Dasen was jarred from sleep by a fading dream and made a groggy inspection of the ground outside the shelter. For the briefest second, he could not remember where he was, and a wave of fear raced through him before his mind regained its balance. He groaned and rolled over onto his back. The night was cool, and the thin blanket that he had taken from the shelter left him shivering, so he threw a few stout logs onto the dying fire and eased himself closer to its warmth.

  The sky above was clear and beautiful unlike any he had ever seen. The moon had dropped near the horizon, leaving the stars to dominate the night in a multitude so great that he could spend the entire night counting the number covered by his outstretch hand. He searched that sky for the constellations he remembered from his childhood but only found the jester with his magic flute of bright stars in a row. His eyes grew heavy as he searched, and he was just about to sleep when something caught his attention and held him.

  The beginning of a dream, he thought and snapped his eyes open wide, but the image was still there. Far away and very high was the silhouette of something moving. Its shape was indefinite – he could only see it because of the stars it blocked. He considered an owl or nighthawk, but it was far too large to be a bird, at least twenty feet long given the number of stars it blocked, and it had what looked like a serpentine body and great bat wings that slowly beat up and down. A cloud, a trick of the eyes, some kind of animal that he had never heard of, all of those answers presented themselves, but none fit. The thing moved too quickly and with too much motion to be a cloud. He certainly would have heard of a creature that large. A trick of the eye was a possibility, but it had been there for so long that it did not feel right to him. A combination of all three, he decided in the end, with a bit of dream thrown in.

  It was the only reasonable explanation, so he forced his eyes to the fire. It was building now, its warmth washing over and comforting him. His eyes returned a last time to the sky, but the shape was gone, so he forced himself to forget the aberration. He felt his exhaustion building, carrying him back to sleep. Still, his doubts remained, and the beginning of his dream was of the kind of creatures discussed in legends and children’s stories.

 
H. Nathan Wilcox's Novels