Watership Down: Untold Legend [Fox!Reader]

Chapter Two: Fire

You're awake, aware of your warm body, from your core to your limbs. Your lazy, sluggish mind expands and for the moment, you simply lay there. All is good, all is normal.

Until you breath in the thick scent of biting, bitter smoke.

Glowing orange eyes snap open, and you take in the now suffocating darkness of your burrow. Your purple enlarge before they turn to slits, adjusting to light that seeps into your home.

You get up, ears forward and alert.

The light that comes from your main entrance is deadly. The heat it brings with it is a warning of something far greater.

Something familiar.

Once again, thoughts race through your head. You don't remember ever smelling burning wood, but that too trickles into your nose and you quickly recognize its origin. The smell is so wrong and out of place in your— my— forest.

You swallow, the longer you stand down here...the hotter it gets. The cool earth beneath your rough paws, slowly heats up. Your little heart is picking up speed— Run. Flee! The muscle in your legs tense, and your hackles raise and fear urges you to move.

You listen and dart forward, scrambling up and out of your home. Darkness fades into shades of orange. Like the world had been tinted under a rising sunset. Shadows are black as night and the bight blinding lights that glimpse through the thick overhang point to something terrible and all consuming. A beast of burning, uncontrollable pain and destruction.

The world is a mess of noise and fire. You pause, while your animal mind screams, and look back. The large familiar tree that looms protectively over your home is untouched by the glowing flames. Though, you're not sure how long that will last.

The sight, causes your chest to ache. Though you haven't lived there long, and in normal circumstances you would be able to leave without a second glance, here, surrounded by a growing fire, you feel helpless. Despair spins to life as you are unable to protect the old tree.

You turn away— The air is alive, like it's full of billions of buzzing insects, static and full of energy— and run.

Instinct guides you through unknown paths like a close friend— a human hand holds another, pulling while the other follows.

You run, relying completely on the feeling that takes hold of your tensing and springing muscles, slipping between spaces scattered throughout the never ending burning woodland.

A nightmare.

A loud snap of wood shatters through your panic-led mind and you leap without thinking, over sunset flames.

The world slows and a large burning branch grazes the end of your tail before it lands right where you had been.

You land on the trunk of a fallen tree, and duck down as a cloud of embers disperse into the air like deadly fireflies.

You breath and it burns.

Thick bumpy bark crackles under the weight of your sleek body. Your shiny black claws scrape against it's charcoal surface and it coats them in a soft powdery mixture of ash.

A dream..?

It's so hot— unbearably so.

Your tongue is heavy and dry, the moisture in your mouth nonexistent.

This must be...!

The fear leaves you.

You sigh and slowly raise your head. Muzzle pointing up to the smokey sky.