25 Desperation

As they kept riding east towards Lake Falad, Forest Kastlam got strangely quiet. They spent two days without seeing even the smallest animal, and the sky above them turned a dull gray color, even though there were no clouds in sight.

The four of them were in low spirits, without having a specific reason for feeling like that.

"If that's what the atmosphere at the Amazon camp is like, maybe you should rethink your decision," Rayvad said after they had been riding silently for three hours.

"I'm sure it's not," Brightise muttered. She wasn't even in the mood to argue with Rayvad. That was definitely not a good sign. "Can't you do something about the weather?" she asked the two brothers. "It's making us all lethargic."

"No lightning or clouds around," Syd said. He was uncharacteristically serious. "I'm afraid we're on our own," he concluded.

Perhaps the worst part for Brightise was seeing Clober's grim face. Her expression took her back to the day Morral had disappeared. Her sister hadn't been this quiet and somber ever since.

"Look!" Clober yelled suddenly, pulling Brightise out of her thoughts.

She was pointing up at a tree, where a small squirrel was rushing away, jumping from branch to branch. It was moving in the opposite direction than they were.

"What's the hurry?" Brightise asked out loud.

"If only there was an Elf handy," Syd said. When he noticed the confused expression on Brightise's face, he explained, "Some of them can talk to animals."

Brightise definitely wished she could talk to animals herself. As they moved forward, they kept encountering more and more animals who seemed to be in a rush to go somewhere else. Birds, rabbits, ants... They even saw a wildcat jump over a bunch of bushes hurriedly.

"Maybe they are late to a party," Clober suggested.

Syd smiled down at her. "Maybe."

Suddenly, Rayvad pulled his horse to a stop. "What's one thing all animals are afraid of?" he asked them with an ominous expression on his face.

The blood froze in Brightise's veins. "Fire," she said in shock.

They all looked at each other for a minute, letting that sink in.

"It could be a campfire," Syd said. He didn't really seem to believe it himself.

"No Amazon would travel this far west, unless there was a war," Rayvad countered.

They pondered the situation silently for a while, before Syd finally said, "Let me go ahead and check things out. You wait here."

"I'll come with you," Rayvad said right away.

"No." Syd shook his head, pointing at Clober and Brightise. "They don't know this forest as well as we do. You need to stay with them."

He rode off without another word, leaving them to wait there and agonize over imaginary dangers. Rayvad got down from his horse and started pacing around anxiously. His nervousness seemed to magnify Brightise's worry.

"How long has it been?" he asked her after what seemed like an eternity.

"Two and a half minutes," she told him.

Barely five minutes later, Rayvad's horse made a strange, unsettling sound. Rayvad turned to it with a scared expression. "What is it, Lyber?"

Maybe he had forgotten that he was not an Elf.

There was no need to talk horse to be able to understand though. Two seconds later, a bright orange light lit up the forest around them. There was a fire right ahead of them. Before they could process the scene before their eyes, they saw a mass of black clouds move over the forest towards the source of the fire.

"Syd!" Rayvad murmured.

The three of them got back on their horses and headed straight towards the burning area. The smoke got thicker as they got closer, making it hard for them to breathe properly. Brightise held a hand over Clober's face to shield her, holding the reins with her other hand. She wasn't worried about the fire itself, but the smoke in their lungs was a different matter.

"Syd!" Rayvad yelled, no longer restraining himself.

When they reached the heart of the fire, Clober let out a gasp against Brightise's palm.

The demon before them was distinctively female. Her body was slimmer and curvier, and the flames on her head were longer. They moved in an eerily elegant way, as if they were smaller sets of hands. Syd had been cornered against a tree. His spear was in his hands, but he wasn't focused enough to control the clouds he had summoned.

In the end, he decided to use his spear as a normal weapon. Taking a step forward towards the Fire Demon, he tried to stab her with the tip of his spear.

The demon batted it away effortlessly. When he tried to do it again, she grabbed it out of his hands with her burning palms and destroyed it. Syd was standing half a meter away from the Fire Demon, completely unarmed.

Rayvad tried to push his horse through the burning trees to get to them, but Lyber wouldn't move. Brightise's horse was trying to turn in the opposite direction as well. They instinctively wanted to get away from the fire.

Rayvad abandoned that idea and jumped off his horse, reaching for his spear.

"No!" Brightise yelled at him. "She'll burn your spear too! You have to make it rain!"

"I can't!" he yelled back. "Only Syd can!"

Except Syd couldn't anymore. What was left of his spear was lying on the ground amid the flames as the Fire Demon kept closing in on him. Syd started climbing up a tree to avoid her, but it was pointless. The demon lifted her hand slowly and set one of the tree's branches on fire. The rest of the tree quickly caught fire too.

Brightise grabbed Rayvad's arms and tried to hold him back.

"Let me go!"

Brightise gritted her teeth hard. Tears slipped from her eyes as Rayvad shouted his voice hoarse, but she didn't let him go.

The whole tree had turned into a giant orange torch by then. The only person who could climb it and live to tell the tale was her.

If she was willing to go past that demon, to let it watch her move through the flames unscathed and realize what she was, to risk being taken as hostage to Mount Krasta and leaving Clober alone and unprotected, crying for her lost sisters, if she was willing and able to do all that, she might have a tiny chance of saving Syd from that raging fire.

She couldn't though.

Staying where she was and holding Rayvad back while his brother was being burned alive in order to protect her own sister was the toughest decision she'd ever had to make in her life.

Brightise kept weeping as she sank her nails into Rayvad's skin in an effort to hold on to him.

She couldn't save his brother without endangering Clober, but she could at least save Rayvad.