>
> “What’s beyond the big lake?” Ebhen asked his mother and she paused at her table, mixing vials spread over its surface, some still bubbling and their colors all the hues of the rainbow. Some he knew, others she wouldn’t allow him to touch.
>
> ‘You’re too young and this path must come to you. Or it won’t. Not the other way around.’
>
> Her old ways and stories of doom and gloom. Ebhen wished he could understand her more, but even if he could speak her tongue, some things about her were shrouded in mystery.
>
> Like her name.
>
> ‘The Realm listens’, she always cautioned him. ‘What you speak aloud creeps ever closer. Life is a maze dear, but there are roads out of it, you don’t want to take.’
>
> "Well?" He insisted.
>
> “Another human city,” she replied cautiously, rapping her long nails on the table.
>
> “Is my father there?”
>
> “Your father… was unimportant,” she murmured staring at her fingers. “A lapse in judgement on a feverish summer night. Loneliness getting the better of an old soul and the Gods intervening to have their laugh with me.”
>
> “I want to visit him,” Ebhen insisted stubbornly and got up. A black cat approached him, but the cat wasn’t real. He kicked it away just the same. “I want to make friends, away from this place.”
>
> “We visit Pascor,” she reminded him. “You don’t like it.”
>
> That town was a fucking dump, but that wasn’t the main reason for not liking it.
>
> Ebhen showed her his bare arm, the shirt he wore one of her old robes cut and turned into a small tunic for him. “Not my people.”
>
> “Neither are those beyond the lake,” she told him and got up to approach him. His mother was tall and gracious, long flowing mostly purple and blue hair, with some white in them. She cupped both sides of his face and brought her forehead near his. The long finger tracing his ears, stopping at the pronounced tips, nowhere near as elongated as hers, but different if one paid them close attention. “They’ll never love you.”
>
> “Unless?” Young Ebhen croaked sensing there was more to it.
>
> “There’s a path,” his mother murmured and touched her soft lips on his forehead. “That may give you what you seek, but it’s full of dangers.”
>
> “What else?” he probed stubbornly and she pulled away with a deep sigh.
>
> “Fame, trinkets… sex,” Ebhen frowned, as he didn’t care about that.
>
> “You will,” she said, reading his mind.
>
> “What else?”
>
> “Friends, lots of travels,” she replied after a small pause. “A life away from me.”
>
> Ebhen longed for all those things.
>
> But he loved her also. She was the only person he really knew.
>
> “You could come with me,” he offered eagerly, already smiling at the prospect.
>
> “I can’t,” his mother had told him sadly. “I must wait here, for the raiders will come this way again. By the time it’s over, I fear you’ll be long gone.”
>
> “How do you know? It hasn’t happened yet. Many roads remember mum?” Ebhen countered curious and she’d looked away to hide her tears, strained voice coming out a whisper.
>
> “I’ve seen your stupid statue in all of them.”
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Nard
Maiden’s War
Part III
-Crabs & Hag’s Garden-
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Shhh, the Hag whispered in his head. Let me hear this part.
“What’s across the mere, fish boy?” The Crab soldier asked, black face covered in week’s old growth white as snow. Eyes a sickly yellow and skin cracked from exposure to the elements. Nard turned his eyes beyond the edge of the old stone path, the stones unseen, sunk deep under soft mud and cut grass. The old Willow trees standing crooked over the shallow still water, their weirdly leafed branches touching it at spots and blocking the view of the land behind them.
“More trees,” Nard replied and hopped over a fallen trunk, landing on the trotted path cut through the Fenlands. The Duke had built bridges and brought wagons upon wagons of large boulders to elevate the terrain, poured gravel and crushed stone to beat back the bog, but each season the mud gained more ground. The terrain was traversable all the way from the Isle, if one didn’t mind getting a little wet and Nard didn’t mind.
You just followed the scrubs and the cattails, the brighter green road marking the real path, as the larger black-barked trees couldn’t grow on the hard packed terrain underneath the mud. The Duke’s efforts were partially successful in that regard.
“How the fuck does Pascor get these type of trees here?” The marine from Tollor grunted eyeing the ominous misty grove beyond the flooded path they were following. A Captain had asked him the same question a couple of days back. Nard didn’t know. That is, he kind of knew, but he wasn’t going to tell them.
Shhh, boy. You hear that? Silence is bliss. And rare. Uhm.
She always could do that. Speak to you without anyone noticing. Nard believed she did it to everyone visiting the Fenlands, but the grownups were too prideful to admit it. Sometimes she would come to his dreams if she was bored. Nard had touched her once in his dreams. Though she looked a bit different then. Her skin was cool and slick like porcelain. Her hair were white like a purebred Issir, but with purple strands in it. That skin a pale white and flawless, but for the small blue veins at her wrists and the sides of her heavy breasts.
She had come to him naked.
Nard hadn’t told anyone about it. It wasn’t pride, or fear, because there was plenty of the latter, but pure greed. He didn’t want to share the moment with anyone else.
“Are you deaf?” The Crab soldier snapped and grabbed him by the shoulder. Nard snaked away from him. “Fucking weirdo.”
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“Aye, these people are right creepy,” his friend agreed with a grimace. A younger man, wearing that same armour. Issirs from Tollor. They have taken his father. Snatched him from their fishing boat and onto their big ships. Red crabs painted on their banners and armed to their teeth.
They are up to no good Nard, his father had warned him. You do what they say now and worry not about me.
So Nard had brought them to the Duke’s place near the edge of the Fenlands. Showed them the paths and kept his mouth shut for the whole way. Eighty had gone to Pascor, but only ten had returned. Not all of them had died there. The Wolffish was a harsh lord. Nobody really liked him, but you ain’t supposed to like your lord.
You are allowed to hate outsiders though, Nard thought.
Hate is a strong word hehe. Ah, just come over the water, the fish are sleeping.
They’ve taken my father! Nard retorted angrily and grinned stupidly at the scowling soldier. We need to get him back!
Joris is dead boy. We, are not a thing, she chuckled, a bird flying away from a branch breaking the stillness of the humid spot. It wasn’t quiet of course, but after a while you got used to the sounds of the swamp. Tuned them out. The usually permanent mist covering everything opting to stay around the inner island grove like a grey blanket.
The mist like everything else unnatural.
What? No! He had flinched in shock and the wary soldier narrowed his eyes.
How do you know?
Nard’s grin had turned into a snarl and the Tollor soldier frowned and glanced at the rest of his patrol, but they shrugged it off with a scoff. Their camp huge and quite some time down the opened path to the south. They had patrols covering the route to Pascor and watching for the Duke’s reaction. But they were few and far between mainly due to the distances involved. The Fenlands were a huge parch of land and water, the Isles tiny in comparison.
I caught a fat Wolffish yesterday and told me it had Joris for dinner.
Nard reached for his machete and freed it from the custom made rough leather sheath. He gripped it with his right hand tight and then started walking towards the group of armed soldiers talking amongst themselves about some operation and plunder.
One of the Crabs saw him approaching, a determined look on his tanned face, but didn’t think much of it. He turned to his friends again, four of them, to continue their discussion, but paused the words dying down abruptly.
Nard stopped himself and listened for the usual sounds of the bogs, but all he heard was a deafening silence. It made his ears ring.
“Uher’s light,” one of the Tollor marines gasped. “Where did she come from?”
Nard crooked his head from where he was standing, a couple of meters from the group, to see what they were seeing. There in the middle of the well-trotted muddy path, the woman of his dream stood. Only she didn’t look much like a woman now.
“What the fuck is that sprouting out of her head?” A soldier queried sounding bewildered. “Are those plaguin’ ears?”
“Oras hells,” another cursed equally stunned. “You’re god darn right sarge. Fuck!”
“Hey! You freak,” the third barked, a hand reaching for his blade. “Can you speak? Come over here!”
“I’m not getting in the water,” the Hag argued, her Common accent weird, but strangely pleasant, a strange gleam in her silvery large eyes.
Nard realized the patrol was standing much further to his left now, out of the path and waist deep in the shallow mere. The color of the suddenly wildly stirring water turning a dark red fast. The screams of the terrified men getting eaten alive disturbing the silent wilderness and erupting a thunderous response. Just like that birds started chirping loudly, insects clacking and buzzing, frogs croaking, snakes slithering unseen in the mud and the moist branches and tall grass moving with a hissing whisper at the touch of a soft breeze.
“The fish get mad, if you disturb them in their sleep,” the Hag elucidated with a shrug and used her long staff to shove a squeaking marine trying to get out of the water back in. The man’s lower body shredded apart, his bloody pants ruined and the flesh torn leaving the bones exposed. Another tried to escape crying desperately and she stooped over him as he crawled out using his arms and elbows to dig in the soft mud. The Hag grabbed his chin with her long fingers yanked it once to the side, the crack heard so clear, a numb Nard dropped his machete without realizing it. With a sigh, as if the dying men splashing about desperately in the shallows were annoying her, the Hag plucked the dead soldier’s right eye out casually and slurped it down her gullet.
“Mmm,” she let out a pleased hum and Nard’s stomach contents burst out of his mouth and nose so fast, he didn’t have time to direct the putrid torrent down. The Hag stared at him vomiting for a moment and then pointed a bloody thin finger at the gruesome site that had been an idyllic pond just moments ago. “Wash your mouth and face. Don’t drink from this spot,” she cautioned him. “But do bring me that torso that’s floating near. I haven’t had ribs in a while.”
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An hour later Nard was still near the tranquil waters, the bloody remains quickly devoured from the Fenlands fauna. A rare spotted jaguar had made an appearance, along a giant white snake that had just unfurled over the water hanging from a branch and examined the floating remains thoughtfully, before going away. The sounds of the Hag cracking the bones to reach at the fresh marrow surreal. He wanted to run away, but he was too scared to turn his back to her. So Nard had just stood there and watched her gnawing at the torso he’d brought out of the water for her.
Strangely the wolffishes had left him alone, just as she had predicted.
“There’s some left,” she told him, producing a cloth to wipe her bloody mouth. “Some preferred it as a roast, but you lose on the meat’s potency.”
Allgods.
“How long?” Nard croaked, a sabre added to his waistband along a couple of harpoons, he’d taken out of the water and tied over his back.
“They were in the water? Moments,” the Hag replied casually. “The spell breaks easily, if pain is inflicted… or pleasure,” she chuckled at the latter, finding humor where there was none.
“You didn’t look like this in the dream,” Nard noted with a grimace.
“You were too aroused to notice. It has happened before,” the disturbingly alluring and shapely Hag paused with a frown and got up. She was much taller than him and in his sixth and tenth year, Nard wasn’t a short young man. Her long pale blue robes dirty and covered in mud. “I had to move fast to intervene,” she explained seeing his eyes staying at her garbs. “I forget how sensitive your species can be to loss. Joris was a good boy. He used to bring me stuff when he was little.”
Nard licked his dry lips and attempted to step back, when she came closer to him. He failed, his legs unwilling to obey.
The Hag’s expressive eyes changed color, taking the muddy green of their surroundings for a moment afore returning to that gleaming liquid silver.
“Do you want to see my garden?” she asked with a smile. The twin fangs in her mouth scary and belonging to a predator. “It’s rather nice.”
“Ahm… all trees are the same,” Nard murmured not wanting to go with her.
“No they are not,” she replied with a glare. “That’s a silly notion.”
Nard glanced at the misty grove beyond the mere and gulped down nervously.
“Can I refuse?”
She frowned and stood back. “Mmm. No,” the exotic creature admitted. “You can’t.”
“Will you let me leave?”
“If I do, you’ll talk about it. It will get you killed Nard,” the Hag explained. “I don’t want that. You can hear me, not many can.”
Nard nodded and sighed. “You said it happened before,” he murmured and frowned seeing the mist expanding towards them. “What came of it?”
The Hag gave him her hand and he took it unsure.
“Ebhen,” she whispered reminiscing. “A divine gift to this realm.”
Nard followed her inside the shallows again, still apprehensive of the fishes swimming between his sunk legs.
“Was it? A gift?” Nard asked apprehensively, as crossing the water in the blind was the fastest way to get you killed in the Fenlands. Cajoling with the Hag being as dangerous, he supposed.
She paused and turned around to look at him for a long moment, lost in her thoughts. It ended with a gnarly smile that strangely had a lot of fondness in it, as much as it was familiar.
“Ebhen was a naughty boy,” the Hag explained. “So he went his own way.”
Familiar because it reminded Nard of his late mother.
“Where did he go?” he asked and felt her hand warming up, the feeling running up his arm and soothing his tired muscles.
“Home,” the Hag replied sadly and that was that.
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