[SWP] caught like a rabbit

[Pavetta]

p a v e t t a - - - Many years later Pavetta would wake abruptly in the night—remembering the taste of ash and soot on her tongue and the searing heat upon her skin. She couldn’t see. The smoke was too thick, too dense—burning her eyes, searing her throat. Ashes and embers fell like an eery winter snow, leaving her silver skin singed. She couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t breathe. The panic built; a helpless numbness spreading in her veins. Helpless. The roar of the wind (or was it the roar of the flame) was like a hell beast that had crawled forth from the bowels of the earth—hungry, insatiable, and filled with rage. How could it sound so alive?  She didn’t know west from east, north from south. She could not see the sky—did not know whether it was day or night—so thick was the boiling black smoke rising high into the sky. She ran. What else was there to do? Away from the heat that drove the breath from her lungs, away from the flame she could see torching the trees and everything around her. But where to? Trapped. She wheeled about, searching desperately for an escape route but finding none. Only flame and smoke and ash. She screamed but no sound left her scorched throat—only a sob of despair. I am going to die she realized. The panic subsided—an icy calm taking its place.  She was about to close her eyes—knowing the superheated gas of the oncoming fire would kill her far before the actual flames would—when she saw it—a stag amid the smoke. Their gaze met and Pavetta recognized that same terrible knowledge of their doom in his black eyes—and then he was gone, bounding through the smoke. She followed without hesitation, adrenaline spiking in her veins and lighting a last desperate fire in her heart to survive. She raced through the trees, bloodying her knees and sides as she leapt from a steep ridge and fell to the bottom. She stumbled back on to her hooves, stunned and winded, pain in every nerve of her body, but she was alive. At some point, she thought she a cry for help on the wind but could not be sure.  Perhaps she was hearing her own screams.    a pearl in pigshit, a diamond on the finger of a rotting corpse, creature in whom nothing, but nothing, remains of an elven woman ---