FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Sleep did not come easily to the human, as weary as he was. In fact, it hardly came at all save for a few brief interludes laced with strange and disturbing dreams that did nothing to ease the confusion that ran rampant through his mind. It was early and a faint twilight glow had still lingered behind the mountains when he had crawled into his sleeping bag in a futile attempt to get some much needed rest. He had tossed and turned for what seemed like hours while the events of the past six days played through his mind in an endless loop, a sense of uneasiness leaching into his thoughts. There were so many things that he couldn't explain, so many questions that he needed answered.

For interminable hours he stared up at the pine branches over his head, eyes glistening in the firelight. Bizarre images spawned in the half-awareness between awake and asleep jumped out at him from the unearthly patterns of light and shadow thrown against the roof by the flickering flames. A few times he managed to nod off to sleep, only to jerk awake a few short minutes later with his racing heart echoing heavily in his ears as if from the bottom of a well.

He was seriously beginning to think that he was going crazy.

Ever since his encounter with the wolf-like creature that had come to his camp, a terrible sense of wrongness had been growing within him. It shifted through his veins, creeping, gnawing at him until fear and uncertainty lurked in the dark places beneath the overhanging roof of pine boughs. It drove him from the dubious comfort of the lean-to and out into the cold, still air of an October night.

Through the remaining hours of the night, the watchful eyes of the heavens gazed unblinkingly down upon him as he built the fire up high, seeking to drive back the night and purge the fears that plagued his mind. Pine and spruce logs crackled and hissed in the fire and the dancing flames made the nearby trees appear to flicker in and out of existence from the encircling night.

He paced back and forth in front of the fire like a caged animal, trampling the coarse snow down into hard pack. His head was down and his brow was furrowed with lines of intense concentration. Back and forth, back and forth he paced, heavy boots crunching on the hard frozen crust of the snow.

He paused his restless pacing for a moment and looked up into a midnight black sky studded with innumerable stars and painted with the bluish green curtains of the ever-changing and shifting Aurora Borealis. Surely the night must nearly be over he thought, but he had lost track of the time. The night hours are long when troubled thoughts weigh heavily on one's mind and sleep is far from one's grasp. The Milky Way arched overhead, a bright swath of eons old starlight that bisected the night sky. His eyes searched among the glittering stars, seeking among them the familiar patterns of the constellations he knew so well, and the ground seemed to fall away beneath his feet as they failed to find them.

A gnawing dread took hold deep inside his guts as his eyes frantically searched the heavens. Orion, the hunter, should have been low in the southern sky at this hour. Instead of the unmistakable three bright stars in a row pattern of the hunter's belt, there was nothing but a random smattering of bright and faint stars. Not a single recognizable constellation revealed itself among the myriad specks of light that punctuated the curtain of night.

Just my luck, he thought ruefully. Even the stars were alien.

He continued to stare upward as his brain feverishly attempted calculations of time vs. stellar drift and the distances involved in relocating his person far enough away from planet Earth to make the sky appear different. He knew that there were tens of thousands of years involved in the one option and hundreds of light years in the other but it made sense somehow, a tiny piece of the puzzle slowly sliding into place. A growing sense of desperation wormed into his soul as he turned away, his jaw clenched and his mouth pressed into a grim line. The strange just kept getting stranger.

With nothing better to do, he sat down on a log at the mouth of his shelter and pulled his sleeping bag around his shoulders to keep the chill night air at bay. Conflicting feelings of confusion, fear, and anger banded together and made it feel as if he were spiralling down a dark tunnel towards something unknown, watching as his life receded away from his outstretched fingers. It was with sickening realization that he began to understand a kernel of the truth. Almost everything that he knew had been wrenched from his grasp and cast into oblivion. His home, his friends, his life. Everything he knew was gone. A long sigh escaped his lips and he slumped forwards to cast another piece of wood into the fire. He really hoped that the light at the end of the tunnel, if it finally decided to show itself, wouldn't end up being a train.

He was beginning to suspect that everything that had happened to him over the past six days was part of something bigger. Getting lost was one thing but disappearing trucks, picnic tables and civilizations were not usually part of the experience and neither were wolves that walked on two legs. Civilization was always somewhere out there and it was usually just a matter of time before it revealed itself in one way or another. That was not the case this time. So far, he hadn't seen a single damned sign of anything that would tell him that he wasn't the only human for miles around. He tiredly shook his head and tried to bring some sense of order to his thoughts. Maybe he was just being paranoid, but his whole situation seemed a little too well planned to be just a random sequence of events.

For one thing, he figured that the odds of him being randomly relocated in the unnatural manner that he had been were somewhere in the neighbourhood of several hundred trillion to one, and that the odds of something like that wolf existing weren't a whole lot less than that. Those facts alone were enough to make him carefully reconsider the events of the past six days. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed as if he had been picked out of the campground by someone or something, transported to parts unknown and left to fend for himself. To what end, he couldn't even begin to imagine.

He shifted uncomfortably on the log and leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. He propped up his chin on his hands and stared blankly into the fire. He still couldn't quite believe everything that had happened to him. What was supposed to have been a three day hunting trip had turned into something else entirely, an episode that was so far from believable that he wasn't sure if it was completely real, and it was really getting on his nerves. This world, or wherever he was now, looked real, sounded real, even smelt and tasted real but it just felt so undeniably wrong, wrong enough that he suspected it was permanent.

He sighed heavily and stared deep into the fire. Lost in thought, he was mesmerized by the subtly shifting patterns in the glowing embers. Time slowed to a halt. Seconds melted down, pooling to become minutes and then a most disconcerting thing happened.

A shadow passed between himself and the fire like a hand in front of his eyes. The world around him shifted, distorted, and faded away in a kaleidoscope of sound and light.

And he was somewhere else.

Not again! His mind questioned crazily as he looked around him.

The fire and the campsite had disappeared only to be replaced with a desolate wasteland of smashed rock where the only colour that existed was a lifeless grey. No stars marked the twilight sky above him and not a single creature except himself moved about on the barren land.

Gripped in the throes of a powerful dream, he began walking. He had no real direction in mind but he was driven forwards by a sense of anticipation. Something important was about to happen.

The sky grew lighter with the approaching sunrise and the first hints of colour sprang to life in his drab surroundings. The fields of shattered stone gave way to softer earth and grass began to sprout up from the ground beneath his feet, the landscape shifting smoothly into a panorama of undulating hills. He saw a river in the distance, a thin ribbon of deepening blue that twisted its way to and fro among the grassy hills. He turned and approached the river and stood waiting on the bank, a lump in his throat as the rising sun cast the first rays of light across the land.

In the blink of an eye, everything changed again. The breath of light brought life and colour to a land once devoid of anything but grey. Before his very eyes, seedlings sprouted up from the ground. In the space of barely a minute, they grew into towering trees, matured and eventually withered and died. The trees fell to the ground only to be replaced by more sprouting up like weeds as the old ones decayed into the earth. A few small round shelters seemingly materialized out of thin air on the opposite bank of the river. He stared at them curiously for a moment before he understood. Framed with the ribs of long extinct mammoths and sheltered with the hides of animals, they were the homes of ancient humans. But why was he seeing them?

The sun continued to rise at an accelerated rate and his surroundings changed and evolved like he was watching some crazy time lapse movie.

The shelters across the river moved and shifted, collapsing into decay as new ones jumped up in the spaces between the rotting piles that slowly sank out of sight into the earth. Subtle changes appeared as the sun kept rising. The shelters of mammoth bone gave way to leather clad teepees, and still the trees and grass grew, lived, and died, the cycle of life shown at high speed. The teepees gradually faded into ruin and a few solitary houses built from logs rose up from the earth, their construction taking mere seconds.

And still the sun climbed higher into the sky.

The isolated log structures were reclaimed by the land and a cluster of old false-fronted wood buildings built themselves along the bank of the river. In short minutes he himself was surrounded by the growing town. Buildings were torn down before his eyes and new ones rose up from the wreckage. The architecture changed slowly, evolving. Buildings of brick and stone replaced those constructed from wood. Taller and taller they rose. Three stories, four, and higher yet. Steel and concrete replaced brick and stone, a small town exploding soundlessly out past him, reaching out towards the hills as it grew into a dense city.

He stood in the middle of an empty street, watching in fascination as two huge buildings rose up on either side of him, each level being stacked on top of the previous one at an impossible rate. The towers of steel transformed into pillars of golden hued glass that reached up to scrape the belly of the blue sky just as the sun passed directly overhead. As the sun began its descent towards the western horizon, the rate of change in the city slowed down. Old structures were still torn down and new buildings still rose up but they were not as elaborate as before. Stone and brick reappeared, and the new buildings were always shorter than the previous ones. The city shrank; the suburbs swallowed up by a constantly changing forest. As the sun descended to a mid afternoon level, construction ground to an eventual halt.

The sun sank steadily towards the horizon and the city was still and quiet. The ravages of time soon took their toll on the city around him. Concrete walls crumbled away, leaving their steel skeletons exposed to rust in the still air. Buildings collapsed all around and trees took root amongst the piles of forgotten stone.

And still the sun sank ever lower in the sky and the light faded away before the returning night. Nature invaded the city, creeping in on silent feet to cover the fallen stones with moss and lichen, to rust away the steel beams that lay strewn about like the bones of giants. Within minutes, all was covered with a thickening layer of earth from which new life sprouted. A forest shot up from the dirt that covered the bones of a city.

As the sun went down and the light disappeared under the onrushing darkness, there was nothing left of the city save for a few mounds of earth and some weathered, lichen encrusted stones. Time and nature had won the battle.

At the end, he was left much as he was at the beginning. Alone in a monochromatic world of grey, but this time he was left with something else. A terrifying seed of understanding had been planted deep within his mind.

The message was clear enough that he understood the meaning behind it without a doubt. There could be no return to the life he knew so well. It didn't exist anymore.

"No!" He muttered through clenched teeth, balling his hands into fists. "It can't all be gone!"

"NOOOOOO....!" He screamed as he raised his arms in the air, trying to ward away the darkness that rushed in from all sides. His cry of despair was cut off as the darkness swallowed him up.

********************

Kendri walked down the narrow trail with a spring in her step and her tail wagging happily behind her. For the first time in what felt like years, she was happy. At least she thought she was happy, she wasn't completely sure though. Over the last half an hour her emotions had run the gamut from the initial bout of gut wrenching fear all the way to exhilaration. Happy? Maybe. Numb between the ears was a little closer to the truth. Even so, she still felt better now than she had at any time in recent memory.

With a little luck, and a lot of work, perhaps everything might turn out in the end after all. Her meeting with the stranger had turned out far better than she had expected. Granted, there had been a few tense moments right after the stranger had spotted her, but she had expected that. The amazing thing was that she never sensed any animosity from him, just wariness with a hint of fear around the edges. He had grabbed his weapon but instead of brandishing it threateningly as she had expected him to do, he had simply held it at the ready in a defensive posture and waited for her to make the next move. What she did next was not even something that she had expected herself to do. Now that she looked back on it, it had been one of the toughest decisions she had ever made to put aside her spear and step forward completely unarmed before a creature that had the power to snuff out her life before she would be able to do anything about it. How her heart had soared when he mimicked her actions and put his weapon aside! She smiled happily and felt the warm glow of contentment spread through her body. Perhaps the dreams were true after all.

The most amazing thing about her meeting with the creature was the simple fact that he had even gone far enough to share some of his meal with her. She still couldn't quite believe that. Among her people, it took a huge amount of trust for one to share their meal with a complete stranger. It was an instinct that traced its roots far back into the forgotten past of her people. Strangers were competition and competition was not welcome at the kill. Of course she realized that it might not have the same significance to the stranger, but nonetheless it was a gesture that had two important side effects. First, her fear of the creature had melted away to become something that floated between wariness and curiosity. Second, by all of the traditions of her people, she now owed him a small debt. Nothing major, something along the lines of a small gift. Preparing a meal for the person in question was the usually accepted manner of repaying such a debt but there were a host of other possibilities as well.

After stifling a yawn with the back of a paw, she looked up at the darkening sky through the canopy of branches above her head. It was getting a bit late and after all of the excitement this evening, she didn't particularly feel like continuing the long hike back to the cabin. It wasn't going to be a particularly cold night she thought, so she might as well find somewhere comfortable among the trees and sleep until morning. It didn't take her long to locate just such a place. She found it in the form of a huge uprooted spruce tree. She followed it along the length of its trunk, sniffing carefully. It had not been long since the tree had toppled over and most of the branches were still full with green needles. As she walked along, she pulled aside branches here and there, looking for that perfect spot. When she finally found it, she crawled under the cover of the branches and up to the rough bark of the trunk, which was as big around as her waist. Safe within her cocoon under the resinous branches, she shucked of her leather cloak and spread it out over the snow covered moss beneath her paws. After she placed her spear and short knife within easy reach, she crawled onto her cloak and after turning around three or four times, she curled up nose to tail. She shifted uncomfortably for a bit and her head snapped up. She growled something under her breath and rooted around underneath her cloak with a questioning paw. She grasped the offending stick which had been poking her in the side and tossed it out into the dark. She settled down again and after shifting around a bit to make sure there were no other annoyances waiting under her cloak, she began drifting down the short road to oblivion.

Kendri's slumber was not the usual near comatose state entered by those looking to get a decent night's rest. Such an unwary state could be dangerous when out in the forest. Over the past two years she had trained herself to sleep lightly whenever she was outside the confines of the cabin. To an outside observer she may have appeared to be deep in dreamland, but the fact that her pointed ears were sticking up, listening, twitching as they followed the night time sounds of the forest gave a clue that there was part of her that never slept. Ever vigilant, her mind walked in that grey area between the waking world and the dream world, keeping a wary ear cocked for anything that might pose a threat.

The night passed without incident, at least for her anyways.

When the sun finally climbed above the horizon behind a thin veil of high cloud and the feeble morning light crawled its way through the trees, it found Kendri sitting on a log trying to rid her fur of all the pine needles that had worked their way into her coat during the night. How she hated those things! She growled and muttered to herself as she tried in vain to pick the offending needles from her fur with her blunt claws. After several minutes of unsuccessful attempts at grooming, she let out a heavy sigh, stood up, fluffed out her fur and let loose a vigorous dog-like shake. Pine needles went flying everywhere, bouncing off of nearby trees and bushes with a sound like someone throwing sand across a wood floor. Grumbling a bit to herself and wishing for the millionth time that she had a decent brush, she smoothed down her coat as best as she could. She had disposed of most of the pine needles with the shaking but she could still feel a few here and there, making her itch and scratch where they poked at her skin. A bit of a wry grin grew across her muzzle as she remembered the last time this sort of thing happened. On that particular occasion, she had got stuck out in the forest in the middle of a ferocious downpour and had been forced to take shelter under the overhanging branches of a spruce tree. Not only had she been inundated with sticky and itchy pine needles that time, she had also been drenched clear through to her skin. She had returned to the cabin in a rather foul mood and as a rather bedraggled mess. She smiled and chuckled a bit. It had taken days to get her coat straightened out after that. Still smiling, she gathered up her cloak, shook it to rid it of clinging snow and more of those bothersome pine needles and threw it over her head. She affixed her belt and her short bladed knife around her waist and then gathered up her spear. She scrutinized the point of her spear with a critical eye for a moment before flicking a blunt claw over the edge of the blade. Satisfied that it was sharp enough, she set out in search of her morning meal.

As she stalked through the trees in search of prey, her mind wandered back over yesterday's unbelievable events. In her mind's eye, she could still see the stranger's face. For the first time, she had been able to look at him closely without a haze of fear obscuring small details, and she was intrigued by what she saw. The unruly mop of fur that covered the top of his head was a rich, patternless brown. She was fascinated by the way it ended a distance above his eyes, how it grew down the back of his head and faded into bare skin as it crawled down his neck. There was a confusing hint of copper tinted fur that grew around his mouth, down his neck and crawled up his cheeks to join with the brown mass on his head. Two of the strangest strips of dark brown, nearly black fur lined the heavy brow ridges above his eyes and seemed to move as if they had lives of their own. Then there were his eyes. Those eyes captivated her. Pale blue eyes, like those of a young pup, but with a tinge of steel grey that reminded her of the reflection of the blue sky off the calm surface of a deep lake. She shook her head, trying to push away the feeling that those eyes gave her. She knew it was impossible, but there was something about those eyes that triggered a fleeting sense of familiarity deep in the recesses of her mind when she looked into their pale depths. She was at a loss to explain it but she thought it might be tied in with the dreams somehow. Or perhaps as was more likely, she was just imagining it. Among her people, prolonged isolation from any type of social contact was known to have strange effects on the mind. For two very long years she had only herself to keep her company, so it wasn't all that surprising to her that she might have lost a bit of her sanity somewhere along the way.

She stopped suddenly, searching for the subtle movement in the nearby bushes that had grabbed her attention. She stood as still as a statue, ears pricked and her nose twitching. After a moment, something brown moved near ground level amongst the patchwork of twigs and the background of snow perhaps twenty-five or thirty spans away. The wind wasn't particularly in her favour so she crept noiselessly around in a wide arc, trying to get scent on whatever it was that lurked among the leafless branches ahead. A wolfish grin split her muzzle as she finally located the scent trail. Grouse! She ran her long tongue over her teeth. Just what she needed! Two or three of those would make a filling meal for both her and the stranger, and she would be able to repay the small debt she owed. She sniffed the air and grinned again. Grouse were medium sized birds, but were relatively stupid and easy enough to catch, not to mention tasty as well. She put her spear aside and eased off her cloak. Grouse may be stupid, but they are wary. Her leather cloak was good at keeping her fur dry and relatively clean but it would be a hindrance in a case like this. Stalking through thick bush like this was a lot easier without the added encumbrance of clothing. She carefully folded up her cloak and lay it on the snow next to her spear. She reached for her knife and her paw hovered uncertainly above it. After a moments thought, she put it and the belt on top of her cloak. The only things she would need for this hunt were her bare paws. She crouched down low to the ground, looking more like her four legged cousins than she would have believed, and began her stalk.

Kendri blended in exceptionally well with the background of tree trunks and low bushes. So did the grouse. It took a keen eye to be able to pick out any of the players in this drama as they moved towards their fateful meeting. One moved with extreme care and patience, the other two tottered around in blissful ignorance as they picked through the underbrush. Their soft chirping noises were barely audible as they moved about in search of seeds and other edibles. Her amber eyes fixed dead ahead and her ears standing at attention, Kendri moved with almost infinite slowness. The gap between her and her prey was narrowed by a paw's breadth at a time. Five spans, four, a minute long pause at three spans as one of the birds cast a wary eye in her direction. She waited, gathering her legs underneath her for the final spring, every muscle taut with anticipation. The grouse came closer yet, two spans, one and a half, and Kendri launched herself out of hiding. There was a startled whirring of wings as the grouse exploded out from under her lunging form.

Only one made it to the safety of the high branches of a nearby tree.

The other one dangled limply from Kendri's right paw. It had been too late in its attempt to flee and she had caught it in her outstretched paws and given its neck a quick twist. Panting happily from the excitement and the exertion, she made her way back where she had placed her cloak, spear and knife. She put her cloak back on, gathered up her possessions and went in search of another grouse or two.

A couple of hours later, she'd managed to catch another grouse and had narrowly missed bagging a third one. She hoped that two birds should make enough of a meal for her and the stranger. She was quite thoroughly hungry and was getting tired of hunting. It was time to return to the creature's camp and repay her debt by sharing her breakfast with him.

Now if only she could figure out where that was...

It took her perhaps another hour to retrace her steps to where she had spent the night, and there she paused for a long while. The trail stretched out before her, winding it's way through the dense trees. As she stood there, a battle raged within her. Despite everything that had transpired, she began to second guess her decision to return to the stranger's camp. She looked longingly down the path she knew would take her home. It would be all too easy to take that long, lonely trail back to the cabin. There was fear in her thoughts, underlying all else like a cold pool of water. It was a fear of change, but also a fear of things staying the same. Her ears and tail sagged and she leaned despondently against a tree. The happiness that had been her unfamiliar companion through the morning was suddenly drowned in a flood of uncertainty. To take the worn path back to the cabin meant a return to the life that had plagued her for the last two years. She wasn't particularly thrilled with that life, but it was hers. It was familiar, predictable and for some reason that seemed a little strange to her, it was comfortable. To take the path less travelled, so to speak, would be to start anew and she wasn't sure if she could handle that. It was one of the most difficult decisions she had ever faced. She leaned against the tree for a moment longer, watching the shadows of the forest move back and forth over the snow as the wind toyed with the tall trees. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, eyes fixed on the trail before her. She took a hesitant step forward, then another, and another. Soon she was striding purposefully in the direction of the stranger's camp. For better or for worse, she would seek out her future down the uncertain path.

Two years was far too long of a time to be alone.