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 Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2012 12:27 pm
Zachariah looked paler than a moment ago, ill at what he had just seen and deeply disquieted. “Was… was that a trick of my eyes”? His voice barely a whisper as though he feared by speaking any louder the thing might once again become a tiny man, or tiny men if feathers and leaves, all bloodied and torn.
“Or, did anyone else see that as well?” He finished the thought, raising his pale eyes to glance at the others, for a moment not even caring if the infuriating hunter chose to use the opportunity as another chance to mock him. He’d never seen anything like that in the times he had hunted with his father. It was strange, eerie and haunting.
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Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2012 9:40 pm
Mette had stilled and gaped as it'd changed - and again - with every step. Was she already going mad? But when Zachariah broke the spell with his words, she rushed forward to turn over the corpse.
"It's...a bird," she marveled, laying it back down as it had fallen, as if it were more miraculous it were not a tiny man.
"I saw it too," she looked over to the Noble, eyes wide, "it was a man, or at least, there was a man. But now..." and she stared hard at it to make certain, "nothing. It is just a bird again."
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Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2012 11:27 pm
Florian's voice was just short of a nervous laugh, a touch overloud, a bit overconfident. It drowned out the near silent rasp of steel against leather as he drew his sword: "It couldn't possibly be a man. Men don't fly, and they're not a foot tall." But there was nothing natural about the way Ever's hawk had reacted. His father's falcons seemed to delight in the kill, only turning it over to the falconer once they'd been promised a treat, a strip of meat. Ever's hawk had seemed -- scared. And birds of prey were fierce.
Florian shuddered. The small hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and even his unsheathed sword did not help his confidence. Nor did the wide, pale eyes of Zach. With his free hand, Florian scrubbed at his face. "--this is the Blackwood. We're all nervous. It wasn't a man," he added again, perhaps for his own benefit.
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Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2012 12:29 pm
For his part, Ever finally inched in closer to the think, to sink to a crouch beside it. His arrow was gone, a pass-through perhaps, and to him that was strange enough. Usually, when he fired, he hit the meat of the beast solidly enough that he could recover his ammo after. He'd thought that he had this time, too...
But he didn't say anything. He didn't touch it, just considered the blood against the side of its head and its wing, a glancing shot, and looked up to where Thunder circled above them.
"...I don't think we should be here." It came slowly, not the quibbling of a terrified kid but nervous all the same.
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Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2012 5:57 pm
If anything could have made Zachariah more unsettled than the trick of the woods that made him wonder if the beast was in secret a man, or a mount for a man. Then the fact that the cocky, swaggering Ever was unsettled, that he thought they should take their leave. He took a breath to speak something, a moments thought that he let die for fear that speaking it might only serve to make him all the more anxious.
“What should we do?” He asked after he found the nerve to say anything. He couldn’t turn if no one else did, but good lord he wanted to even if he was branded a coward. He looked from the knights, then directly to Ever, pointedly even at Ever, because he was the hunter who’d brought down the strange beast.
He wondered for a moment if he’d ever –eaten- an animal that was in some strange secret way, a man.
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Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2012 7:35 pm
Perhaps that was the moment Mette first truly knew fear. She looked from Ever to Zachariah, to Ever, and back. These were the men who had been in the Blackwood - Ever, especially, well-versed with the place. Yet, here they were, grim and drawn, and in the very least, anxious. If they had told her this was how it was in the forest, bird turning to man back to bird, she would have believed. She had come prepared for fantastical things, she would have pressed on with fortitude. But they had made it rather clear this was not the way of the forest they knew, that they were just as lost and wary - that their little group had walked into something...something they knew not how to face. She had known Ever but for the barest of moments, and even so, she could imagine that apprehension did not often fraternise with the mockery that seemed to dominate his speech. But he had sounded nervous...that scared her more than the bird.
Her heart thudded in her chest, harder than she could ever remember it. Did she want to run? There was all manner of darkness she did not understand at play here. Briefly, she thought of Mama, Papa in the fields, her brothers and sisters around the hearth. For the first time she thought, I might never see them again. And it was but her first mission -
- It was but her first mission.
Had she not longed to come to the Blackwood like this? A Sword? Just like Grandpa...
"I don't think we should leave," her voice held doubt that it said the right things, but struggled on, "the Hunters - I know you think it unlikely, but if they still lived, they would need us...or perhaps the Civilians should leave, and we Swords press on by map? We are bound by duty, they are not." She stared hopefully at Florian, as if he could provide some magic answer to make sense of her conflicted thoughts.
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Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2012 2:01 pm
Florian noticed Mette looking at him -- looking at him, like he had the right answers, when he'd never seen anything like that before -- and paled. A moment later he remembered Ever's comment, for once completely serious, and tossed his head to clear out the cobwebs. He did not sheath his sword, but nor did he start wildly flailing it about, cutting at shadows.
"We shouldn't be here. Ever's right," and this time, he used the hunter's given name, "So let's move on. Carefully."
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Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 4:52 am
Move on. Carefully. Mette relaxed and nodded, straightening again, a hand on her hilt for safety, but not yet wont to draw the sword.
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Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2012 3:58 pm
"Why?" He still had his bow out; Ever kept both hands on it as he pivoted to look at the pair of Swords, his own feet rather thoroughly planted -- and dark eyes turning back in the direction they'd come. A muscle in his jaw jumped a bit as he chewed on words, worked to quell his instincts to make a sharp comment. Probably wiser to be calm, here.
"We should turn around and carefully go back the way we came. The forest is dangerous at the best of times." And, said his tone, this was not the best of times.
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Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2012 11:33 pm
"We were given a mission," Florian interjected, with a suddenness that surprised him. The thought of incurring Rosalie's wrath was almost as scary as going on into the Blackwood. The Blackwood held things unknown. He knew exactly what Rosalie would do, or at least had a fair enough estimation. "Are you ready to give up on the others so quick?" He raised his eyebrows. "What if you were the one lost out here?"
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Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2012 7:29 pm
“If I was the one lost in the woods.” Zac said with a perhaps unusual moment of honesty. “I’d be dead, I’d have been dead… days ago.” He said softly and shook his head anxiously. “If we’re not careful, if we’re not careful they are already dead, and we’ll join them soon. Missions… don’t justify suicide. But I’ll respect whatever decision that the group agrees upon.”
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Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2012 11:37 pm
Mette looked deeply unhappy. She had not the mind for such decisions, not when they involved the fates of others: life on the farm had been simple and straightforward, she did all she was told and did it happily. She had imagined life with the Swords to be much the same, herself as a blunt weapon turned on whatever task at hand, that she would set her will to no matter what the cost.
"I am sorry," she finally said, looking between the two civilians glumly, "I stand with Florian. But we cannot stop you from leaving." Though that would probably mean suicide for the Swords; Mette hadn't quite thought far enough to whether Florian would be fine with that.
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Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2012 5:44 pm
They wouldn't get the opportunity to split up. Mette, standing firm and unhappy, would get the first of the strangeness; a battering against the back of her neck like a hummingbird's wings, a breathy sound like a very soft laugh, but when she turned, there would be nothing there. For just a moment she'd be left to her nerves, to her potential panic, on her own. Then the rest of the party would get similar treatment, creatures like large birds pawing at their clothing, unseen, and sending surprisingly-warm wind dancing over their skin. Slowly, whatever-these-were worked to drive the group closer together, to confine them to a circle. Those who got a glimpse might recognize them as birds, others as the same little human-faced beings they had seen before. It was harder to discard these as fantasy. It did not last long. Two or three minutes, in which their flailing or panic would be met with empty air, touched but unable to touch in return. And when they air cleared at last, all those wings gone, the flapping and the flutter and the faint, warm breeze faded back to still, cold forest, everything would look different around them. No landmarks remained. Nothing they could recognize. Even a glimpse up at the sky, the most steady of maps, would leave them staring up at an unfamiliar sight, the points of light shifted into strange locations and washed over with a glowing veil of pink and green and gold light. In other words, they were not where they had started, and now there was no chance of simply returning home.
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Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2012 4:01 am
The first of the touches, she had slapped an instinctive hand to her nape to swat away, whipping around at the ghostly exhalation to see - nothing.
"Did you hear that?" she began to ask, a rising alarm in her chest - but she never noted if there was a reply, for the tugs and pushes started coming in earnest, and she forgot the rest, flinging her arms out and fumbling at the invisible blows with a hoarse cry. What was this - what was it?! She spun, wild-eyed, looking for something - anything - she could fix her sense of reason to...but what she could see...the half-caught glimpses she could see out the corner of her eye... It wasn't so bad when she could recognise them as birds of a sort...but those little men. She squeezed her eyes shut and tore clawed fingers into the empty space around her with a desperate yell that was as close to an outright scream as anything she had uttered in her simple life to date.
When she opened her eyes again, they were gone...but it was, perhaps, worse.
"Frost..." she whispered, the rest of the curse dying in her throat, "...where are we?" voice raw and trembling, reaching a hand out towards the strange light as if it were something she could close her grip around and wrench away.
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Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2012 6:41 am
They had been herded, certainly, into this circle -- shoulder to shoulder, mostly, close enough that they had to touch. Of course Zac was to Ever's right, their shoulders pressed together, and had he been just a bit shorter, fingers might have brushed, and he only noticed as the monsters cleared away and he was finally able to catch his breath.
The wise thing would have been to stay where he'd been, stay within relative safety, but instead Ever stepped immediately forward, drawing in deep breaths and rolling out his shoulders and trying to shake away the discomfort. There was a wild light to his eyes as he looked upward, and then around, trying to figure out the stars and the trees.
"I...I don't know." And he didn't. He didn't recognize any of this. It wasn't even the night sky rotate somehow, wasn't that they were facing a different direction. The growth seemed wrong. The snow mostly gone. The stars were different. "...I don't know what to do now."
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