The scene was like something out of fiction—horror or alternative history in particular. A sheet of flame rose up between two of a severed stone wall. Rubble littered the ground and smoke obscured the backdrop. And through it all, the visual and audible marks of panicked creatures—silhouettes darting through the fire and anguished screams mingling with the repeated crackling of explosions. Some examples of these signs persisted, while others were clearly cut short.
Redwallers fled as they could, but entirely avoiding the inferno that raged around the western part of the Abbeywas next to impossible. In the state of physical possibility that only comes in the face of death, many of the common Abbeybeasts were able to burst through the flames with only minor singes to their fur. And others outdid even that. Old asthmatic Sister Oxalis the Recorder dashed from her gatehouse quarters to a place where the smoke could no longer asphyxiate her lungs. Badger Mother Marne was able to carry a half-dozen dibbuns at once out from the wreckage, and she kept going back in for more of them, her motherly explanation of the crisis that the kitchen was indeed the problem. The cellarkeepers were able to push any barrels of alcoholic drink to the side of the Abbey opposite the impact site to prevent the flammable liquids from igniting—all this before their own escapes.
There were some that stayed within the Abbey grounds, deliberately. The otters Rohan and Gregory showed no aspects of their light demeanors and twinnish buffoonery as they worked. They were designed to operate in an aquatic environment, but now they had to bring the water out into the terrestrial sphere; they did all in their power to bring the contents of the Abbey pond out to combat the raging flames. Bransles the hare, along with others of her species, were naturally more suited to land. Utilizing the springpower of massive muscled hindlegs, Bransles and her squadron of hares kicked showers of dirt from the ground to the wall, with the hopes that the raw earth would be stifling enough. Via air the Sparra fought as always, working with assembly-line efficiency to release clumps of moist forest subfloor from within the cloud of smoke above. To stamp out and blot out in one blow. The flames sputtered under the barrage as the firefighters sputtered from the flame. A different sort of vicious circle.
Most Redwallers, however, simply ran. After their lives are gone and their first-person tales with them, history books will undoubtedly regard them as nothing but terror-stricken, nothing but cowards while others did so much more to fight back. That's a hypocritical recorder, right there. Most who write of history from a distance have no firstpaw part in anything interesting, and thus they have no right to be critics. Can anyone blame those poor beasts who ran? Would you not do the same if the building which was more than a mere building to you—which was the world to you—was suddenly and unexplainably ringed in flame?
They ran out into the forest, into the depths of Mossflower which were normally only traversed if there was no other option. And nobeast thought of that, of the perils well cautioned against and the warnings not to go there. The world was burning, coming down around them, inconceivable after contemplation and even more so before one has time to contemplate anything. They ran for their lives, and for denial, out into the deep, dark, and cool woods, the woods with their own wild atmosphere, out through them until the smoke no longer twinged their nostrils and a sickly bright orange glow no longer silhouetted the trees.
