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sure what could do this.”
    Lin walked up quietly, carrying something she picked up off the ground. “Pretty sure I know, big brother,” she said grimly, holding up what looked like a flat, dull red shard of pottery the size of an outstretched human hand.
    “It was a dragon! A big red one!” Maya spat out angrily, having come up beside me, still cradling Nia.
    Lin nodded. “This scale looks just like something we would find on the twins’ dorsal hides, other than the color, of course. And the fact that it’s three times the size of any scale they currently have. One problem though, the footprints that I can see all around the tree look like some form of big cat rather than a dragon.” She opened her sketchbook and rifled through it, finally coming up with a dragon-foot sketch, for which she had probably used Dawn as a model. “See here, three toes and a sickle hind claw that doesn’t really make an impression when they are walking. The prints at the base of the tree are more like this.” She flipped through the sketchpad until she came upon another print with an obvious pad and four clawed toes. “This is the print of a civet wildcat that we discovered on one of our nature hikes. Of course, the prints here are way bigger, bigger than a lion or any other cat I’ve ever heard of.”
    Maya looked confused. “Most of the biggest cats in this area aren’t much larger than a human, pound for pound. Woodland cats are hunters and ambush predators; there’s no reason for them to get very large.” She carefully stalked over to the area indicated by Lin, still carrying Nia. “These are giant footprints.” Maya deactivated the enchantment in her boots and took tentative steps in the torn up soil, judging the weight of the creature against her own, and shook her head. “Whatever cat made these tracks weighed as much as a hill giant or more and that’s pretty impossible.”
    Lin grabbed Julia’s hand. “C’mon, Jules, let’s see if there are any survivors in the underbrush we can help.”
    As they left, Nia, still dazed, finally spoke up. “My people are dead, my race is dead. Without the Mother Tree, we are no more…I am the last. Mister Alex, they hated me, but I never wanted anything like this to happen.” Turning away from us all, she burrowed deeper into Maya’s embrace.
    A short distance away, I saw Julia freeze up as if clearing her mind of the horror. After making a fumbling motion with her hands, she stretched her right hand out pointing and called out, “Alex, over there is a section of hollow log. There’s something alive inside, but just barely.” Finding the log she indicated, I gently removed the remains of a red fox that had died covering the log’s open end. When I tipped it forward, a startled looking, badly burned toad slid out which Lin deftly snatched up and took away. I was about to lower the log back down into the ash, when I heard a whimper and a small hand appeared, pulling itself out of the mouth of the log,. Then a pixie head appeared, a male. I tossed my own gauntlets to the ground and reaching in, retrieved his small self out of the wood. It wasn’t good, the entire bottom half of his torso and wings were completely charred. Quickly, I rushed him over to the horses where I grabbed a clean cloth and some water out of the side bags. Placing him on the scrap of cloth, I leaned him against the pommel using it as a backrest and gave him a sip of water.
    “Jules, Nia, get over here!“ Julia sprinted over and Nia buzzed erratically. “Jules, can you heal him?”
    She looked stricken as she brushed her brown curls behind her ears and shook her head, answering sadly. “No, our skills only extend to natural creatures; pixies are magical beings. Alera might be able to do something with her talents, but…” Her answer and expression told me that he wasn’t going to survive long enough to make it back to Alera.
    Having downed some water, the pixie waved away any further talk of moving