The Isbjørn

Twenty

Sri took the lead back to the hotel after much longer at the cross roads. With a hot meal and a short goodnight, Daire fell asleep around late evening and dreamed of home.

When he was young, Daire had been caught in an avalanche along a ridge several miles away from his village. He had been drawn there suddenly in the night when he woke to a blue glow just outside his window.
Daire was very familiar with lights of unknown origin. Spring to late summer, just as evening would fall, he was graced with Sao Soles. Greens and blue and pinks, all waving rhythmically through the stars above, not much unlike the water.
There was legend that on occasion, these lights would fall to the ground, and if followed, could bring an Isbjørn to their destiny.

His father had always described him as an imaginative child, simple, a side effect from the extensive coddling he received from his older siblings. Daire was the youngest of four.
When he woke to the mysterious glow out in the distance, the cub did not hesitate to venture out into the night in search for his destiny.

After trampling miles in the snow, he had suddenly lost the source light. Moments later, he heard a rumble from the earth. He frantically ran into a cave in the side of the mountain to avoid the avalanche. When the earth settled, he found himself trapped by ice and rock. But strangely, the cave was still not dark, it was lit by a soft blue light. He thought of the one that had drawn him up the pass. Somehow, troubled more by the missing orb than the fact that he was trapped inside a cave, Daire set deeper into the cavern to find the source.

The cave was massive, and bizarre, unlike the other caves he had ventured into with friends. Winding ice chutes lead down into dark chasms, towering, jagged ice pillars with pine trees growing horizontally out of them.

He found himself in this same cave again, this time, in a dream.

As flawed as memory could be, Daire saw only accuracy in his mind's recreation of the place he had been lost in four three days before rescue came.

As Daire slowly wandered though the high domed enclosure, he experienced those same feelings of dread he knew in the last day of his wandering. Helpless, tired, hungry. But never cold. Between his adaptive layer of adolescent fat and the emerging hair on his body, layers of hide were growing obsolete.

But in his dream, the cave was frigid, the cold blistered his hand and footfalls. He feared for the well being of his filangees, and, unaware that he was dreaming while captured in the dreamscape, his life.

He wandered on, hoping to find wood to burn and flint to make fire.

As he reached a new section of the cave, the ceiling dropped suddenly to perhaps seven feet. Passing into it, he felt the ground trembling. At his back, a couple of the ice pillars came to life and turned into giant, living, breathing, crystal-blue ice monsters with beady, glowing blue eyes.

Daire took off into the low hanging section with the crystallized, almost serpentine monsters slithering after him trying to impale him with their pointy, icicle fingers.

Not knowing what else to do as the chase persisted, he sprinted off onto one of the ice chutes and slid down into the dark chasm.

When he reached the bottom, it was dark at first. But that same eerie blue light started to very slowly filter through the darkness. He could barely see at first and did not know where to go, so he just started walking. However, walking was actually kind of difficult as the snow was deep and he kept having to step over things. As more and more light filtered in, he found himself in a vast, open field with nothing in the distance that he could see, but an arched tree at the very end of his visual field.
Daire knew this place,  too. His father often took him there to play. This field was just North of his village, hanging over it as a place to watch over the town.