A firefly blinks to be found. The will-o-wisp blinks to be followed, and nearly everything else about the two differs from there. The wisp is knee-high, a teardrop of cold flame with no warmth in it, teal at the core and lime at the edge. Its tail runs about three times the length of its body and whips into a thin spiral of smoke when it darts. Around it drifts a loose cluster of small snail shells, circling like moons. Over the black water of Czerwiny Fen I have watched one of those shells, cracked down the side, glow from inside while the others stayed dull.
I set down three accounts of it here, side by side. Vesna Rakowa cuts peat on the Czerwiny side and saw one at noon, which she says is rare. It hung beside a rotted post with its eyes half shut, pale and set wide, and looked at her the way a cat looks at a dog on a chain. She stood still for as long as she could stand it. It never moved off, and she was the one who left. Vojtek, a reed cutter out of Rzeszuna Reach, saw one at dusk and says it was fast. It went away from him across the open water in a line so straight that he followed for twenty paces before he noticed his boots were wet to the knee. Vasil, who drives geese along the causeway, says he never saw it at all. He saw only its reflection doubled in the water and the ripples spreading beneath, and he took that as plenty.
Where the accounts agree is the useful part. The wisp feeds on marsh gas, on rot, and on being watched, and it is brightest when someone is staring. Nobody in either district whistles over open water, because a whistle makes it turn. Nobody answers it by raising a light of their own. A found ring of clean snail shells set on a post means one has been working that stretch, and the cutters move their pits a day's walk off. Its smoke leaves a gray, greasy film on the reed tops that is easy to track. Walking with your back to the glow is the usual way of avoiding it.
What I could not confirm is where the shells come from. Vojtek swears they are taken off the drowned, and Vesna says they are only snails, collected out of vanity. I have not found a single shell near it that I could prove was anything else, and I did not try to take one. Vasil, asked how he gets across the causeway at dusk, shrugged. "Don't be interesting."
- Classification
- Marsh spirit, cold-flame lure
- Habitat
- Peat bogs, drowned meadows, reed flats
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- Globe the size of a lantern, knee height
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Wetlands and borderlands
- Binomial
- Ignis vagans palustris
- Diet
- Marsh gas, rot, and attention
- Temperament
- Vain, playful, quietly misleading