Górin knew not for how long they remained there, waiting and swaying where they sat. For a time, he realized that each of the others seemed to likewise have some difficulty in sitting still, for Jynge pulsed back and forth gently while Handor trembled vigorously in short bursts. Though any conversation had long been abandoned, they all seemed too preoccupied with their own thoughts to continue anything. Górin thought back to the day and what it could have been. I should have realized the omens. How fortunate it was that we made it to High Ridge unharmed and on schedule. What could good news mean except for an impending disaster? We could have had fresh venison tonight before that wretched Síarner woman went about her witchcraft business. He looked bitterly at his companions and heaved a sigh. So confident are they in their witchcraft that they’d send us into blighted land? To send other rangers to lands near the deep blight, no less? Are these stifling masks not meant to protect us from harm?
Like an unspoken congregation, Dákk and Handor rose from where they sat at nearly the exact same time that Górin did. Blinking in confusion for a moment, the three stared at each other.
“The hunt…” Górin began, nearly stumbling over his words.
“Yes!” Handor exclaimed, his dark eyes wild from behind the lenses, “Why not?”
Jynge looked up at the three and tilted her head to the side. “What shall you bring us?”
Handor laughed openly. “Flesh! Deer! Venison! Meat! Flesh!” His cries echoed throughout the tower, and he only chuckled at the repeating voices that danced about the empty space.
The three rangers walked in arcing paths towards the curtained entrance to the tower. Górin thought that something seemed strange about it all, and stopped as he looked at the two men that walked ahead of him. After a moment of thought, he called out to them, but his words went unnoticed.
“Wait!” he called. “Dákk, your bow remains here beside your pack. And Handor! You have left everything behind, entirely. What shall you hunt with, you thoughtless lout? Listen!”
The two men showed not the slightest indication that they had even heard him. Continuing onward, Dákk reached out and pushed the blanket aside, revealing the grounds of the ridge. Dark and yet light, the mists that surrounded High Ridge trailed through the air like a swift smoke. He squinted his eyes as he tried to see down the slope and into the trees below. A voice sounded out in the wind, but he knew not from whence it came. Hurriedly, Handor stepped past him out to the exterior and hastily looked about.
“We must work quickly, Dákk,” he groaned, “I fear that I cannot bear this great hunger for long. It has torn through my belly and now claws at my heart! We must be quick, lest it consumes us all.” With that, he darted down the slope, with Dákk stumbling and following.
Inside the tower, Górin swore sharply. He cursed the fools that would have forgotten their equipment so easily, in such an awful situation. He had had enough of their careless behaviors. Let them do as they wish, and let whatever shall happen happen. Anger welled in him as he looked at the pinned blanket over the door, slowly moving from the motion of the two walking through.
“If they come back asking me to hand them their bows,” he began, “They can get them themselves, for I-” his words were cut short as his vision was caught by the sight of Jynge stumbling towards the staircase. He watched wordlessly as she swayed from side to side on her way before grabbing hold of the rope that danged from above. Her grip faltered for a moment, and she stumbled backwards before resuming her place and starting an attempt to ascend. Górin tried to say something that would dissuade her from making the dangerous climb up the rope, but his words did not come easily, and his voice came in broken chokes.
Jynge gritted her teeth and kept her gaze upwards as she climbed. The faint ringing of bells had not ceased yet, and she was not about to waste her opportunity in being in their midst as they chimed. Only the Bell Witches were permitted entry into the bell tower, and try as she might, the Hags had never considered her of the right disposition to join the lineage of those bell-ringers. But how the bells rang! Many tones echoed throughout the tower, and she heard each one as clear as though it were just beside her head. She wondered if those chimes she heard were the bells themselves, or simply just an echo ringing endlessly throughout the tower.
Every time her foot slipped from a hold on the wall, every time she tightened her grip upon the rope, every time she made progress in the ascent...The sound of bells rang on. If she could only ring one of them, herself. Such beautiful music came from that tower that she wished to enter. The chanting incantations and the sung hexes were treated with so much awe and interest by the others in the convent, that the news would spread so quickly the circle would have a small audience outside their hall by the time they started. Yet so few turned an ear to the bells that rang every morning and every night. Jynge did not care. It was nice to hear this joy to herself. As she climbed the wall, she grinned like a young girl at the thought that there was no one to stop her from entering the heights of the bell tower.
As the witch made her uneven ascent up the wall of the staircase and finally made her way up to the room above, Górin growled at the sight. She asks for our guidance and protection, and she doesn't even bother to listen, he thought, What is even the purpose of our being here, then? He fumed at the situation. Jynge was at risk of killing herself and Dákk and Handor had rushed out to hunt without their bows. The Veil! he suddenly thought. The fools were going to die in the foul mist. What could have possessed them to do away with all sense and reason?
Górin felt a strange pain in his knuckles and looked down. At the end of his arm was a closed fist that lay within the rubble of broken stones and wood. He must have slammed his fist down upon them. This waste of stone, he thought angrily. As he held his hand in the other and hissed at the pain, he looked around the dim room. From the door came dull trailing lights, illuminating little but glowing clearly against the dark stone. The fire gave off a light of its own, but the flames seemed to move slow and languorous to be as warm as a proper fire. He again cursed Jynge for the sudden departure without leaving some kind of daír-fire to warm them against the bleak cold of the Veil.
All he wished for then was safety. Failure and death swirled about the tower, and soon it would crumble, letting the two evils bluster about the withered bones of those that would perish within. The heavy weights of duty and trust bore down on him as though he were deep beneath the ocean and he no longer sunk by his own heft, but the terrible weight above pushed him further below into the abyss. Yet for all that dragged him into despair and death, he did not hate the Veil. It did not hate him, nor did it see him in its terrible crawl. It moved over High Ridge, and his group was in the way. All blame and hatred could be rightfully laid upon his head. His vision blurred and he breathed sharply.
As he looked about the chamber, suddenly he beheld a figure against the far wall. A lone figure, one he had nearly forgotten. The only one that had not stupidly rushed from the safety of the tower. The figure had moved, of course, but not far. It was the twitching that caught his eye. The left arm of the figure moved back and forth in a violent rhythm as it hung by the side. He gazed at the one who stood facing the wall. Clad in the dress of war, and yet the form was fair and slender. A bulky gambeson was set over a fine blue shirt. Stiff boots rested upon vibrant leg wrappings. And beneath the fighter's kit was not one meant to know the troubles of fighting. Fair and harmonious, wise and cunning. If traces of life had a chance to live on once the Veil had let them be, it was that figure who carried them. Beneath the tools of war, beneath the dressings of nobility, beneath skin like cream, there coursed the blood of those who survive and those who push forth through hopeless odds.
What earthen-green eyes shine from behind that ghastly mask? he said to himself as he stepped towards the figure.
Nearby, Troíde lowered her head at let it rest upon the wall before which she stood. Sitting had become uncomfortable, and she had long become loathe to remain where she had settled. The weasel that lived in her hand danced wildly and she could not keep her concentration that would him still. It didn't matter, though. Even though Jynge had given them an antidote and Górin had led them to shelter, her own thoughts were wiser than what words others had given to her. Hope was a defense, but what defense could stop that could not be defended against
Long ago, when she was hardly more than eight and had been handed a sword for the first time, her aunt had taken her to a locked room and brought forth a large and ancient box. Within were many old trinkets of the family, heirlooms of the ladies of Elórdn. There, she handed Troíde a little hinged wooden panel. Opening it up, Troíde found many painted scenes, and her aunt informed her that the panel was painted by her and was her heirloom of choice to stow into the box.
The Box of the Blood, her aunt called it. Against impossible odds, the family had struggled against the curse, hopelessly seeking a way to rid themselves of the white fires that smoldered within their wombs. If the end of a daughter came and she had failed to break the curse upon herself, then the only blood she could pass on would be as an heirloom stowed within the Box, for the next daughter of Elórdn to behold. With tears and a shaking embrace, her aunt held Troíde and told her to hope, but never expect. In time, she would place a trinket of her own in the Box of the Blood, as a weak struggle against a cruel fate.
Troíde did not weep as she stood within High Ridge. Such a thing had been done quite enough, and the white flames could not be quenched by tears. The time of mourning a cursed life had come and gone for her. All that was left was rage. A bitter tension that crouched and waited for a trial to show itself.
Feeling that reluctance to remain still, she turned from the wall. She was not surprised when she saw that Górin stood not three paces away from her, but rather, she felt confusion. He was further away when she had gotten up? Why did he now stand as though speaking to her? She looked at him, and found the sudden focus difficult. For a few moments, it appeared as though there were two of him, swaying about the room as she struggled to concentrate. Even his eyes beneath the mask were hard to discern. Half open or half closed, she could not tell. The pale green lights beneath were shadowed heavily by the large black circles which widened within.
"How ridiculous it is that a man's seed cannot put out those flames. Like a bucket of water turning to steam when thrown upon a blaze!" she slurred, her head growing dizzy in the attempt to speak.
He must have said something in response, but she could not understand it. His words came out only as an uneven murmur, as if from a half-asleep man. Taking a step towards her, he raised his hand to the side of her head and placed his gloved palm against the wool of the cowl.
The rage that coiled within her neither sprung nor tightened, but it slithered in place. Like a snake shifting in its nest, no less or more tense than before. Raising her hands in turn, she reached for the knot of his belt, and began to undo it. With a final sudden thought, she looked around the room. Chuckling softly to herself, she thought of how embarrassing it would be if the other rangers or Jynge were to see her and the leader in such an arrangement.
True, only they now remained in the ground room of the tower, for the two hunters had long since made their descent down the ridge. Not wishing to waste any time, Dákk and Handor rushed down the slope and into the woodland below. Their footsteps were heavy and uneven. Little could be seen from atop the ridge and even less could be seen as they moved deeper into the swirling mist.
Handor had never seen any fog such as this before. Never even had he seen a Veil with his own eyes before. It was not so bad, the more he thought of it, just merely a hindrance to the senses. He thought of Górin's anxious words as well as all of the warnings he had received from so many other rangers throughout his time. He fearfully, if tenuously, believed them once, but now that he beheld a Veil in full? He chuckled at the memories and of the cowards who would fear such a thing.
It did not take long for him to reach the flat grounds beneath the ridge, and when he did, Dákk was not far behind, stumbling and darting his eyes from side to side as though trying to spot something in the mist. Handor narrowed his eyes as he looked past his companion. Only just faintly for a brief instant could he see the dark pinnacle of High Ridge atop the slope; a distant finger on a flat hand. Through thick mist it appeared, and just as quick as he caught sight of it, the mists obfuscated it once more.
"Ha!" Handor said loudly to his friend as he continued onward, though he paid him no mind, "Stumble not in your footsteps, man of the heartlands. The hunt has only begun and we must be onward!"
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He had hardly finished his words when he suddenly felt something beneath his feet. In his haste, he could not catch his balance over the heavy thing, and tripped forward, landing amongst the grass and leaves. The world around him spun violently as he heaved deep breaths and tried to push himself upright. In his daze, he heard the distant footsteps behind him gradually slow to a stop.
"An ill omen," the voice of Dákk hissed, "Is this gruesome sight he who has fallen from the tower?" Handor's head ached as he tried to make sense of what words his companion uttered. An omen? Fallen from the tower? He frowned as he thought about what he could mean. With an exhausting turn, he raised himself to his knees and looked behind to what it was that he fell over.
His companion stood there, transfixed upon the mass upon the ground. A corpse, or part of it? Where were the legs? Why was it so torn? Handor had meant to rise up to his feet, but as his went to the carcass, the thought left him. All thoughts left him. What reason there was had moved away in place of drive. He felt himself grow numb at the sight. All feeling left his body, and awe took hold of his perception.
The carcass lay before him, and yet it still breathed. Perhaps the broken chest itself did not move as it breathed, but there around Handor, life permeated through the air like smoke. He grew dizzy as it passed through him nearly as easily as if he had no solid form at all. Through whatever ability he possessed, he reached out in an attempt to take hold of that life and bring it close, keeping it for himself.
Numbness was spread throughout his entire being, but numbness itself can be broken. Deep within his spirit, a great hunger rose. Not an aching of the belly, but a ravenous beast that dances within the boundaries of the mind. It spread throughout his chest, it wracked at his belly, it sent his mind into frenzy. His breaths were heavy and deep. Beneath his fingers, the carcass caved at his piercing touch. Life flowed through its dry veins. Sustenance rested among its rotten flesh. The hunger called at him, and Handor opened his jaws in anticipation. He lowered his head slowly, nearly frantic with excitement. The hunger danced.
A faint noise from above sounded out, as though someone said something, and then there was a rush of footsteps. It grew silent, and Handor paid it no more attention. The sudden rush of movement in the space around him only dizzied his head further, and he groaned at the disorientation. Below, the corpse lay still. He placed his trembling fingertips along its leathery grey flesh and breathed in heavily. All dried and rotten, it seemed to be. This would not do.
The life faded, and Handor's thoughts came back for a time. Where had it gone to? Why did this carcass lose its life? He growled in frustration as the hunger gnawed at his body. Unlike him, it could not reason nor could it question. It needed to be fed. He needed to feast. Fury shook at his core, and he stared down at the corpse. How could such a sweet and tangible life escape from his grasp when it lay beneath his fingers? He dug into the hard skin, but it did not so much as scratch.
His breathing became strained as a terrible stress overwhelmed his balance. For a time, the presence of life had allowed his hunger to dance like a rapturous priest upon bruised and swollen feet. It never left him, but it did not hurt his mind nor body. Now that the tempting presence of life was gone, all that remained was the hunger. Like a humiliated dancer left suddenly in silence and stillness as the players all quickly cease their music. Pain and panic spread from a minute point within his spirit, and it trailed endlessly throughout his being.
Handor gasped loudly, feeling as though a great hole had been suddenly bored through his chest. He started from where he knelt, flinching and moving his body back. Back to simply upon his knees, he might have forgotten the carcass lay there before him, and it would have made no difference. For what good is a vessel if life has left it to the wayside? Pain shot through his body as he knelt there, shaking. Then he saw it.
In the distant mist, in the heights above the near ground and in the lows beneath the grey void. For only a moment, the sight of a wary and lonely roe appeared to Handor's eyes, but he felt its presence before it appeared and after it vanished. There ahead, life glowed. Blood flowed. The image of the roe remained clear in his mind if nothing else could be formed, then. In an instant it had appeared and vanished in the shimmering fog, and yet Handor might as well have been staring at under in the midday sun on a cloudless day.
The memory of the vision but a moment ago remained fixed in Handor's mind. Nearly as soon as it had begun, the pain that afflicted him ceased. In its place was that same hungering dance that had departed only so short a time ago. What only thoughts he could manage led him to no reckoning or reasoning, but only to reach for the knife that hung at his belt. There was no hesitation, nor was there effort. He didn't even wonder at his choice or his method when he flung the blade ahead into the fog. Nor did he think to follow a plan when he sprang to his feet immediately after, and sprinted with a frightening haste in the direction of the roe.
Perhaps he might have understood more clearly what the pained cry of the beast before him meant, had such things been the case. Yet they were not, and whatever sounds of the sort came to his senses as he darted through the woods was met with only primal focus and a force of instinctual direction.
The hunger moved him, it gave him that strength which sustenance could never give. As he ran on in wild ecstasy, grinning madly, he gave a call of his own to meet that of the wounded prey. A hunter's call. One of the chase, of impending doom, and beneath it all, a furious hungering rage.
The call echoed many times throughout the land, turning in many ways left and right, but rarely straightforward. Dákk stopped quickly in his tracks as the twisting sound spun around him, obscuring its origin. He bent to catch his breath and try to make sense of the letters that swam in the air before him, but so quickly they moved and danced from trail of mist to bark of tree that he could rarely read one in full before it transformed once again. It was like trying to take in all of the shadows of a tree’s leaves upon the ground in a single moment before they can change once again.
Still, he ran and ran. The great voice that appeared once as a distant echo was not one he had ever managed to locate in his time. He cared little that such a spectral voice had come to find its way out so far as High Ridge, but if it had come to him out on his ventures into the wilds before, then there was no reason to doubt these circumstances. As he sprinted through the woodland, venturing into deeper and deeper grounds, a thought came to him. A realization, actually. It only made perfect sense that he should behold the voice here of all places. Whatever fair lady’s voice it was that sounded throughout the empty lands was often elusive and always sought but never found. To make her home within the boundaries of a Veil did not only seem likely, it seemed almost right. Dákk ceased his running for a moment when the direction of the voice’s origin suddenly became difficult to determine. His chest ached and he breathed heavily. It was well that he stopped when he did, for the momentary rest calmed his nerves, and like an eye gaining its focus in the sudden sunlight, he beheld the letters and words that surrounded him.
CROSSINGLISTENOVERLAIDLAYERDIVIDINGONEOVERTHEOTHERSPLITTINGMURDERCONJUNCTIONFEASTDEVOURRUNDEARFRIENDROTCRUNCHTHICKMISTFOUL
Amidst the letters, lights flickered in hues of green and grey. The world seemed as though he were looking at it through a piece of bent glass. In a moment, his attention was seized by his understanding that he was looking at the world through bent glass. Laughing at his foolishness, he turned his head and felt the great cowl shift about his head, neck, and shoulders. The leather mask pulled at his face. Reaching up, he undid the fastenings of the headpiece and pulled it from his head. He took a deep breath.
It was as though he had suddenly raised himself up from beneath a murky water. In moments alone, the words around him became as clear as ink drawn from a needle pen. The lights shone ever brighter. He laughed in relief and nostalgia. It hurt as a child for the Order to acknowledge his sensitivities, yet find them inadequate to admit him to their tutelage, but he came to put it behind him. The visions, of course, he did not have to leave behind. He laughed at their foolishness. Inadequate perhaps, but for him, it was enough. The visions came seldom, these days, and never so intense as this. Though the words which he beheld troubled him, he cared little in that moment.
Standing there in rest, as his strength returned he began to hear the fair voice call him once more, distantly. Tucking his mask into his baldric, he sprinted ahead. For a time, all he heard was that faint voice, speaking some and singing otherwise. It filled his thoughts and his heart. Whatever proximity he needed to enter to comprehend the words, he would pursue, he vowed. All the while, other sounds came to him from the woodland, and he cast the consideration of them away without so much as a first thought. The beastly cries of the hunt did not so much as catch even a moment of his attention. The shrill whistle from afar might as well have been just a trilling of the wind.
The unexpected and sudden whistle broke Górin away from his focus for just a moment. Once it began, it wavered sharply on for a moment before quickly ceasing, and a span of breath passed before it resumed once again with vigor. It rang down from the higher levels of the tower, and echoed many times against the stone walls. He frowned and ground his teeth. I thought that she had gone to do her own thing, he thought in annoyance, Not create a senseless racket. The whistling would not stop, even after he felt two hands wrap around his waist and a muffled voice from below urging him to keep going. This too? He grumbled and looked down. First the whistling and now this. She isn't even paying attention, he thought as he looked at Troíde's heavy-lidded eyes behind her mask. The whistling wouldn't stop and it offended his ears. He felt the expelled anxieties sneak through the open door of his thoughts, and felt the sinking begin in his chest again. No! he thought, There are no whistles, there is no Veil. Only her moans, only her flesh. Only the safety and peace of her gentle touch. With an exasperated and forceful sigh, he redoubled his efforts and continued. The whistling continued, and Troíde began to moan again.
In time, she no longer wished to remain beneath, and twisted so that he lay upon his back and she sat atop him. Just as a horseman would ride a darting horse from a land of death to a land of salvation, she thus rode him. When the time came and Górin began to struggle beneath her, she felt the cinders within grow in anticipation. He gave a sigh that could only come from one suddenly freed from the terrible omens which loom about him, even if only in freedom for a brief moment. Alongside that sigh, she felt his seed enter her. She did not weep when she felt the white cinders suddenly ignite. Nor did she weep when she felt them cruelly burn away a future of hope that her womb would have grown. No ash remained, no steam trailed upwards. There was only the faint consideration of what could have been. Her dry eyes grew hard, and she looked out into the dim grey stone about her. For as much as she strove to see the light that the campfire offered, a cold darkness was ever the more present. Shadows trailed about the chamber, and through the curtained entryway, they danced along in the air as streaming wisps of darkness.
The wisps spun in one direction and then another, but mostly, they came from all around. As Dákk sat with his back towards the tree, breathing heavily and shaking, he watched as the thousand images flickered among the trails in the mist. The fog went forth, and it went onward, deeper into the miniscule points at the edges of his vision. Hanging on to the trails were the many images of things formed from his memories into conceptions of that which was to come. Unable to close his eyes or divert his attention away from the gruesome and frightening images, his mouth hung open and a low murmur left him, forming no words, and with no thought behind it. The world around him turned to red as his dizziness nearly maddened him and the images collected together to form sights of carcasses and broken piles of torn meat and flesh. His vision suddenly lurched forward as the scent of warm blood came to him. Gasping in between convulsions, he gazed out left to right, trying to locate the scent. Yet, he could not do it, for it came all about. In moments, he began to sweat, and a strange wave of relief came over him, though it lasted for only a short moment.
The relief welled up like a rising tide, but like a waterfall, it fell unhindered to the depths below. The fight was over, and the deer lay slowly dying at Handor's feet. It bled from the arrow wound in the chest, from the knife wound not far away, and from the many scrapes it had received when Handor grabbed and wrestled it to the ground. It's leg shook in short bursts, and it choked grotesquely. Yet Handor had been careful not to let the hunger distract him. He knew that life was fleeting, and just as before, it could flee from his taloned grip upon it. Sinking down to his bruised knees, he bent over the deer and laid his hands upon its twitching neck. He quickly removed his mask and drank in the intoxicating scent of blood, prey, and life. In a single ravenous motion, he fell upon the deer and began to feast. It was not long after his teeth began ripping meat from flesh that the deer expired, but Handor joyously laughed, for the life had left the deer, but it had not escaped from his hunger.
The laughter sounded widely throughout the ridge, for Handor had felled the deer in an open clearing, not far from the slopes. It reverberated far and high, each burst echoing many times. Some went in odd directions, and some went for a time, but eventually came to be carried upon the wind, far down throughout the hills. One echo came to find its way up to High Ridge and to the rooftop of the decrepit tower that was built there long ago. Upon that rooftop stood a witch of Irka, caught in the process of blowing through a blade of dried grass. Her attempts at sending a sound up to where the bells hung had so far been futile, but she had not been ready to give up just yet. It was when she was in the middle of catching her breath that the single echo of distant laugher came to her ears, and stopped her in her tracks. Just as the bells had suddenly ceased to ring as Jynge had raised her head out of the rooftop passage, the single sound ceased, and the world around her was left in silence.
She looked all around. She went from side to side of the rooftop. Curiosity arose in her as she looked down and marveled at the endless grey depths below the tower. How many thousands of steps had she gone up to reach such a height, she wondered. In one direction, there was only an endless expanse of nothing, like a formless ocean. All that remained was the peak of the tower, and the twisting grey aether around her. Jynge's frantic smile faded, leaving her wide-eyed and without words. She ran to one broken pillar. Then to another. Faster she ran, in circles. Over and over. In desperation, she unfastened the latching of her mask and went to examining each pillar as she passed. Several circles. Soon, she no longer bothered to look closely. Only to move in circles. Over and over again. It was long before she collapsed where she stood and gazed up at the grey sky. In time, as the endless swaying of her senses went on, her thoughts failed her and she drifted off to sleep.