High upon the Range, amid one of the villages of the Giants, a scoutmaster shared his favorite campfire stories with his apprentices. Once he had done his worst, they each crept away to their tents and sealed them tight against whatever bears, lions, or ax-murderers might be on the prowl.
Had they only known.
Some may have noticed the familiar sound of a snapping branch or something like a paw settling easily into the forest carpet, thinking to themselves, “just unzip the tent and have a look around. Then you can vanquish that doubt and sleep better. But you can’t do that all night. Just forget it and pretend to sleep” until—by some accident—they eventually dozed off.
Outside the little blue collapsible A-frames, forest shadows shifted. The forest was not as still as it ought to be on such a stagnant summer night.
A wary ear might have heard. Her feet settled into the coniferous carpet almost silently with each step; audible, yet not loud like the rhythmic respiration of sleepers dreaming of footfalls in the dark.
Something caught the glow of the smoldering coals in the fire ring; an orange silhouette of fingers descending into the sleeping fire and nabbed the smoldering fire sticks like sleeping babes. Suddenly there was movement in the shadows of the grove again, and the coals slept alone, thieved of their feast.
By morning it might seem that the coals had devoured what fuel remained. It wouldn’t matter how much wood had been consumed. The end would be the same.
While the phantom crept among the other shadows it was formless—formless as a night breeze carrying embers aloft to go forth and multiply, fire’s own promiscuous spirit; but once the phantom parted from the shadows of the grove, it moved in crisp definition. It took a female form, as forest spirits so often do; a pure, unclothed form. The burning branches swung in bundles with their bindings—her hands, shadows themselves but for the orange arcs of coals swinging in the night air.
The Promethean shadow laid down what burning branches she had here and there, arranging her seed just so, just as a gardener, planting seed on a naked lot, envisions next summer’s growth.
She would lay the coals down in a nutritious salad of pine needles or a yellowing, folded vermicelli of meadow on a dry ridge. After she laid down the last coal, she visited the glowing seedlings in her nursery one by one, tending to their every need until they could each spread their wings, go forth, and raise fiery families of their own.
She watched her children feed, and listened to them breathe and chatter like songbirds, their multicolored phoenix-wings unfurled. She watched each fling embers like seed into the air; some to perish, some to germinate. And all the conspiratorial bushes and trees around them exhaled the life-breath that fed them, urging them on to take flight.