The feeling seizes her suddenly, the taste of ashes in her tongue, a flash of reflected pain across her shoulder blade that does not hurt her, but lingers. She drops her gardening tools and rises to her feet, heading across her territory and past the tree line without bothering to put her boots back on.
As a young girl, her grandfather had taught her to respect the woods, how to read it and traverse it safely, and to never enter it without means of protecting herself. As a woman, she needs nothing but her bare hands. The harsh change to her usual gentle aura a warning that keeps the other animals at bay. Alice feels the corvid contracted to her flying overhead, the felines she brought with her to this land standing guard in a radius around her. She is grateful for their concern, but she is at home under the darkness of leafy canopies.
The sensation guides her to a fallen doe, an arrow pierced at a quartering angle leaving her agonizing. There is no saving her, but she can ease her pain. Holding a hand to the animal’s head, she chants under her breath and lulls it to slumber, and through it, a gentle passing. In touching the arrow, she can sense the hunter’s intent - Smug despite clear inexperience, either not well taught enough to let an animal be if the shot is difficult or too proud to give it up. The willing, cruel choice to let it run off and suffer a slow, painful death, made with a shrug and an annoyed scoff - and it tinges her mood black.
With one last caress to the soft fur, the witch rises, and the forest seems to breathe as one with her. Her energy expands like roots across the earth, seeking. The cry of a crow has her looking up at the sky, finding her familiar circling a spot west of where she’s standing. Alice directs her energies there, and peeks at the careless intruder through three sets of odd-colored eyes stalking his every move.
She must be careful of her own intent. Hold back her animosity towards those who hunt for no other purpose than the sport of it, thrice so for those who do it irresponsibly. Magic allows her to make her thoughts, feelings and desires tangent, and she must not wish misfortune or harm to befall him. But he is in need of a lesson on respect. The blood soaked earth beneath her feet echoes the sentiment.
Alice lets herself be a vessel through which the forest can communicate, lending it her energy to show the hunter its displeasure. The creeping feeling of being watched would suddenly overtake him, a current of wind blowing to loudly rustle the leaves that seem to close in more and more all around him and dim the lights.
All that the forest can give, it can also take. And until that planted seedling of fear blooms into value within him, he will continue to feel himself prey amongst the trees.
