Graeme Brandham - 1928 AD - The Peruvian Andes - Ken’tillin an Andean Rabbit
The Aurora Archives: Day 24
Date: December 24th, 1928 Location: The Cerro de Pasco Mining Outpost, Peruvian Andes (14,000ft elevation) Subject: Ken’tillin (High-Floater/The Beacon)
Ken’tillin was a rabbit of the Sierra. His bones were lighter and his fur was thick wool to help protect him against the crushing cold of the altitude. He lived with his family in the shadow of the human mining camp, tolerated but ignored, a ghost eating scraps at the edge of the lamplight. The end of the line when it came to rabbit outposts.
The message for him arrived via the deep-rock tunnels, carried by a runner whose route through the warren networks had been perilously fast, arriving with multiple sore looking bruises and cuts from scraping against the walls the mountain. The runner collapsed at Ken’tillin’s feet, gasping one word in the old tongue, sky-falling-man. Due north 17 degrees.
The runner was wearing the red scarf, a message all the way from the north. The fabled Lumi. Never in his life did he imagine it could be his turn to be chosen. He closed his eyes and listened to the strings. At this altitude, the air was thin, and the connections hummed with terrifying clarity.
He felt it instantly. Panic. Pure erratic human terror vibrating in the upper atmosphere like a song that had no structure.
The runner who had regained some breath described the target. A blizzard sweeping over the mountains. A bi-plane being buffeted in the wind and snow carrying crucial supplies, food and penicillin for the mining town. He sensed the engine choking on ice.
The pilot was going to crash.
Ken’tillin moved, bounding up through his warren, letting the mountain updrafts carry him ten feet at a time, a white blur against the grey rock.
He reached the outpost runway, a flattened strip of gravel on a cliff edge. It was chaos. A white-out blizzard had swallowed the mountain. The human miners were screaming against the wind, desperately trying to light kerosene barrels to guide the plane in. But the wind snuffed out the torches instantly. They were blind, and the plane above was a deafening, circling drone, getting lower and closer to the peaks with every pass.
Ken’tillin knew they needed a light that wouldn’t go out. A light higher than the drifting snow.
He ran into the center of the frantic humans. He thumped his hind legs hard on the frozen ground. Thump-thump-thump, an urgent demand for attention.
A large man in a heavy sheepskin coat stumbled over him.
“Get out of the way, vermin!” he roared, kicking out.
Ken’tillin dodged. He thumped again, more insistently, looking up at the sky.
The humans ignored him. Desperate, Ken’tillin did the forbidden thing. He let go of the earth.
He floated up to eye level with the foreman, hovering in the swirling snow, his large dark eyes pleading.
The reaction was instant. Horror.
“¡Brujo!” someone screamed. Witch.
The foreman stumbled back, crossing himself. Another miner, terrified by the unnatural sight of a floating creature in the storm, fumbled for the revolver at his belt. A shot cracked out, lost in the wind, kicking up snow inches from Ken’tillin’s tail.
They would rather die than accept help from a monster.
Ken’tillin dropped back to the snow, heart hammering. He couldn’t make them understand. He had to do it alone. His eyes locked on an open crate near the supply shed. Emergency mining flares. Magnesium. He dashed between the legs of the panicked men and jammed his head into the crate, clamping his jaws around the thick cardboard tube of a red flare. It was heavy, cold, and tasted of chemicals.
He didn’t know how to light it. He saw the strike-cap on the end. He braced his paws and ripped the cap off with his teeth.
With a sound like a hissing snake, the flare ignited.
A blinding, searing crimson light erupted from the tube, violently spitting sparks that scorched his whiskers. The heat was instantly intense.
Ken’tillin didn’t let go. He clamped his jaws tighter around the burning tube and pushed off the ground, dancing up into the air and into the storm.
The weight of the flare was immense, an anchor that seemed destined to drag him over the cliff edge. He fought with the wind, paddling the air, rising higher and higher until he was twenty feet above the runway, a solitary crimson star hovering in the white void.
The wind battered him, spinning him around. The smoke choked him. The heat blistered the skin around his mouth. He held on anyway as his sights locked onto the plane in the distance. He became the lighthouse.
***
Up above, Captain Luis Delgado was preparing to die. His altimeter was useless. His fuel gauge was empty. He was spiraling down into a cloud of icey razors that hid within its depths, the hard cutting edge of the mountains.
Then, through a tear in the white curtain, he saw it. A glow in the air, faint, but clear. A steady, piercing red light that cut through the fog like a beacon.
“Mother of God,” Luis whispered.
He didn’t question it. He aligned the nose of his rattling bi-plane with the impossible red light. He followed it down, down, out of the sky until suddenly, looming out of the snowstorm was the familiar runway, his wheels bounced down onto the jarring slam of frozen gravel.
As the plane skidded to a halt, its propeller chopping into a snowbank, the red light above wavered, then fell.
Ken’tillin dropped the spent, smoldering tube into the snow. His mouth was burned, his body exhausted. He didn’t wait for thanks. He knew what humans did to things they feared. He vanished into the shadows of the rocks before the cockpit opened.
The next morning, Christmas Day, broke crisp and clear. The penicillin was already on its way down the mountain.
Ken’tillin cautiously emerged from his crevice. He winced as the cold air hit his burned mouth.
Outside his small den, neatly placed on a flat stone, was a pile of dried apricots and a small, perfectly carved wooden figure of a rabbit with wings.
He looked up towards the outpost. The foreman, the man who had kicked at him the night before, was standing by the supply shed, watching him. The man slowly raised a hand in salute, then turned away.
It wasn’t friendship. But it was a truce. Born under a red light in a storm.
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE: This event is the verified origin point for the widespread human myth of the red-nosed guide creature.
It is crucial to note the human pilot, Captain Delgado, never saw Ken’tillin. His logbook records only: “Saved by a miracle. A red star floated in the storm and guided me home.” The myth attributes the light to magic or religion; the reality was a stolen industrial flare held by a creature brave enough to save the species that tried to shoot it down.
Ken’tillin suffered significant scarring around his muzzle, which he bore with pride until his death. The truce established that night allowed for the eventual integration of the Andean rabbit community into the mining vilage where their skills proved mutually beneficial, proving that sometimes, the only way to be seen is to become the light in the dark yourself.
Present Day
Elias finished reading. The datapad hummed quietly in his hands.
He looked out the viewport of his quarters. The stars were hard and cold, much like the air over the Andes must have been in 1928.
He glanced over at a screen to his right where little red lights flicked about. He was looking at a small, pulsing red dot in particular, the one that showed Cas’shya’s location. She was currently in the hydroponics bay, likely liberating some vegetables for whatever her next plan involved.
A red dot moving in the dark.
Elias smiled, a tired, genuine curve of his lips. He thought about the over-zealous jollity, the playful demeanor, the relentless dedication to archiving the truth, even when it was painful.
“A guide,” he murmured to the empty room. “Just like the story says.”
He set the datapad down. He couldn’t knit a cape, and he couldn’t fly a bi-plane. But the stories had taught him that the size of the gesture didn’t matter as much as the intent.
He stood up and walked towards the door. He had an idea for a gift. Something for the archivist who had given him something he hadn’t felt in a while. He felt loved.
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