The River (LSU's Accepted) - M

[Weasel Overlord]

~Eleiamae~
...Games…

I led Joseph back to my stagnant den. It was strewn with rushes and mud lined each cavity in the ground, and it was the only place I could call my own in my lands. Even though the swamps were my territory, I didn’t live there as such. And now, there was a human here. An enigma to be unravelled. And I was going to enjoy him.

Joseph smirked as he entered my lair, contempt written all over his face as easy to read as woodland signs. His glances fell on the rotting logs, the stagnant pond and the bed of rushes below an overhang of rock chiselled out of a bare cliff face with my bare claws. They were much sharper in my youth…

Shaking my head, I glared at Joseph.

“Something to say about my home, human?” I almost spat the word ‘human’, baiting him for a reaction. He didn’t take it, manners as impeccable as the first time I sensed him, but I could taste his lies.
“It’s lovely.” His eyes flicked from place to place as he decided how to deal with me.

Motioning to a pile of rushes, I gave him a tap in the small of the back, indicating that he should sit. He glanced at me, eyes veiled behind a sheet of dirty blonde hair, but I caught the foul look and smiled, careful to show all of my pointed teeth. Shrugging, he lowered himself gently onto the pile, wincing a little when a particularly sharp bulrush stabbed into his leg.

“Comfortable?” I enquired innocently. He nodded, but he couldn’t keep the discomfort from his eyes. I was pleased. This was going to be fun!

Now, to play the waiting game…the first to break was the weakest, and I had had centuries of experience. I gazed unblinkingly into his eyes, noting every detail. They were a mingled grey and green shade, tinted with hatred but with a hint of remorse underneath. Truly an enigma and I wondered when he would break.

“What do you want of me?” He demanded, mottled eyes flashing with self-righteousness. “I haven’t trespassed; I haven’t caused you any trouble. What do you demand of me?” Shaking my head gently, I glazed over my true feelings with an outer shell of icy calm and added some regret for effect.

“I only want to talk, Joseph. I haven’t had a chance to speak with Humans in a long while…” I let my voice trail away, hoping to leave him wondering about me. Glancing coyly up at him from beneath my hair I judged his reaction to me. He was startled, but hiding it, and his wondering at my species seemed to be bothering him, as if he recollected my kind from a tale he had heard at a younger age.

“I am a type of Dryad.” I decided to fill him in. This information couldn’t hurt, after all. “My power lies in swamps and marshes, which are my kingdom, but also my prison.” I let out a small sigh and bowed my head, allowing some unhappiness to spread from me.

My games all relied upon the strength of my plaything, and their ability to sense and cast off my glamours. I felt that Joseph was probably able to do this, although he may not know it yet. I could sense a slight resistance at the back of his mind, warning him, if he chose to listen.

My plan rested on the hope that he would not know how to listen…

[Emotional Faun Chiko-sai]

Plantae: Thanks, I thought that was filler cos it doesn't really concern any other character than Hela.
Asi: Lily is in wolf form... right? *sweatdrop*
----------------
Hela
"crazy mother nerve*, one"
-----------------------

Burn burn burn burn. Burn the bone. The horse's meaning, though unclear in words, had been obvious in the telling: not just any bone, but her dagger bone. The dagger bone was unfamiliar (not unicorn nor animal, not human nor piscean) and she thinks that she might not want to find out. She doesn't want to know what had been killed, to make her dagger. She doesn't want to damage the picture of her father that she keeps in her head.

She is seeing familiar territory, now; more trees, more green, less water but still enough moisture to kill her should it start to drizzle; and the humans' campfire is deserted. They were weird ones, these humans. Last night they hadn't seemed like nomads but today apparently they were. The mud on her feet is caked dry over the heels. She leans down and pulls some of it off. Then she hears the howl reverberating throughout the forest.

Heartache and frustration it says. Then instinct kicks in and the next moment the danger signals are running through her mind, the sirens, the warnings, wolf WOLF WOLF!!! and she is looking for a tree to be up in. Not far from the humans' fire she unintentionally encounters the wolf. It is large and grey-brown and though it doesn't seem hungry you can never tell with wolves so Hela scrambles up the nearest tree anyway.

She looks down at the wolf, her gaze anchored to its form, and to her surprise it doesn't snarl at her, nor does it pace patiently around the tree, like so many wolves had done before it. It just sits there, looks back at her with sentient eyes a little sad that seem suddenly familiar, half-glimpsed last night in the light of the now abandoned fire. Hela knows that look. It is Lily's look, as much hers as the look of deception and shadows is Mathias' look. The wolf is Lily; Lily is the wolf. How or why is not hers to ascertain.

"U-um? Miss L-lily? Is that you?" Hela doesn't descend from the tree just yet. Lily might turn out to be a raging werewolf.

Wolf Lily raises her head and whines a little. It might mean a yes, or a maybe. Hela has not had the time to learn the wolf dialect: she runs away from them; there is never much chance for casual talk.

"Was that you what h-howled just now?" Another little whine. "Oh. Oh, I'm s-sorry." Hela doesn't know what she is apologizing for, but she does it just in case. "C-could you become h-human again? I, I'm scairt of wolves..."

Wolf Lily shimmers, for a moment, and then she isn't there, and then there is Lily with a crossbow and no clothes. She crosses her arms over her chest and ducks into a bush for modesty. A shapeshifter. Hela on top of the tree branch twitches a little and apologizes again. "'m sorry..."

"It's okay. You were saying, you had a house?"
-----------------------
* direct translation from chinese chi ma gen, not a very polite phrase; means crazy, insane, preposterous.
Sorry for the shortness of this one, I'm going through acute mental block...

[Plantae]

This is a placeholder as of now, but there will be a post here come night in the Midwest. I do, however, want to address the issue of inactivity.

Krystalline Kabutops - I've already had discussion with you, so it should not at all surprise you that unfortunately, your character no longer exists. I hold no disrespect for you (as no one reading this should either), but you no longer have a place in this roleplay.

Drusilla and Asilynne - Technically you are breaking the five day rule, but you both have informed me as to the reason for your inactivity. I do expect a post from both of you soon.

EDIT: Alright, I lied. I misjudged my homework situation, so the post will actually be tomorrow. Thanks for posting, Asilynne.

[Asilynne]

Yeah she was in wolf form, your post was perfect for things I had planned too :D
~~Lily O'Keefe~~
To fly with wings unbroken..

The little girl, Hela, nodded as I asked about her house. She looked nervous, when I mentioned it, I didnt see why, I was the one naked here in the woods. Color rose to my cheeks as I thought about it, and thought what if one of the men should stumble upon me like this? If it were either male it would be unacceptable, Mathias because...he would stare, and Trywen because....well, just because. One thing was for sure, and that was I wasnt going to take another step while nude.

I wanted to go back to my wolf form, heh, how quickly I was getting used to my new ability. But I knew she was afraid of wolves, even though she would know it was me. And I didnt want to scare the little girl, though strange as she was. She was still a little girl. But I also needed a form that could talk, and since I didnt yet know the capabilities of my new found powers, I chose the first form that entered my mind, the form of a much loved animal of my past.

"Um....Hela...your not scared of parrots are you?"

She looked pensive. "What is that? Is it anything like a wolf?"

Despite the situation I smiled. "No, nothing like a wolf. Its a small bird about this big--" I showed her the size with my hands. "I could ride on your shoulder, and even still talk to you. I dont like being naked so I want to change into something to cover me." Blushing again I shifted awkwardly.

She pondered this a moment longer and then nodded. "You wont hurt me right Miss Lily?"
I smiled gently at the little girl. "No, Id never think to do that."

Slowly I shrank down and sprouted gray ribbed feathers all over my naked form, covering me up as I changed into an African Gray. I watched the Hela and the world around me grow to a huge size as I shrank, my mouth changing to a beak and my arms to wings. When I was certain the change was complete I fluttered up and landed gently on Helas shoulder, careful not to singe my feathers. "Do I look scary?" I said in my slightly comical parrot voice. Hela giggled slightly and shook her head, her face alight and happy for the first time Ive seen her.
This made me happy for the first time in awhile. Funny how the laughter of a child can make your life feel like it has a purpose. I began to preen my feathers as she skipped off down the woodland path.
~~~~~~~~~~~

Hope thats ok, if I got something wrong tell me ^-^()

[Drusilla]

I know it's really short and pathetic, but one, I have a billion other things to do, and two I don't really know where to go from here right now.

Sara Raize
"I cast this curse and you will find an evil darkness deep inside your vengeful mind..."

[color=#a0ffff]I sat on the ground, staring off into the morning mist. I rather liked it, how the light was softly diffused as the vapor drifted between the trees, giving a surreal glow to the world that I and the others had suddenly found ourselves in. A world of water and mist... And I, a dark flame, ensnared within.

My stomach rumbled, and I hugged my knees closer to me, trying to ignore the stabbing hunger pains. My vision swam slightly and my head ached, but whether that was from hunger or this strange new power I seemed to have suddenly, I didn't know.

I could see things... pictures associated with strong emotion, a random slideshow that refused to stop. It seemed that I could also 'give' the others my own thoughts, and I had a much better handle on that. But what had happened between myself and Mathias... I hadn't been able to control it yet. What would come of that interaction?

A sudden torrent of images flooded my mind; swamplands, wolves, fire spirits, strange creatures... I cried out in pain and cradled my head.

"Please... make it stop... please..." I whispered.

[Plantae]

Alas, I shirk my duties until the last possible moment. Herein lies a... spontaneous post.

= Joseph Faust =

Dryad, Nymph, it made no difference. I could feel the nag of her magic at the back of my mind, and though it was too early to be sure that I possessed the knowledge to realize it, I believed that it was some sort of illusion. I had not only seen through that quicksand trap earlier, but seen a sort of double image. I had seen it as she had intended, also, and now I nearly understood. The feel of her glamour at the back of my mind was similar but I couldn't place it. "Sara," I muttered quietly, letting the syllable float some inches from my face, but not pricking any interest from the Dryad.

It was in my inherent nature to decipher this being's fact from her fiction, but I could not sense her motive. Was it so simple as the one I imagined? Surely she could not be but a seductress who had grown lonely and tired of seeing the same terrain day after day. I felt a sort of pity for a second or two, but realizing the terrible thing it was, discarded it. It was not in my blueprint to have a discussion with an almost Fae creature just for the purpose of having it, but it was the least I could give to the needles in my conscience.

"There are six of us here," I began, near breathlessly from a small exhaustion, and watching as the Dryad's ears perked up. In an inconvenient second, my eyes blurred and I was incapable of reading her actual expression. I assumed she had interest to this detail, or those that followed, but she could be feigning it. "Ours is a loose company, as you noticed with Tryfan's pursuit of myself. We hold no connection to one another but that we are here, and we are the only humans, or so we would assume. Having heard your words, I know this to be true."

Her yellow eyes glazed a sort of bronze in contemplation, and she asked, carefully and with much hesitation, "How are you here?"

"We are here." She sensed that I knew no answer, and sat back against the cave wall, resigned. "We know of no way back."

"Hmm," was her only reply. It was then, in sudden revelation that a thought occurred to my fickle mind. Was not life a path? If it was, as the poets had described it, was there not a going backwards? A path was no path if it only went one way. We did not live in a world of black and white morality, as I knew but failed to understand.

I gazed into the being's eyes, sensing the charm that furled off her in a sort of blue heat. How easy it would be to give into that warmth... I knew, that if I wanted, I could.

I stood up, and began towards the cavern entry at a brisk pace. The female made no attempt to stop me, but cried out quietly. "Will you not stay longer?" She urged it with a silent intensity.

Only after making a small and mildly whispered pact to not secede my resilience did I mutter, and look at her out of the corner of my eye, before taking hesitant steps back and seating myself on a protruding rock. "It could not hurt."

=====

I hardly continued it for you, Weasel Overlord, but hopefully your character can pick up on a bit of Joseph's intentions. There may be another post of mine tomorrow, if someone else posts after me and in ample time.

[Emotional Faun Chiko-sai]

Yup yup yup, post coming right up! Meant to put it up earlier (as in, last night GMT+8 hours, but my sister kicked me off the comp >_>) Hopefully this post is within the bounds of the RPG.
---------------
(Intermission: Favart + Gevaudan)

Gevaudan walks in the space between worlds, and he does not like it. Gevaudan likes things to be certain and solid and preferably torn to pieces between his teeth. He is always hungry. He lopes with a hesitating gait. His feet unwilling to relinquish the feel of semisolid squelching grey ground between their toes, as far as it could be called ground. Tail between his legs. He doesn't even deign to gurgle.

Gevaudan is the idea of a wolf.

Favart walks in the space between worlds, and he is used to it. Noone except maybe their master knows what Favart likes because Favart never shows partiality, unless it is partiality meant to be shown. He is always hungry. He walks with the certainty of someone that knows what they are going to be doing two hours from now, and that it is going to be the exact same thing they will be doing until the end of time. Sometimes he has two feet and sometimes he has four. He feels that gurgling is a Bad Habit.

Favart is the idea of a man-wolf.

They do not speak when they are faced with silence so forbidding.

Eventually they reach a point where they are so hemmed in by the dark grey walls closing in on them where there was once infinite space that they walk in single file. Gevaudan in front because he is always more ready to hurt. And then later Favart in front, because his resolve is the greater. To try to find anywhere in the space between worlds without resolve was foolishness.

They twist and turn and wind about, and when the ground begins to be a mud-packed floor, set with ashes, there is at first a very slight pinprick of light visible, reflected off Favart's teeth spread in a very subtle grin.

The glow comes from behind a door, one of many. What matters to Favart is the very presence of doors, and not the number of them that appear. He does not even flinch at the thought of floundering through Terra Incognita, many-doored (with bolts), without map or landmark. It means that they have reached the inside of the house. The inside of Hela's father's house. The house with a labyrinth.

The house with the heart of Chaos.

--------------------
Hela
"Marsh-mallow-land"
--------------------------

As far as Hela knows there are only two doors in her father's house: one on the outside leading to the inside (with bolts) and one more on the inside leading to somewhere she doesn't know (with many more bolts). But this thought, perhaps relevant to later events, is far from her mind when Lily perches on her shoulder.

No creature except her father had ever touched her voluntarily before, without wish to do harm. They were too afraid of her nature. Her trembling-on-the-edges incandescence. Or they thought her unworthy of their attention, a smallish too-nervous fire sprite hanging on to memories of a missing father. There were better things to do. Like living.

Hela decides that she likes parrots, much the way that she had liked unicorns until she had found out that they were possessors of an arrogance beyond all reason. When Lily mimed falling off as they brushed a young fir that Hela walked into, unthinking, Hela laughed a light soft laugh that she hadn't laughed since forever. Lily fit neatly into the hole in her which her father left behind, among other things. She cared. And she didn't lie. Not to her.

Which was enough for Hela.

Although she does not realize it, Hela begins now to miss her father a little less. The hard edges of the hole smoothened over. An unconscious step taken to save herself before it was too late.

They reach the bogland and something in the obtuseness of the swamp fog tells Hela that they will be mazed the moment they set foot in the squelching semisolidness of the marsh. Strange people live in the marsh. Hela doesn't linger there. She goes the long way round. Lily on her shoulder senses the stiffness return to her shoulders.

"We're not going through the marsh?" she says in her parrot-voice.
"No." Hela, tiptoeing on a large tree-root, looks for the little path through the firs which leads in a round-and-crooked path to the Iron Stones, more forest, fire country, dead trees, and eventually, her father's house. She is planning to just show Lily the house. Not to go inside. "Um. Something's happening. In the marsh. Not safe."

Lily turns back to the marsh. She seems to be looking for something as well. The moment passes and Hela locates the primrose-lined path, barely visible because the season for primroses is nearly over. The parrot-voiced Lily says, cocking her head to the side like a real parrot, "I thought I saw people in the marsh..."

"Swamp people are funny," Hela replies, as usual choosing mild words to cover harder ones, like not safe for life-threatening. And funny for morally ambivalent. She always tries to think for the best. "If there's s-someone, that's, uh, not them inside the marsh already, uh, I don't think we should i-interrupt."

Lily is still craning towards the marsh. Deciding.
------------------
Uh, tag?

[Weasel Overlord]

~Tryfan Wen~
He will not be led…

Tryfan Wen threw his hands to his side and decided. He was going back into the swamp. No bloody Dryad could deter him from going where he wished in his forest.

Smirking slightly at this unconscious reference to his new home, he stood up and dashed the tears from his eyes. The clearing actually did resemble the original one, although he had heard long ago in the mists of his childhood that Dryads were tricksy. She had probably laid glamours for him, and he, not thinking, had followed them blithely.

From the first time he saw her, she had captivated him. Although he told himself that this was the point of Dryads. They had no truth in them, only tricks and illusions of love. He still couldn’t help the way he felt. When she had picked him up by the Unicorn pond, he had been ensnared by her wiles, and it would take much to break free of her.

Meandering to the edge of the clearing, he peered out between the trees, clutching his spear. There were blurred shapes, moving slightly, murmuring among themselves. He dismissed them as illusions and continued, pushing through the undergrowth, careful not to break a branch. He was on the very edge of reality, he could feel it bending and straining as someone used its power.

Ears pricking, he turned in the direction of the childlike voice. On the edge of the marshes, just on the border, was the fire-spirit girl…whatshername, Hela. That’s it. And she had something with her that sounded familiar.

Lily.

“Swamp people are funny.” Tryfan stifled a smile at this. What an understatement. She had obviously met the Dryads before and was wary of them. And with good reason.

Clearing his throat quietly, but just loud enough to be heard, Tryfan stepped out from his watching place and waved at Hela, to put her at ease. She started slightly, and then sighed, looking at the parrot on her shoulder.

“He’s one of you, isn’t he?” She grimaced a little as she spoke, obviously unwilling to address me.
I walked forward, my hands out with my spear dangling loosely at my side.

I am no threat.

She seemed to get the point, but still glanced at the parrot for guidance. The bird looked at me sidelong, as only a bird can do. Studying me, as if for reactions.

“Lily?” I enquired. “Is that you?” If a bird can ever show an expression, the parrot did so then. Shock registered and I thought to explain.
“You don’t smell like an animal. You smell like you…”
Which is very seductive, actually… I thought it best not to air my thoughts yet. The Dryad was still heavy on my mind. Damn her glamours!

Hela glanced sharply at me, as if she knew my secret thoughts and I blushed. Giggling, she turned to Lily and whispered something. It sounded like ‘change’ to my newly attuned ears, but I couldn’t be sure. The Lily-parrot shook her head and fixed her beady eye on me.

“Why are you here, Tryfan?”

“I heard you…I was…following…following Mathias…I...er…thought you might be in trouble…” I finished lamely, knowing that she didn’t believe me.

“Hela was showing me her house.” The girl nodded.

“I was only showing you it…” She added. “It’s…strange inside…not good for you…” My curiosity was instantly aroused.

“Hela? Will you show me too?”

[Plantae]

= Oiyg =

I cock my head curiously at the human creature, sitting with her knees hugged tight and red strands dangling over those green pools. An hour or two ago, I climbed the tree I sit in now and had stroked the wood fondly. It is a sort of sympathy I have for these trees, I finally decide now after stumbling over the thought for an hour.

My eyes cannot be distracted from the red-haired girl, Sara, I say in whisper, testing the foreign language on my tongue. My understanding of this "human speak" is primitive, so I stumble over the syllables. "Sah-rah," I say in a long drawl, and stop speaking with satisfaction.

My stomach grumbles and I stare at it an awe, but then quickly back to the girl. I am hungry, I realize, is this girl too? Is this why she rubs her tummy so and clutches it as if in pain? It must be. I drop from my perch to the ground awkwardly, a sharp pain running through my left leg as it takes most of the weight from the fall. I let out a little whimper, but quickly stand upright, and stumble. Stepping backward, I see a pebble. I curse this pebble for making me trip. Stupid pebble.

With a sense of purpose now, I continue onward and sing in a low creaky voice. It sounds oddly melancholy, despite my cheery song. Each note comes out a little screech-like, but I do not know enough to realize it would make other people cringe. "I know of a bush, a berry-berry bush..." The awkward pitches continue to roll forth from my mouth, until I find my bush and its berries. Having been an... ugh... I know this plant. It has little blue, oval-shaped pods that have a couple purple fruits each. The fruits are crisp, almost dried, and needlelike. "Thinnier than the thinniest branch," I muse softly to myself, before taking up chorus of "I know a bush" again.

I scoop each berry and have some difficulty as to carrying them, especially as my pile grows large. "I am getting berries for twosies of persons," I remind myself in a gentle, lilting tone. I lean over and kiss five of the bushes leaves in homage of its gift, but in doing so drop all the little pods that I had been thus holding up in my linen shirt.

I have clothes, I realize now. A white linen shirt and skirt, which I know because of the plant it comes from. It is stained with the purple juice of broken berries, and I observe the stain and the pile with disdain. With the careful eye, I slowly recuperate my stack, further staining my shirt in the process. I laugh, a booming but tiny chuckle, to myself. What a lovely shirt, I muse, so messy. As I carry my load back to my tree, and to Sahrah, I make perfect watch for tripping pebbles.

It is only when I pass the pond that I see my frightful appearance. My hair is strewn wildly, my eyes inflamed green. I nearly scare myself into tripping on one of those dastardly pebbles again.

This will not do, this will not do. The herculean challenge then becomes finding away to snap my fingers while simultaneously holding my "charge" in place. I must change, I must change. Sahrah would be very, very scared or think me hostile if I come to her like this! Ah. I succeed, and I eye my gruff male appearance with satisfaction. I look at my dirty blond hair, and partially unshaven face and giggle. The voice that comes out is masculine and haughty, pessimistic even, and I can only give a low chuckle. I take a moment to prepare what I plan to say, as muddling the words might cause suspicion. I realize, with disappointment, that it will be much harder than I thought.

===

It has been an hour. It is growing darker, slowly. The sun is lower on the horizon, but it is bright still. I am at the bottom of the hill with my black shirt full of berries, mumbling and continuing to practice as I go up. "Hello Sahrah." I say, cursing as I mispronounce the name again. Oh insufferable changing! So difficult to mimic this boy. It had taken me twenty minutes alone to master his shifty, shifty eyes. Even now it seemed more like rolling of the eyes, and it made my head hurt.

I nearly dropped my load as Sara nearly ran into me. She, evidently, had grown tired of looking at the misty morning and proceeded to pace. She eyes me, startled, and then gazes at the berries hungrily.

"Hallo..." I say quietly, and offer my shirt with the little pods to her.

"Are these safe to eat?" She asks it, but I can see that she probably knows the answer, and that by the look of her sprawling red hair and eyes, would eat them just the same.

"Yes. These be good-" my sentence breaks as her eyes raise. Drat! Must keep humany language right! Must! However, she gives it little thought and proceeds to tear through the pods, stuffing berries in her mouth. She blushes as I watch her ravenous behavior, and I say, "No worry" in a thuglike manner.

Assured that I don't mind her etiquette, she offers, "About before..." What? My mind is thrown for a loop. Did I pick a wrong disguise? About before what? Then I remember, and groan internally at my bad luck. My mind has forgotten that the boy had run off after looking at this Sahrah before. I drop the rest of my berries at her feet, pivot, and run full tilt in the direction of the forest. My concentration as broken, and my linen skirt flits in the sudden speed. My shapeshift is dropped, and I can only wonder Sara's reaction as she sees a swarthy, filthy woman bolt into the distance.

Afterwards, far away and looking at my reflection in a puddle, I contort my own looks into a strange curve of the mouth and widened eyes. "Many worse than that," I decide, aloud, "many times..."

=====

[Plantae]

I'm sorry about the double post, but this is a necessary addition. Below is a map of the River World (which I tried to keep as close to Hela's geographical description as possible). There is further explanation below.

The River World

With the scale, the approximate size of the island is about two hundred and forty square (21 mi. at the longest, 15 mi. at the widest). The map is nearly self-explanatory, but a note on the question mark near the blue line.

The line is what Hela believes to be the River, but with exploration is actually less short and less grand than what would be expected from the "entity" that brought the five here.

Also, the large dotted line I dubbed "Hela's fine line" is the line in which she has not crossed (sorry Emotional Faun Chiko-sai if this messes with any of your plans) and thus not explored. Eleiamae, by assumption, has not crossed this line either.

The only decipherable thing beyond this line is dense forest and a deep foreboding (the reason Hela has not crossed it). If you look close enough, you can see tall, misty mountains in the distance.

The entire island is wreathed in thick mist, a little thinner the farther South, and that flows inland a little over the Marshes.

The elevation scale of the island is highest at the mountains and inland of the bottom peninsula, and at the top near the knoll and Dense Forest. The sparse forest is lower, the Marsh lower still, and the Fire Lands is almost entirely flat.

Anything not explained or thorougly explained is well up to the rest of you, and do not be bothered to add length or width to the land beyond Hela's Fine Line; please do not change the apparent size of anything above the line.

[Emotional Faun Chiko-sai]

Yeah, I'm late... *rearranges eyeballs so that they do not continue focusing on page 348 of Going Postal, and instead on incomplete post on computer screen* Um.. aheheh?
--------------
Hela
"enn oh"
-------------------

Marshes. Swampland. Bog. It didn't matter which name you used for it, but what was certain was that they drove minds in bodies crazy. It was the marsh gas, and the will o' the wisps, some people said, but more said it was the fault of the nymphs that lived there, because of course they were already stark raving mad themselves, and they wanted to spread it around.

Or so Hela had been told. However, the thing that moved her to not completely trust Tryfan was an instinct deeply rooted, an instinct that hit her repeatedly on her mental head and reminded her whenever things were horribly, hopelessly wrong. Tryfan was wrong, just as Mathias last night was wrong, although not to the same extreme degree of wrongness that Mathias had been. And so she knew, because that instinct knew, that if she brought him to her father's house,

Her father's house, with bolts on the outside of the door and not the inside, squat woodcarvings on the beams, where even wolves had not the heart to pursue her, with a heart of chaos masquerading as a labyrinth, where inside she must do the fire divination with the dagger by herself so as not to put Lily at risk because her father's fire protection did not extend to outsiders, indeed hardly extended to her, and bad things happened to other people in the house which would only bend to her father's will and wrap itself around her father's shoulders like a pair of enclosing arms,

he would want to go in without her permission or the house's permission, and later in through the door that opened to endless rooms, and that would have been the conceivable last that anyone would have seen of him. Even the marsh people could not save him then, if the house swallowed him. You needed lodestones and a lot of luck in that house if you were not her father. So that you could find your way back. And even then it was not certain that you could find your way back.

When her father had been angry with anyone, which was a very rare occasion and never without justification, (he was not a capricious man, although in the time before Hela's birth he might have been) he would put the unfortunate creature inside the endless rooms, and a day later it would become grey ashes, and the walls of the rooms were a little richer in colour. And when the wanderlust seized him he would go through the door and not come back for a few days. When he did come back Hela would ask him where he had been. The answer was always:

"Lost within the boundaries of my fluttering heart." With a scarred grin. And a fond hug for Hela to show that everything was really all right.

But it was never all right for anyone else to do what he had done. (Because, says a voice in her instinct, the endless rooms would eat them alive, in more ways than one.)

So now she looks at Tryfan, trying not to shiver, and says in answer to his question: "No, I couldn't."

"Why not?" There is a sort of shifting in his eyes. He was claimed by the nymphs, already. Hela wrings her thin fingers beneath his gaze.

"B-because-" (the house would eat you alive) "-b-because I c-can't. And y-you would want to g-go inside n-no matter what I d-did or said, and you wouldn't c-come out ever again, and I would b-be in horrible trouble with t-the swamp p-people."
--------------------
(Postscript: Gevaudan)

Gevaudan is a little less hungry. After uncountables of neverending charcoal-grey blackness after the doors (though at least the ground was hard, now, and did not feel as if it might suck him up to his bones and not even leave the marrow; nevertheless he slunk very close to Favart's sometime legs, and cowered in a discreet fashion) he and Favart have finally encountered a thing. A thing as incongruous as an eight-legged rocking horse, but.

Favart said that they could destroy it.

When Gevaudan sunk his jaws into the ash planks of the rocking horse he tasted flesh and ripped living tissue, and it was good.

At the time.

[Weasel Overlord]

I'm so sorry for such a delay...my mind has been very blah lately...*punches mind* However, I am back to my usual regularly posting self now...enjoy! *drifts off in a cloud of smoke with the sound of Gackt playing in the background*

~Tryfan Wen~
...No Entry...

So, I couldn’t go inside? Fine, I would not trouble Hela for an explanation. Maybe I would go and do some exploring...or something...But what had she said about the marsh-creatures? She would be in trouble? But why?

“Hela? What did you mean about the swamp-people?” She twiddled her hands together nervously and looked at the floor. She reminded me of a small child who’d got into trouble.

“I...I can s-smell them on you...you smell f-f-funny...like the marsh people do...I d-don’t like the m-marsh people...they’re m-mean to Hela...” She glanced around surreptitiously, as if a marsh person was going to pop up next to us.

So...the marsh people eh? I was quite sure that I had never met any marsh people, although my dream-rescuer had a certain essence of muddiness about her. Well, since Hela clearly wasn’t going to allow me access to her house, I decided to go explore the swamps. She had me curious about these ‘swamp people’ and I felt like exploring some more of the territory anyway.
Grasping my spear I waved to Hela.

“I’m going now, so don’t worry about taking me to your house.” Glancing at Lily, I added, “And if you want to talk later, just tell the forest, and I’ll be there.” Maybe I looked a little too hopeful, because Lily seemed surprised at my suggestion.
I had found her alluring since she helped me out of the River, although now, something was blocking my feelings slightly. Something at the back of my mind, niggling away, holding me back. I needed to know what it was, and I had a feeling that I would find the answer in the swamps.

Turning my back on Lily-parrot and Hela, I sauntered over the border and into the marshes. Nearly as soon as I entered, I felt an atmosphere of hostility that I couldn’t find the source to. It felt, sort of, North...although I knew that a feeling couldn’t point in a direction, it felt right that I go North. So, North I went.

Treading through the mud and reeds, I began to feel creatures slithering between my bare toes. Glancing down, I saw that they were snakes, a small variety of what looked like a grass snake. Not poisonous. Nevertheless, I felt that they were a warning, or perhaps a directing. They followed a pattern, wavering around my toes, and then in front of my stride, only to be between my feet again.

The mud felt nice. The leeches, however, didn’t. Wondering how far my powers extended, I sent out a tendril of thought to the leeches that were attacking my feet.

-I taste horrible. In fact, you’d do better just to leave me alone-

They got the idea and I marvelled at yet another aspect of my powers as they spread themselves back into the waters. I was curious exactly how many things I could do now...communicating with various members of the forest seemed to be the majority, along with my newly silent movement. I also appeared to have some sort of natural camouflage in the forest, which was helpful in being sneaky.

This walk was quite relaxing, the muddy waters splooshed gently around my feet and there was a peaceful air to the area overlaid with a slight tang of...wait...I sniffed...a tang of lust. Well...that would fit with the image and feelings that lingered at the back of my mind, sticking to my thoughts like the proverbial glue.

I changed direction slightly, a scent on the air leading me more to the North East that purely North. I followed it on a whim, the scent both attractive and sinister at the same time, reminding me of the one that lingered in my dream-land, shortly before finding my powers. In fact, the smell was intensely familiar: maybe I’d had contact with it’s owner before...Only one way to find out. Stepping out with more fervour than before, I added a little speed, although I was careful to make myself silent too. Something was warning my newly powerful senses not to be too forthright, and I decided to heed them. Treading carefully, the forest itself seemed to lend me its strength as I walked the marshes. This was not my territory, and it showed. The creatures didn’t accept me as they did among the trees. There, I was part of them, a part of the tapestry that made the forest whole, and in turn, made me whole...well, almost whole, anyway. There was still a part missing...but now wasn’t the time for that...I hoped to receive a message soon...

Dismissing the negative thoughts, I put all my efforts into blending with my unnatural surroundings. Closing my eyes, I sensed that I was close...the snakes had ceased their swirling about my feet and were beginning to drift away, leaving me alone with my camouflaging efforts. Although a part of me knew it was futile, the creature I hoped to find would sense me before I got close, I continued anyway, getting a strange thrill from chanting myself into the background. Becoming just another inconsequential piece of the scenery.

This is what I was born to be...

I tested my every nerve almost to breaking point before I felt ready to continue my search. The tension as I drew closer to the creature’s den grew almost impossible to bear. I could almost feel her, { for I knew she was a her now}, every thought as I pressed closer.

Voices...

Hmm...she’s entertaining...maybe she won’t notice me...the faint hope hung on my lips as I lurked outside her den, set into cold, unyielding rock. To my surprise, I heard a voice from within, beckoning me inside. It was Mathias' voice, languorous and deep, with a bored undertone.

“Come in, Dear Tryfan. There’s someone who wishes to meet you...”

[Plantae]

= Joseph Faust =

I could hear him just beyond the cavern. It was easily within my ability now, considering the perception I had developed thus far. "Come in, Tryfan. There's someone who wishes to meet you."

He was not about to deny his presence when I had invited him in such a way, and from his movements, he might not even be following me anyway. It was amply possible that his intentions were to Eleiamae. Since I had nearly left the cavern, our conversation had devolved into myself giving concise, laconic answers to all her questions. I could tell she was irritated that I did not give in to any of her charm, but she put on a smile of plastered optimism, and continued her merry prodding, hoping to disengage my disinterest. I sensed her curiosity towards me dying beneath that doll-like mask.

It was then that Tryfan's entrance was a relief, and I gave him an almost imperceptible glare out of the corner of my eye. Eleiamae, I hoped, was not quite up to the subtleties that could be added to human facial expression. In his eyes, I assumed that Tryfan had noticed the glimmer of thankfulness that had passed from me.

The dryad, at Tryfan's entrance, stood up from her rocky stool and a small bit of longing passed through her features; the silence was fluid. I knew she was interested in Tryfan, likely as much or more than me, though I didn't know for what reason.

"Welcome to my abode, forestwalker." My eyebrows raised at the odd title, but it could be that she understood the power he emitted, how his magic blended so easily with the marsh night.

I could not decipher Tryfan's expression beyond an external surprise, but he simply answered, "The pleasure is mine." He may have been entranced. Either way, their eyes locked, but I was could not feel awkward. All I saw was Tryfan step from the entry way, and when the opening was clear, and the two distracted, I slipped into the coarse air of the evening.

===

I had walked for what seemed hours. My steps were not guided, and I feared to sleep nowhere in this land. I could not tell, but my sense of direction had surmised I was going North; more possibly, I was traveling Northwest and into the dense wood that I had seen off the knoll.

The underbrush was deeper and the moonlit ruts of animals had grown sparse. It was as my first coming into the woodland before the River on the other side, the Earth side. There was not such a distinct foreboding, but an undertone, with no night sounds, that there was something amiss.

I saw it long before I reached it, but an odd compulsion had taken over my limbs. This was not the hunting sort, I could tell, so there was no danger in it. I would not be hurt from a fall. With this decided, I let them spring the trap. I stepped over the pitfall, just as the hunter had intended. What met me was the hard surface of cold silt some ten feet down, and I let out a mild wheeze as my lungs contracted upon impact.

As I came again to standing position, I noticed first the pungent smell of spice and incense that had been vaguely laced in the dusk above. I took a second to observe my surroundings, the eerie green light that emanated farther down the tunnel in front of me. With a last look at the footholds embedded in the wall that was part of the pitfall, I assured myself that it would be easy going to find the surface again. I drifted towards the ghostly beauty of the lantern down the tunnel. It had not been a trap, but I would follow the rigid corners of these underground passages regardless. After all, I reminded myself nonchalantly, I would certainly perceive any threat before it did me.

I only hoped saying so was not overconfident.

=====

Not quite plot advancement, but I'm working on it.

[Weasel Overlord]

Hee hee...plot! YAY! The absence of Eleiamae, and she returns, spiteful and mean! Narh!

~Eleiamae~
…Stone…

My conversation with the other human had been dull to say the least; he seemed to have vowed to be as boring and laconic as he possibly could be, and I was losing interest.

When…he heard something.

“Come in, Tryfan, there’s someone who wishes to meet you.” It can’t be…Tryfan?

What is he doing here…

I rose as he entered my home, and I knew that I couldn’t hide my feelings for him. He must have caught my expression for he smiled at me, catching my eye.

“Welcome to my abode, forestwalker.” The title suited him, he blended without even trying. He was very interesting. Much more so than the languorous one who was here before…I caught him slipping away and felt no remorse in letting him. I finally had someone worthy of my attentions. Tryfan had looked surprised at the title, maybe he hadn’t been called such before…

“The pleasure is mine.” He looked, happy to be here…how odd. Maybe he came of his own accord, although I had no idea how to deal with someone like him…In some ways, he was more of an enigma than Joseph was. Maybe charm would work. I opened myself: my mind to his in a connection that I think he sensed. I let feelings of love and happiness flow down that link, hoping to overwhelm him with feelings.

But why does it feel wrong…?

Snapping away from his mind, I reeled and staggered, landing on a pile of moss, my eyes a dull ochre. He reached out at once.

“What’s the matter?” I shook my head indicating that I was fine and got to my feet. Grasping him by both shoulders, I steadied myself and heaved a great sigh.

“My name…I…I am Eleiamae, dear Tryfan.” A look of surprise registered on his handsome features, probably at the fact that I knew his name.

“I was there by the Unicorn pond…and again, in your dream-land. I was the one who saved you from the horrors that waited in the dark places. They lurked, waiting, watching, needing you. For you are so much a part of the forest now…they lust after your power, you know? Even now, in my home, I can feel them reaching out for you, tentative at first, but they will grow stronger…” Oh…he looked confused…what did I say?

“What…what does all this mean? There is a thing out there, waiting for me…?” He trailed off, the information clearly too much to take in at the moment. “And why have you brought me here? I felt your pull…”

His eyes were passionate and deep, looking into mine. He was in earnest, truly had not come of his own accord. Tears formed in my eyes. I had thought he was the one… but no…he was just another weak-willed fool, come under my spell. I dashed at my eyes bitterly and composed myself. He must have caught the change in me as he looked puzzled. I hardened myself to him, blocking him out.

So…hard…

How can you block out love…?

“What is it…?” Always with the questions. I allowed myself a harsh thought and a glimmer of a malicious smirk returned to my lips. He backed away, not liking the transformation, and I raised my arm to him, eyes flashing yellow bright.

“Let’s have some fun…shall we?” I had a game in mind, one that I wouldn’t have been able to play with Joseph. “You run…it’s a test of your new skills, you see? If you reach your camp before me, then you win. If not…” I would not let myself become enamoured with another man who didn’t feel the same…“Well, we shall see.”

If it’s love I feel, then why does it hurt so much?

I dismissed him from my thoughts, all tenderness gone; empty of love…well, almost…

“You run, Tryfan dear…” He fled from my cave, and from my heart, and I made myself stone to him. Hard, impenetrable stone.

[Drusilla]

Sara Raize
...let's play with the chainsaw...

[color=#a0ffff]I was losing my mind. It was as simple as that. I was losing my mind...

Right?

Oh, but why did I even want to keep it in the first place? Here, here I was far away from the living hell of my true life... maybe, if I stayed here, this would become reality. No, not reality, just... something else.

I watched Mathias... no, it wasn't Mathias, it was someone... something else. Nothing, nothing here was what it seemed to be. What the hell was this place?

It wasn't home, whatever else it may be.

Home was hell. This... this was a dream world. Nothing here is real...

The white-hot pain stabbed through my skull again and tears welled up in my eyes. My hunger was slightly sedated for the time being, and now I knew something could be eaten... if I could find it. God only knew...

God. Heh.

I longed for a god, a god and lover.

Mathias.

That... creature...

Why did that creature take Mathias' form?

Where was Mathias?

Where was I?

Pain. Hunger. Fatigue. Sorrow. Longing.

Confusion.

Anger.

Hatered.

Lust.

I didn't have to see my reflection to know that there was fire in my eyes. I abandoned my humane instinct- out here, wherever the hell here was, they meant nothing. Nature survival needed nature-instinct. It was time to let go, let go of the old life, the old pain, the old tale, and become... become someone else.

Someone else... something else...

The fire burned in my eyes, burned from my soul. This world ruled by water would not quench the flame, rather it fueled it. Not natural flame... flame of my soul. Flame of strength, of power. Of destiny. I would not give in, would not lose, would not die.

[Plantae]

= Joseph Faust =

It struck me as odd that there was no sensation of watching, no implication that some higher being was following or stalking me. All was nearly silent, and the air breathed that such was not quite correct. With an effort, I thought the aspiring mind might have been able to palpate the bitter taste of an elegy on the cold, dank air here.

The near foreboding I had felt earlier did not persist. I also soon found that the candle colored a pale fir was not from any lantern that I could see. Depending on where I stood, or the direction in which I moved through the tunnel, it grew softer or brighter. I wondered if it was I that was changing the perspective, or if the light itself was floating and dancing through the stagnant breeze of the place.

It was after some time only that I reached a muddied corner of these obviously manmade walls and heard the faint sound of a sort of gibberish around the other side. It was then that I proceeded to peer with caution at my choices: to follow the bend which was likely the entrance to some larger room, or to continue my way and possibly avoid the risk. Then, that emerald glow that had grown so fondly in my mind chose not to wait for my decision. As I tiptoed just past the bend, and realized that there was a being there, but it was too late as a pair of thin but long gossamer moth wings (three pair I learned with exact examination) found themselves fluttering in my face.

The two of us stumbled and I heard the lilting voice of a female, still with her back and wings to me, mutter something incomprehensible but clearly irritated. The scene changed when she rotated her head to the left, caught a glance of me from her peripheral vision, and then used a boost of energy from her flapping wings to sprint full tilt down the corridor to the right.

It was from this diagonal slide of dirt and roots that I soon heard the woman conversing in her language, and heard several more coming along with her back down the hallway. It was my first instinct to run, but if these people were to behave anything like humans, it would only serve to prove my guilt. So I stood, appearing calmly externally but having some amount of fear as two lithe but equally menacing men with the same tanned skin and spritely features of the female Fae came trotting down the hall. Their faces were blurred and obscured by swirling and almost runic tribal tattoos writ in some forest green. I noticed that they were perhaps a foot shorter than I was, but ruled even mentioning this would be suicide.

As they neared, I raised my hands into the air in the human gesture of peace (which I surmised was probably universal), and let the metal fan fall to the ground with a "thud." I could not prevent myself from quailing a little at the sound, with the sort of avid fascination that I possessed for the object.

"My name is Mathias. I do not mean to trespass here."

The men puzzled over the words, murmuring quietly to themselves in gibberish, and then rebounded, "You come peace?" The man who said it stumbled awkwardly over the grammar, but I was still quite shocked by their startling ability of magical comprehension, as it appeared to be. I sympathized with him, also, because it was obvious that in his own language he was a charismatic speaker. Having his words pronounced so ineloquently made his features seize up almost imperceptibly.

I nodded gently to answer the comment, and clarified again in English, "I come in peace."

He glanced up and down my caricature, as did the second tribesman, but they both seemed satisfied as to my sincerity. The man who had spoken knelt and did not cease that single fluid movement to carefully confiscate the fan of mine that had fallen there. As he rose, a look passed between our eyes that we both understood to be, "Be careful with it."

"You, come," shouted the second soldier who seemed a little more irritated than the other. I also noticed that though the other man had spoken first, giving me the presumption that he was higher in rank, the second's tattoos were starkly more intricate. There were symbols that had the appearance of resemblance to some written language, where the other man's seemed like glyphs and that only. Knowing nothing of their culture, I decided to discard the thought, and followed the second man. The first walked behind me, as a customary precaution, and we followed the diagonal tunnel a couple yards. Then, the tribesman who I perceived was of lower rank voiced an incoherent plea in gibberish, and we turned our course. Then, we followed a different, straight lane instead.

This tunnel was larger, and struck me by the footfalls in the dirt below to be more used. Moss grew at some points of it, and we even passed an area of buildings that were set into the walls. If there were people among them, which I thought their might be by the faint and mournful humming, then they took no notice of us. The rest was bland and full only of relentless dirt walls with low ceilings and the occasional rock skewn amongst them. As the path narrowed briefly, the warrior in front took a sidelong step and pressed his palm hard against the wall. A dull, mystical groan surfaced from what I understood was rock face as it slid away. The hallway past, lit only by the occasional torch and the still-apparent mossy brilliance was clearly fit only for these people. I was forced to crouch a little to avoid skimming my head against the stone atop it, and was so preoccupied that I barely noticed the man in back offer quietly, "We go to Elders." I looked briefly back and nodded in thanks, but the man in front merely shook his head and said something in this Fae tongue. The guard in back then slumped, seeming drastically shorter, and encapsulated any emotion on his face into a somber glare. I turned then, realizing that it was best I not interfere with their social process.

It was then a mere thirty seconds before we emerged into a vast cavern, which likely was even more vast when viewed from the public standpoint that would have been past the adobe building that fell just short of touching the ceiling. The chamber had several structural supports, probably three, though I could not see the main square. We had entered in what was like an alleyway in the back of the first building, and here there was a small Fae-sized doorway. The rotund opening was straddled by a wooden doorway, which though it was only a door, showed such carpentry in the furling wooden swirls of the pattern that it was gorgeous to behold. The guards were less amazed, and it was then that I realized such craftsmanship must be commonplace. The guard, again, had only to place his palm against its girth before it swung open to reveal a brightly lit inside furnished with a myriad of neutral and Terran colors. Drapes and carpets littered the stone floor and walls, and a single spiral staircase ascended up a floor. It was from this staircase that their came a woman, her iridescent wings reminded one of autumn, with the eccentric crinkle here and there, but speckled with such a palette of green hues that they were marvelous to look upon. Her grace was unhindered, unlike the woman I had run into who had stumbled at least once when she ran away. At regular intervals, these silken extensions of her body would fold and unfold with certain gentility. A single rune was visible on her forehead, of a much darker green tint than that of the tattoos of the males guarding my person; the rune shimmered as the light of the several strange lanterns passed over it. Her skin was a good deal fairer, but still the ruddy tan of the rest of the Fae. Each black strand of her lustrous and knee-length mop brushed against her wings in a small rustle as she stepped lightly. There was sign of age in her, whether subconscious or not, as her fingers brushed the inlet in the wall that could only have been the banister.

"Leave him to me." She spoke it in English, which I had not the faintest idea of a reason for. What struck me was that each pitch and syllable of it came out powerful, and perfectly clear. There was no accent about her. This was not practice, I could tell, but a great magical intuition. And, as if I had expected any different, the guards bowed low, low before exiting to either side.

With scarcely a single gaze, she said nothing, and began walking off to the right; this direction was towards the front entrance of the building. She needn't say a word. It was blatant that it was my duty to follow.

=

We spent hours in which she painted a single magical rune on my chest in dust. She said it meant "friend" in the Fae's magical speech, but something about the way she said it made me think otherwise. Either way, no commoner bore me further inspection upon seeing that rune.

She introduced me to the prominent officers, and I knew her only reason to do so was that I, as a human, entertained her. It was then that I kept my comments as appropriate and loyal to her intentions as possible. It was by her own generosity only that she did not have the Fae's standing army, which appeared to be all adult citizens, to be obliged to a public execution. In that she carried a certain heavy implication, as she wanted me to understand just that; I was not a prisoner, but I was expected to be infinitely courteous.

There was barely a moment when there was no song or humming around us as we walked through the village. Once, I heard a song so sorrowful and enticing that I was forced to stop. My guide was somewhat less enthused, but I could tell that even she was impressed by the complexity of the piece. We stood, enraptured together, just listening; we did not attempt to move closer to the singer, who was more or less around the next bend. It was perhaps ten minutes or so that we stood before the composition found an ending, despairing by regret. I longed to hear more, but she ushered me on with a look of "tsk, tsk" in her eye. They were an odd gray, her eyes, and I only called them odd by the standard of comparison. All the other Fae I noticed had green.

She explained the importance of dance, music, and the arts to her people's culture. She told me that the reason for the varied but haunting melodies along the tunnels was that her people did so many tasks by the power of a magical music that was hereditary to them. She explained that this was an issue of controversy, whether there was more heart in a song or in actually doing the labor yourself. From her hard demeanor, I could tell that she sided equally with both, something that was not evident in most of the other Fae. She understood what it was to do things in combination, and even moderation. Though it was trivial, she mentioned that some men did sing as women did, but I heard none of their low hymns in our travels.

When she found the subject of politics, I behaved in a way that was acceptable for a guest. I found that I was not at all interested in this aspect, but I did manage to catch that they were a matriarchal society. Five female elders and one high elder, which it was evident she was. Community members could gather for assembly, so it was no tyranny. It was in this same discussion that she mentioned that women were more generally magi, and men warriors.

Of value to her race were the morals of tragedy and the rituals of the moon, the light (along with the sun) on which they fed. I found out, in a roundabout way, that they were mostly nocturnal, diurnal when the moon waned. There was one thing they held higher, however.

When we passed one commoner's house, a little fairy girl, perhaps no older than five or so, fluttered gently out into the tunnel with amusement. She had a naive grin that was welcoming and comforting, and I saw my hostess' face light up deeply. She covered it by turning her head, as it was her duty to be stone, but I smiled at the girl who continued her silly countenance in glory of my attentions, bored with those of her native companions. I could tell that children were rare in their society and something to be appreciated.

We spent a perplexing amount of time in which I explained our humans’ predicament (and accidentally fell on our magic; her face was indecipherable in that moment), but she could think of no solution that they were capable of executing. "Zhila brought you here." It was all she told me, before elaborating that "zhila" was "she who is" in the language of sprites. I did not understand who this entity was, and there was no further conversation on the matter. I was downcast at this bland and insufficient answer, but I tried best to hide my disappointment as she brought me again to one of the entrances to the tunnels; it was just several minutes before when a male soldier had returned to me my confiscated weapon.

"You have been patient and charitable with me, most High and I am grateful." The matter-of-fact tone pleased her, as did the praising of her station that might have stoked her ego a little too quickly.

"That symbol on your chest will not fade. If you wish to visit again, you may kindly do so. But know this: if you see a ritual occurring, leave. My people are not merciful with those that interrupt the ceremonies."

"I am in your debt for such hospitality." I spoke it in a gesture of politeness, not fealty, but the serious expression that was the counter was not to my liking.

"You would do well to remember it, as I will." With that last, hard word she retreated into the tunnels. Within moments of her dispersal, I had gathered my thoughts, and picked myself up. It was time to return to camp, and to spread word of the mystique of the ground dwellers.

=====

This, I promise, is the beginning of a true storyline.

[Emotional Faun Chiko-sai]

Hela
"The Dancers"
------------

Past the primrose-lined path the firtree forest thins out into plains. This is not to say that the plains are any less interesting. They are so interesting that they might be dangerous to the uninformed and the merely stupid.

But they look like flat, undulating pieces of land, with uncommonly healthy-looking grass growing on top, and various species of wildflowers in isolated clumps. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there are no chalk figures cut into the turf of these plains, because there are no humans here in the River world to cut them with. Sometimes a rabbit might venture out to graze, if it is certain that predators are not around. But even rabbits don't go near the stone circle. Even rabbits aren't that dumb.

This stone circle is a little over fifty feet in diameter, and it might be called small. This stone circle is a ring of eight stones, four tall and thin, four round and broader than they are tall, spaced evenly in a shallow indentation in the ground. A little way away there are two large standing stones, with the remains of ancient pigmentation where their faces (if they were anthropomorphic representations) would have been. It is the only stone circle. It made itself. The stones rolled over of their own accord. Or so Hela thinks, and she realizes that she usually treads on very thin ice when she thinks things.

Hela thinks that power bubbles to the surface in the place where the stone circle is. The spot of uncommonly green grass in the middle of the ring, where mushrooms of an admirable size and colour sometimes sprout, is a wellspring of power. The stones are there to restrict it. The unicorns say in their knowing way that no iron can pass through the stones, which are iron themselves, but stone iron, and why this is they cannot explain, but they give her arrogantly knowing looks, and leave the discussion at that. Her father had told her to leave the stones be.

When they pass the circle, Lily the parrot says into Hela's ear: "Where I come from, they told us that stone circles like these were really people at a wedding party, who danced all the way from Saturday into Sunday, and were turned into stone for violating the sabbath - uh, the holy day. And the two big stones there, they were the people that made the music. But usually the circles were much bigger than this one."

"What is a... wedding?"

"It's like, well, when a man and a woman love one another so much that they want to spend the rest of their lives with one another, then they have a wedding. So everybody knows it's official." Lily is slightly surprised at the ease at which she describes a ritual which, so often, ends in failure.

"Oh, mating," says Hela. "I didn't know it had to be, um, official."

"Not always, but it's better if everyone knows about it. So they don't talk," Lily says this a little darkly. Then, changing the subject: "How much further is it to your house?"

"We're passing the Iron Stones now, so, um... you see that forest full of grey trees over there?" Hela points to the line of grey at the edge of their vision. "They're dead trees. Means it's almost fire country..." (And my house, that eats people...)

"Oh."
-------------------
I have no idea whether the Fae are in the habit of making stone circles. That's why this post is horribly ambiguous. Sorry for the shortness. ><
Next post will be Favart+Gevaudan. I think.

[Weasel Overlord]

~Tryfan Wen~
…The Chase…

“You run, Tryfan dear.” Her spiteful words kept coming back to Tryfan, echoing in his mind as a shout echoes down a gorge. Stumbling, all his former graceful self lost without her emotions filling him up, expanding in his mind, he fell through the marsh land. No snakes to help him this time. His powers wouldn’t come when the leeches arrived again. He ran with them clinging on for dear life, while sucking away at his dear life. They made a sort of squelching noise as they sucked, and it seemed to fill Tryfan’s ears, loud as a beating drum. Loud as a pulse pressed to an ear.

Thump.

His blood poured away, mixing with the waters of the marsh.

Thump.

She would find him easily.

Thump.

His trail clear as goat’s steps through snow.

Tryfan ran, pell mell, not looking where he went. If he had been observing, he would have noticed the hole.

If he had been observing, he would have seen the partially covered pit trap, already sprung.

If he had been observing, he wouldn’t have leapt over it instinctively, as it was still quite well disguised. His powers were back!

At once his confidence returned, his powers back to their full strength, whatever that was. Speeding up, he entered the forest, leaving the marsh behind. Pausing behind a tree, he caught his breath, and allowed his mind to touch the leeches again.

They would soon leave. And his blood would soon replenish, cells rebuilding themselves in the natural order of things.

Slumping down for a few seconds, Tryfan collected his thoughts. The swamp creature (Eleiamae)…she had placed some sort of glamour on him, and then when it had worked…she had turned…Odd. Almost as if she didn’t want him to be affected by it. Shaking his head, he dismissed her, thoughts turning to Lily unbidden.

Ah, Lily. She was beautiful. Intriguing. And…well…beautiful. Since she had helped Tryfan, looked into his eyes offering friendship, he had been smitten, although it had taken some time for hi to realise it. The swamp creature (Eleiamae)…had been blocking his mind with her seductions.

And now. Now, she chased him through his land. His territory. Revenge, thinly disguised as a game. Well, Tryfan wouldn’t let her win. He would reach the camp first. Shuddering slightly at the memory of her, he grasped his spear, slightly surprised to still have it, and stood up.

A sound! Off to the East…She Comes!

Tryfan ran, towards the camp, springing off the ground with each step. She was fast.

He would need to find the extent of his powers. And quickly.

[Plantae]

No post here, sorry. Just an update to the map, and some information on the Fae if you were unclear on anything.

River World Map
Fae Underground Map
The Fae

You can assume that once Joseph comes in contact with your characters, that he basically tells you everything he learned about the Fae.

[Plantae]

= Joseph Faust =

By the by, I did make my way back to camp, but the condition to which I returned it was not quite the same as what I had left it at. There was only one person here, a distraught Sara who clenched her knees tightly, resisting perhaps the temptation to rock herself gently. My body felt a tingle of regret for leaving and a bout of sympathy simultaneously at the sight, and I ran the last one hundred yards.

"Sara?" Surprisingly, she was not quite as fragile as I might have perceived her, but answered both feebly but with an intensity in her eyes that suggested a growing confidence.

"Hello Mathias..." The comment stung awkwardly, and it was impossible to hide the flash of guilt in my eyes. "Mathias?"

"My name is not Mathias." I admitted it woefully, both lamenting at the loss of deception, and at what Sara was likely to think of me once she heard the words.

"Of course it is," she muttered, illconfident that I would lie to her. Her features, however, seized doubtfully.

I pricked up my ears carefully, noticing the tracks of Tryfan some distance down the knoll, noted them and the rupture of nature from that direction, but then spoke. "My name is Joseph."

"Joseph..." she tasted it, gazed at me once, twice to approve that I was indeed telling the truth. It was evident, as a certain amount of my initially frigid pretense had fallen. "Why did you lie to me?"

That was the harder question, which I was more or less prepared for. I knew, I so knew, that lying was the only answer, but I told a half-truth. "I was scared, a little. It might not seem like I am quite the type for fear, but I always had a certain hereditary shyness. It was an easy fix, and I really did not expect to get so close to anyone here. I hardly expected to be here very long, but I understand that this is an inevitable possibility."

She did not quail at the news. It seemed that she had in some way accepted the same for herself; what was this new fire in her limbs? Her response was bitter, a murmured, "You lied..."

I almost embraced her in that moment; my body refused to touch but with the mind. "I did. I know you might not want to trust me anymore, and maybe you shouldn't. Maybe... maybe this place is changing me, but I cannot promise that I will not lie to you again. But please trust me that it will be with good reason if I do."

She chuckled a little to herself, before muttering, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions..."

"I think... I get the distinct feeling that rules like that do not apply out here." She answered that with a cursory, questioning look.

And then I told her. I explained the Fae, and Eleiamae, the lot of what had happened to me in the short span of time I had been gone. We sat on the hard ground, and I talked about it all. She told me what she had been feeling, but I had the distinct notion that she had not told me everything about her and her longing. I could tell that the name lie still hung about her mind with each breath. The unspoken implication of the end of each sentence she said seemed to be, "What else has he lied about?" That was one secret that I hoped would never see light, not even in my own mind.

So we did sit. The two of us, until the day turned pitch again and the stars shone feebly through the misty atmosphere. It was then, when we made an effort to start a small fire again, that Tryfan ran out of the forest at the bottom of the knoll; I saw him first and pointed him out to Sara, and we both noted his stumbling. He had his head down, and seemed to be making himself the better for being aerodynamic. I tried to tell myself that I had no idea what may have happened, but I knew I understood. It was the Dryad.

=====

[Weasel Overlord]

~Tryfan Wen~
...is it real?

I ran until my lungs felt fit to burst, all thoughts of grace gone. One track mind now. Survival. It pulsed at the back of my mind. I would not let myself become prey to the swamp creature (Eleiamae)...she would not outwit me! Clenching my fists, I put down my head and charged the last distance to where I knew the camp to be.

Stumbling, I nearly tripped over a fallen tree trunk. Normally, I would have offered my condolences to the fallen ancient; to it’s slowly dying inner self that only I could understand. But this time, I was on the run.

This time I tripped. Another log...the same one...shaking my head, I looked behind me to find the log I thought I had evaded the first time. It was identical, from the murmuring whisper beneath the bark to the sequence of knots that told its age.

Confusion overwhelmed me again, and I staggered to my feet. Looking around, I saw Mathias chatting with Sara by the fire. They looked particularly friendly, maybe they would help me...

help...

My voice isn’t working...I clutch my throat desperately and fall at their feet, exhausted.

Help...

My mouth moves, but no sound...I try to shout, no avail. It is like my tongue has been ripped out...
I grasp at my mouth at this thought, feeling inside.

tongue...moist, warm..

I sigh. It is there. Tears roll down my cheeks as I sob in relief.

So why can’t I speak?

Gesticulating wildly towards the pair at the fire, my face glistening and contorting with the effort of trying to speak.

Mathias turns his head away...embraces Sara

I sense love there...

But why won’t they help me...?

I feel like a child as the tears flood my eyes.

Why won’t they come...

--------------------------------------------------------
Aw, poor delusional Tryfan...he is delusional and hallucinating, in case you couldn't tell from that pair of extremely confusing posts *grimace*

[Drusilla]

*stumbles in* I'M ALIIIIIIVE!!!!

...I think...


Sara Raize
Can we burn across the night sky like a dying star? Will you wish upon me as I begin to fall?

[color=#a0ffff]I gazed at Tryfan, half paying attention, half thinking...

Glamours...

Something was deeply wrong. Something... couldn't quite put a finger on it. It wasn't human, whatever it was that held Tryfan and his mind captive....

Set him free...

I stood, not really knowing what it was that I intended to do to help him, but knowing that I could. Slowly, I approached, Mathias... Joseph watching me. I focused my mind on Tryfan's...

Help...

He looked like a trapped animal, not sure how to help himself or if it was entirely safe to trust another. I could tell that his human side was crying out for release, but... his wild and untamed mind didn't trust me. How much of that was from the glamours, I couldn't tell.

"What's wrong with him?" Joseph asked, not bothering to disguise the hint of bitterness in his voice.

I shook my head. "It's an external influence. I don't know what it is exactly, but I can help him..."

Deep in Tryfan's eyes a glimmer of hope shown through the anxiety. Let me help you... I reached out with my mind, trying to calm him. The... thing... was like a mental parasite, anchored into his conscious being. I took a deep breath, and pushed at it... it recoiled slightly, but didn't weaken.

Tryfan Wen, speak to me.

Dryad... glamours... so lost... help...

He was lost in his own mind, but the flow of mental babble continued. That was all that I needed.

Get out of his mind. I commanded the other presence. It refused, much as I had expected. I focused on the link that I had with Tryfan's true self, strengthening that connection, gathering my power...

And struck out at the alien presence with a mental blow, shattering it's connection with Tryfan's mind. He gasped, stunned with all that had just happened, and I collapsed in my own shock.

[Weasel Overlord]

~Tryfan Wen~
Free!

Everything fragmented before my eyes, like I look through a broken mirror.

Swimming…like seeing through water. Everything shifts and changes, never relenting.

Through the veil of tears, I see Sara (a fragmented, stained glass perfection) approach me and I feel her cool touch on my forehead.

Let me help you… Something pushed at my mind…it hurts!

I scream (in my head?) and recoil from her touch. It feels like she is trying to remove a part of my body…like a limb is being amputated but I am awake and feeling, paralysed…unable to do anything.

Now she pushes harder…(the pain!) Still, there is no change.

I feel limbs untangle themselves from around my tender mind as Sara lashes at it, all her fury poured into that one blow.

Small spikes and claws detach, leaving mental sores, and the being, whatever it was, left me.

Collapsing to the ground, I closed my eyes and allowed the warmth of the fire to wash over me. I was free! My mid was my own again.

Opening my eyes, I caught Mathias looking at me, and I sensed a slight jealousy emanating from him. My eyes widened and I lifted my head to gaze at Sara. Reaching out my hand, I grasped hers and gave it a little squeeze.

“Thank you…” My voice sounded odd in my own ears. She just looked back at me, clearly suffering from some sort of after-effects of her powers.

Blinking, she shook her head.

“It’s okay…”

Another voice interrupted our quiet exchange. A voice tinged with bitterness and jealousy.

“So, was it the Dryad Tryfan? Did you allow yourself to be taken over by one of her calibre, or was it only due to the powers of her great mind?”

I gaped at him in disbelief, and shrugged.

“How did you resist her?”

“I used my obviously superior powers…” Standing, I wobbled my way over to him, my feet still unsure of their position on the ground. Plopping down next to him, I crossed my legs and closed my eyes, focusing on his feelings.

“I’m not going to take Sara from you.” I whispered quietly, glancing at her, I saw that she could not hear. “She is quite clearly yours…” Hs eyes widened and then he arranged his face back into that usual bland expression.

“I…I feel nothing for her…” He hissed back, but I could sense unsurety and lies. Interesting. If I didn’t know better, I would say that he loved her…but who was I to tell? Mathias was a mystery to us all.

“I only want one girl…” My thoughts drifted to Lily once again, and I was delighted to find that they were not obstructed this time...

Mathias coughed discreetly and I sensed that he had something to reveal…

[Plantae]

For anyone reading this thread, it should be noted that all instances of "Joseph" in any post but mine or Drusilla's should be correctly changed to "Mathias." Do not feel the need to change any instances that have already occurred, but remember for future reference that Sara is the only one that knows Joseph's name.

= Joseph Faust =

“I used my obviously superior powers…” It was a mistake the second it came of my own tongue, and was almost impromptu considering my current dismal mood.

Tryfan plopped himself next to me rather discreetly, and I was at least partially glad that he was disillusioned that I was "Mathias," though Sara might well tell the rest of them soon enough. "I’m not going to take Sara from you." He whispered quietly, giving a cursory look to make sure Sara could not hear the exchange. "She is quite clearly yours…" I felt my own retinas widen with a certain intensity, which could have easily been mistaken for shock at someone discovering some inner part of myself, but the less than evident truth was that I did not indeed understand what my feelings for Sara were. I also lamented the way he referred to Sara as more of an object than an actual person, as if I could possess the wild being that she was, for there was a certain blaze growing within her.

"I... I feel nothing for her." It was to my bane that I stuttered, though even I could tell that it was out of the tingle that crept up my limbs, the uncomfortable ache that accompanied my current position. My back was curled awkwardly, and so I thus straightened out, but from my turning away I gleaned no information as to how Tryfan had taken my last hissed comment.

"I only want one girl..." he mumbled, nearly incoherently, and I almost felt for him. If Lily was the apple of his eye, he could have her. Eleiamae had quite clearly displayed her unaffectionate manner towards the boy, and even with my demeanor towards him, her mind games displayed a certain cruelty. It was, however, possible that the Dryad's reaction was a facade.

I coughed, which seemed ill-suited and behaviourally obvious to me, but was likely indiscernible to an observer. In the same awkward breath, I managed a quiet revelation for the boy's ears only. Even he strained to hear with the casual, mild inflection that I spoke and the winded quietness of it. Sara seemed a little unconscious of the world yet; at this point in the conversation, that was more of Tryfan's concern than my own. "Lily has gone. I have little of intuition, but her and the fire girl Hela may just have gotten along well together. They are probably off to that house she spoke of now."

"Yes, I met up with them." He said it with ease, but the tone at which it came was quite enough for me to realize it might contain some evidence of the events that had transpired. I imagined some blushing was involved.

"Pursue and court her if you do desire her," I told him, and though it sounded almost too concise, my intentions were so clouded that even I could easily believe its sincerity. There was none of it, just indifference, but there was no way he could have seen the discrepancy between fact and fiction. It strengthened what little good he judged in me, or so I could tell from his eyes. There was subtle nuances in Tryfan's facial expression that said so.

"I might well do," he added, smiling a little at the thought.

"Also," I did not hesitate externally, but my mind shirked the next comment a little, before I continued, "Sara is not mine. She is her own woman, and just because you witnessed a little lust does not allow you to perceive anything of love." It was slightly harsh, the words, but kind enough that he nodded. I could tell he did not take well to being "scolded," but he more or less now believed that what I had said was truth. I had a certain knack for deception when I tried hard enough, and I planned now to go back on the defensive, but of a different sort. I found that feigning an outward joy with an inner apathy was all too easy. My features had already adapted this small smile that most had, and it was only the first rehearsal. Then, it was easy for me to end with, "I apologize for my earlier comments, which might have appeared jealous. I suppose you would be able to understand why any of us would be in an unhappy mood, eh?"

"Aye," he chimed, with a nod. That issue was then resolved. Sara's eyes were then fully aware, and I took the moment to observe her to make sure she was of alright condition after her ousting of Eleiamae. Sara's power had been before dormant except for those nearly embarrassing images, but the Dryad could only be disturbed by this new force in her land. Eleiamae, I had judged her as a wit, an elegant and refined woman of the marshes; I was proponent of the near irony of such a statement. However, her spite towards Tryfan only heralded one ideal: it was clear that somewhere near to her heart was a certain malice, and she might just take further retribution. I dearly hoped this was not the case, and sensed that she might have been motivated instead on a positive emotion to her vengeance against Tryfan.

And then, an ominous crack split the sky and felled a tree not three hundred yards from the spot at which the three of us stood. Tryfan jumped, likely for the tree's demise, Sara of surprise; I stood stoic. My eyes widened in what was an act, pretending some amazement. There was no fire, for which I was glad, but the downpour that followed, having soon soaked the three of us through as we ran for cover, was not of kindly nature. Sara was shivering, and I remembered grabbing her arm to pull her through the muck once or twice on our mad dash for shelter. I knew well enough that she was not weak of heart, and that was what scared me; to see the willful fearful was unsettling. She was an empath of sorts, and it was my worry then that the slight shade of fear in her pupils as they darted across the landscape was not entirely from the almost unfamiliar weather. I saw no silver bolt, or blur, but a crystal whinny shattered the thunder. The majestic unicorn, then, was even galloping to the highland.

Several hundred yards in, we reached an all to convenient overhanging that I had not previously encountered. It was about ten feet deep into a small hill face, entirely rock, and probably eight feet high. With a quick check to review its bowels, that we had no other creatures for company, the three of us made our way in. We were not quite cold enough to break our silence and mean spirit to huddle together, but we all made an effort to nudge ourselves as deep into the face as possible. It was not so cold at the posterior of it, and the gale and water could not reach it. We nestled down, momentarily satisfied. I caught again glimpse of Sara, who was still shivering.

I realized then why that fear had been there. She was not shuddering entirely out of our bone-chillingly frigid existence, or of the sorry and wet state this motley crew had reached, but of some foresight. She must have felt it, and Tryfan might have even sensed it in the land. There was ringing in the very back of my eardrum, which was probably a small warning.

The night had been brooding before, but such obsidian velvet deepens when only the weary and mournful laments of wind and booming marches of thunder and lightning strikes shake the sky. There were no other sounds, and it was so that Sara, Tryfan, and I attempted to start some meager conversation. I was not too inclined to do so, but I could not deny that there was not much other way to pass the time.

The truth... the truth it was, that we all tasted it in the air with the nature of our powers; it was palatable, the intention. There was something awakening in the night.

"She," I mused.

"What?" Sara asked, her convulsion to tingle with the bitter wind having ceased.

"A part of the Fae culture, of which they refused to tell me more. It seems suitable for mother nature's righteous fury."

"I suppose Mother Nature is like that," muttered Tryfan, our resident nature dweller, before he added, "she has that force of personality. Almost like she has mounted the battlements..."

I turned my thoughts away from the bitterness of this land, as mention of the Fae had grabbed Tryfan's attention.

My final thought to the matter was thus: it was quite possible Mother Nature's opponent was almost as ferocious as she was.

=====

[Emotional Faun Chiko-sai]

Hela
"Bleak _____"
-----------------------

It could not have been a worse time for the sky to decide to rain, right now, when her father's house loomed quiet in the background, and Lily had flown up to the roof, to admire the carved wolves that sported and hunted over its intricate surface. Hela had tried to flatten herself to the outside walls, for the rafters of the roof were not meant to provide any kind of shelter; but it was clear that the rain was not stopping, and indeed the storm was getting worse.

Lightning strikes somewhere far in the distance, and strikes again nearer, charring a dead tree even further.

"M-miss?! Don't go flying about the roof, there's lightning!"

At the sound of the near-shriek in Hela's voice Lily ceases to inspect the decorations of the door-lintel, and resumes her perch on Hela's shoulder. Another flash of lightning iluminates the night. Hela sees that Lily has now assumed the shape of a seagull, wings slick with rain that runs right off. The wolf-pack howls, telling stragglers to hurry back to the den, it will be a long night; and she flinches.

Strange, that she should be afraid of everything her brothers stood for; and the soft-hearted might say that these brothers were not the sort of brothers at all for someone like Hela to have. Lightning, chains, wolves, snakes - she'd never had enough contact with the latter to actually warrant any fear of them, though. But sometimes in her dreams there are scales rasping against the dark and she turns over and she wakes up with a vague feeling of displacement.

She looks at Lily with eyes full of dread, and she knows that she must open the door. Already her feet are feeling of rot.

Her fingertips are aflame, now, and they burn with a soft fluctuating phosphorescence. She draws along the outline of the door with fire, and doodles a circle roughly where she remembered her father used to scribble his circle, till she feels something tangible take shape beneath her palm and then she turns...

Fire magic, plain and simple. With, of course, the requisite amount of belief.

With a smoothsolid ashen shudder the great door opens. Before it can slam shut Hela is already inside and has wedged the piece of wood she keeps by for this very purpose in the space between the door and its frame. She wants to be sure they can get out again, and she is not taking any risks.

Inside her father's house it is warm and dark. Not a leak has sprung in the sloping roof; not a trickle of rainwater has succeeded in trailing its way through the shutters of the windows. When he had originally built it her father had considered Venetian blinds, as they were all the rage; but his senses returned to him quickly, and thus the house was practical as allowed. He vented his artistic tendencies instead on the gables of the roof, the settings of the door, the engaging tilt of the crooked chimney, and the shutters of the sensible windows.

Two bright eyes, luminescent in the blackness, say: "Wow, it's dark in here."

Hela jumps, but it is only Lily, and she is a cat, now. "I-I'll make a fire..."

She feels her way across the familiar floor to the fireplace, still piled high with dry twigs and branches, and lights it. The room is suddenly filled with the shadows of dancing flames. Lily, a ginger cat with damp fur, wrinkles her muzzle in a cat-smile and pads closer to the warmth. The inside of the walls of the house are filled with shelves, of varying lengths and disrepair. There is a huge black grimoire in a corner where Hela's father used to keep his things, such as he needed. And in the opposite wall from the door leading in is the other door.

(...eats people)

Suddenly Hela wants, more than anything else in the world, to see her father again, and have him tell her everything was all right. Said in that flippant tone of voice that no one else could imitate: said with a fond hug: said so convincingly that it might be true.

She turns to Lily. "I'm g-going to do a b-bit of fire divination with my father's dagger. Begging your pardon, m-miss. P-please don't go in that other door, e-even if it's just a p-peek. Bad things inside. A-already dangerous w-with you inside here. Please."

"Well, okay," says Lily, curling up in a comfortable letter C in front of the fire. "It doesn't look particularly friendly, anyway."

Hela nods. She will just have to trust Lily's discretion.

On the outside wall, the mural of the labyrinth flares red as the bone dagger hits the center of the burning woodpile; and the fire begins to burn ever more intensely as Hela concentrates.
------------------------
Urrgh... I wanted to add a Favart/Gevaudan postscript... but my brain didn't feel up to the strain. Sorry again for dilly-dallying, as it is.

[Plantae]

= Oiyg =

Trees like rain, I think. Oiyg also likes rain, because she too was a tr... ugh. I find myself closer to saying the word, to realizing my old existence, but it is only because in the dark hours I have found more of the shapeshift. The snap is now a mental one, a flick of my mindly wrist, which changes me into the humany-like creature I so desire.

This practice is not done in a dark cave. As said, trees like rain, so Oiyg likes rain. Trees, oh trees, do not like thunderstorms though. They cower, and screech in the wind, screaming in their fear. They are afraid of the fire of lightning, and the vicious wind that blows off their limbs, when they cannot even hide, not even run. They want to crawl away, but Mother Nature is all around them. But... but, the exact reason trees dislike them is mostly due to the lightning. The tree I had seen before, struck, was why. But, that is a blaze... the powerful charring that lightning does. Oiyg is of fire. Oiyg then, dances in the thunderstorm. I reflect on my present condition, changing shapes in this small clearing here, and twirling frantically in the droplets; my eyes are wild, but not of the wild of nature... the wild of a demented soul.

As I twirl a little more to one direction, suddenly I feel the earth give out from underneath. The tumble is small, but I find a particular distaste for the minute discomfort of my knees crunching and scrunching a little, and the subsequent pain, which lasts briefly, but is very irritating. I know this well as the tunnel of the wingy men, the troupe of faeries that I used to see come up out of the ground and their holey-holes to jig in the moonlight.

There was a stench here that I did not know. I had imagined it would smell like spices and giddiness, rather than the terrible fragrance... which, I more or less could guess, was the indomitable smell of burning flesh. It was terribly unpleasant, and I considered immediately leaving.

They come around the corner they do, the wingies, all male. I raise my hands politely in a gesture of peace, but they do not look at it? Why do they look away so? Oh, no, they are not looking away. That is not joy and the dance in their eyes... that is fear, but it was dominated by a glaze. The look was not of any emotion, happies or sads that I knew. It hardly seemed to make sense there, as if duly misplaced. All I knew was that it sent now a tremor of terror across my limbs, which hovered listlessly in my eyes, floating and quivering gently.

They speak, but only in their language. It is gibberish, flowing and joyous, like them. However, it is as malformed as the look of their eyes, and sounds distinctly as if they had spat it through clenched teeth. It dribbles almost, like a rabid froth, from their mouths. It is then that I freeze, realizing my features. In my confusion, I had forgotten to change back from the form of the girl Lily. It had been random, the last morphing I had tried. Now, in my cold sweat, my nostrils tortured by the still evident stench, I could not escape my mind. I am afraid.

The male Fae do not stop... they come for poor Oiyg! I am frozen... stuck in place... a fly in a web... no escape... One, one that I had not realized was a woman, an auburn-haired woman, gestures silently. I feel my lids go heavy, and the blackness creeps into my vision... I feel the vague sensation of myself lifting away, and know not if this is the effect of her magicky actions, of my own nausea, or of some physical force. All is lost.

=

My eyelids do not flutter open slowly. My mind does not awaken blurrily. I have no grogginess, nor signs that I ever fell away. I just wake, and when I see what I see when I wake, I wish I was still asleep... asleep in a cozy bed. My body is laden, ropes binding my hands and feet. I am upon a crude wooden altar, two gloriously sharpened and cruel pegs that cross and are bound together in their intersecting center. In the crevice of the upper part of this altar is a flower, crimson in color. Then, I realize, the flower is white. The crimson... the burgundy red, darkish pink, ugly, ruddy liquid is blood.

I am surrounded by the fairies. Little-ish beings, gossamer green wings somehow lacking their luster. Eyes all as glazed and wrong as the first ones that had taken me. Wait... wait, Oiyg is wrong. There is a single being in the crowd, a raven-haired being with fairer skin than the rest, and wings that still glittered, but mockingly. Grossly and groggily they go, back and forth. She is not of glazed eyes, this one, but her pupils are almost invisible. Dead eyes. She is in the back of them all, and as she approaches, they all see her and part to the side like water. They flow away, making an obvious path for her, as she walks, closer, and closer... to Oiyg.

She chants as her pace grows slower and more deliberate with each step, ceasing to follow a beat, but creating a soft and hard pit-a-pat as she takes miniscule little steps. Her wings flap gently, again and again, but the very motion of it sends spasms through my body. It is sickening, even in its beauty, for reasons that I, myself, cannot understand at all. The chant is like a screech, but low and rhythmic. Voices, many, in perfect harmony. They say it so carefully that I can make out each syllable with perfect accuracy... "Uilank unteliganbavee." The words turn foul in my head, and the effortless regurgitation that occurs in every one of them fae is vomit-like to behold. The accuracy... the unceasing end to its vicious cycle- it is maddening.

The woman, the villainy girl she is, stops finally at my bound feet. Her silvery dagger glitters as menacingly as her wings, and a drop of blood falls from it, intermixed with a timeless hue of blue that can only be magic. She says nothing, but her eyes change briefly. Vehemence hatred, and duty flutter through her eyelids like a butterfly. She moves vastly faster than I, and slashes the dagger across my wrist...!

It bites! It bites deep! The wound is an enormous gash, but flows blue, and as she yells triumphantly, I suddenly understand her... I struggle vastly to make out it out through the blinding white in my arm. It throbs, it aches, and it burns, and boils with any motion. I jerk, seize up violently. But I do hear her, and she says, "Death to the humans!" An echo roars through the chamber, each Fae repeating the phrase, and she turns her back to me, raising her hand in a gesture of anger to the sky and screaming a shrill note of such intensity that I feel it in my bones... a chilling, sharp, but perfectly accurate pitch that is like the sound of a dying child.

I scream again as I feel the altar pushed ungraciously by the crowd, my body and it falling deep into the black depths of a pit. It is here that I understand the smell of burning flesh. There are animal carcasses vaguely visible as dots from the great height I am falling, and it is only seconds before I join them... Oiyg will be dead. As frantic as I am, the will to survive suddenly hardens me. I am a tree, and I say it easily. I will have its hardness, I decide in that small moment of what is my life. I will find my inner demon, and I will have my anger, and I will destroy! I embrace this!

In my fire, my fury, my retribution, my rage, energy reaches me and I shift. The bonds break on this new form, and I float effortlessly again to the entrance of the pit. I rise fast, flowing past the woman, who looks up at me, unsurprised. I am in her form, the form of the black-haired woman and her tricks. The malignant being she is, and with my wings, which should be wholly difficult to me, feel light and I understand their use somehow. It is no miracle, as my wound is still effortlessly bleeding, profusely and inanely, dripping, some of the drops even touching the fierce pale skin of the woman below me. I fly, I fly so fast. I go before she can cast her spells on me, her enchantments, her delusions, and her destructions. Her way to slaughter me, and my livelihood. I will not die... not here, not now.

The sodden dirt of the tunnels flies by, and I follow the fresh air, away from the near-vomit inducing stench of burning flesh... and there is no light, not in this darkness, not in this rain, but I understand it by the roar of thunder. I grow closer, closer, and the very fabric of my being is shaking. I know she is not pursuing me, and I understand the words she had uttered just before I began my flight. I hear her words, right when I moved more rapidly than she could follow. She turned to her subordinate, at her side, and gave her aside. She had said: "The full moon is in four days. We go to the surface then." But I hardly cared now, as I approached the final exit. The pit I had fallen in and my true gateway to the rain, and the freedom of the wind.

It is closing! It was horrific, the dirt collapsing on itself and making the gap smaller... I could just make it, and I did not slow or hesitate, merely flitting through. But... but my feet were trapped! My beefy, girly fairy feet trapped and I sighed in anguish. I changed, to the slightly slimmer form of Sara, and was out! Out! Out! Out!

But then, I realized... this was not out. The trees around were not the trees I knew. My innocence had been shattered, and now I was alone in a cold world without a blanket of either physical or emotional kind to keep me alive. They were great and gray trees, and there was a stagnant bog stench. I had reached the marshes, by pure accident, and not my rain-dance clearing. But it grew dark again, darker than the velvet black of the night, and an uglier murk than that of the thunderstorm or the tunnels of the Fae. It was a gray and unencompassing light that grew in my head that took me away, on some ethereal jaunt. I could still feel my blood, which had slowed to a trickle; there was weakness in me, exhaustion and emotional turmoil. It was if some great being had brushed her hand over my eyes, and said, in their gentlest voice... "Sleep child." I was cautious still, even in my wreck of a state. But, I knew one simple fact that allowed me to give in, and say, "Yes, yes," in a quiet voice. The fact: I lived. Now, now I was no longer motivated by curiosity. Now I was motivated by vengeance... the need to destroy the thing that had so nearly destroyed me; I knew that I would ally with anyone that could help me unlock the necessary power.

=====

The Fae have been corrupted! And the plot begins its rising action…

[Weasel Overlord]

~Eleiamae~
…Foiled, but what’s this…?

I had screamed long and hard for at least an hour after being ejected from Tryfan’s mind. Not only had it hurt, the bitch had ruined my plan! And now…I had to think up another.

Padding through my marsh, I found a certain solace in the muddy waters. Feeling the leeches slender bodies feel their way between my toes and up my legs. They would find no edible blood within me, and yet I enjoyed the sensation.

Leeches and mud and water. My only realm. My only subjects.

“Tryfan will pay.” My fists clenched of their own accord and the leeches, sensing my anger, dropped off my legs and squirmed away. I hissed. “Cowards!”

Left alone to my devices, I began to walk again, bereft of company, I wept crocodile tears as I splooshed through the waters. They rolled down my face, my eyes flashing golden and sad. The marsh wept with me, and a downpour began. Looking up, I smiled through the rain and continued to walk. If there was one thing I loved more than…(Tryfan)…it was water.

Precious, beautiful water, gushing from the sky in answer to my tears. The rains understood my pain, and I twirled in the storm, happy at last to lose myself in the downpour.

The lightning lit the sky in great crashes of thunder and in between, I swore I heard a mewling sound. Odd that. Nothing that lived in my lands made that sort of noise…Curiosity getting the better of melancholy, I set off in the direction of the sound, though it grew fainter as I walked.

Off to the left! I padded quietly up to the slumped figure on the floor. There was a seeping patch of red spreading out from underneath her, and I understood that she was dying. Turning away, a sudden flare of compassion (revenge…) woke within my heart, and I turned back to her. Peering up close, I saw that she was a slender young thing, barely grown (naïve) and badly injured. She had the remains of tattered Fae wings but something about them seemed wrong.

As I examined her, a pair of beautiful grey eyes snapped open and she mewled in pain. Passing my hand over her eyes, I placed a simple sleeping glamour on her (like Tryfan…) and she passed into gentle sleep with a smile of relief on her tender mouth.

“Sleep child…” I whispered gently. “…For I may have a use for you yet…” Picking her up (light as a feather) I carried her back to my den, the rain pouring off my back in rivulets that plopped to the marsh floor, mingling and clearing the mud for a second before it dirtied again. Chanting a few words, I erected a simple shield over us. It would not do for her to die when I had a use for her…

Placing her on a pile of rushes at the driest part of my cave, I sat back on my haunches to watch as she slowly came awake. Blinking a few times, her eyes widened as she caught sight of me.

Smiling benevolently, my eyes flashed wine yellow and then to a gentler sunlight colour. No cause for scaring her.

“W-where am I?”

[Plantae]

= Oiyg =

"W-where am I?" I stutter, slightly cold, and with a growing sense of something I had not previously felt to such a large degree: annoyance. There is an odd woman in the front of me, her scraggly and ruddy brown hair dangling nonchalantly past her shoulders. She is clothed in green, but it is such a green that it makes me shudder... it was similar in its shimmery-quality to the wings of the Fae woman, whose form I notice I still occupy. Her yellow eyes observe me carefully, they are like... sunlight, and I feel some comfort into looking into them. Despite the situation, my personality prevails and I giggle slightly. I hope she does not understand that I find her eyes settling.

"The marshes, dear girl," she answers, patting my arm in a friendly way. The gesture is lost, however, as the tingling sensation of dribbling blood falls across my chest.

"I hurt!" I shout, remembering the encounter with the Fae, and panicking slightly. My breathing grows desperate, and I exhale and inhale frantically. I can feel my heart speed up in my chest. My wrist is bleeding uncharacteristically, and I feel strangely alone.

"Now, now," she calms, quiet like the field mouse. With her slender hands, she grabs at a reed embedded in the dirt below. She snatches it up, wraps its large width around my wrist and ties it with a quick jerk. I am almost thankful, but her indifferent jerk causes a throb to jar my body.

"Youch!" I yell, and pull my arm away from her lack of mindfulness, but as it bends at the elbow, the pain burns me again. I clench my face, aching both inside and out. I feel a small gap within me, and as I think of the animal I crushed, the lies of my shifted form, and the Fae, I realize that my days of innocence have gone.

"Sorry," she mutters, unsympathetically. I let go of the strand of magic that is monitoring my Fae appearance, as it disgusts me. She stammers in shock, "You have magic?" I nod, politely, baring my pointed teeth, clenched in my ailing. Looking at my face, she eyes the wound, and I swear her face twists into a dull grin. "It seems you need a little schooling in your power, eh?" She says it carefully, like a coiled snake, or cat, waiting to pounce.

I see no harm in saying, "I suppose I could use sum'mat of a lesson."

She smiles, grinning more wildly this time. "Can you walk? You could come back to my lair, to rest and heal," she pauses, "and I might teach you a few things."

I look at her out of the corner of my eye, slightly suspicion, but in light of her hospitality and my hunger for knowledge, I choose to trust her. "Yes. Lead," I respond, finitely. I realize, quite suddenly, that it is no longer raining.

"Yes," she repeats, unnecessarily. Then she grins again. She stands up, and I stand up, and she is grinning all the while.

It is a very dodgy grin.

=

I look blandly at her home. I frown, in the slightest, but she does not notice. She tells me her name is Eleiamae. She tells me, after I ask her very kindly, she tells me so quite irritably, that I cannot call her Elly. I do anyway; this Elly, she has an odd abode. It is brown, it is dirty (for a cave even), and smells faintly musty. She takes a seat on a rock, and stares out into the muddy night, a vision that is blocked by cypress trees and reeds. Then, I realize, she is looking at the cypress trees and reeds; and the mud, the mud that is not so nice.

The mud, as it happens, chose to trip me on the way to this "nice" little cave. The mud, so it happens, is a savage creature. I slipped, and I fell, and I cursed it, my sworn enemy (albeit second to the pebble; there were no pebbles in marshes. Or were there? It would be a question I must pursue in my free time.).

"Elly?" I question this, but her head is turned, but I get the notion by her still figure that her face is mad.

"Yes, dear child?" She says, after turning her head. Her face is now an optimistic smile. I can tell it is a fake, because it is less dodgy than usual.

"Elly, where am I to sit?" I finish, vaguely, my gaze wandering across various objects in the room. There are several rocks, each similar to Elly's, each of which look marginally (ahem... largely) uncomfortable.

Her face is temporarily frantic, and her eyes flash wine yellow, but then she leaves her seat, pulls some cave lichen from its attached status to the wall, and spread it on one of the rocks in the room. She spreads it on the roughest one, actually. I fail to see how the lichen helps, but she spouts, cheerily, "Now is that not homey?"

I look at the rock, and at the pebbles by it, and at the lichen, and at Elly, and at the ugly, coarse rock again... and then I say, in such a matter-of-fact way that a bead of sweat rolls down Elly's embarrassed forehead, "No." Appreciating her kindness, though, I push past and sit daintily on the rock; my bottom hurts.

She, somewhat satisfied, crosses the "room" a second time and seats herself again on the rock; Elly folds her legs primly, and much to her anguish, I copy her. Her example brings me to believe it is only proper.

We sit, awkwardly, for several minutes. We both stare at each other. My lips are set in a thin line, and I can tell it unnerves her. But, she continues to pose a positive, but failing, countenance.

After this period, she slaps her knee, and bounds up again. "You wanted teaching!" She dances a little, and I cock my head at her; why does she dance?

"Now..." her faces becomes a mask of contemplation, and she mumbles, "now..." Then, quick as a finger snap (which can be quite slow), her demeanor turns determined- and slightly wicked?

She strides across the floor, stares straight into my eyes, slaps her dirty palm down upon my shoulder, and her eyebrows fix themselves in a downward arc. "Now, listen to me, you are going to be my apprentice. Have it, wild child?"

Her inflection seems gentle, and almost without demand, but her speech is laced with a funny tingle that makes me giggle. I say, almost accidentally, "Of course!" The excitement in my voice was not quite the excitement in my head, but she continues to look at me with her sunlight eyes, and I dismiss this thought; surely it is exciting, or so says the eyes.

"Good," Elly says, unflinchingly and continues to keep eye contact.

"Good?" I ask, carefully.

She merely nods, and her face sneers. She is looking dodgy again; no she is not, the eyes say. The eyes, those perplexing bulbs, fall darker at each heartbeat. She laughs, for no apparent reason, and I chortle too. "Good," she finally says, nodding vigorously to herself. And it is set in stone.

=====

[Drusilla]

Sara Raize
Breathing together in the dark

The storm blew overhead, and I shivered... though 'shiver' is quite an understatement. Convulsed, maybe.

Mathias... Joseph and Tryfen looked at me, questions in their eyes. "N... nothing..." I muttered.

But it wasn't nothing. It wasn't the cold that made me shake so... there was a dark undercurrent of power in the wind and rain. Lightning tore through the sky, and with each flash, each gust of wind, I trembled at the force that I suspected was the true cause of the storm. There was something about it that wasn't quite evil, but was definitely malevolent. It slashed at the edges of my consciousness, and I glanced at my companions. They could sense something as well, but they weren't being effected in the same way. Corruption... corruption was thick as smoke, hanging in the air, and it tried to push it's taint into my mind. My fingers clawed at my hair, my face, trying to keep the darkness at bay. I whimpered softly in my throat, barely loud enough to hear, an animalistic sound, a sound of desperation and fear.

"NO!" I screamed, startling Joseph and Tryfen. I had finally broken free of some of my own evil, and I had no desire to succumb to a new source. I would fight...

I ran into the storm, rain partially blinding me as I plunged forward. I didn't need to see, though... like a bat, I "saw" in my mind where I was going. I pushed forward with my mind, and the nearby landscape unfolded in my thoughts. Branches of trees still tore at me, at my clothing, though, ripping the delicate fabric and drawing blood in thin rivulets that mixed with the rain and ran down my body. The pain was distant, like it wasn't really mine, and dull... I ignored it.

I don't know how far or how long I ran before I collapsed in a small clearing at the foot of an ancient tree. The moment my hands touched the roots of the towering tree, calm flooded my mind. I sobbed in relief, water pouring down my face and my hair dangling in wet strands. Mathias... Joseph approached me, slowly, unsure...


Sorry, gotta run... But I think someone can pick up from here.

[Weasel Overlord]

~Eleiamae~
…Apprentices and illusions…

My main aim for this…child was to seem entirely harmless. Naïve as she first appeared, I was sure that underneath her façade, she had a store of guile and inbuilt knowledge. And anyway, her experiences with the Fae can’t have been good for her, coming away from them almost dead.

Ah yes, her wounds. I used a trickle of my magic to bind her ribs with a bulrush and she was experiencing pain in her elbow, which I managed, perhaps too sharply, for she cried out.

Now. Now she was all fixed and I had work to be done. Capering slightly as I went about my abode I attempted to throw her entirely off course about my true intentions and nature. No doubt if she caught sight of what lay beneath my skin (anger…jealousy…love) she would flee like prey before the hunter, only to lose herself in my marshes. The girl’s innocence was almost amusing to me…

Elly? What sort of name is that for one of my kind?…my face froze into a mask.

“You may not call me that…it is unbefitting for one such as myself…” Her face had fallen and I had smiled. A victory! I would break her…and I would enjoy every minute of it. For now, however, I needed to put her at ease.

Rearranging my face into happiness, I approached her as she sat on my rock, squirming with discomfort despite the luxury I have put in place for her.

Ungrateful! My mind hissed at her from within its confines, chained for the moment before my indomitable will. No! I will not let it free yet…in time…

Capering a little to put her at ease, I worked my way over to her until I was staring deep into her eyes. Concentrating, I worked one of my glamours; most secretly though, I had not yet got the measure of her magic. She would love me, if not like me. She would be my apprentice. Yes!

“Now, listen to me, you are going to be my apprentice. Have it, wild child?”

She giggles and I ply my glamour harder, gazing deeper into the depths of her eyes.

“Of course!” Her voice is high and girlish and I nod in satisfaction.

“It is good.”

“Good?” She questions me then. That will not do. But that is for later…

I giggle with her. “Good.” For now, I will be kind, gentle, and what she senses, why, I shall soon dismiss.

Keep her busy, that’s the aim of the game. She won’t have time to question me.

Meanwhile, this storm…most unnatural it seems. I glance outside, breaking our contact for a second.

“The rains have stopped.” She nods, perhaps already knowing.

“Something is abroad this night…” I mused aloud. Snapping my fingers, I glared at her again, not quite hiding the longing in my eyes.

“What is your name, child?”

“My name…oh, my name. I am…Oiyg…I think…” She looked slightly puzzled, her tender mouth pursed delightfully. “Yes, I am Oiyg.” I smile at her and she looks worried. Maybe I cannot hide the predator inside…

“Have you met any of the…humans yet?” My eyes light up without my permission and I scold them back into blankness.

“Oh yes!” She chirped. “I have met one or two of them. Well, only one actually…her name was Sara...” I waved my hand in an attempt to silence her prattling. Sara was not the one. …Not the one I wanted… (desperate now…) No! I silenced the voices inside. I am stone! Stone to him! Shaking my head, I catch sight of her bemused frown.

Don’t show weakness…

I can survive alone! I have done it before. Turning on the girl…Oiyg, I snarled at her before reigning in my emotions.

Shrinking away from me slightly, I swiftly put on a sickly sweet smile.

“Do not worry child. I shall not hurt you.” I did another jig to put her at ease and came to a stop at her feet. Glancing up at her, I smiled again.

“So, you want to learn, eh?” She nodded in excitement. “What type of magic do you have, child? What is its nature? Its strengths, weaknesses…if I am to teach you, I must first know the nature of what lies inside you…” She shakes her head and smiles shyly.

“I don’t know any of that, Elly. I …I’m Oiyg. I don’t know owt of my magics…” I sighed. This was going to be more trying than I had first expected.

“Okay then…Oiyg. What do you know?”

“I know that the fairy creatures aren’t nice…” She scowled, a shadow coming over her lovely face, her mind obviously turning to her wounds, inside and out.

“I have a task for you that will help you get your revenge on the creatures that hurt you so…” I tipped her chin so she was looking into my eyes again. “I know what they did to you…poor child.” I stroked her hair, brushing a strand out of her face.

“Elly won’t let them get away with it…” I could risk it…a bargain, then.

“You know, there is someone…someone who has hurt me dearly too. He took my heart!” A snarl came into my voice and she shrank again, but I held her fast. “He is unworthy of life…surely you see this?” Shaking slightly beneath my thumb and fingers, she nodded.

“His name…” I hissed. “His name is Tryfan. Tryfan of the Wen. He came with the humans and took my heart…treading it beneath his feet as he took over our forest!” My voice grew louder as my speech became more impassioned. “He must be killed!” She began to nod her agreement, and I trickled a little more of my glamours through her eyes. Her nods became more fervent.

“It is well. You will help me then?” She looks puzzled at my satisfaction, but nods anyway.

“Elly has to be avenged…and then?” A touch of eagerness came into her voice.

“Then, my dearest child. Then will be the time when we crush the Fae as Tryfan crushed my heart and love…They will quail before us!” I laugh, and it is a laugh tinged with bitter happiness and the sharp delight of revenge.

“We will show them, my love. We will…” I nodded in happiness. “It is well.”

[Emotional Faun Chiko-sai]

Prom shopping is driving me NUTS...
I'm not dead. Really. *adjusts spiffy pointy black hat* *slinks back into the RPG*
--------------
Favart+Gevaudan
"'You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. 'Who are you?'"
-----------------------

They have been walking for an age. Sleipnir was a long time ago. Favart with his conman's mind had expected the others, but the expectation has not come home. Gevaudan with his wolf's mind had not expected anything but the blackness and the bleakness and the unavoidable claustrophobia.

It comes and goes, the claustrophobia. It comes in the passages and goes in the great yawning hallways, with the ceilings that stretch away impossibly into the dark of the house. Then Gevaudan hears, or thinks that he can hear, the rumble of something slow and menacing in the distance, and sometimes he hears it much closer to hand, and the sometimes growling is becoming ever more frequent as the hallways they enter become larger and larger, and the stink of unwashed lupine comes raw and intrusive...

Fenrir!

Like a flashfire, a lightning bolt across the brain.

Favart knows this also. How could he not? Gevaudan can tell by the excited way his colleague's nose pricks up, the tip showing yellow as they enter the chamber.

Fenrir is large and so black that he is darker than the darkness. His red eyes smoulder like coals. Favart can count every hair off his muzzle in the glow of his eyes.

Gevaudan has never seen Fenrir, and so he stares at Fenrir's eyes, which are pupilless and fierce. They might be the eyes of a true wolf, if a true wolf meant that the wolf slept not, ate not, and tired not; and this wolf, if it was a true wolf, had been tricked and chained up; and this wolf, it was angry.

You. The address is directed at Favart, who, dapper and debonair, bows till his forehead touches the grey ground. Gevaudan cowers a few paces behind Favart. I was told to kill you.

"We are all wolves here, master," says Favart, with just the right effect of toadying regret, "it would not do for a wolf to kill a wolf without proper reason; such as the humans do."

Yes. But I have also been told... you want to kill my sister, who should not be killed. She is blood of my blood. Kin of my kin. Such excuses my father lie-smith has given me.

"Have you ever seen your sister, master?" Favart keeps his gaze steady and about the same level as Fenrir's claws. "Had you known that you ever had a sister prior to this denouement?"

No. I have, however, found it generally rewarding to pay due attention to what my father says. I have drawn my own conclusions to this matter.

"Then why not leave us to our business, master? Your father need never know. We will leave no trace of our passing. And surely master is great enough that he need not do others' bidding."

You are wrong. He knows everything that happens here. He knows what is happening now.

A pause. Then:

I will let you go. But do not expect such leniency from my brothers. Nor does it do you well to underestimate my father.

Gevaudan, momentarily proud again, steps forward, baring teeth. "I ate your brother, the horse: he was easy."

Then you are a fool and an idiot. A paw slams down, nearly taking off one of Gevaudan's own; Gevaudan backs off immediately with a yelp. Go now, before I review my choices and change my mind.

They go, and they are running.

(Postscript: Hela)

Hela stares, eyes wide open, at the flame before her, which seems to Lily the same as all the other flames that had danced before it, and her forehead creases more and more. She grips the bone so hard her knuckles are white. She does the fire divination again and again and it is always the same.

It tells of a blazing tree, the marsh people, and the dark things moving underfoot; and what it says most is that the humans will be dead come the full moon.

"M-miss? It's b-bad, miss... e-everything's bad... everything's d-dangerous-"

And then a tongue of fire lashes out, and the door in the wall swings open.

[Plantae]

= Joseph Faust =

I approached Sara with a tenative air, wondering what mystical force had such power to cause her to run in wild abandon through the woodland without regard for life or limb. "Sara, what is it? What is hurting you!?"

"Darkness..." was all she said, in an eerily calm half-whisper. "Darkness..." she repeated, a growing sense of fear manifesting in the night.

"Are you alright now?" Tryfan asked meagerly, showing some care for her situation.

She shook her head no, but seemed confused, and said, "Better."

"What is this corruption inside your mind?" I asked, afraid of what her response might be. From what we knew, there was already one charmer rampant among the island, Eleiamae of the marsh.

"I don't know!" She cried angrily, though it was only to be expected. "This deep gnawing pain is wracking at my conscious, like something is trying to get inside me! To see through me..." The very thought of it had me almost petrified. Surely... what force knew we were here. The Fae, as I knew them, were benevolent, and I had no doubt to that. Eleiamae had been pushed away by Sara before, so she would be a fool to try again. Besides, she had neither rhyme nor reason for doing so.

"What could possibly do this to you?" I muttered, unsure, and knowing it was more of a rhetorical question than anything. I was surprised, then, when she gave a feeble response.

"Well I did meet a shapechanger today..." she mumbled, "a wild-haired woman with dark skin, grimy hair, and tattered linen clothes. She approached me as you, but she offered me food, berries. I cannot understand why she would would want this, and judging by her timidity, she has not the power to do so."

The apprehension was like a particularly disgusting green jello, a wobbling mess of vegetable matter and water that threatened to eclipse hope. There was something, somewhere... a force had woken, and the feeling grew only stronger that we would soon learn its meaning. Suddenly, the thought came upon me.

"Is there a river in this land?" I scarcely expected a knowledgeable response, but the statement was the same amongst the two.

"None that I have seen, but the small one in the marshes." Tryfan said, wondering the reason for my question.

"No," answered Sara shyly, obviously regretting her lack of exploration.

"Me either," I echoed, but preceded to interrogate Tryfan. "What of Eleiamae? Did she know of any?"

"The impression I got would have me assume that either she did not, or that she did not find it important."

"There could hardly be," I said with a sigh. "There are no mountains from which it could have a source."

"I sighted distant mountains further down the peninsula, near to Hela's supposed house." Tryfan voiced, curiously, likely wondering the same thing as I. Was there a river in that region? If so, was it the same malignant presence that had so kindly escorted us here?

"I have the feeling that there must be a river," I said prophetically, "and that it is probably our ticket home. I suggest we look for it. Are you feeling up to it Sara?"

"I believe so," she answered meekly.

"We ought to leave in the morning, which is actually closer than it appears, I believe. It must be at least past midnight. Anyone against sleeping in that cavern?"

"Sounds like the safest and most sensible choice, should it start to rain again," suggested Tryfan.

"Alright, agreed it is then. We will set out at dawn."

Neither of the other two answered, both contemplating, Sara visibly distraught from her previous experience. I counted their previous comments as a "yes."

What would lie beyond?

=====

Very short post, but there will be a longer follow-up within a day or two (depending on how long it takes someone else to post).

[Weasel Overlord]

Erk, short! *wince* I reckon everyone else's lack of posting is catching...what is it with this season??? [obvious answer...Christmas!] *jigs* YAY!

~Tryfan Wen~
…trust…

We would set out at dawn. It seemed so final, so, well, unchangeable. Shaking my head slightly, I set off after Mathias and Sara, who were, all unawares, walking side-by-side so close they could almost be holding hands. They were an odd pair indeed, and yet, I had no doubt that a pair they were. There was something between them that even my newly attuned senses couldn’t pick up. Something raw, passionate and wild. Similar in fact, to the lusts that raged within me.

Oh, how they raged…my feelings seemed heightened by my time in the forest, and my dicing with madness caused by the Dryad witch. Eleiamae. Her! Oh, how I hated her now, with her yellow eyes and her glamours, working on me while I, all innocent, ran from nothing. She had taken my mind so easily. So easily…

My thoughts were broken as Mathias, realising that I had stopped walking, approached me. His footsteps were like crashing elephants’, tramping on leaves and animals alike, with no care for what lay beneath. My head snapped up as he stopped in front of me, what appeared to be a look of care on his face.

But I knew. This one was duplicitous.

Don’t trust him! My inner mind whispered at me, incessant and persistent. But I would not be swayed by my mind any more. It had failed me once, and I had resolved to stick with my instincts from then on.

And my instincts were telling me that Mathias was to be trusted. He smelled right in a way that Eleiamae had not. Despite the fact that he crushed m the forest beneath his feet, I found myself liking him.

“What’s the matter, Tryfan?” His expression radiated honest concern, but I knew not to be fooled.

“Outer appearances…they are nothing…” I whispered. Looking him directly in the eye, I raised my voice, but not so loud that Sara could hear.

“I trust you.” His eyes widened, but a smile followed.

“I am glad of that, Tryfan. Shall we continue?” He must have sensed my need to trust people. Eleiamae [my mind spat when I thought of her] had left me almost childlike…I didn’t feel quite like myself again. My powers had returned, sure, but my confidence in people had not.

But Mathias can be trusted…

[Plantae]

= Joseph Faust =

It was a gray haze that dogged her steps, Sara with her once haughty air, now distraught and far away. Tryfan had said he trusted me, how little he knew, but I could be no more glad than to know that I still had enough strength of deception yet to trick intuition.

We were all slow of foot, making fair distance and seeing no sight of Lily who we knew by Tryfan's commentary to be with Hela. We had not the faintest clue what she was doing there, and I thought of Hela with her fiery magic, and as we passed the fire lands... there was something amiss. It was almost as if they were smoldering more than usual, that is, in the areas beset by such flames. The rest was full of large stone circles and verdant grasses, all of which swayed gently in the breeze.

The air was all of suspicions and glamours. I had not been affected by Eleiamae, no, but this land, this place- it exerted a conscious force over my actions in some minuscule way that was immeasurably discomforting. I could feel the heartbeat, and I feared of it, the great pulsing monstrosity it was. The skies were jolly, only tinged slightly blue, and cloudless. The rains had dissipated entirely, leaving only the annoyance of mud and a lingering feeling of dread, and of worry for Sara.

It was growing in me largely, this fear for her, and this liking of her. It blossomed, but it also wilted from time to time, which left me strangely alone. She was a blaze in the darkness of the night, a bonfire that ate at the air, clawing its way to freedom and life! There was something in me, in man, that found safety by fire. I admired Sara for her spirit, and much as I tried, the old apathy sunk in with ferocity. I could do little more than respect her, and be slightly attracted to her. Tryfan, for all his empathic qualities (for I had seen the subtle glances when he realized just the slightest beneath my ruse), had failed to access the feelings between us properly. Besides, I told myself I was not quite sure if it was just lingering feelings of lust. I thought so, and she likely did also, but as much as I tried to tell myself- it was a different passion I had, however muted.

I could not properly guess, but I would have it that we had traveled something like ten miles, or eighteen or so kilometers. For all the wariness we had, the caution causing us to circumvent the marshes in such a drastic way that the sea was duly visible, nothing occurred in this entire period. The landscape was unchanging in its sparse forest but for the small river we were capable of jumping over, due to the point at which we crossed; we also passed the fire lands, as aforementioned. For all its lack in interest, the hours that it took to traverse this distance came and went. It was eight hours, or so, by the steady count of our footfalls and the position of the sun. To tell the truth, I could hardly tell. Suffice to say the afternoon was wearing upon us, and it was at some point, with our aching bodies and similarly aching spirits that I was the first to speak up. It was likely that I appeared to be babying Sara, thinking she could not manage, but in truth I was almost as tired as her. I spoke for myself, and the group, Tryfan who I assumed was both hungry and fatigued. He had been alert the entire time as it was, watching the woods and the marshes, and sometimes in a blissful mediation, and once in a while not even looking where he was going. He was at one with nature for brief periods of time, and this delighted him, but every now and then a small twitch would come about him. It would not know, but it was as if something unnatural had suddenly occurred.

"We ought to take a rest, or we will forcibly march ourselves into death." I sputtered, taking several deep breaths to sustain myself.

"Agreed," mumbled Tryfan, in an aloof manner.

"I believe I could use it too," answered Sara, but with some fervor, to my relief.

There was a gnawing fatigue as we finally stopped, a longing for food. From what we had survived without it, I was under the assumption that our magic was sustaining us to some degree. Still, nearly anything edible would do, as long as it sated both my thirst and my appetite. I was under the impression that the other two were thinking on much the same wavelength. We had stopped only once, and not to forage, but at the cool, clear river. It was likely to nauseate us within time, but it had been refreshing, and had tasted not unlike the pure mineral water that was about in bottles in our home world... oh how far away it had gone... so far.

"Sara, would you remember those berries if you saw them?" I asked, hopeful that she might be of some help.

"I might, I think Tryfan could help too. Maybe he could... sense what would be our best bet." She shrugged, trying to fend off her exhaustion.

"I swear," I spat with a fevered pitch, "I am going to lose my sense of taste quite soon."

"I think Sara is right," Tryfan mumbled, partially ignoring my previous comment. "My expertise may come in some handy... I suppose we'll see."

"Correct," I stated, admittingly, a little unnecessarily.

It took us some time, in which our stomachs only managed to growl more, and our palates suffered greatly with an almost foul burning. We did find the previous berries, and an interesting plant or two that Tryfan identified as suiting, all of which we divided and devoured. It was quite easy to fill ourselves, for what we had eaten (a small amount); I was not sure if that was just the quality of what Tryfan had found, or if the magic we possessed was again fulfilling some of our need. There was a pond nearby, too, and we stopped again there to drink. We talked little, which was appropriate: we were most keen on surviving, the lot of us. We had just sat down and were eating the raw tubers Tryfan had found, green and stemlike things they were with darker green centers that flowed out in an oozy sap; then, it suddenly hit me, with my sense of perception. And I caught it... just a little off the treeline, a small glimmer and a green wing.

There had been signs... the time, all of it! I had been so inert and un-noticing, and Tryfan, for his alertness, had not the hearing and sight that I possessed. I realized, with anger, that there were Fae following us. That was the only explanation for the green wing. It was little more than an expeditionary force, for certain, but it would still cause trouble.

"I think," I muttered, and leaning towards Tryfan with a pause, "that we may have company." The last half was whispered, as not to attract their attention. Tryfan nodded and we continued to munch, somewhat unperturbed. It was slightly later, and in whispered voices, that we talked again with each other.

"How many are their Mathias?" Tryfan asked, hopeful that I had seen.

"There were only three or four, roughly. From what I saw of their population, they could not afford many more. They have been following us for a time, though I do not know why, and I cannot fathom how they had remained so quiet as to draw my attention away just enough."

"Does anyone have a course of action?" Sara's comment was cloaked in silence. After a minute or so of contemplation, Tryfan began speaking.

"We ought to find them, and rid ourselves of them... in whichever way-" he was cut off abruptly, as I interrupted him.

"We can only play their game now. I am under the impression that they are not here on aggression, as they seemed benevolent. I just cannot understand why they would follow us. The queen, the leader of them, did tell me something about understanding the favor I owed her: I had intruded on their territory." Tryfan was dissatisfied with what I had said, and Sara seemed likewise unconvinced.

"But," I continued, "Tryfan could you manage to cover our trail a bit, scent and all?"

"Yes," he replied, a small look of suspicion entering his eyes as he said so.

"We will do that, maybe twist a bit, and lose them in denser woods. I can tell where they are now, and will know when we have lost them. I should be able to see an ambush coming if neither of you can, and if push comes to shove, Sara might be able to negotiate with them: am I right Sara?" She nodded only vaguely to my question, but I continued regardless.

"Good, let us go then." I stated indifferently, and it was met with a similar intonation. In a minute or two, we had gotten up and preceded off on our way.

A mile or two later, coming upon the densest forest we had seen in quite some time, and feeling a chill air, I carefully told Tryfan and Sara that we had lost them.

"Are you sure?" Sara whispered, worried of the Fae's intentions still, myself having the confidence that they were not evil.

"Yes, now what are we to do?" The reason for my inquiry, simply, was that the sun was beginning to set beyond the trees and the woodland at our head was looking increasingly unknown.

They both waited, not sure what the question was pertaining to. "Are we to camp or continue? We cannot go much farther, I shan't think. We moved a ridiculous distance on foot today. We are going to be sore if we do not take a break, and most of the things that live in the night probably have an advantage over the majority of our group." I hated the ask the question, and wished for more hours in the day, and the ability to accrue less tiredness. Still, neither immediately answered me. Despite the ugliness of either choice, or maybe because of it, they did not answer immediately.

======

[Weasel Overlord]

~Tryfan Wen~
…something wicked this way comes/a communal with an Alder of an ancient and prophetic nature...

The Fae had pursued us for some distance, and I had used all of my considerable talents in tracking to cover our footpads. However, they seemed to be above my magics, and still they came, until, dog-weary, we paused a while to consider our coming actions. Were we to search for a place to retire for the night? Or were we to continuer plunging through the unknown forest, in the dark no less, with only my own eyes guiding us, and my own senses to alert us.

No, this adventure should be one for the daylight, and I spoke up in favour of camping, And besides, we had travelled hard all day, barely pausing for rest. I didn’t think that the two could go on for much longer. Myself, I was not worried for. I had the forest to sustain me, and even now, I felt the rustling if the trees in the darkening wind fill me with energy. I felt as if I could walk on throughout the night, and the next day too, but sensibility took over and I took in the state of my companions.

“We should rest. We all need sleep, and we will do no good on the morrow if we are too tired to move. Shall I find us a haven?” Sara looked relieved at the suggestion, but this was soon removed for a look of decisiveness.

“I think it would be a good idea. Preferably a cave, or somewhere dry. If it rains like it did earlier, then we have no chance of resting.” I nodded at her sensibility and scurried off into the night to commune with a tree. I had spotted an aged Alder as we rushed by and it was sure to know the land hereabouts, as all the creatures of this forest seemed to do.

Approaching the tree softly on velvet feet, I held out my hands in a peaceful gesture, my spear slung over my shoulder by its leather strap, posing no threat. A slight wind blew through the leaves and I took it as a signal to continue. Hands outstretched, I placed my palms on the smooth bark and my forehead across my knuckles.

Breathing in and out with the movement of the wind, I sensed that the great tree was worried. It showed in the slight drooping of the branches.

“What is it that troubles you, old one?” I murmured, nor expecting a vocal reply, but to my surprise, a creaking came from within and the branches stressed about my hair, twisting around it and lifting my head until my eyes gazed directly into a gnarled bole. This tree clearly wanted to talk, so I opened my mind and let it inside.

A sudden sensation of age filled me and I gasped. Dust. Fire. Growth. A series of images flashed before my mind’s eye, faster and quicker, blurring at the edges. This Alder was very worried. Something stirred beneath the land. Something old and dangerous.

Wrenching my hands away, I tried desperately to escape what it was showing me, but the supple branches only grasped harder, and a final bright image flashed into my mind.

South. Rushing water. A cave nearby…

That is where we should be. The thought was clear as a still pond. I had found our resting place, and it was marked by an Alder sapling. Kin of the very tree I was communing with. We were to speak with the sapling, which would allow us access into the cave. It was a guardian, despite its youth, and feelings of pride emanated from my tree. The guardian would sway aside and we would rest in the cave. Away from the dangers that passed.

But I doubted that a single Alder sapling could stay the storm I had seen in the tree’s thoughts.

“This is bigger than us…It will devour us. And you…and anything that lays in its path.” A hint of terror crept into my voice and the tree released me swiftly in a motion that threw me to the ground.

-You must not mention this…They must not know.-

I nodded and scrambled to my feet. I had found us a resting place that would prove to be more than a haven if the trees premonitions came true.

[Plantae]

= Oiyg =

Elly had told me most carefully, for that was her- Elly was careful- that I was to find him. She mentioned his name several times, the despicable Tryfan that had crushed her heart she said! Crushed it and stole it away he had! How could I not want to help Elly, who was so kind and so fair, willing to help me against the trickster Fae and their cruel mistress...? I would meet this Tryfan, and I would beat this Tryfan. It was my duty to make her proud, so it was, and it was so that I immediately began making myself as hard and cold as she was.

I moved fast, she had so admired, whispering little praises she thought I could not hear... "my little sneak," she had said, "my loyal shifter," she had spoken. I was glad that I was already making Elly proud, and that when she had given me a lesson in the proper breathing techniques... for she said it was a most important basic of magic that you knew when to breathe, to keep at flow with your inner power... she had responded, telling me I had done well! It was hardly a favor even when she asked me to discover his hiding spot afterward, no hardly a favor. Her lacey speech had said it, and I had heard it, and I intended to follow it. I could need little more than to be like Elly... to think like her and to be grateful to her. Already I felt more of my magics surfacing, and the debt only grew as I came to understand just more of my "talents."

I grew to admire Elly who I was obliged to learn again and again, was named Eleiamae... "Ell-eye-a-may!" She had intoned it with a stomp, and the slap of hand to forehead, for she said with digress, she hated to be called "Elly!" It was not mine to know or understand, but I thought it might make her feel a little weaker, and though I knew she disliked it to some degree, I hardly thought this small amount of anger was worth losing such a pretty name. Elly sounded so much better than that hideous Eleiamae, surely? So I called her Elly, and I was coming to know her as Elly, and it seemed that she would be forever dubbed with the humble title- "Elly."

Before I had left she had warned me, sure as she could, and as much as she was able, that Tryfan was not to be trifled with per se. "He is wicked, and a rogue, not the debonair sort!" She had told me with a scream, which she quite entirely missed herself. "You must be careful," she had warned, "to not be near the trees when you change." Quietly she had told me, a good big switch from the norm of her moaning and groaning yell. "He understands the speech of plants," she cautioned, and I could do little to suppress my own chortle.

"He talks to his plants?" I asked while laughing as I thought was expected at such a ridiculous comment.

"Yes!" She added it hastily, and with such a manner of seriousness, that I could scarcely stop myself from going red in the face from stifling what was a gigantic prod to my funny bone.

"Does that help them grr-row?" I chuckled again, and I scarcely noticed, even by the contorted look of her features, that she found it less amusing. When she had continuously pushed this fact into me, and I had only been able to grant it my own laughter, she finally decided that simply making me change inside the cave was a necessary endeavor and one that would assure my disguise held.

I was careful to keep my guise, to breathe properly, recalling it perfectly; she asked me who was best to sneak to Tryfan, maybe a test, maybe truly asking me my opinion. I told her I had seen another human girl who I did not know as well as Sara, and she liked the idea. Elly made sure, however, that I understood that I could not be afeer'd at all if they asked me strange questions if they saw me. I thought about it, and how Sara's sight through my guise had worn on my senses, causing me to flee. I knew this would be necessary, so I shook her hand with gusto, and promised her with another sentence involving the use of the dread "Elly."

I was quick, we had agreed, and so it was done; it took me little time to pass the marshes, and the river, and the sparse forests before reaching the woods so dense; their tracks up to this point were hardly invisible for a good while, trodden in soft dirt and mud by the rains (oh the mud that soaked into my feet and the cracks in my toes!) but they stopped almost abruptly after a point. "Tryfan," I muttered with vindictiveness, with which I mused quietly to myself, would make the contemptible Elly satisfied. For how else? The nature man he was, the heart stealer and the path breaker, the tree talker... none of the others had quite the skill to cover tracks in these woods surely, not in woods so close to Elly, for how could Elly miss them? No one was better than her at navigating the marshes, with their bogs and their mud and their strange log creatures that swam and floated both.

When I reached this point in the path I made way still, much slower, at such a rate that it was worse than midnight gloom, darkness all around, before I was allowed a break: this break, of course, was not so poor Oiyg could stop, but so I could push onward! A break in the case of the missing Tryfan, the clever bastard, and the keeper of broken love! It was this offense that I must requite for Elly, I must, and so I thanked all of the deceivers and knaves and imposters and dodgers and swindlers for the happenstance and chance to make my master mistress glad of me.

I came across all three of them, as it was, with a stumble and a jerk and a snap of leaves that woke all their senses; it was so loud to them, and I cursed myself, so loud to them that even the fatigue of the girl, Sara, could not halt the concerned jerk of her head in my direction.

"Over in the woods there," pointed the Mathias boy, who I thought to be assisting Sara, and I had to stop myself from hiding away in a little hidey-hole. They had seen me! It was too late for sure! I must instead... act like... this girl- Lily.

"Hello!" I yelled, cheerily, merrily, sure that Lily was similar in disposition; or, I hoped so dearly- oh, how I hoped. I prayed again to the charlatans and the humbugs that I might have just a little more luck. A pinch more? A grain? Was it too much to ask? Maybe just a little? Please?

My wish was granted, but I could have asked for a little more on the one giving the response. I calmed myself, and only listened with a turned ear and a visible smile when Tryfan the diabolical beckoned to me with his hand. "Come Lily! We were just seeking shelter! How is Hela, and how are you? You ought to get out of the night," he cut off as I trotted closer with the enthusiasm I thought a human girl like myself like have, and once reaching him, listened as he finished, "as there are probably beasts about." My irises flashed a suggestive wine yellow in a way that would make Eleiamae blush.

=====

[Emotional Faun Chiko-sai]

N/B: Post may be annoying due to storytelling format

(Prelude)

Before she goes through the door she gives Lily a flint and a few words. She tells her of the danger at the full moon in halting breaths.

She says: "I-if I don't come b-back, i-if you need help - kindle a fire, and m-maybe I can come, I don't know if you have the fire-talent, I, I -" A biting of the lip, the slip of her dead feet into the grey passageway -

The door in the wall slams shut.

-----------
Hela
"The brothers pull together at the request of the father,
Little sister's story comes to an end."
-------------------

but I live only for you. and I believe only in you.

Perhaps you have never heard of a girl named Hela. Maybe she should not be termed a girl, as she was really a fire spirit, and later something else; but for convenience and story purposes she will be classified as one. Her principal occupation was trailing after her father, and in his absence, looking for him. Her legs were sewn on by degrees, as the original ones had fallen off at her birth, and altogether she was not very pretty at all, but rather pitiful and worrisome.

One day as this girl, Hela, was thinking of her father, who had been gone a long time, she made a fire in their house, and she put his dagger in it, and suddenly a beautiful map opened up in the embers, and so she knew where to find him. She had to go through the maze, or labyrinth, in their house, which was a magic house, and the fire, made into a compass, would guide her.

Inside the door, she walked for a time through the terrible darkness, and she was frightened; but she pressed on at the thought of her father. Eventually she came to a dead end, a smallish deadly corner. She might have cried, but she didn't; and she just sat down on the ashy floor, and when she turned about she met a horse.

The horse had eight legs, and a thunderbolt marking, and it could speak. Listen to its scratchy-lightning voice:

Little sister, be not afraid.
I am your brother, the Thunder Horse Sleipnir,
Sent by our father to take you upon my back
Crossing through the chaos-maze.

So she did, and they flew through space as though there was no dead end, and the divine wind (where did it come from?) beat the horse's mane into her face. Soon enough they arrived at another hall, which was vast and lighted by a single flame in the middle, which was the remnant of the fire-compass. There Sleipnir let down his charge. "I must leave you here," it said. "My master is looking for me." "Thank you," said Hela, "but where do I go now?" "Follow the fire," said Sleipnir. "You may meet with another of us, if you are lucky it will not be Fenrir." "Who is Fenrir?" asked Hela, but the thunder horse was gone.

She walked through the hall, that led to more mazes, and we shall say no more of how long she had to twist and turn, follow and rebound. Eventually she came to a corner, an awfully suspicious corner. Dank yellow fog wrapped itself around her so that she coughed. And round the corner was

A big black wolf, dark and fearsome
Red eyes that glow like coals.
Towering to the ceiling that could not contain him,
With breath like yellow fog that clings and saddens spirits.

Hela, being most afraid of wolves, clung to the damp walls like noodles might cling to the bottom of the pot if you don't stir them, and trembled as best as she knew how. The wolf opened its large jaws wide and snarled, "Little sister, come hither into my mouth so that you may reach our father ever the quicker." "I-I daren't, brother, I am frightened of your sharp teeth." "Close your eyes and walk forward, then." "My eyes are already closed, brother." "Come forward, then."

With her eyes closed she walked into the gullet of the wolf Fenrir, and the soles of her dead feet made their way over the jagged teeth, the lolling tongue, and then Fenrir shut his mouth with a snap. Inside his mouth Hela felt as if she was walking through a tunnel longer and darker than the ashen warrens of the house. There was only one direction she could go in at any one time. Eventually the darkness thinned a little, and she began to note that she was reentering the terrain of the house. As her fingers brushed the walls they were stickier than ever, and smelled odd, and she began, again, to be afraid. At the end of the tunnel something beneath her feet pushed her up, and out, and then she saw it was an

Enormous snake, tail in mouth
Neverending circle that holds up the world,
Intelligent eyes with slit pupils, and
A forked tongue that served to prop her out, a lisp.

"Hail, my sister," said the splendid snake. "I am your brother Jormungand the Serpent: and now I would advise you to hurry on, and follow that flame from the lodestone until you come to the twins." Hela was trembling so much, she could not say anything but a muffled thanks, and ran away into the darkness.

Eventually she came to a circular clearing, which was really a pit that stretched away at the bottom into nothing. Beside her the flame settled down in a clump of rubbery innards. Hela would have screamed, if she did not know better; but she had seen worse things than the dead insides of creatures, and reasoned inside that dead insides of creatures were much friendlier than living insides of creatures, in that they could not possibly hurt her.

The innards said, "Hail, our sister, we are all that remains of your brothers Ali and Narvi. Of yore we made bindings for our father, but now you must use us to cross the dread pit. Throw us across, sister."

With trembling hands Hela caught hold of one end, for the innards were all tied and trussed up into a long rope-like form, and threw the other end over the pit, where it caught something and came taut at her hand. "Walk across us, sister," said the innards. "Don't be afraid." Hela balanced herself precariously on the rope, and as she took step by careful step someone was pulling her in, closer and closer to the other bank.

She fell off the rope into the lap of someone too familiar not to be recognised, and it was indeed her father. Hela was happy beyond measure, and it felt like her soul had returned to her once again after a long time. Her father gave her his fondly hug and his devil-may-care smile with the lips that were scarred with the marks of an awl, and said over his shoulder to a black shape, very charred and oily-like in its mien: "You know what it is that I mean to do, Freki; tattle to your master, if you must. Also, remove Geri from my domains." It wrinkled its black nose in a toadying manner, and withdrew.

"Now Hela," said her father, "we are going on a journey." "Where to?" she asked. "Far, far away, away from this world... do you mind?" "No, father, as long as I am with you, it will be alright." "Very good." A door opened in the wall, and they went through it, and neither of them, hide nor hair, were ever seen again in the world of the river, at least not in the physical sense.

Where they went is another story best told in other settings.

The fire went out with a rasp in the large living room of the house, and Lily clutched the flint ever harder.
-------------------------
Uh... yeah... was reading way too many chinese classics... Hela's story is finished; next post will clear up the Loki/Odin loophole, and describe the state that the house is left in, as well as Lily. And my brain is officially dead for the week.
*Gevaudan = Geri, Favart = Freki

[Weasel Overlord]

So what if I'm neglecting Tryf...not the point...*mumble*

Oh no! No more Hela?!? What's gonna haappen noow?!? *rocks*

~Eleiamae~
…madness and love, one and the same?…

My little puppet had become very good at transforming in her days as my apprentice. She was even becoming tolerable to me, which I found myself surprised at.

Since when had I tolerated anyone? Especially not young whipper-snappers who persisted in calling me Elly. The very sound of the name made me hiss and spit at the ground in her absence. For when she haunted my lair, I was forced to be sweet old Elly, all smiles and teachingly warm. It grated on my very soul. And the jigging! Oh, the jigging. My jolly little dances were all that held her trust at points, and so I am forced to continue with the jigging, for in my heart, I do not think that she trusts me wholly. Not yet.

But now. Now, she is implementing the first part of my plan. Tryfan. Well, he was nothing to me (or is he?). NO! I am stone to him…I am…

He will not seduce me…that is my job…I am the seducer, not to be seduced. To be tricked into love is to show weakness…

Surely that means Tryfan is strong…he was not tricked…

The voices in my mind grow more persistent as the days go onward. My love for him will not leave me…and I realise, it is love that drives me so.

“But I am STONE!” I scream, in the loneliness of my cave, a’waiting for Oiyg’s return.

[Plantae]

Oh my... I haven't posted for this long? Lordy.

= Joseph Faust =

We found the cave Tryfan suggested with little difficulty. With a simple manner of speaking, he managed to beseech the sapling guardian at its mouth to move to the side. The two of them shared a strange similarity... as if they knew something. I hadn't an idea what it was, and I hardly desired to know. They trials of the last several days had been more than enough.

Lily, admittedly, had giggled profusely when Tryfan had talked to the tree; he had pretended to keep himself upright, tall and manly, but I saw red come to his cheeks. She couldn't quite explain it, just as she had difficulty explaining what had happened at Hela's home. She merely voiced something similar to "Hela merely wanted to be alone. I needed to catch up to all of you, too!" She was lively, cheerful, and light-hearted through it all; even when it began to drizzle briefly again, she merely guffawed at the rains, and danced. It was lifting to have such an optimist with us, and I thought I saw Sara's eyes flash with a bit of spirit again during Lily's escapades. It was still a little awkward to have her with us again, but there were few qualms about it amongst the group; I believed this strange feeling to be nothing more than a product of her leaving our presence for a time.

The cave was not uncomfortable, to say the very least of it. The floors were smooth and polished, unlike any natural cavern I had previously witnessed. It was almost entirely circular, a wonder of erosion and the formation of rock, with a small pool (no more than five paces in diameter) at its center. I must say this particular source of water made it difficult to start a fire, and so we huddled in the larger back end of the cave, which was more or less convenient.

I could hear strange trickling sounds in the walls the whole of the time, I imagined some larger force of water- possibly an underground stream. We were now on the edge of the mountains, as this cave was.

They were not towering, as they had seemed, but were actually relatively short. Climbing them would not be profusely difficult, and it was likely that it would not be hard to find a pass that was neither cool nor rough in demeanor. Our quest, though we were still not entirely sure where it was we were going, seemed to be coming more and more to fruition. I could only muse that this water must be connected, somehow, to the ancient river, the one that might send us home. That was what I told myself, and as the four of us sat around a meek fire (for it was quite warm), we muttered a few scattered comments about home; we had a new appreciation for it, truly, the land from which we had come, but I had my doubts. My face, and the edges of my consciousness assured me that I did want to go home. My subconscious, however, and the confines of my thoughts doubted this proposition. They doubted, also, that I was even to survive here. There was a deep-seated cynicism there, but there was also something much darker. A secret, I feared with each moment, might bring itself into being. Then no longer would I be just a deceiver to them, just a reserved but still kind man, but rather... It was not a sound idea to dwell on it, I finally decided.

Lily was more reclusive than she had been after our initial talk, and she seemed to like her time out of the limelight (more than surprisingly). We were not at all abashed, however, to allow her to revel in a little shyness. We had no doubt that she would be back again in full swing. It was only a matter of time.

Time was wearing away this day, too. Night had come again, and we were all less than restless; we hadn't the sense to immediately think to assign watches, but Lily merrily volunteered. I told her to wake me when she finished. We all rested, ungracefully, in a pile of clothes and lichen. Lily sat quietly on a rock, pretending not to be uncomfortable, and this sight was enough to allow me to float lazily into the dream world.

=

It dripped keenly down my hands, and pattered quietly onto the dirt. I stared aghast at it, and quailed in fear. "Keep calm, cool..." I muttered in my head. It was far from the time, and the insides of my head could only scream in utter terror. What had I done!? My freedom was surely gone now. What had I done!? What had I done!?

=

Cold sweat, tingling across my back and chest. Musk flitted to my nostrils and I cringed in the heat of my dreams; it was only a dream... or was it a memory? I had suppressed my inner emotions with such purpose that I scarcely knew. I could only sit, and shake, and watch the crackling fire. Lily saw none of my pain, and I was glad that I had not feigned hellish surprise in my sleep. Dreams... they let us escape to a world all our own- the world inside my mind was not one I cherished. They only served to expose us, and I would have none of it. It was not with immodesty or without true passion that I told myself that I would never allow myself to see into that world again. Never. For if I looked too far, I would tumble into the pit, and as the echo of my scream rang out in the gloom- I looked at my companions- they would know.

Lily rose from her seat, and I distracted my disheartened mind with her movements. She walked carefully and deliberately towards the pool, and there should stood and gazed into the pool. For a moment, I swore that from my position at the side of her I could see the reflection of a woman with gray skin and mudded white locks. Then it disappeared, and Lily frowned with impunity. I discarded the image immediately. It was only a hallucination from beyond, likely, some ruse made by angles and light.

I waited for some time longer, not falling asleep until Lily gently tapped my shoulder, seeing I was awake with surprise. "Well, hello silly," she muttered. She leaned against one of the cavern walls, with her eyes trained towards Tryfan's sleeping form, and closed her lids gently.

=

Drip… drip… my countenance was eerily panicked as my eyelids fluttered open again. I realized that I had fallen asleep, tragically, during my assigned watch. I cursed myself gently, and suddenly realized that I had little to fear. What was it about this night, suddenly that had me so jilted? And then I looked at the pool, and the insides of my stomach did a somersault. I watched a single drop coalesce upon its side, and furthermore, go tumbling an incomprehensible distance downward and strike what sounded like rock with a gentle drip. I marveled, and I drew back, before bolting to standing position. Then I saw it for its true form.

It was a set of aquan stairs, so elegant and so well formed that my eyes glazed over with sadness towards their watery beauty; I was almost sickened by the solid surface, which was not ice, but rather water in such a magical form that it held itself up without the aid of any science. I eyed it with no suspicion, for it had me utterly dumbstruck. The staircase led a steep path downward into where the pool had been, into a pit, and suddenly the rushing of an underground stream came to my ears. It was a gentle flow, archaic in rhythm, but I was ensorcelled. Each beat of its current I felt, and each beat of my heart was felt by it. It was wondrous, and my heart was a flutter with the surreal quality of it all. And then I saw it, and I quivered with fright.

A shadowed form moved up the steps in the slowest motion, fluid like the water it traversed, and shadowed. The cave was dark, and a single ray was all that fell on the pool. This moonlight illuminated it in gorgeous details, but the steps below were all but uncharacteristic in the light. The movements of the figure were lithe and seductive, almost, even of this night crawling beast. It was humanoid in shape, but that was all that there was to say of it. There was a quality of its step, that light and happy smashing motion that pressed my mind into cogs which crushed it with alacrity; it was utterly wrong and I felt nauseated by the power in those limbs.

It was a long staircase, and though little time had passed, it felt like a singular century by the time I could bring my trembling, chapped lips to make out several syllables. “Who comes?”

There was no answer, but I could have sworn the shadow creature’s “face” curled into what looked like a wicked smirk. All the color was torn out of my face in that moment, like it had been ripped from it by a savage animal, steel incisors clamping down upon my skull and crushing it. I could have warned the others, but I knew doing so would only anger it. I could have tried to do so without speaking, but I knew this humanoid, she, as it became suddenly apparent to me, would not have it and would notice this movement immediately. I felt like her mind contained my mind, and I had not even heard her speak. It felt as if for every action I had considered, every strategy I could think of… she had thought of it, and tossed it away with the finesse of an acrobat, and only the slightest of wrist movements. She exuded such glorious sadism that my deeds, as hideous as they were in civilized society, seemed like nothing this black lady could have done.

Each second passed with suspense, and I both rejoiced and was disgusted in the time that it took for her to mount the stairs and reach the position where she was clearly visible. I longed for it, to see her, but I also knew that in that walk was death.

And then it happened, and my body was seized and clamped, and torn into by a steel vice grip of metal vivacity. My expression was utterly vapid, and the fan I had readied subconsciously fell from my hand and clattered loudly on the floor of the cavern. I regained myself, but the effect was done, and though I would hardly bow to it, this was the true iron maiden.

All the parts of her being were layered with the subtlety of an icy lance plunged into the stomach of some unlucky soldier. Her obsidian, slate, hair flowed like icicles from the crown of her head, for she was royalty. Her eyes were dark blue, that furled and unfurled like a sea, relentless, and a river of pain drilled into my consciousness. Looking at her was an effort, and I felt the need to turn away for reasons I could not rightly fathom. She dwarfed me, even, and was no less than six feet in height, with all the towering magnitude of a giantess. She was lithe and so fair it burned my pale skin, white as the maggots that crawled about carrion, and just as maddening. She was the utter impression of a lady, and was beyond it, a queen of such fine nature that the room itself seemed to fall away to make space for her. Her wrists looked like the flick of them could kill a man, but she past this telltale sign she seemed almost frail; it was duly hidden just how easily she could wring your neck. She was bold, as her face was, with ears that accentuated the mark of an elf of some sort; they were not dramatically pointed, but it was there, and it only further increased the mythical aura about her person. She smiled with all the draw of a shark, biting into your skin with those incisors, slightly pointed, so keenly white that the embroidery of the same color about her robes looked yellow. It was a face, so flawless and unmarred that it seemed she was perpetually impossible to injure in some normal way. The black robes that covered her left quite little to the imagination as they were so form-fitting, a form with voluptuous curves and her feet were shod in the oddest white leather sandals. There was a lustrous pearl embedded in her forehead, I noticed as her hair was swept away, and then the true meaning of her countenance hit me. The expression was so effortlessly grim, and the very malice of a thunderhead covered the whole of her person. She bore into me with those fiendish blue eyes, my own stare locked and I felt my resistance shatter, and her hand began to raise skyward, and then fall. She then threw her arms to the heavens, and yelled with glee, shouting there and to the ground in a voice amplified and mechanical at the same time. The power of what seemed Satan breathed behind each syllable, as she screamed in the beautiful pitch of a water nymph. And then I realized that it was not words, but a glorious cackle, and then her features fell and settled on the awakening group. She manipulated the waters of the stairs, and they disappeared, and then danced about her in concentric circles. She threw her hands out, and the very force of a wall of water bound all of us to the cave wall.

She did not pause to speak, but merely began to choke us with each of the movements of her wrist. I began to drown as water poured into my lungs, and I saw the others in a similar situation. Though we managed to fall somewhat down the wall, and wriggle to a point where an actual battle was likely, she did not maintain her concentration long enough for us to get into a battle stance. She merely wheezed suddenly, choked, and I could not help but revel in it, to see her harmed; she pointed a single finger at Lily, and I knew not of her reasons, and uttered contemptibly with a cough, “The marshes will boil! The waters will churn!” Then, speaking to all of us at once, she articulated in a soft tone. “Death will come swiftly to all of you, for you may never escape when I am near; I am the universal conduit. Heed my warning, for it was never meant to be given.” She spluttered, and the pool gathered again as the power of her waters dropped. She gave one last leer, so wicked that I cringed in it, and then dissolved into the water with a splash.

The only thought that could run through my mind was thus: it was she. They had told me, the Fae. I now knew.

Zhila. She… is.

And then I realized... if she was the river, could we still go home? My last hope died.

=====

[Weasel Overlord]

Hee hee, Jobie, you're becoming me!! Lordy indeed! Anyhow, you asked for surreal, and here it is! ^^ *jazz hands* I hope it's satisfactory...

[CENTER][COLOR=darkgreen]~Eleiamae~
…and the marshes boiled with the wrath of the River God…

Crawling out of my cave, I glared at the sunlight as if daring it to shine ever-brighter. The day was disproportionate to my anguish, and I was furious about it, stalking my home, my marshes, with more fervour then usual.

Glaring once more at the sky, my eyes squinted for a better view; I caught sight of clouds, swirling about the golden orb. The clouds…

The clouds were an ominous purple colour, and they didn’t so much swirl, as loom over the horizon, seeming to mock my very presence.

Spitting up at them, I continued my trek. I wasn’t about to be deterred by some angry weather, in fact, I loved rain, and hoped for some to fall now.

Maybe it can cleanse me of my anguish…my pain…

Shaking my head, I pattered along memorised routes. Routes that were etched into my mind, into my very consciousness I had trodden them so many times. My mind raced as I walked, not thinking about where I was going, just letting my feet lead.

There was something about this very day that seemed…well, wrong, somehow. I could not put my finger upon the reason for my feeling this way, but something was wrong. Dead wrong. And it was beginning to unnerve me.

And it must have felt wrong, for me to be unnerved, Eleiamae, the Mistress of the Marshes, Seducer of Men. I was old as time, or at least, time in this world, and nothing frightened me.

Or at least, nothing frightened me until Tryfan came into my life. Now, I was afraid of my own feelings, keeping them locked away, deep in the back of my mind they cowered, afraid to come out for fear of what would happen. Shaking my head to expel such dangerous thoughts, I continued my trek through my lands as the clouds moved and shifted overhead, growing ever closer and almost beginning to obliterate the sun from sight.

I was glad of that, the sun’s bright glow was enough to make me spit in my wallowing. It almost seemed to want to cheer me up, with the yellow and the warmth! Pah! I wasn’t having any of that. I would wallow in my misery for as long as I pleased, for I am my own mistress (and Tryfan’s)…

Howling my defiance at my own thoughts, I fell to the moist ground in despair. I would never be free of him! Oh, how I wished for redemption, for my old self-control to return and grant me even a little dignity.

But it was not to be, and I grabbed at my hair and beat the ground like a widow in her mourning.

Exhausted, I slumped down, my hair torn and eyes dull, as I caught sight of my reflection in the muddy waters.

Lifting my hand, I dabbled a slender finger in the water, causing it to ripple and the mud to rise to the surface, disturbed. Pushing a fragment of dirt around the small pool, I sighed and propped myself up on one elbow to peer into the waters.

Lifting my finger again, I gave the water a single prod, and it became as clear as a bell, obeying my command. Images flashed within the pool; a cave guarded by an Alder of the old clan. Oiyg, parodying Lily’s behaviour as I had taught her to. I smiled at this; she had gotten so good in such a small amount of time. Despite our little spats, she was the closest I had felt to any creature, and I had begun to enjoy her company a little, though I was always careful not to inform her of this.

My elbow grew weary, and I switched over, allowing my eyes to flash once to the skies again before coming to rest on the waters.

Gasping, I stared, open-mouthed, back at the sky.

It had grown dark. But this darkness was not of the normal variety. For one thing, it was day, it should not have been dark yet. And for the second, the darkness had a terrifying quality to it that made me shudder.

There was a hint of evil in that sky, nay, more than a hint. A good helping, disguised in the colour of hellish orange and looming purple. It was like a livid bruise, and, though I was fascinated, I found myself not being able to look at it any longer. My eyes were drawn, inexplicably away, to anywhere but that horrendous sky streaked with red.

The earth tones of my marshes were a truly welcome sight after that sky, and I tried to keep my gaze down.

Much to my horror, the trees parted in a whisper of a breeze, allowing the light to beam down and into my little pool. The nightmarish colours streaking the previously blue sky were reflected in my pool, once again drawing my eyes in a sick fascination.

Gazing deep into the pool, I realised that there was a tear in the skies. This tear was the colour of nothing. It was like a black void that called to me, luring me into it and into eternity.

Shaking my head vigorously, I gathered my senses and glanced away from the water, at the trees, anywhere!

But even the trees were behaving unnaturally. My ears being attuned to the sounds of nature, I managed to pick up their twisted shrieks of pain as the wind whipped them from side to side. The very plants wept; those stoic trees I had known for most of my life showed the most torturous anguish at what that hellish wind was doing to them.

Tears poured down my cheeks in sympathy for their plight, but I could do nothing. My limbs appeared to be frozen to the ground, unable to obey the simplest of my commands.

Once again, my eyes were drawn to the pool of water that was no longer a scrying haven for me, but a nightmare of colour.

The waters, seemingly stirred by that ghastly wind, began to bubble and ripple. The ripples were small at first, but they soon grew and spread through the water until it almost leapt out of the hollow in which it lay.

And the worst thing was, it retained the colours of the sky as it jerked from the ground, forming perverse and deviant shapes before falling with a splash.

And my eyes were still drawn; I could not wrench them away from the horror that lay before me. Immobilised, I knelt in the mud, sickeningly fascinated, as the water leapt and dived before my eyes.

It seemed to be growing closer, ever closer, and like a weasel dancing before a rabbit, I was enraptured as it crawled over my legs, up my legs, across my torso and up my chin.

Clamping my mouth tight, I closed my eyes, finally able to move at least a little. Just before my vision was obscured, I saw that all the waters in my home were acting in the same fashion as this tiny puddle, trapping tiny creatures in their hypnotic movements before crawling over their bodies with an almost delighted malevolence.

My own marshes turned against me. That was my last thought, as the waters swam down my throat and flushed into my lungs and stomach. Trying desperately to cough, I caught sight of my hand.

It was greying.

Like a disease, grey crept up my limbs, obscuring the flesh beneath as it solidified, encasing me in what appeared to be stone.

My face and mind were the last to go, and the sick terror overcame me as the grey filled my mouth and throat, causing a wave of blackness to wash over me.

My last awakening thought was a revelation…

…I love him…