Fox O' Nine Tales: Larissa Of Foxwood

Chapter Four: Dr. Gwen is Captured

A Fox O'Nine Tale

By R.W. Slavin

Book One: Larissa of Foxwood

Chapter Four: Dr. Gwen is Captured   

     The storm clouds, their frightening thunderheads pillaring and expanding by the moment, continued to darken and deepen and spread across the skies above the endless grasslands plains. So this is the right spot, thought Elrik, as he accelerated his flight speed, his wings now become invisible from the furious velocity of their thrashing.  He had to be in perfect position to observe the "event!"  For Elrik was not just any garden-variety sprite.  He liked to think of himself as the Prince of the Sprites, maybe even the King!  Surely he deserved the crown, he thought, as he was by far the most inventively mischievous of all Foxwood's sprites.  And fully 93% of all gossip in the Kingdom (it had been affirmed by a specially appointed committee) had its origin in Elrik the Sprite's nefarious spying.  But this might just be the gossip-gathering mission to end all missions!  The geographic coordinates pinpointing what Elrik had heard the Grand Oracle Fox himself whisper to be "a disturbance of cataclysmic historic proportions!" - the spot Elrik now raced toward - had been "gathered" whilst the daring sprite hovered just beneath the Grand Oracle Fox's own dining room table in the elderly fox's absolutely-off-limits-to-sprites-and-faeries deepest forest cottage.  What illustrious sprite but Elrik would ever dare such a violation?!

     The grains of "compass dust" Elrick had ingested began to burn hot in his belly as the winged elf, no bigger than the smallest hummingbird, dodged and darted through the broad blades of the tall grasses.  The enchanted dust was telling him that this was the place, but where exactly was this?  And what was he looking for?  So far there was only the impending thunderstorm.  Sprites rarely ventured this far out onto the Wolf Steppes, the lands of the Wolfen Folk, and for good reason...

     Whatever it was Elrik was about to discover, he knew, would be come across in the most sudden and startling manner.  So it was on the Wolf Steppes, a prairie frontier land of seemingly endless waves of grasses, hypnotic in its flatness and sameness, but hiding many secret dangers to trap and doom the unwary.  The Steppes encircled all the beautiful Kingdom of Foxwood like a protective barrier.  Whether the Steppes could even be considered a part of Foxwood was a question of great conjecture for the Grand Philosopher Fox and his fellows. Once out on the Steppes, it was if one were castaway and rudderless on an endless ocean of flatlands, the dimensions of which had never been charted.  How far the most distant horizon?  Thousands of miles?  Tens of thousands?  And beyond that frontier: only the legends of lands beyond "The Mists."  But then, the unwary traveler would step through yet another wall of the smothering grass, only to find himself tumbling down the sheer dug out wall of a massive Wolf's Den, sunken a half mile down in the earth and several miles across in its basin.  A wolfpack of many hundreds of tribal brethren might live there in their earthen burrow homes.  Then again, sometimes the hidden dens were dug out only a dozen feet deep and a hundred feet across, home to only a lone wolf family.  Few of the Fox Folk, mostly special royal ambassadors, had ever seen the insides of the wolf's dens.  Some were said to be as bare and Spartan as those lived in by history's first cave dwellers, the Wolfen Folk preferring simplicity to complexity in most things, the wholly natural always over the factory-produced.  But some Great Dens of the most important Wolfen Commanders and other leaders were rumored to be as magnificently crafted and designed and sumptuously appointed as would please a king residing in a great medieval castle.  Just how many wolfen folk and wolfen dens there were was any fox's guess (and, oh!, how the foxes loved to speculate and guess!) - as was just how the dens were all "connected," both in the sense of their kinship and political relationships but also in their actual physical connection: beneath the Wolf Steppes ran thousands of miles of connecting burrows and tunnels, with hundreds of hidden entrances and exits.  An intruder never knew when a legion of Wolfen Guards might spring up out of the earth as if by magic!  These thoughts crowded Elrik's head, but he kept flying, resolved to find out a great secret this day!