Longs and Shorts of Laverito: Lyra 2 - Terra Borealis

Sticks could be very useful things, especially in wintertime.

 

This fact did not make either of the stryx happy about collecting them, but although Laverito was careful not to ask for it, the stryx still helped. Badallaioc and Helagnus both loved to complain, so that was probably why they bothered. Now Laverito had only two choices: either tell them off and be left up a snowy mountain without any way of hitching a ride back through the great portal, or else act grateful about all their endless bellyaching.

 

Laverito went for the second option, but although he kept his own complaining quiet, he definitely was complaining.

 

Helagnus had a fittingly brutal and careless approach to stick-collecting. The orange stryx simply ripped branches off the surrounding trees. She had no problem climbing their trunks to reach her wooden prey, even as they creaked and sagged under her weight. Helagnus brought each branch back to the pile one at a time. She was careful to avoid lathering her feathers with the sticky end, but not so careful about stacking the branches. With her contribution, the pile was actually more like a smear.

 

Laverito did not inform her that fresh branches would burn poorly, not to mention the potentially hazardous popping of sap. He didn’t want to bruise her ego, or appetite. 

 

Badallaioc was neater, but only because Helagnus was being so messy. He was also a little lazier. Instead of going to all the effort of clenching claws in bark and ripping each branch free of its trunk, Badallaioc followed Laverito’s lead and collected fallen branches off the ground. Laverito hadn’t removed the tack from the white stryx’s back quite yet, so Badallaioc awkwardly wedged each additional stick into the tangle of straps and buckles he wore. Laverito despaired of the brand new holes he was going to find in those very worn and weary saddlebags. Badallaioc wandered away through the trees for long stretches of time to find and gather sticks. Then he returned, looking more like a piney porcupine than a stryx, and yanked all the sticks free to stack them on the pile. Neatly, of course, and not at all like what Helagnus was doing.

 

None of this was bad enough for Laverito to complain aloud and risk driving his feathered frenemies off. But regardless, Laverito lost the battle to keep said complaining silent when the snow beneath their assorted toes and talons suddenly began to vomit rainbows.

 

“What! Who decided to kick all of this in my face?” Laverito wailed. “My eyes!”

 

Helagnus was right next to Laverito, but halfway up a tree that was having a terrible evening, safely above the rising tide of rainbow light. She wasn’t in a position to see the pretty colors quite yet. “Raaz yur prabblem chu-legger?” she squawked around her latest wooden victim, without looking down.

 

“What have you gotten cursed with now?” Badallaioc clucked, from somewhere beyond yon stand of pines. “You’d better not be dying, rabbit!”

 

“Someone’s dropped a drunken rainbow down here!” Laverito shouted. “And I had better get a pot of gold out of it!”

 

Helagnus finally ripped the branch free with a nasty sound of crunching wood. The orange stryx spread wide wings for balance, carefully turned without getting the branch stuck on anything, and blinked at the color-bathed scene below. “Rrraa?” she asked.

 

The… phenomenon, because Laverito lacked a better word, must have spilled far enough to reach Badallaioc, because Laverito heard the white stryx screech over yonder. A moment later, Badallaioc was trotting back into the clearing, a stick clutched in a red beak purely as an afterthought. Badallaioc let the stick fall where it may and turned to glare at Laverito, like a very large pincushion with stompy legs and a higher-than-average chance of dispensing splinters. 

 

“What did you do?” Badallaioc asked.

 

“I had nothing to do with this!” Laverito squawked, grossly offended.

 

“Are you sure?” Badallaioc pressed.

 

Helagnus took flight in an unusually graceful maneuver, pushing off the tree-trunk horizontally, letting her latest weeping branch fall sort of near the messy stack, then twisting to rise above the treeline with powerful beats of her wings.

 

Since he was standing right in the middle of whatever was happening and not dying a horrible death, Laverito dared to not run away screaming, yet. “Look at this stuff,” he complained. “Doesn’t even have the decency to flow downhill! Here, give me a bottle. Maybe we can sell some.”

 

Badallaioc shuffled over, offering down the saddlebags. Laverito went straight for his trusty cast-iron bread-pot that had always served him so faithfully, but no amount of scooping or shaking could make the intangible swirls of color stay inside the pot.

 

“Well, that’s a bust then,” Laverito sighed, as he trussed the pot back up onto Badallaioc’s back. “Pity. I bet bottled rainbow would make a pretty penny at market.”

 

Helagnus swooped down then, staggering to a stop just shy of sticking a foot in the sappy stick spill. “It’s all over the place,” she told them. “Rainbows all over the snow, wiggling towards the moon. Like big snakes.”

 

“…towards the moon?” Badallaioc asked. 

 

As one, the trio all craned their necks, to stare up at the massive moon that made no secret of owning Lyra’s night sky. The sweeping arcs of color that engulfed them added new and wondrous dimensions to the whole world and everything in it. Bathed in the light that welled up from the snow, Laverito’s humble tunic resembled something much more expensive. Badallaioc’s white feathers captured the wavering colors almost greedily, as if he’d bathed in a vat of iridescent dyes. Even Helagnus’ garish orange feathers were softened into the hues of a dying sunset. 

 

“So,” said Laverito, “There has to be a pot of gold, right?”

 

“Why?” asked Helagnus, with all of her typical curiosity, yet none of her usual disdain. Perhaps the colors had addled her mind. Childish wonder was a foreign emotion to Laverito, who was motivated solely by food, and money which could be used to buy food, but he’d heard of it before from other, less profit-driven people.

 

“There’s always a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow,” said Laverito. “It’s a very well-known fact. Has to do with goblins. Or was it gremlins? Either way, gold!”

 

“Kebab?” asked Badallaioc.

 

“Sure, a pot of gold would buy a whole heap of kebabs!”

 

“Kebab, you have told me of the kebab. I want kebab,” said Helagnus.

 

The thought of shiny gold pieces had all three of them searching the mountain long into the night, but they never did find a pot of gold. In fact, all they managed to do was lose track of the pile of sticks, so they spent that night in darkness, with no campfire, and not a single freshly-roasted snack — kebab or otherwise.