Glow-Flies

Overview

Glow-flies are the small beetles whose lights fill the forest meadows of the Elderweald and the field edges of the cradle-web on summer nights. For a few weeks around midsummer the groves are full of them, and Wood Elf children name the year by how they shone: a year of many lights, of few, of late lights, of lights over the water.

Appearance

A glow-fly is a soft, narrow beetle about as long as a fingernail, dull brown with a pale shield over its head, and the last segments of its body a pale sulphur-yellow. That tail gives a cold green-gold light that the beetle flashes in a pattern: a slow pulse, a quick double blink, a long glow. By day it is nothing to look at. At night a meadow full of them drifts and winks like sparks rising from a fire that is not there. The flightless females glow steadily from the grass. They are silent.

Habitat and Range

They live in damp, grassy places near woods: forest meadows and glades, grove edges, streamsides, hedgerows, and the margins of fields in the Elderweald, the Crownboughs, and the Confluence Basins. They are surface creatures and need the dark of an open night; none lives in the lightless country below.

Behaviour and Temperament

The grown beetles live only a few weeks in summer and hardly eat. Their lights are courtship: males fly low over the grass flashing their pattern, and females answer from below. The larvae, which also glow faintly, live in leaf litter and damp grass and hunt snails and slugs. They pay no attention to people.

Life Cycle

Eggs laid in damp ground hatch into larvae that live a year or two in the litter, feeding and growing, before turning into the winged beetles of a single summer.

Uses and Dangers

They do no harm and are of little use, except that their larvae eat slugs and snails in the gardens. Children catch them in jars and let them go at dawn.

Lore and Belief

Wood Elf groves keep the year-names the children give, and an old Elf can recount a long run of summers by their lights. Basin Humans say the glow-flies are the souls of the year's dead, come back for one night to see the harvest, and on midsummer night some villages leave the shutters open for them. A summer with no lights is held in both peoples to foretell a hard winter, and the Elves say a grove where they stop shining has been wronged.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals