Shine bright like a creepy firefly

His trip through Auster had been a moderately uneventful one so far, but he was throughly enjoying the more pleasant weather it had brought. It felt a bit like he was on a permanent vacation after the first year of his life that had been spent up north. It was warm and pleasant here, though that did cause some issues for him with his thick, winter-ready coat of reds and golds. He ended up keeping to the shade during the day and mostly doing his exploring at night, but even adapting his day to the weather was better than being up in northern Boreas with the piles of snow that accumulated this time of year.

As the sun began to set he made his way out toward the shore, finding himself on a beach that was more rock than sand with cavities in the ground that formed tide pools littered with coral and little sea creatures. He saw a crab skitter from one pool to another and he chuckled as he walked in between the pools. The sun set pretty quickly once it began to dip down toward the horizon and soon enough darkness began to envelop everything. As had been the case for the last few weeks, the moon was bright and full with just a few clouds occasionally drifting past to block out the view. It made the world nearly as bright as it was during the day, but with a more cool toned, blue hue about it. The stars looked strange as well, streaking across the sky in a pattern of lines instead of a random scatter of dots.

He did not know what had caused this unusual change in the sky or how the space above them interacted with the world, but it was a small advantage for him while he kept to a slightly more nocturnal schedule. It gave him plenty of light to see by which was a small blessing even if it made everything feel quite a bit more ominous. He kept expecting to find more instances of the weird fireflies he had observed with Onyx, but somehow he had mostly avoided them besides the occasional glimpse of them through the trees or across a body of water—at least until tonight. While he was wandering through the cove, he noticed a couple of them here and there at first as the moon reflected off of the tide pools to make them almost appear to be glowing themselves, but eventually more and more of the blue-hued fireflies began to gather, filling the air around him.

Ciná slowed to a stop and looked around at them as they lazily floated around the tide pool filled shore, his golden gaze following a few of them as they drifted past, blinking in and out of existence in a random light show. His eyes caught one near him and he tried to follow it to get a better look, squinting to try and make out the shape of what he thought would be a bug like the usual fireflies he had seen before, but the light was so bright that it was hard for him to look at it directly. By the time he actually got close enough for him to see or maybe attempt to catch it it flickered out. He half expected to see a bug fly away from where he had been staring, but there was nothing. He blinked with surprise and confusion and finally just wrote it off as the light playing with his eyes and making it so he could not see things clearly from staring into the firefly's bright light.

When another cloud passed in front of the moon he noticed how the shadow passed around him and the ground around him darkened, but the pools on either side of him did not. His brows pulled together as he watched the shadow drift past and the pool continue to reflect and glow like the moon overhead even when there was no light for it to shine by and that was the first time he really noticed the ominous feeling that this all gave. Some of the fireflies danced around the surface of the pools almost like little ice skaters and he began to move away from the tide pools. He did not know what was going on or what strange energies were making something like this happen, but he did not like it. A mist began to roll in from the shore, like a heavy fog that was far more dense than any fog he had ever seen. It had a strange, blue hue just like everything else on this strange night. He backed away from the shore toward the tree line behind him, but he could not get himself to actually leave.

Ciná stood there watching as the fog rolled in, obscuring the tide pools from view and making it look like the whole shore was simply a curtain of thick fog with pin points of light shining through. In a way it was almost like watching clouds during a thunderstorm that are being lit up from within by lighting. He began to wonder if any of this was even real. Was he actually asleep right now? Making this out to be a dream or a nightmare seemed far more plausible than any other explanation he could think of. In some spots the lights seemed to condense and get brighter as if they were all combining together into one larger light and his golden eyes widened with shock as these larger, combined lights started moving toward him, coming closer to the edge of the fog were it thinned out into more of a mist. From the fog came a series of large crabs, moving slowly across the rocky, sandy shore. They were all glowing as brightly as the fireflies if not more so and even if they were not moving all that quickly they were still decidedly moving toward him.

"Fuck this," he muttered and finally broke himself away from this train wreck his brain seemed so intent on forcing him to watch. He turned back toward the mainland of Auster and ran back the way he came away from the shore. He was not sure if knowing what was causing all of this would make it any better, but he knew for sure that the mystery and uncertainty of it most certainly made it worse. He didn't stop running until the lights were out of view and when he did slowly lope to a stop he immediately began to look for a den to hide out in for the night. He might just have to suck it up and deal with being too warm during the day in order to avoid running into any more ghostly things like that.

Cináed Praetor