The sunlight filtered through the canopy, seeming to dance as the wind rustled the leaves and changed the shapes cast on the forest floor below. The pleasant day found a young faun, crouched over on the ground with a serious look of concentration of her face. In the dirt, a series of foreign symbols were scratched out in a circle, and the young female seemed intent on finishing the last one. The details done, she sat back for a moment to survey her work. "That...looks right...I think," she muttered, still frowning and double and triple-checking her work before proceeding.
Some might have mistaken the faun's work for some strange child's game, had they happened to wander by. However, the work she did was both important, and dangerous, if taken lightly.
It became clear that something more was going on here as she closed her eyes and held her hands out over the symbols. She began chanting, muttering strange words in a foreign tongue under her breath, words that one could almost feel rather than hear alone, filled with darkness and power and mystery. On the palms of her hands, a symbol similar to those scratched into the earth began to glow with a reddish light, casting this glow onto the circle. The light spread, filling each of the symbols in the circle until they were all glowing the same as those on her hands. Still, she kept chanting, in a low, rhythmic tone, her eyes closed tightly in strained concentration.
The glow grew stronger and stronger, spreading throughout the small clearing until everything seemed touched with red. The effort of continuing the chant seemed to put strain on the young lady, but she kept on without faltering. The glow then started to condense, forming a pair of rings that hovered around her wrists, then shrank down, tightening and becoming almost corporeal. Then, there was a quick flash, the rings and the glow disappeared, leaving the faun crouching in what looked once more like a normal forest clearing.
She sagged suddenly, as if exhausted by the strange ritual, minutes later opening her eyes halfway, unfocused and seemingly distracted by something only she could see. Then, she blinked a few times, her focus cleared, and she reached out tiredly to begin brushing away the symbols in the dirt. It was done, not for the first or last time, but it would at least be a while before she needed to perform the binding ritual again.
Sitting back, she tucked her hooves to the side, reaching up to brush a stray lock of hair from her eyes. It was a tiring exercise, but necessary to keep her 'powers' in check, if that's what they should be called. At least now she could rest and recover a bit, enjoying the serenity and peace of the forest around her.