An elf is carried away

A gust of hot wind blew, and all the other leaves were lifted and tossed in the dry air. The elf awoke as they came sprinkling down on him again. Some had fallen into the fire behind his head, and he could hear them crackling as they were instantly consumed. It was the sort of end he would have wanted for himself, but he no longer had the nature of these leaves.

Overhead there was another sort of crackling. The sky was filled with the soft creaking of old leather. He seemed to lie beneath a tent of leather, but the tent moved.

Overhead there was another sort of fire. It was not like the fire behind him, which was only the stored sunlight of a hundred summers. This was a sulfurous, suffocating fire of the earth: a dark fire oozing up from places where the sun had never shone.

The heat of both fires was reflected back onto him rather than lost to the sky, and for the first time since he had released Catan’s hand, he was not cold.

He flexed his hands and wiggled his toes. He squirmed his shoulders against the ground. He ran his tongue over his lips. He wanted to remember what it was to have an elf body, but also, most importantly, he tapped at the gash on his palm with his fingertips to remind himself why he had died.

For he knew what they meant – the dark fire and the crackling leather spanning the sky. He was dead. He knew nothing of the customs of bats, and he knew nothing of what his second life would be, but it appeared that some enormous bat – the Mother of Bats perhaps – had come for him.

The broad wings creaked, and something enormous moved near his body. He could feel it by the heat it reflected. It was as large as a tree.

Something scraped through the leaves beside him, and his hand went out to find it smooth and hard as bone and curved into a crescent. It stopped moving as soon as he touched it. It was a claw as long as his forearm.

He sat up and ran his hand along the claw. At the end of the claw there was a finger as large as his leg, and at the end of the finger there was a hand large enough to grasp his entire body around the middle and carry him away.