Before the Morning Gets Loud

The four crayon towers of Crayon Beaver Lodge caught the early light like colored glass — red, yellow, green, and blue — throwing soft patches of color across the treetops of Craft Room Forest below.

Ms. Crayon Beaver stood on her balcony, chin resting on her paw, watching the forest wake up. A family of armadillo neighbors rolled past on the path below, lunchboxes bumping at their sides. Two deer kids chased each other between the paper-birch trees, giggling loud enough to startle a gecko off his fence post.

She smiled. She loved this forest. Every noisy, tangled, busy piece of it.

Her giant blue crayon leaned against the railing beside her, humming faintly the way it always did in the morning — not magic exactly, more like habit.

"Another quiet day," she said to nobody.

But even as she said it, something made her ears prick up and tilt toward the trees to the east.

East of Everything

The sound came again — not loud, but wrong. A low, rhythmic thudding from the east, steady as a drumbeat, growing.

Ms. Crayon Beaver grabbed her blue crayon and launched off the balcony, shooting through the air above the canopy. The treetops looked fine from here. Then she spotted it.

A wide, ragged scar was cutting through the forest — a path of flattened paper-birch trees, churned-up roots, and overturned earth, moving fast. Not fire. Not a storm. Something was plowing straight through the forest like a drill through cardboard, and it wasn't stopping.

From above, she saw armadillo families scrambling out of their homes. Rolled-up luggage bounced loose down the path as they scattered.

Then a tiny voice crackled from the utility belt on her waist. A small yellow drone — no bigger than a softball, shaped like a cartoon sun — buzzed up beside her. She called it Pip.

"Ms. CB!" Pip chirped in its bright electronic voice. "It already passed the Pinecone District. Three blocks gone. And it's heading straight for the heart of the forest."