But Rust did not run. He had seen the deer bolt and the birds flee. He had seen the panicked scattering of his own kind—siblings and cousins chittering, stuffing their cheeks with last-minute stores. They did not understand. This was not a storm or a fox. This was the mountain waking up.

One young female, her fur a softer russet, understood. She followed. Then her brother. Then a wary old male with a scarred ear. Rust led them not in a straight line—straight was death—but in a weaving, downward path, keeping the wind at their backs, jumping from stone to stone where fire could not run.

They called him Rust the Ember-Kin. And for a hundred years after, no hunter in Oakhaven would raise a hand against a red squirrel. For they remembered: when the world burned, it was the smallest red fire that showed them the way home.

He dropped from the oak and ran toward the smoke.

Then he saw them. A dozen of his kind, frozen on a rocky outcrop. Their eyes were wide, their noses twitching at the strange, hot smell. They were trapped. Behind them, a dry streambed offered a path to the river. Ahead, a wall of flame was beginning to crown the ridge.

That autumn, when the rains finally came, the people of Oakhaven returned to find their own homes half-destroyed. But they also found something strange: a colony of red squirrels living in the surviving black oaks near the river bend, their coats the color of the fire they had outrun.

He reached the muddy bank and dove into a shallow pool choked with ash. One by one, the other squirrels tumbled in after him, plunging into the water until only their noses showed. Above, the world burned. The roar was now a continuous thunder. Oaks that had stood for two hundred years burst like torches.

On the morning of August 12th, the wind came. Rust was perched on the highest limb of a lightning-blasted oak. His fur was the color of embers, a tawny red that seemed to glow. He watched a plume of smoke rise beyond the far ridge, not gray like a campfire, but yellow-white, churning like a living thing.