It is early December, and you are walking through the forest.
Snow falls, filtering the thin dying light of midwinter. It has a raw beauty that leaves you unsettled, as if the light, fragile and angled so low, sifted through snow, can open up doors in the forest.
That’s when you see him. Stunned, you stop in your tracks.
Your eyes meet.
And in that glance a world thunders. A message that can’t be held by language.
Quick as only a wild thing can be, he is gone.
But he has left you his gift. An egg warm with light. You know that a gift from the fox is a rare and magical thing. That more is bound up in it than you can know.
There will be unforeseeable trouble–that’s the way of the Fox. But there is new light, unmistakable in its potency.
You reach down to pick it up, and with your touch it bursts open, disintegrates into nothingness.
The clouds shift and golden light spills all around you.