In The Small Hours

     He awoke to witch lights dancing beyond his window. He didn't know the time, in the high latitudes one couldn't always tell late twilight from early dawn.
   
     He dressed quickly and warmly and stepped outside, finding what he half expected to find.  It was after midnight and cold enough to hear the stars twinkle and the northern lights play a chromatic scale on harp strings stretching from one horizon to the other.  

     "The heavens declare ...'" he chanted to himself.

     Shuffling sounds in the forest drew his attention earthwards, a  scuffle between a hunting fox and its prey ended in mystery.  His eyes swept out over the sleeping village, past the mudflat with its grounded fishing boats, out to where the North Sea rolled restless in her bed,  Mists shifted leaving the horizon a clean line where sea met sky.

     As he watched, flashes erupted seaward.  Below the horizon and dim at first, then blossoming white hot before dying out, only to repeat and repeat.  Within minutes a hands width of sky glowed dull red, punctuated by sporadic brilliance.  By a rare combination of temperature gradients and wind an atmospheric duct opened and a distant thunder that was not thunder rolled through.  

     Twenty minutes later the light show ended abruptly, the horizon darkened.  The aurora was gone but he hadn't noticed when.  The stars were quiet again, dimmed by a rising predawn mist.

     By the end of the week debris from the inconclusive meeting between the English and German fleets began washing up on the mudflats: a yellow and blue signal flag, a wrecked lifeboat, a patch of fuel oil, a drowned sailor.