“It’ll be dawn soon,” complained Noel.

“Almost there,” I said.

“You’ve said that many times,” she countered.

“Yeah, well, it’s always almost there,” I replied.

I’d made a groove in the wood with a rock to help hold the stick in place but it kept jumping out. A few more thumps, as well as an explanation to Noel about how important it was to keep the stick in place, and we had at least managed to turn the hole a little darker.

The sinew was holding up, thankfully, but both Noel and I were tired as hell. We’d swapped places multiple times, with me holding down the stick and her pulling the sinew, and vice versa. It was my turn on the sinew and we were getting desperate.

“Maybe we should go to The Terrible after all,” said Noel.

“But we’re almost there!” I said.

“You’ve said that—”

“Many times, I know. You’ve said that many times too, you know!”

“Because it’s true.” Noel shot a glare at me. “At this rate, they’ll think I was cursed by The Terrible.”

“You mean they think you’d be burned by its fire?” I said.

“No,” she said, “the curse of The Terrible is not like his blessing.”

“Oh really?” I said. “Huh, I assumed a curse was when it missed lighting your offering stick and made elf barbecue by accident.” I didn’t say how I suspected the ‘blessing’ was probably this monster missing the elf with its fire breath. It was a fantasy world, there was probably a sealed dragon or something in that cave, after all. I reckoned these elves were mistaking its attack for a blessing.

“No, the curse sucks away your soul. It dries your body like a prune, with terror caught on your face forever. We can hear the screams all the way from our camp outside the forest,” said Noel.

Okay, that was different. Maybe there wasn’t a dragon in that cave, after all. Also, they had prunes in this world? Why? God damned prunes. My mom—

“Wait, what’s that!” said Noel.

I looked at the stick. “Smoke! There’s smoke!” My heart skipped. Finally! I kept pulling the sinew and Noel stared straight at the smoke. I asked her to lift it up for a second, to which she gave me a frightened, wide-eyed look, but I insisted. She lifted, I leaned close. There was no ember yet, so we kept going.

A few more minutes of rubbing and a couple more lifts, and there was an ember in the groove in the wood. I scrambled for the bird’s nest, found it, carefully tipped the ember into the nest, and blew.

Smoke flew in front of my face. I coughed, but kept blowing. I threw the nest into a pile of dead grass and sticks that we’d arranged before.

“Wait, we need more firewood,” I said as I ran under a tree to grab fallen sticks and branches. Noel took a second to react, eyes glued to the now billowing smoke. We piled more firewood onto the smoke, blew into it when the smoke began dying down, and went out to look for more.

I felt like my heart stopped when the smoke started weakening, but we threw in some dead grass, as well as some fluffy pollen-like things that looked like they’d catch fire easily. Twigs, leaves, even another old bird’s nest went into the smoke. A pyramid of sticks and branches soon appeared on top.

A lot of blowing, praying, and cursing later, a small flame danced in the now almost pitch-black night. I yelled a loud: yes! Laughed a little. Hugged Noel and laughed some more.

Noel stared at the fire. She didn’t even react when I hugged her. She did react when I grabbed her hand and started dancing around the fire. A wild, uncoordinated, unthinking dance that hurt my feet and made my tired limbs cry.

But I didn’t care. We’d done it. At last, we’d done it!

Noel began smiling too. And laughing. A strange, but warm and wild kind of laughter. If someone was in this forest at night, they’d think a bunch of demons had descended into the night, cackling at whatever mischief they were trying to create.

In a way they were right. What greater mischief was there than harnessing the power of nature for your own ends? At dancing around the thing from which other animals darted away, pushed by an instinctive fear of burning forests and lung-collapsing smoke.

Even now, the growing heat pricked my skin. The unpleasant smoke filled my nose and made me cough from time to time as we danced. And the light flickered, throwing shadows through the forest. Shapes on trees. Monsters and nightmares pulled from the genetic imagination.

But I wasn’t afraid. I knew who was in control. I knew who had made the fire. I wasn’t dancing with the fire, the fire was dancing with me. And it felt good. I looked at Noel, eyes wide with happiness.

Yep. It felt good.

---

We decided to wait for dawn. We could have made a torch or gone back to the The Terrible’s cave for one of the offering sticks Noel said were in a hole in the wall near the cave’s entrance. But we were tired and the night was dark. A little rest before dawn, and we could go back to her tribe without having encountered whatever was inside that cave.

“Does someone keep track of the offering sticks in the cave?” I asked.

“Someone from the tribe would go every once in a while to fill up the hole, but nobody keeps a count,” she said.

“But we still probably want one, don’t we,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “they will expect us to come back with one.”

I nodded. “Alright. Once the dawn breaks, you stay here with the fire, make sure it doesn’t go out. I’ll go grab an offering stick. Not that I don’t trust you to not go inside but…”

I totally didn’t trust her to not go inside. It was her tribe’s deity in there. What if she wanted to beg for forgiveness, seeing this act of creating her own fire as sacrilege. I’d seen lots of people do stupid things for their religion, after all, so it would be best if I went to the cave myself.

“Alright,” agreed Noel, as she laid on the ground with her feet to the fire.

I joined her on the ground, face to the sky. Now that the moon was gone, there was nothing to see but the stars.

Laying by the campfire, staring at the stars, was one of the only things I’d liked about camp. And somehow, it was only now, faced with stars and constellations that were completely alien to me, that I fully grasped that I was in another world.

Not like I knew where every star was in the sky back home or anything. I wasn’t even all that good with constellations but still. But still. I only had to look at the stars in this sky I had never seen, to feel a pang in my heart that told me: yes, Cas, this is real. These are not your stars and these are not your constellations. This is not your sky. This is not your world. This is not your home.