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Who?
Clurie (Storei), Georgie and Adal (Zanaroo)

When?
The dead of winter in Shyregoed, 1410-1411.

Where?
Somewhere not far off within the reaches of one of many Fellowship bases.

The hiccup was a cough of ember.

A few yards in front of them was a small figure the size of a frown. Hurdling over the lumps of snow, and stumbling forward in blind panic, the little figure rushed across the few cobblestones still visible in a snow swept path. It was Clurie Clemmings, clapping his hands so that splutters of ember rose up from his finger tips before be rubbed them frantically at his shoulders, trying his best to keep himself warm despite the increasing cold outside. He was slowing up, though, the cold having an easy time of freezing up his energy and weakening his frantic stride. Even the copious amount of adrenaline rushing through his system, an unnatural fear to run and keep running until he found himself at a distance shore, wasn't enough to keep him moving at more than a sluggish jog.

Aloud, he shouted and sobbed, only able to express the turmoil of emotions expanding in his chest by way of making miserable sounds, stumbling along the frozen turf. He knew that making sounds might give him away to his brother's deadly hunt, but he cared not, placing his faith in the wind of the increasing storm to rip away the sound of his bemoaning voice as he rubbed sparks and flame into his arms.

He might have continued like this for some time, until he collapsed in the snow to be covered up and forever forgotten in a premature grave of ice, if it weren't for the shapes shouldering themselves out of the whip and whirlwind of gray behind him. At first, Clurie's instinct was to run from any figure that might be his brother, but when he saw that there were two figures and not just one, boyish figures at that, he realized just who it was who was trundling up behind him. He couldn't believe it, thinking instead that it must be others, some stranger or other member of the Fellowship, but it was none other than the Malt Brothers, impossibly breaking into Clurie's shaken up snow globe of a world.

Clurie turned around and clapped his hands together with such force that he felt the jolt snap up with an electric pain all the way up his arms, and what resulted from the gesture was a belch of flame, large enough to catch their attention and scream his existence, like a lantern that had been dropped to the ground.

"GEORGIE!" the little Plague shouted, convincing his legs to lift up from the slip of the ice and rush instead for the brothers, "ADAL! Please! Help me! Help me, Adal, please!" As he ran, now scrambling without care or concern for his upright positioning, he fell face first into the snow, picking himself up again to rush and trip forward with his arms outstretched in plaintive screams for sanctuary.

An eternity of white was what laid out before Clurie's final rush to the first sign of safety he'd seen since his good-willed kidnapping from his grief-crazed brother. Sloshing through the snow with such strength opposite to the weakness building up like cankered sores in his limbs, Clurie stumbled into the hands of the familiar angel-like figure crouching down into the snow drift to retrieve him. His little hands dug into the Plague's palms as he wrenched himself forward onto the makeshift platform and he immediately crawled towards Adal's curled inwards thumb, tucking himself close to it for warmth, which was hardly apparent at all. Not that he had stopped running he entirely recognized the cold seeping into his limbs like an unwanted leak, stiffening up and freezing his ability to shift and move now that he wasn't forcing himself to move and crack the cold in his joints. Desperately, he tried to drag his knees to his chest, his teeth chattering like a rack of bones being rattled together, but no amount of self-compressing could warm him, not in the cold and most definitely not in the hand of one who'd been in the snow long enough for the body to cut off blood flow to the tips of his fingers. For Clurie, it was like being folded up into a clam of ice, tight, constricting, and so cold that he was sure he'd sink into blackness with a few moment's time.

But he couldn't pass out yet, he couldn't surrender himself to the new nightmares that would be festering in his mind. He had to warn the Malt brothers. He had to get them to run.

Pulling up his head as much as he would dare from his folded wrap of arms, Clurie looked out from underneath the curl of one arm that he had slipped over his ashy cranium, his white mouth trembling with haggard violent breaths that wrecked his body with shivers. He could hear himself again, like he were somehow displaced from his body, and he sounded miserable, somehow managing to convince himself to laugh with delirious relief before his voice swelled in a cacophony of cries. "Adal! You have to run! We have to go! We have to go far away from here where he might not find us! He's coming! We have to go now!" he squeaked.

The few initial moments of confusion astounded Clurie, and for a moment, he couldn't understand why they didn't see the peril in their situation. Did they not know what his brother was capable of? Did they not see all those instances beforehand, all those warning signs and clues towards Chauhn's eventual break in sanity? Clurie paused to think and then answered his own questions, his panic swirl of a mind quickly clearing up in a brief glance at clarity. No, they didn't understand, they didn't see. They weren't there to see all the happenstances where Chauhn, for the briefest of moments, was possessed by a rare dangerous and loving monster. If anything, they had seen his ridiculous displays of intense devotion, self-sacrifice, and love, all creatures of chaos in disguise. They wouldn't understand that the moments they had seen as blind sighted dedication, like Chauhn's defensive slug of five knuckles into the zygomatic arch of Adal's face, were blaring signals of the splintered boy who was chasing after him now. Clurie had to make them understand. He just hoped that the sincerity and fear in his voice, the sheer inverted brotherhood that was once the Clemmings' brothers defining element now a twisted and mangled tribulation, was enough to express in so few words.

"Chauhn is trying to kill me!"

What piteous movements there were to somehow protect him from the cold, Clurie thanked each and every one from the bottom of his heart. Pulled closer to Adal's breast, Clurie let his shoulders shake with the convulsing shiver of every crawl of cold that yanked itself up his spine, his cheeks a dim glow in the haze of white that haloed the forms of the confused and worried in the Shyregoadian snow. But even though his body longed to jump somewhere warmer, somehow parkour his way to Adal's collar and brace himself within the folded fabric against the beating veins in his neck feeding on what little warmth would be rising from the nape, he knew he couldn't leave the brothers with so little knowledge of the broken horror heading their way so that they would bicker until Chauhn labored up to them through the snow, his eyes as green as the leaves and branches which writhed with life and pain once he screamed. Besides, Clurie was sure that his legs wouldn't be able to carry him, they were so wobbly and frozen, like the cartilage in his knees had entirely disappeared.

When Adal produced the black vile, Clurie felt an unconscious hunger growl in his stomach, his shoulders weakening at the very sight of the stuff that had, once upon a time, saved his life. For the few moments it juggled between the brothers, Clurie couldn't help but stare at it with doe eyes, gulping back at the thick spit that clogged his throat with clumpy ash. But then, this interaction, however brief it might be, worried Clurie, distressed him. It might take up too much time.

"Please! You have to believe me!" Clurie wailed, trying to pull up anything from his recent traumatic past with the boy who had once proudly claimed to be his protector, "This isn't the first time! He's crushed me before, he's screamed at me, yelled and hurt me! I never said anything before, I thought that it would pass, like it always did! But...But please, now, he's gone mad, I tell you! MAD!" Clurie found himself gasping, unwillingly having used up all his breath in his aching little lungs to scream over the howl of the wind. Catching his chest, pushing back at it as it tried to explode outward into an unnatural bulge of starving inhalation, Clurie eventually collapsed into coughs, his voice a weapon against him. Swallowing past the scratch in his throat, the Ash Plague wiped fresh soot from his lips onto his knuckles, and turned his head up again to scream out his final and most poignant piece of evidence yet. He hoped that he wouldn't have to tell them, as the mere thinking of it made Clurie double over with woe, but there was nothing else direct enough to get through to the Malt Brothers so that they would immediately leave the soon dangerous area.

Clurie unwrapped himself from about Adal's thumb, clambering to the other side of his finger for the most direct spot he could find to accost both Georgie and Adal. Stretching out his arms while his chest hung over the lip of Adal's palm, he deplored with a story that he hoped would sure set the Malt Brothers in a hasty trot away from the Fellowship grounds.

"Chauhn has killed an Excito! He did it late last night...He squashed one of the Bell Plagues in his hands, turned him into black mush and all...! He was going to do the same to all the others he'd saved, he was doing it to me! Sloane came...Sloane caught Chauhn and threw him into the wall, he pried me free, and grabbed the others and ran! Lady Sage came, she found Chauhn clawing at Sloane's door, like...like a monster! She took him away, threw him into the dungeons! He was there for hours...I didn't think that he deserved all that...I thought he deserved another chance...!" Clurie, at this point in the retelling of his messily rushed and chopped up version of Chauhn's fall from grace, could hardly support his head. His little body convulsed where he lay limp like a forlorn and sullied handkerchief over the side of Adal's cold hand, and he wept aloud in between each word, unable to keep himself from reeling with horror too raw to be seen. "I went to him, I stole away from Sloane, I thought I could be a hero, pull him back to what he used to be! But...He wasn't himself when I came to him. There was something wrong, something terribly wrong, and I didn't see it until I told him that I wasn't his brother! I had to tell him...I knew that I wasn't his brother ever since Adal spoke to us at the fair, and it was making me sick to think that he thought I was! So I told him...But he didn't quite hear...Or maybe he did. I don't know, he was a mess! His hands all swollen and his cheek a deep blue, and he screamed at me, came at me, thinking I was going to kill him! I...I just wanted to save him. Warm him up, something!"

Clurie tried his best to refrain from pushing his palms into his face, from crying like a weakling, but when he firmed his face into a betrayed scowl, it shook and wobbled, unable to keep still. He gave a hurt sniff, pinching his face together above his mouth, but his voice completely bespoke the feelings of despair rooting themselves within.

"Now, he's after me...He's coming to kill me, screaming branches at me, busting open all the doors in the cells, makin' them chase and spear, splinter and snap! We have to go, Adal, Georgie, we have to go now, or he might hurt you too! Please, don't let that happen, please! We have to get away! We have to flee! Fly!"

"Thank you...Thank you..."

Tumbling as clumsily as a rock might roll down a small cliff, Clurie flopped precariously from one perch to another, only just barely saving himself from a lifeless tumble down Adal's front by clutching onto the wrapped bundles of fabric wrapped about the Plague's shoulders in an attempt to ward off the insisting cold. Hand over hand, he crawled into the closer reaches of the cloth near Adal's neck and wrapped himself as best he could within the folds which were already wet with flakes of snow. He bit his teeth hard, trying to get them to stop chattering, and wiggled himself deeper into the fabric, trying to duck from as much of the snow's dagger sharp wind as he could, but he was still so cold that his head felt filled with cotton. It didn't help that he had spent the past few hours in long stages of grieving, screaming, or trembling with panic. Adal was right. He did need to rest. He was exhausted and he didn't feel it in its full force until he settled himself down like a screw worm into the mass of fabric swaddled about the Anhelo's shoulders. It slowly dawned upon him that he couldn't move. Shivering became almost too much of an effort to endure, and Clurie, with a strangled sigh, tried to relax his shoulders from where they were frozen about the nape of his neck.

It seemed like the brothers were about to move, separating themselves from the gray of a fortress wall that had now become a looming colossus, filled with dreaded things and dreaded memories, when Georgie surreptitiously pulled away, shouting, a few moments later, the terrible name of his wayward Grimm.

Panic seized up through Clurie's body and he almost fell free from Adal's collar from the resulting burst of terror that burst like an electric bolt through his body. Scrambling in the tangle of cloth, he twisted himself around so he could stare, mouth agape at the image of Georgie's naive attempt to scream for Chauhn. Did he not hear his warnings? did he not understand the kind of peril that he'd be putting them all in if he were to summon the rogue page? Did he not see that Chauhn was a lost cause, like Clurie had so painfully accepted just within the past hour? Whipped about to face the gray again, Clurie had to twist himself about again when Adal lurched forward to snatch his brother and growl coldly at him, so cold that Clurie was sure the steam pushing out of his mouth was colder than the rip of wind stealing those very same breaths away into the spin of the storm. Secretly stabbed through by the faux brotherhood that the Malt boys had built between themselves , almost jealous of it, actually, Clurie worried. There had always been a tangible tension between the two, like a tight wire balance that relied on the tension of the rope beneath for the stasis, but the small squabbles between them were distressing to watch. It was like the taut rope was being wobbled beneath them, a threatening quake, as if someone had plucked the string expecting to hear sound. Clurie sincerely hoped that such tussles were merely tussles of two who were concerned for each other, not subdued arguments of two who would soon come to flail, wobble, and, with a scream, fall into chaos, like his supposed brotherhood with Chauhn Clemmings.

Then, Georgie turned about and followed them, a reluctant slump in his shoulders but a solemn understanding guiding his weak and feeble steps through the sniffles and coughs that wrenched his shoulders.

Complacency, at last, and Clurie tiredly allowed himself to collapse again deep into the folds of Adal's clothes, half-heartedly trying to rub sparks that would no longer come to his fingers into his shoulders. For that moment, he felt safe, assured by the severity in Adal's firm set mouth and the deep furrow in his brow, and even the worried knot that had taken over Georgie's freckled face, but deep in his core, he knew that any stray sound or whisper in the wind would set him leaping up in terror. There was little that the Malt brothers could do to dispel the terror that had been so deep rooted into Clurie's heart, but he hoped that it would change in time. Hope, itself, for Clurie was already a fragile concept, something that he had learned in the past few chapters of his life to be a delicate and practically useless notion.

Hoping that he, alone, could somehow get through to his Grimm, pull him from the dark pit he had helplessly slid into...Useless.

Hoping that Chauhn would become sane again, accept his loneliness as the last Clemmings, somehow atone for all that he had done...Useless.

Hoping that feeble Georgie could understand that the sweet and noble Chauhn that they had once known was dead...Also useless.

Hoping that Adal could entirely save him from his brother's hunt...He would soon come to find that it was useless too.






Behind them by perhaps fifteen minutes, came a slouched over figure, trudging with frozen feet through the snow. He was following the tell tale trail of ash through the snow, a bright path against the white of the snow despite the torrent of fresh flakes spinning wildly into the tundra like falling stars. A flinch, a buckle, and he reached down to pinch free the fragile pieces of glass that had sunk into his frozen foot, unperturbed by anything else than the abrupt end in his brother's tracks. Like a predator, he stooped down, peering at the whirlwind of heavy trudges through the snow drift. Footsteps.

He slowly continued forward, like the creeping future, inevitable and dark.