The Yellow Bard and the Black Bellied God
Chapter 1: Who called the Fuzz?
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Chapter 1: Who called the Fuzz?
I should have expected misfortune to follow me into the woods. Maybe not as spectacular as falling to my death over a cliff with an anthropomorphic porcupine hot on my heels but should I have expected anything good? No! Darren O’Daveron and hiking were not words that were spoken of in the same sentence. “Darren did you even come out of the house this weekend?” was by far more likely.
I had good reason for my mild agoraphobia. My first experience camping was when I was ten. I begged my grandparents to let me go on a trip with my friends. They only relented the night before and I didn’t pack any proper camping gear. I went in high tops. High tops I immediately got wet because we were camping near a lake and half the appeal was going swimming and playing on the beach. I left the shoes on top of a rock next to the campfire. It turns out one of the most reliable properties of rubber is that it tends to melt when exposed to heat. That meant ten year old me wound up stuck barefoot in the woods for three days! Yay camping!
It was a whole decade before I risked sleeping out under the stars again. That time was for a music festival just after I graduated from high school. I was on staff as a volunteer which meant I got to peak backstage and hang out with the bands…managers. Ok not as glamorous as advertised but it meant sticking around in the campsite for an extra three days being trained and helping set things up. In a cornfield in Tennessee. In summer. During a thunderstorm. I learned an interesting lesson in aeronautical engineering it turns out if you don’t tie down a tent properly it shares the same aerodynamic properties as an umbrella and it will literally fly away. At least that time I wasn’t barefoot. Though many of the hippies at the music festival were? Heck even the Puckwudgie seemed more sanitary.
So what brought me out to my ill-fated encounter in these spooky woods? This time it was that friendly and deftly applied peer pressure from a pair of serious hikers and campers. They often spoke at length about their goal to through hike the Appalachian Trail. I was personally weak to precisely their style of high spirited evangelism. Even a hard bitten nightshift dwelling nerd such as myself couldn’t help but be moved. The most compelling part of their argument for this camping trip was that I had honestly needed time away from the house after my grandpa passed away.
He was the last bit of family I had in this world and spending time alone wasn’t something I was keen to do after the funeral. It hadn’t hurt their case that gramps had been a hiking enthusiast himself. It had actually been his tent that I’d sent flying back then though at the time I was too embarrassed to let him know what had actually happened. The tent was far from the only equipment I’d had to pack up after sorting through his belongings after the funeral. I enlisted my friends aid in sorting through it all first before getting rid of it.
They were appalled at the idea of just pitching everything into a yard sale and leaned heavily on me to not just go camping but to bring along gramps equipment as a way of respecting his memory. At least that had theoretically meant I would be better prepared for camping than when I was a kid. Grandpa had even had an expensive watch that I thought was misplaced alongside the camping gear but my friends let me know it was actually a very expensive wearable emergency beacon.
It was sadly not immune to my bad luck with the great outdoors. This thing was supposed to be able to survive being trapped under a sheet of ice and snow in an avalanche but when I’d first realized I was hopelessly lost out here and tried to make use of it nothing happened. It was supposed to emit a bright strobe light I could use to flag down rescuers accompanied by a loud siren to let you know it was sending out the signal to emergency services. However despite frantically mashing the buttons as often as possible the half an hour or more before my fall there hadn’t been so much as a peep from the thing.
About that fall? You will have to excuse my present state of mind as my brain felt pretty scattered. Possibly literally scattered depending on if I had dashed my head on any rocks as I slid down the cliff face. The only thing I really remembered from the fall was the dramatic and painful landing though I highly suspected I had hit at least one boulder while I was busy flitting in and out of consciousness.
I am not sure what I expected death and the start of my afterlife to be like but wasn’t there supposed to be a light at the end of the tunnel, or an angelic choir, a grim reaper? I hadn't gotten any of that yet and I certainly wasn’t having any visions of an out of body experience. Death seemed to be taking its sweet time and oddly it seemed like it was coming with the taste of apples?
Other than the odd and so far inexplicable taste in my mouth the situation I could gather of my near dead body was as follows. I had been blindfolded, had my shoes and socks removed and my hands and arms were bound behind my back. There were further ropes around my waist, legs and ankles securing me to some kind of hard plank or board. Presumably all of this had happened while I was unconscious so the puckwudgie or his friends had certainly been busy. The restraints were fairly loose but were made of coarse rope that scratched at my deeply bruised skin. Not that the restraints would need to be tight. I was not in much shape to resist so they could have tied me up with dental floss at this point without much difference.
The pain banished the pins and needles senstaton from all my aching limbs as I was jostled fully awake by sudden and unexpected movement. The plank I'd been fastened to was being roughly dragged accross the ground. My only comfort was that at least the sharp report of pain coming from seemingly everywhere made me realize that somehow I hadn't broken any bones. If anything was broken besides that never to be sufficiently damned watch the pressure of the ropes tying me to the plank would have probably caused me to pass out again rather than bringing me fully into this painfully awake state.
Being blindfolded I tried to focus as best I could on my surroundings with the rest of my senses as I was dragged deeper into the woods. I kept getting snagged on the outcroppings of low hanging thorns I had tried to avoid earlier when I was running for my life. I did my best to stifle cries of pain from the thorny brambles by biting down on whatever was blocking my mouth. It soon became clear that it was a bit of an apple serving as a makeshift gag and after a few minutes of being dragged through the brambles I had unwittingly bitten it in two nearly choking as I forced the wedges out of my mouth.
While it was somewhat gratifying to be relieved of one mystery and to be able to breathe more freely what wasn’t remotely comforting was realizing I had returned to the land of the living trussed up like a country ham! Complete with edible garnish! It only made the lingering apple taste in my mouth a terrifying sensation as my coughing fit finally subsided having nearly choked on the damn thing.
The sound of crackling logs and the smell of smoke started growing nearer as the obstructing branches and thorns finaly started reducing in number. I had a perverse thought while aproaching the fire that my melted high tops were nearing some Karmic Revenge. I might have prepared some pithy last words to that effect if my throat weren’t terribly raw at this point.
I was dragged to another sudden stop not far from the roaring fire. I was clearly in the midst of the puckwudgies camp and now I could hear the rest of my captors talking which only served to add insult to my injuries. “Is it awake?” “Yes.” “Let me have a closer look then. I could feel the acrid breath of the spiky little creature as it kneeled down close to examine me. “Why does the first human we’ve caught in a century have to have such a poor complexion and greasy skin?” “Yes! And so thin! How can we feed everyone with this meager pickings? I think its mostly bone and cartilage.” If I wasn’t blindfolded there might have been black lines dripping from my eyes after hearing all that. “Shut up! The eyes are all that matter. This human walked through all of my traps like they weren't even there. He saw through my first transformation and had enough confidence to insult me! We have been growing weaker without strong pret. There isn’t normally even enough power here to come out of hiding and properly hunt anything other than twigs and berries! Boil up the eyes of that little mortal and you won’t have to trouble yourself with shifting into a porcupine or a deer you can hunt as a bear or a wolf!”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
This argument didn’t seem to completely quiet the grumbling around the fire so he quickly added “besides the eyes are green!” “You all know green eyes taste the best!” This brought an abrupt eruption of happy chittering in the camp. “I hadn’t seen the eyes since you blindfolded it. Are they really green?”
“If you don’t believe me you can take the blindfold off. Its awake isn’t it?” At that a pair of tiny calloused hands were dragged across my face removing the blindfold. Obviously all this talk of eating my eyes had me keeping them firmly shut. “Hey you said it was awake. Those tiny finger immediately started poking at my eyelids. “gaahg.” Was my response at the prodding.”Food shouldn’t be rude!” it shouted as one of my eyes was forced open giving me my first up close and personal look at a puckwudgie. “They are green!” it exclaimed with its eerie human looking mouth. I caught sight of my original spiny pursuer a few moments later when he replied. “Hmmph. Why would I lie about it? How else can I gloat about getting one of the eyes in the soup pot?”
There really was a human sized pot standing in plain view now illuminated above the scorching flames only a few feet away from me. This made the threats of being eaten even more real in my mind and I finally started to struggle against my bonds. “Stop that human!” The puckwudgie who had been pawing at my eyes reached out to grab hold of my wrist and to both his shock and mine a light burst out from the supposedly broken watch on my wrist and a high pitched siren started blaring out. Amazingly the light seemed to have burned his hand and he jumped back as quickly as he could, the spines on his back arching up in a defensive posture that swelled him to several times his diminuitive height.
“What did you do human!” I wasn’t in any state to answer both because I genuinely didn’t know why his hand had been burned by the strobe light and because my throat was still too parched to reply. “Answer me!” He pointed his finger at me and a quill started forming ahead of the finger suspended in the air and vibrating with quiet menace. “Answer quickly or you die before you make it to the pot.”
This guys speech was really working against himself. I mean it was almost depressingly bad considering how threatening it was having something akin to a magic missile being pointed in my direction. But what did that matter when the alternative was being boiled alive! Its not as if I was looking forward to that! The nearest puckwudgie seemed to agree and smacked down its fellows hand making the quill instantly vanish. “The human probably wants you to kill it fool!” “Yes!” another added “Promise to torture it instead.” That rebuke earned a smack across its face from puckwudgie with the burned hand. “You weren’t the one wounded by the humans trick!” It pushed the offending hand back immediately with a rough shove and a quick retort “I wasn’t the one who tied up the human without removing what is obviously a charm of some kind!” Without having anything to contradict that my captor seemed swayed by that reasoning. “Fine. Speak human! Or we torture you!”
Well crap. I had hope that this little bout of infighting might have bought me some time. Especially now that the emergency beacon was presumable working. I definitely didn’t think there was anything magical about the watch on my wrist other than its near magical ability to fail to work when I needed it earlier but it was certainly my best hope at this point. Truly my only hope.
The pair of arguing puckwudgies were joined by another two of their fellows and this time all of them were holding their hands out with quills filling the air between them and me. “You have mere moments before we turn you into a bloody ruin. You will beg us to kill you but I promise you it will not be a quick death. You will linger for hours, maybe days if you don’t tell us about any other tricks or charms you have and where you got them from.”
While I was pondering their threat and getting ready to at least bluff my way out of getting turned into a living pincushion a cry rang out from the woods. While the puckwudgies stubbornly kept their gazes fixed in my direction I could see the unease on their almost cartoonishly expressive faces. The sound grew more distinct like living thunder only growing in intensity as it came closer to the camp. It was a mournful sound that made every hair stand up on my body and equally seemed to raise the puckwudgies hackles. When the sound reached its zenith it suddenly died away and so did the siren on the watch. It was instantly replaced with a cold wind that seemed to come from nowhere and swept throughout the clearing we were in. It gathered up both the quills hanging in the air and the burning coals underneath the soup pot instantly dousing the fire and the threatening magic simultaneously. The camp was thrown into a deep and foreboding darkness.
“That was the call of a Mesingwa! Do you have any idea what you have done human?!” Well the honest answer to that was obviously no. I had absolutely no idea what had just happened and had never heard of a Mesingwa. Also I still didn’t believe that whatever was going on was my fault to begin with. “You are the most foolish and idiotic human I have ever heard of! I couldn’t see it in the darkness but I could imagine the flustered look on its face through its incredulous tone of voice. That level of earnest disbelief and terror gave me pause. Anything that had caused this reaction from something that had nearly skinned me alive was not promising and the words that followed made that apprehension only grow.
”You think that we little people of the forest are bad? That was the call of the forest giant! The masked one! I don’t know how you did it but you called the masked one here. You actually invited it while you are unable to escape and standing next to a cook pot! What in the name of Muut could possibly compel such madness! And if you had such magic how did you let us catch you in the first place! Did you intentionally wait so you could doom all of us you hatefull human swine!”
I heard rustling as the rest of the puckwudgies grabbed hold of the one that was blaming me for what sounded like summoning the devil. In a sight that would have been unbelievable to me before tonight a silver light illuminated the whole mass of spiky monsters. I wish it hadn’t as their miniscule bodies started to blur the human like faces contorted into the muzzles of foxes and their bodies made a squelching sound more unsettling than the wailing that had just scared the puckwudgies into flight. The only mercy was that the transformation seemed quick and the unsettling sound of organs being rearranged ended just as quickly replaced by the sight of six silver tinged foxes each with twin bushy tails swishing furiously as they scattered in every direction running up the trees and into the canopies of the forrest and out of sight.
That left me alone in the dark. Securely fastened to a heavy board and unable to move as the sound of heavy footfalls slowly approached from deeper within the forest. It was truly too much too soon. It had only been a span of minutes and I’d woken up in this sorry state dragged through the woods against my will, threated with having my eyes gouged out, and had nightmarish visions play out before those same eyes. Now I was falling prey to something that promised to be even more fearsome than all of that! I’m not too proud to admit I started crying out for help. I honestly doubt anyone would have been much more defiant in my place. The footfalls were like thunder now. “Help me. Somebody please help me.” This appeal was almost an uncontrollable reflex as it came out over and over in racking sobs as the footsteps got closer.
The thing I least expected after everything that had happened tonight was that the creature responsible for the startling magical display and terrifying approach would hear me and in a musical and soothing tone reply to my calls for help “Of course. Of course we will help. Please calm down Darren. Its going to be ok.” A warm glow from a torch in its massive hands illuminated another surprisingly human face on an otherwise clearly inhuman frame. It was impossibly tall. At least nine feet or more. It was wearing billowing yellow robes which parted half way down its chest to reveal a pelt of tawny fur that seemed to cover its entire body save for its leathery brown face which was set in a genuine and friendly smile.
I had just been saved from near certain death by a freaking bigfoot!