When she was a young child, Ingmar always wanted a pet gorse-pup. The thick legged, sweet-smelling pups were covered with scintillating hexagonal scales that hardened as they grew, turning into iron-hard plates with a faint sheen at adult age. Whenever a merchant’s stall in the Fora de Curio advertised exotic pets she would plead with her parents to take her so she could at least stare at the tiny animals in their brass or bamboo cages.

She often dreamed of waking up to find a gorse-pup licking her face, waking up to squeal with joy and delight as she petted the soft, shimmering scales. She revisited those childhood dreams now. Cosy in her soft bed, she could feel the happy pup licking her face… it was such a familiar dream.

A sharp bite on her cheek jolted Ingmar awake and she slung the small snake tailed barker rat away from her with strength born out of fear more than her physical condition. “Oh, Mage’s Luck… that is disgusting!” “At least I’m still alive,” she thought, “and nothing seems to be broken or bleed-” She dabbed gently at her sore cheek, then sighed as she felt the beads of blood forming from the needle like punctures, and kept pressure on her face. The barker rat twitched its tail animatedly, keeping its single eye on her but not making any attempt to approach or flee. “Bastard,” Ingmar snarled, and stomped down on the thing’s head, crushing it with her heavy boot.

“First thing’s first,” she thought aloud, “There’s still light, so I can’t have been out for long. The camp and landing site were straight ahead when I went down… If I just head east… So long as I can see my shadow, that won’t be a problem. This isn’t as bad as it could be. Right…”

Chewing her lower lip, Ingmar looked over the ground and in the branches above at the wreckage of the Ornithopter, though she was at a loss as to what good the twisted ruin could do her now. She picked at a bit of the wing or maybe it had been part of the frame… just a polished length of ash wood, now, with a long strip of canvas hanging from it. Idly twisting the canvas around the end of the wood, she scraped her boot heel against a tree root and gave the crash site one last look-over.

“Well,” she sighed, looking at her handiwork, “it’s almost a torch… now if only I had some lamp oil and a lucifer, or even a tinderbox. Oh this is hopeless!” She turned and hurled the make shift torch between the trees, then sighed again and walked off after it, muttering “Just in case” under her breath.

***

It was well and truly dusk now, and Ingmar reckoned that she had covered little more than a mile, definitely not more than a mile and a half at the best. The East Wood was thick and ancient, but she’d been lucky so far. This late in the year, the foliage was sparse enough to let light in, but the canopy was so dense during the growing season that the forest floor was relatively clear. She knew she was still heading east for now… but if the undergrowth got thicker, or the trees denser, she could get turned around in the night and veer completely off course.

Then, of course, there was always the threat of finding something big and hairy that had stronger jaws than a barker rat. Her cheek itched, and she told herself over and over that it was entirely too soon to be festering if the rat had been a carrier. She wished she’d taken a better look at its eye before stepping on the thing.

Barker rats, especially snake tailed barker rats, were notorious in farming villages near the East Wood for decimating shepherd’s flocks. It wasn’t that they were vicious predators, if they attacked it would take an entire pack of the things half an hour or more to kill a single sheep, but they were often rife with disease. Barker rats would bite their prey and lick or suck the wound to promote blood flow, which they would then drink. On its own this would never kill the victims but an infection with Barker Rot could fester for weeks, and spread amongst the flock, before the initial sheep succumbed. The Department of Agronomic Biology at Eastly House claimed that Barker Rot left the eye of a barker rat cloudy and less likely to reflect light from the pupil.

Everyone on the Ornithopter research and development team had been told about this, but rather than practice animal optometry they simply invested in a number of ruthless terriers to keep the research compound free of the pests. Ingmar had named one of them ‘Gimgiy’, the name she always intended to give the gorse-pup she never had.

“Focus, girl,” she scolded herself. “Oh, Mage’s Luck! Do I keep on through the dark, or do I make camp… Do I sleep on the ground, or climb a tree and risk falling out again? I have to be sensible about this… do NOT panic.”

A dry cracking sound of a twig snapping put a sudden stop to her thoughts, and a severe strain on her effort not to panic. She’d come to a stand-still while talking to herself, and it wasn’t her foot that broke the twig…