of everything about him.

Finally, tired out, he cast himself down on a small hillock warmed by the last rays of the setting sun.  He meant to rest only for a moment, but he must have been more worn out than he thought, for as he sat in the warmth of the sun and listened to the sighing of the wind in the grass, he soon fell asleep. 

Thornbriar woke to complete darkness.  Overhead no moon nor any star twinkled in the darkly shrouded sky.  All about him was the tall blackness of the whispering trees in a cold wind.  The elf scrambled to his feet and gazed wide-eyed all around.  In the shifting shadows nothing looked familiar, and there was not the faintest light to let him hope to guess a way.

“Good Heavens!” he thought.  “Well, what do I do?  Nothing to do but guess a direction, I suppose.  Well, the woods don’t go on forever, and I must come out somewhere.  I wish it weren’t so cold, or that I’d eaten something before I left.”

He stood hugging himself and stamping in the chill air, then chose a direction where there seemed to be a hint of a path and started following it.  In a moment, the dark woods had swallowed him up.

Perhaps if he had a little more wood lore he would have done better, but he was after all Field Folk and not one of the People of the Woods, and, being only a few hundreds of years old, was not very experienced.  All about him the trees grew thicker and denser and the underbrush more impassable.  He began to feel like a fly blundering blindly in a web.  His feet tangled in unseen roots, and the rattle of a year’s worth of leaves blown on the wind was like the hum of an angry hive around his ears.

Then Thornbriar panicked.  He never remembered what triggered it, but he suddenly shrieked and started to run, arms stretched out in front of him.  He jolted into trees that ricocheted him off into new directions.  He scrabbled his way frantically forward, branches whipping his body.  Blind fear drove the elf forward until he felt that his heart would split, but he didn’t stop until his foot came down on nothing but air and, with a cry, he tumbled down into an old, dry creek bed, stones and dirt slithering along with him.  There was an abrupt burst of light and noise.