1. The Fearvolcano

When Ardex placed his tiger paws at the bottom of the stairs, he noticed that the gate doors had been ripped from their hinges.

Deep gashes split the wood, seemingly carving a message. Though the path to the throne of the gods was long, Ardex reached the top in mere moments, panting.

When he called for Bella, silence was the only answer.

Ardex shook his fur, but could not relax. He didn’t want it to be true. He told himself there was a good explanation. Of late, the animals had seemed happy with the gods again! They had opened their gates to them. Perhaps a clumsy elephant passed through? he thought.

The symbols on the door were numbers, written in some ancient script. Ardex could make nothing of them. He searched the deserted halls, pushed off pillars to increase his speed, until moments later his claws slid across an equally empty throne room.

Bella’s throne was empty. Its left armrest crumbled away, the stones fallen to the floor like tears. He crept closer. A tuft of raccoon fur still clung to Cosmo’s jagged throne.

“Bella? Is anyone there?”

He did not recognize his own voice. If they have done anything to her, he thought, if any being has so much as touched Bella …

He paced around the room. There were no traces of life, but endless traces of a fight.

His breathing quickened. The fur on his back stood up and his enormous tusks scraped the floor as if Bella might be hiding underneath.

No! It couldn’t have been just one being. A whole group had certainly overpowered his little sister and dragged her away like a sack of sand. Guilt stormed through his thoughts. How could we leave her alone, the only goddess with no powers to defend herself?

Until all thoughts halted. He felt only fury. His mind emptied, but his muscular body tensed. The fire that always burnt within bubbled to the surface.

He clambered up the walls until he left the Throne through a back door.

“Bella!” he roared over the forest.

He ran and ran, his thick tail lashing the ground. The animals fled from this wild lunatic, retreating into their stone homes.

They did not see that every blow, every thrust, every growl made a hill on the horizon grow. Higher and higher, until you’d rather call it a mountain, until animals pointed at it with shivering claws, until Ardex himself had to run around it.

“Bella is kidnapped!”

He made sure everyone in the East could hear. That was easy, for since that dreadful Howlnight the entire Eastwood had become nearly uninhabitable.

The mountain he created slowly turned brown and then black. An opening appeared at its peak.

“I will find the culprit!”

Smoke billowed from the mountain. Red streams trickled down.

“And I will personally hurl them into this volcano.”

Ardex already knew who the culprit was. It had to be the Proto-Turtles. They had never shown respect to the gods, for as long as they lived, which was such a long time that people now called them Ancient Turtles. They were surely strong enough to do such a thing. And several creatures had overheard conversations at night, stemming from the Midterra Sea, about secret plans.

The Ancient Turtles had done it. They were too big to hurl into the volcano—but he could always bring the volcano to them instead.

By causing an eruption.

He turned toward the Midterra Sea in the North, when a wing blocked his vision. Cosmo, a large bird and god of the air, barred Ardex’ path. “My dear brother, tell me now why volcanoes appear?”

“Let me through. I know what you think, I know what you all think of me, but this is no unnecessary fury. Bella is kidnapped.”

“Pardon?”

Eeris hopped toward them, still laughing. The giraffe was goddess of nature, but sometimes they thought her true animal form was grasshopper. That cheerful behavior constantly irritated Ardex. He stepped closer to the territory of the Turtles, but Eeris grabbed his back paw with her long neck.

“I think it’s very nice that you created a volcano for my birthday party, but—”

“It’s your birthday today?”

“Not really. But I convinced the animals it was, so now I have to play along.”

“Brother! Sister!” Ardex jerked free and sank his teeth into a tree, just to stop himself from biting his own family. “Bella is kidnapped! I’m serious.”

“She would never allow that to happen!”

“And yet it has happened.”

It took far too long, in Ardex’ opinion, before his siblings’ faces became as grave as his own. But their presence did calm him, and the volcano stopped growing and sputtering.

At least they were unharmed. It seemed only Bella was taken. Now they could solve this together.

“What do we do now?” squeaked Eeris.

“Records,” said Cosmo, already walking back to the Throne. Ardex reluctantly followed. “Bella holds an audience with forest animals once a week. Everything they say is written in the Lifelogbook.”

“By whom?”

“Magic.”

“Oh yes,” Eeris chimed in, loping faster and faster. “That log just appeared one day. And it works great. But we really must find out who enchanted it.”

Together they shuffled through the splintered doors. The log, a collection of large wooden tablets stuck to the wall, stared back at them. Cosmo searched for the latest addition.

“Leion of Paraat. Reason for visit: asked Bella to accompany him to solve a grave problem. He gave few details. Bella refused.”

“Then we go to Paraat,” said Eeris as if discussing a cheerful adventure. Cosmo kept staring at the symbols with a frown.

“Nonsense,” Ardex growled. “Bella refused. It says so right there. So she didn’t go with this Leion character. I’m going to the Ancient Turtles. I know they did it.”

Cosmo nodded. “We split up. You go to the sea, we go to Paraat.”