Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

An Unexpected Visitor

"What do you mean she never showed up!" The smile on Adam's face vanished faster than gas from an airlock as he looked into Kanan's face, and realized, this wasn't simply a tasteless joke.

Kanan would never dare do such a thing, and Sunny would never let him.

He watched the big Drev's eyes closely, watched as mild concern morphed to worry and then to fear.

"I saw her land! I saw it n my tracking beacon, she has to be here!"

Kanan grabbed him by the shoulder, "We WILL find her, her and Kay. I promise Adam I am sure she just got sidetracked showing Kay the flowers or something. She said he's just like you, he wants to touch everything."

While that was a true enough statement, Adam could not help the bubble of fear that bas beginning to slowly expand in his stomach, rising slowly up through his chest and into his throat. He felt like screaming, and his eyes prickled with heat which he forced down with a swallow.

"We have to go now."

Kanan nodded his big head and turned, casing up a cloud of spores as he hefted his bulk over the ground. "Zhankeel!"

At Kana's command a small Drev boy appeared from one of the hut openings and raced over the ground. The boy walked with a pronounced wobble to his step, but when he pulled to a stop one would hardly have noticed there was anything off about him at all. His carapace was a bright canary yellow, but his orange eyes were unfathomably sad, "You're in charge until I."

A slow growl erupted at Adam's feet, and he turned his head down suddenly worried that Pancake or waffles had taken a disliking to one of the Drev children, concerned that he hadn't brought a leash for them, but when he looked down, he found both of them pointing back up the little valley, their hackles raised their head lowered and their teeth bared. The nearby Drev children pulled to a halt eyeing the animals with an equal mixture of fear and fascination.

Pancake cut a particularly fearsome figure, with longer hair on the scruff of her neck than Waffles, she managed to puff herself up to look almost twice as big as she was. Her tail was low sweeping back and forth slowly from one side to the other, her ears pulled back against her skull. The growl that the two of them gave was menacing.

No one else would have been able to tell, but after thousands of years of evolution side by side, he as a human could distinguish the individual sounds that the dogs made. This wasn't a playful growl, or even a warning growl for small creatures. This growl was...

Fear.

"Kanan, Kanan." The two of them turned sharply to the left, watching as an older Drev made her skidding way down the mountain nearly tripping twice before staggering to he base of the hill, righting herself at least once. Her voice was thick, and when she spoke she motioned quickly with her four hands.

Kanan responded with similar hand signals as he spoke, "What did you see."

"Latinash." She panted miming something with her upper two hands while the other two created a flat plane below her upper hands.

Adam didn't speak Drev sign language, though after this crisis was over, he was certainly going to have to think about it because it would be awesome, but he did speak Drev, and he knew what a cynderwind was.

Kanan frowned, "Cynderwind, but it's the middle of the bright season."

The young Drev grabbed him by the arm and pointe back up the hill, "It is, it is."

"I believe you, I it just, it doesn't make sense. The volcanos aren't active this time of year so there's no way that a cylinder wind should be possible. The two of them hurried up the side of the hill after the young Drev who pointed towards the horizon with an urgent finger, and she was exactly right. Brewing on the horizon, slowly approaching as a wall of whirling blackness was a large wall of cynders.