Fanning the Flames

A sudden flash of red against the browns and greens of the forests below caught the owl's attention. She angled her flight sharply down towards the blaze, her previous destination (or lack thereof) quickly forgotten. The heat of the fire touched her feathers as she descended, but she paid it no mind, letting the warmth only fuel her and urge her onward. Even as the once-subtle warmth became nearly unbearable she continued towards the blossoming forest fire, down, forward, forward, down, closer with each beat of her wings. Closer, closer, closer...

She landed just at the brim of the fire, the sand beneath her talons hot but not yet ablaze. Her gaze was captured by the flames the moment claws touched earth, her wings folded against her body as she stared into the brilliance in front of her. The flames flickered, danced in front of her eyes in a too-bright glimmer against the lightening sky of a now-forgotten dawn. All that mattered to the owl now was what was in front of her. Fire.

She focused on the flames with a dedication that burned as much as the blaze she was studying, squinting her eyes against the brightness as she searched the fire. Coals burned, flames rose, ashes blistered around her but she did not move, she stared, searched- until one spark drew her eye, one cinder called to her. She saw a loose form in the ashes, watched as its form moved about incoherently, a dark smudge in her all-red view.

And then that cinder grew, and suddenly, without warning, all the flames in front of her were pitch black, darker, it seemed, than the midnight sky when the moon was at it's smallest. Dark ashes swirled around her, above her, overtaking the bright fire and enveloping her in the frenzied blackness.

In horror she froze in place, talons rooted to the ground as the flames darkened around her. Her mouth hung open in her fear at the form the fire took, but nothing left her beak-

A coal the size of a small rock flung out of the flame and in her petrified panic she didn't move, didn't stop to catch it or flee from its path. The coal landed on her face and she screamed, breaking the silence. Futilely clawing at her own face with her talons she lifted into the air, the sound and smell of burning feathers overtaking her as she flapped heavily, heaving herself upward and away from the darkness that had encapsulated.

As she rose, she realized what the flames had become to her. Cinder and ash fluttered like molted feathers in a storm, pitch black, shimmering feathers of dark fire that chased her up, back into the air and far away from the doomed grove of trees below her.

When she could no longer feel the heat of the storm against her tail feathers, she finally looked back, though she didn't stop flying. Behind her, black fire receded into a growing red-orange inferno, the dark message fading back to the warm colors of flame as she disappeared into the light of day.

Her eye was still singeing, sizzling into a burned, useless stump. The last thing it saw was blackness, and now it would never see anything else. She tried to sob, but couldn't. She fled, fled from the fire, from the coals, but mostly from the unnerving blackness that had overcome her, throwing her into a frenzy as she left it all behind.