Stink [24]

There’s always that uneventful moment, during the course of an eventful life. Sometimes there are more than one, but there’s always at least one. That one little bubble in time where you can feel circumstances dilating away from you and a small space of still, sweet calm surrounding you. It’s almost as if the “movie” stops, just for a split second, and you can feel yourself at the center of photograph, a fixed point in the stream of causality.

It was one of those kinds of moments.
Tremayne was fiddling about taking a bunch of stuff out from under a corner giant “table”, and stowing it somewhere, and I was standing still close to the table leg, so as not to be in the way.
And I thought, “He’s so kind to do this for me.” And I felt calm, cared for, and mildly excited to be given someplace to call my own.
And then I thought, EWWWW! And blurted out, “What’s that SMELL???”
Tremayne, reaching for the last bundle of grass under the table, paused and turned to look at me over his shoulder, “What?”
I said, “Please forgive me. I just… smell something AWFUL.”
He cocked his head and sniffed the air.
Before I knew what was happening, he grabbed me around the waist with one enormous hand, screeching something that sounded a bit like a screaming eagle, and his eyes began glowing ominously with that blue light I’d seen at the portal stones. I heard responding screeches from the others in the different parts of the workshop area, and then one of them flew towards the village, squawking all the way.
Tremayne, meanwhile, clutched me to his chest, ran outside, and flew up to the second floor of the workshop, where he deposited me unceremoniously in a pile of straw.
“I’m sorry, Lo Rell, I have to go get to the town hall right now. You should be safe here for the time being.”
A little shaken up by this departure from the usual courteous escorting of my slow biped movements, I asked, “What’s going on?”
Tremayne positively crackled, “Snakes invading.”
And then he was gone.