Just as you predicted, the rain moved in within a few hours of you and your father reaching your hunting grounds. Between seeking shelter from torrential downpours and finding your final hide spot, Tyrriel pointed out the yellowing grass of a well-worn deer path, asking you, “How long ago was the last deer through here?”
You take a moment, pick the closest side of the path to you, look for broken saplings, or tufts of fir in the edging brambles. You find a couple of snapped off leaves, but no fir. Looking up into the low hanging branches of the surrounding trees, you see three of four leaves surrounded by green brethren starting to yellow where small snags had been torn from them.
“The buck was probably through here two to three days ago, maybe less considering the cold.”
Tyrriel nods. “Which way?”
The snagged leaves the perfect indicator as you wave your hand along the path. “That way.”
“You want to set the hide here, or move down trail?”
The raised brow over his left eye gave you pause before you begrudgingly answered with what sounded more like a questioning, “Neither?”
At that, Tyrriel smirked as if fighting a full smile. “Why not?”
You step away from him in answer. Careful not to disturb everything as you move, you step over the path toward the cliff face mere paces from the trail. Examining the strata, you notice picked over wildberry vines clinging to its surface, still bearing up a few unripened pebbles. Turning to face your father, you signal, just like he taught you, that you should move up the trail toward the nearest fork then set up the hide there.
He crooks his head, then nods in agreement, moving parallel with you up the pathway. As you walk in silence, you follow the cliffside in your periphery, seeing the crag in the crest well before you came to it. Having been this way before, you’d spent many days climbing up and down the rockface, slipping in and out of the crack in the rocks as you chased critters all the while. You sense Tyrriel smile at you but don’t look at him for fear of chasing away his joyful memory of watching you play. You wish you could get back to that innocent place with him, but trust is a rare commodity for you these days.
Up ahead, you see the fork split, but it might as well be a clearing for all the shelter it would provide. Fortunately, you know precisely where the washout is between the two trail tines. Unfortunately, that means setting the ambush in the run-off. From Tyrriel’s expression, it’s clear to see that he likely guessed this was your plan all along. You begin to prickle with heat around the edges as you remember seeing that jaunty little head tilt of his before he wordlessly followed your lead. He knew the outfall would be flooded. He knew you’d never be able to set up a proper blind in this spot. He knew it!!! And yet he let you fail anyway.
The knowing smirk Tyrriel wore shifts to a hard line as his eyes solidify into a threat more menacing than you’ve ever seen; a promise to match you, anger for anger and rage for rage, right here, right now. The intimidation you suddenly feel bleeds some of the spunk from your resolve, but you dare not break eye-contact first. Your father or not, he will not see you as too weak to confront him. Perhaps that’s why what he does next catches you so off guard.
Expecting, and ready, to stand there for an age, he just shakes his head, exasperation clear in the firm set of his angled jaw and elevated eyebrow. Settling back on his heels, he makes it clear you’re not a threat to him before motioning to you to “turn around,” while crossing his arms with impatience.
There’s a perfect hide spot some fifteen paces up the hillside providing overwatch from atop the cliff. You get the impression he also knew this was here too. You close your eyes instantly irritated with yourself before you feel his hand on your shoulder. The shock of the gentle touch pulls your eyes to his. He no longer looks angry or irritated, only patiently resigned to let you settle your thoughts without interfering as he simply nods and shrugs toward the location for your approval. With your affirmative nod, he wastes no time silently setting off toward the hill, leaving you there alone to wrestle through the turmoil of your own thoughts as he begins setting up the blind you’ll both be sharing for at least the next few hours, possibly more.
In deliberate stillness, you waited. As the rain once again began sheeting over you, you waited. Even after your father placed the last bit of timber atop the final rock, you waited… and waited. The blind was perfect. Blending into the hilltop, it looked like nothing more than a clump of rocks and detritus the tree had been relentlessly pressing from the ground from since it was a sapling. You’re more than a little impressed by Tyrriel’s craftsmanship. Truth be told, you now wish you’d have been up there to learn everything you could. Pride and rage, however, brew a potent potion against prudence of mind, and you’re resolved not to move even one foot until he tells you it’s ready. Standing there in the cold and damp, you’ve begun to ache from the effort. Unsure how much time it’s actually taken to assemble your lean-to shelter, you now feel every piercing second you’ve stood there down to the marrow in your bones.
You watch as Tyrriel slips in under the moss flap casting the slim opening in immutable shadow. Within, you see only the slightest edges of his huntsman’s form as he twists into position, ready to stubbornly wait out this game trail’s own resilience to his masterful deception. Only when he is settled, do you hear the songbird trill issue from the treetop above the hide. You can’t help but smile at the thought of your father turning the spell-stone in his hand. You swear you almost see the tiniest flicking of sunlight glint through the form of some loose spell-frame as it moved up into the treetop letting free another trill, your signal to finally join him in the hide.
That first step is equal measures anguish and liberation. Every ounce of tension you’d employed to remain a “tree amongst trees,” as your father would say, lances through every strained fiber of muscle as you fall into motion. Despite the physical discomfort, you still move with unique grace, entering the blind just as your father had. Unfortunately, your swing brought the moss curtain down full over the entrance dropping the two of you into complete darkness. In the fully blacked-out space, your vision shifts, taking in only the cold spectrum of colors: greens, blues, violets. It almost feels like an inversion of reality as your own hands take on a deep purple sheen speckled with a nearly black hue of tiny blue dots. Your father’s face looks more the color of bluish charcoal in the dimness, a stark reminder of just how different you two are from one another.
The color change does little to hide Tyrriel’s sudden annoyance, however, as he points his brow-raised side-eye in your general direction. Taking the hint, you close your eyes and fall directly into the trance-focus your mother has been teaching you. You feel the weave of energies you’ve been able to see since you can remember flowing in endless streams around you. Beneath you, you sense the gray earthen press of life push relentlessly past you, unconcerned about your presence, until you drop your fingertips into the loamy moss padding packed beneath you. Calling forth a growth form, you give sudden life to your shelter, entrenching it into the permanence of your surroundings to ensure proper hold over the moss shroud draped over the window. With the earth around you firmly in hand, you shift back the curtain once more, shedding enough light on your situation that your father can see.
You hear Tyrriel exhale softly. Opening your eyes, you see much more of the color spectrum, but no shift of light could hide the guarded grimness of his grave expression. Feeling as if you simply can’t win, you go back to pointedly not engaging him, staring back into the forest. You can still feel him looking at you, but stubborn is as stubborn does, and you’re – once again – resolved. Even if you wanted to say something, it’s not as if you’re allowed to speak aloud out here anyway; you’re on the hunt. So it is, the two of you will spend this next stretch of eternity remaining vigilantly on the lookout for any form of distraction to take you blessedly away from the uncomfortable edge of your disquiet.
For hours, the storm drives home the fact that nothing wants to be out in this weather, especially you. Tyrriel has been quiet, though he still looks over to you from time to time. You, on the other hand, have continued being obstinate.
Barely an hour into the waiting, you were ready to start looking around at your father’s handy work. While your spell had “shorn up the edges,” so to speak, Tyrriel was a real pro. You wondered, not for the first time, if he’d gone out like this with his father. You assumed so. Or else, where would he have picked up all this knowledge? One of the biggest surprises, you noticed while fixing the blind after you climbed in. Your father, it seemed, had spread thick peat mats both above and below you. This novel idea was one you would definitely have to make use of when the time came for you to go out on your own. The natural connection between the moss and the detritus all surrounding your hide made it the perfect material for you to shape as you did. Even if you’d not had to make repairs, the moss would have provided both some relative protection from the excess rainwater, as well as almost entirely mask your smell from any prey that happened to pass nearby. It worked well enough that you didn’t even smell the dried venison your father was holding right under your nose until he inexplicably coughed to get your attention. The scathing look of rebuke you shot him was quickly tempered once you realized he was holding food under your nose, also pointedly not looking at you either.
Taking it from his fingers with your teeth, you had a sudden irrational urge to bite him. The moment the thought entered your mind, you felt his eyes on you again. You imagined his expression was pensive but fixed stern, as if daring you to do it. You didn’t. Despite an overwhelming desire to do so, you… you just didn’t.
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Hours later, you’re still wondering why you didn’t just act on impulse. You’ve been back and forth about whether you should have, ultimately settling on, “Why give him the satisfaction? He obviously expected me to. Why else hold it in my face like that?” Through the blind rage seething through you, you fail to see that the rain had almost entirely let up; fail to see the shadow play across the maples just yards across the path from you; fail to recognize just how still Tyrriel has gone beside you. Still, blind as you may be, you’re not deaf, as the slightest snap of a limb just outside of your shelter brings your vision sharply back into focus.
The rain has cleared out. Birds and squirrels are chirping and chittering throughout the whole of the forest. You hear a soft hoof clop land in the middle distance, still out of sight. Your body is coiled in anticipation, ready to pounce from the blind and ambush your prey. Your father, next to you, gently brushes your hand with his fingertips drawing your gaze to his. His expression is stony, a passive mask that, as he shakes his head, causes something inside of you to deflate. You know he’s telling you to relax, you almost hear that damned mantra again, “Breathe deep… just breathe.” You feel your eyes turn to slits causing him to press more firmly upon your hand, his head moving back and forth with deliberate slowness, clearly telling you not to go. Your body only compresses tighter, and then you see it, a massive hoof entering your field of view, pawing at the ground, foraging for food.
The tension is too much, the impulse too great to control as you bolt free of the hide. The moment you’re in the open, you realize you’ve made a grave mistake.
Before you stands a sylvian buck, brindle grey, majestic, sacred in these woods, and at least twice as tall as your father. Instantly, you note the fifty or so points that tip the massive creature’s vast set of antlers. Bejeweled strands of starvine interlace the tines of his crown. His thick-necked, broad-shouldered stance shifts from impressively sleek to imposingly menacing as he cranes his anvil of a head toward you, leering, head held high and imperial… until something more significant that you suddenly spooks him.
Behind you, you hear the whisper of cloth against cloth as Tyrriel slips quickly from the blind, the creak of a drawn bow drags your attention to your left. Atop the cliffside, you see the real threats come into view. Three giant wolves stand on the ridge, the alpha perched over the ledge as if to direct the assault. Your ears perk up then as you hear signaling yips informing that alpha that the pack is in place.
Half panicked, you glance around, finding your father has the alpha lined up for a desperation shot. His dark eyes are full of fear, but his sharp jaw is locked in determination as he clips out in an all but imperceptible whisper, “RUN!!!”
The damp air pumping through your lungs feels laced with acid as you careen over boulders, under branches, and through the endless brush. You feel like you’ve been on the run for miles, fleeing from the rhythmic thrum of paws eating up the ground behind you. Despite countless tries to take refuge in the trees, you’ve not been able to gain enough ground to climb. Fretfully, you remember your lessons in shadow stepping through the trees of the grove, but as your feet drive you ever onward, you’re too scared at this moment even to attempt such a thing.
Ahead of you, the stag darts left then immediately right. You leap for a low branch to whip yourself around a copse of trees only to find yourself flung into the shadowed heart of a fallen oak. On pure instinct, you drift through the shadow and into “the slip,” the space between spaces. Swiveling quickly around, you see everything in this space in a bleak negative of greys. The smoke grey shadows of the pursuing wolves are brilliant against the charcoal backdrop of this place. Set outside of space and time, you begin to feel the drift of energies surrounding you fighting to project you back into the world of the real. Still, you know you have some time to decide what to do.
Running through your options, you could try to catch the hart bounding away ahead of you, but you’d likely be putting you both in greater danger. Here, in the slip, you note the pace of the wolves has slowed from a loping sprint to a brisk walk. Usually, you’d have simply waited till they’d passed, but the building pressure on your body tells you that you have precious little time left here to hide. If you’re ejected now, you’ll be dropped right in the middle of the pack then painfully ripped apart.
Quickly, you begin pressing upstream against the wave of wolves. Though virtually incorporeal, the shadows buffet you as they pass, making it harder and harder to remain in the slip space. Up and to your left, the massive shade of several elms clumped together promise likely your best option against the being spotted by any stragglers at the back of the pack. In two bounds, you scramble, utterly weightless, up to the protection of the shadows above just as your hold on the slip fails, and you’re dropped back into the here and now. Below you, the last of the three wolves bounds away without even slowing.
Looking around, you take a deep breath only to realize you’re in strange territory. Waiting till the echoes of the pack are far beyond what you can hear, you finally decide to drop to the ground. In your exhausted state, your drop is more kin to a fall. As you tumble hard into the dirt, you scrape your sides all down the clump of elm trees, take an errant limb up under your chin, and slamming the back of your head against a rock. By the time you shake the stars from your vision, you see by the orange evening sunset that the damp ground is a dark mottled black and grey of death.
In the next instant, two things happen. From the shadow of the fallen oak you slipped into, a female figure immerges, clad loosely in a gossamer cream gown. With every step, the sheer fabric of her dress hypnotically undulates, her footfalls glide effortlessly across the course woodland detritus as if it were a bed of peat or a woolen blanket. The strange woman’s pale chestnut visage is strikingly beautiful, though slightly gaunt and full of sadness. You understand in an instant that she, much like your own mother, is a grove maiden, a woodland guardian born – if her demeanor was any proof – to specifically protect this grove. As she strides to you with ethereal grace, the danger you thought you were in dramatically pales in comparison to this.
From behind you, a hand gently sets down on your shoulder. Despite its intent to comfort you, the shock of being touched draws an involuntary squeak of surprise. Scrambling toward the safety of the trees, you turn to see the bloodied showcase of battle wounds that is your father. With a finger pressed to his lips, warning you to remain quiet, he does not take his eyes off the strange woman. You watch the exchange in silence, obedient for once in your life.
“I am Tyrriel. My daughter and I were hunting far from here when we were set upon by wolves after our game.”
The woman’s face goes eerily whimsical for a moment as she speaks, “The sylvian are sacred. They are forbidden prey. The wolves are foolish to pursue, but not nearly as foolish as you. You should have known better. Still, I have little doubt that the hart got away this time. It’s a shame they won’t be able to say the same for you.”
You can hear the tinkle in her tone, see the shape of magic around the full lips of her mouth. It triggers something primal in you; territorial, as a different kind of fear begins to sink in.
As the woman steps closer, your father pulls you forcefully to your feet by the scruff of your cloak. “We know the law. We’d assumed the deer was just a deer, nothing special or significant. We certainly would never harm a sylvian, doe, buck, or fawn.”
She chuckles, saying, “It is easy, huntsman, to deny one’s malicious intentions in the face of justifiable wrath. I might have believed you if you’d not set your hand to your bow but moments ago.”
Shock spreads over Tyrriel’s face, his hands gesturing to his blood-spattered gear as he replies. “I was fending off wolves.”
Smiling magnanimously, she gives another light laugh. “I mean no offense, huntsman, but there is no blood on the haft of your bow from defending yourself as you say.” Huskily, she adds, “The weapon only tells me of the heat of your touch and strength in your grip.”
“I have other weapons.” Tyrriel growls.
She snickers, “Oh… of that, I’m sure.”
“What difference does it make what I used?”
Her smile is all but faded as she rebuttals. “You say you know the law, then you know that intent to commit an act carries the same weight as following through with committing that act. I’ve no doubt, you slew only ‘what was necessary’ to ensure your survival. Still, our laws are clear, and you were seen in pursuit of the stag. There must be consequences.”
Tyrriel pulls you behind him, futilely countering, “The only thing I pursued was my daughter as she fled for her life from wolves.”
“And she survives, I see.” The woman’s eyes meet yours directly, for the first time. They are so dark green that they appear black behind her sunset silhouette. As she examines you, you feel somehow unworthy of her gaze, a lesser being fit for slaughter. “Remarkable,” she says with a toothy smile. I’d almost believe you, huntsman. Indeed, you must cherish her, but believe me when I say, she is the most dangerous thing in these woods. Do you not see it, or does she have you under her spell?” Gliding a step toward him, she mock-whispers, “You are in no danger from me, huntsman.” Her shifting tone now an enchanting melody, “Leave her here, in my care, and all is forgiven. You’ll be free to live out your days as you had before you came across her. Besides, we both know it was really her chasing down the deer.”
You notice her smile falter as Tyrriel gives her his signature brow raised smirk, as he mock-whispers back, “The only danger she’s ever posed is to my calm.” You close your eyes in sudden exasperation that cuts through the fear. Did your dad… just make a joke?
Stepping you both back a pace, Tyrriel’s tone with the matron becomes all business, “She and I are innocent in all this, and you know it. I don’t know what your motives are here, but I suggest you let us return home.”
Your eyes open in the light of this woman’s failure, you see the frame of her glamor is all but gone. She looks… tired. She is still beautiful, but she is weak and pitiful as she squeaks, “I… I cannot. You cannot leave.”
Seeing her like this, in this exposed state, nearly breaks your heart. Heedless of your father’s warnings, you speak out. “You need help. You’ve been hurt.”
The woman’s face goes instantly livid. “I need no help from the likes of an abomination like you, child.”
The venom in her words is acidic, sending you reeling on your heels. Catching you, Tyrriel draws you back behind him, steadies you, then plants himself firmly in front of you. You expect to get a reproachful glare, but he still refuses to tear his eyes from the maiden. Taking a final breath, he lets fly, “She is my blood. Her mother, like you, is a grove maiden, a matron… and my wife.”
This brings the matron before you up short, her expression going flat and waxen as all glamor of her former beauty fades. “You…” she stammers out, visibly shaking, “… are a liar.” In the blink of an eye, she is on top of him. You feel yourself fall back through the center of the stand of elms that you’d just tumbled from moments before, again scraping up your sides and elbows from the force of being thrust away by your father.
Frozen in fear, you watch as your father goes alone to war against the grove maiden. The ferocity in her eyes is wild, her flesh taking on the texture of tree bark, her fingertips elongating to sharp and deadly claws at the ends of her hands. To your horror, in mere moments, your father’s already lacerated leathers are becoming flayed scraps of useless hide under the dryad’s careful attention. Your breath hitches in your chest as you are suddenly faced with the all too real possibility of watching your father die before your eyes.