Into the Woods
runictrolls:
“You were covered in blood when you arrived. You probably got a ghostie on you right now.” You ominously point a finger at Sawyir and swirl your finger around slowly as you step out the door and onto a branch.
Whatever smile you let twitch to your features before is gone now–gone for good. This is grim business ahead of you, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. It shouldn’t be undertaken at all, a wiser voice reminds you. You shrug it off. What’s one ghost, more or less?
You step gingerly onto a new branch, a new tree, and run your hand along the smooth bark. Your eyes close, and you tap into the deep reservoir of mirthful voodoo that resides up in you. This is the motherfucking purpose of mirth, of sorrow, of all the wickedest shit that ever slipped from a true believer’s pate. This is the deep, dark hole that acolytes and pretenders will never know. This is power, and you feel it.
The trinkets and trappings that dangle from your trees sing out to you, now. You can see them like a dream, violet pinpricks swaying in a vast white sea. Each of these is a soul, a spirit, a troll trapped in a prison of cloth and wood. You’re about to set one free, and it saddens you.
Your companion doesn’t see what you see. Perhaps you didn’t know, Mandra, but what you do is terrible and wrong. You are inflicting a wound on the world, and other trolls experience this wound in their pan, in a way unique to them. Those porcelain grubs you pride yourself seem to crawl and whisper, their eyes watching. The gnarled knots of a tree form a terrible visage. The wind, the sick wind, carries wicked portent and causes the stomach to curdle. Mandra, you have become 2 spoopy.
You yourself are almost like a ghost, gently stepping from branch to branch until you find a bauble you like. This one is penitent. You think. It was angry once, long ago. Perhaps it has found peace in the silence of the wicker tomb. Perhaps.
You tug on the talisman, snapping it easily between your fingers. You hear a sucking sound, and then a gasp as if from a drowning troll. You pull the spirit of a troll through the wound in the wold in horrible mockery of a hatching, and it screams as you bring it back into the wide world of unlife. You feel it whip around you, circle Sawyir, shake the leaves, rock the trees, and come back to howl in your ear. You open your eyes to face the shrieking visage, twisted and hollow and unrecognizable.
“Go,” you say, “Trouble our fields and hives no more.”
The branch begins to tremble. You feel everything now–the hopelessness, the loss, the anger, the frustration. It wants to kill. Unfortunate.
It makes the mistake of turning on Sawyir, just for a second. With practiced hand you uncaptcha your bow, nock an arrow, and loose it at half draw. It catches the ghost in the back, carrying it past Sawyir’s cheek and embedding it in another tree nearby. The screaming is silenced, and you close your eyes. You dip your toe back out of that dark pool of mirthful power, and go back to 1 spoopy.
You take a deep breath and sit down on the branch.
“You have now seen a ghost. Are you happier for the experience?”
Standing at the door, you watch Mandra glide branch-to-branch through his forest lusus. You don’t dare follow him out. He moves like a stalkbeast in it’s natural environment, makes it look easy, but there is no doubt in your mind that you’d break a bone if you tried. Probably a couple.
There’s a funny feeling settling into your gut. You figure it must be how high up you are - heights have never been you favorite thing. You go to make idle chatter to chase the feeling out, but the sound gets lost somewhere. Is it colder out here than it was?
Mandra peruses his weird ornaments like they’re apples he’s checking for ripeness. Finally, he finds one he likes, and he breaks it. A lot of things happen at once.
There’s a face, and a howling wail, and it tears an awful sucking void in your chest. It’s like pulling a muscle you didn’t know you had. There’s something immaterial, something vital, flowing out of you.
The creature’s face is vague. It swoops around you and where it gets closest it blurs almost entirely out of your vision. A stabbing pain flares behind your eyes. You see it most clearly once it stops by Mandra. You kind of wish you couldn’t. Everything Metadata used to ramble on about at midday is true, and worse. You can’t tell if you’re breathing. Then the ghost dives at you and Mandra fires and it’s gone.
The sucking feeling goes with it.
You plomp down on your ass like a puppet with the strings cut. It takes you a second to track down where the rumbling growl is coming from, and get a handle on it.
There’s something hot dripping down across you mouth and chin. You’ve been in enough fights to know a bleeding nose when you feel one.
“Damn.” You manage. “That was - I don’t feel so good?”
You try pulling the borrowed poncho away from you, just in case it hasn’t got blood on it yet, before you go mopping up your face with the undershirt collar. Your head’s throbbing something awful and the empty, shaky feeling hasn’t left you, but you’re starting to feel a little more grounded.
Mandra looks cool as a crunchcumber over there on his branch. You grin a grin at him that only trembles a little. Your teeth are definitely covered in gross nose-blood.
“But, oh, man. You shot a ghost!”
Standing up doesn’t seem like a real smart plan right now, so you don’t. The floor’s plenty nice anyhow. Maybe the ground would be better, but you’re not betting on your knees to carry you down there right this second.
