The Croft Of Ravens (Closed)

[Jennifer Oakley]

The Croft Of Ravens


tree_life.jpg

"She was here..."

"Who?" Questioned the faun, cautiously crossing the threshold into the clearing about the gnarled and ancient tree at it's centre.

"Jennifer. She was here, this is where she died."

The Animus, a creature bound in spirit to a human's soul cocked it's head and ruffled it's ears. He knew, all too well, what had transpired here a thousand years ago, but he could not quite put it into words. Something, akin to guilt and ancient lore bound his tongue and kept him silent...pondering...ashamed.

"Then it is here that we shall commune with the fae, to seek answers to questions and question the answers given."

Jennifer smiled, a serene grace swelling in her heart. She had started to forget which were her feelings, and which were the faun's, they had become so intertwined she felt for the both of them. The tall tree loomed overhead and in the brief silence between statement and action, she was almost certain she could her bird song, children's laughter, and the distinct melody of panpipes and song.

It was here, many centuries ago, that the tomb of Dumlaught earnt it's name..."The Ravensloft," she began to recite the legend that the people of Underwood muttered to children to keep them out of the forest at night, "is where the guardians of the dead and the fae gather, a portal to the shadow realm where the trees speak", the faun gruffly finished the tale.

"And the creature of the woods are wilder than ever..."

Jennifer glanced over her shoulder and smiled. "Yes, yes they are." With a charming flick of her hair she continued towards the trunk of the tree, it's hollow inviting her into it's throng. Soon, the Circle priests would arrive, and the window of opportunity the Daughter of the Nina tribe had to work her magic in the Ravenslofts' presence would be lost.

[Jennifer Oakley]

"Stay on guard, and call me only if we are interrupted." Jennifer clambered into the hollow, without waiting for an acceptance or appraisal of her idea. Her Animus, as bound to her as he was, was vocal and stubborn and needed to be told...just like she did.

Immediately she felt the cool chill of the evening air fade away. The soft scent of spring blossoms and hazelnut trees faded with it, replaced instead with the peaty aroma of damp, rotting wood and fungus infested dirt. She crossed her legs and faced the gaping hole in the tree's side, looking out to the world like a curious owl. The hollow was large enough to be seated in comfortably, and still allowed for some movement, though it was not large enough for an adult to stand up in.

In recent weeks, Jennifer had become increasingly aware of her own inherited memories. The Nina, especially those amongst them who wished to become pathfinders, had a powerful ancestral recall. Somehow, her mother warden had indicated to her that she was of great importance. Vagueness was the old crow's way, and it had left the young initiate even more confused than when she had first asked.

She closed her eyes with a long exhale, and crossed her legs and extended her spine so she sat firmly upright in a meditative position. Almost instantly she felt a pull, a sudden magnetism between herself and the beating heart of the Concordia tree mind. Her hearing stopped, and her breath almost solidified before her, drifting up into the darkness of the hollow in semi-translucent plumes of vapour.

Overhead, in the tree's canopy, a flock of ravens gathered. The Animus, stood with blade in hand and a stern look fixated on it's gruff, animalism features looked up at the flock nervously. The evening spring air seemed to darken and slip momentarily into winter's embrace, before the effect dissipated into paranoid possibilities and wonderment. He shook his head, and levelled his gaze once more to the tree line.

Jennifer opened her eyes after a minute or so had passed.

"<To the spirit world I walk, to the shadow-lands I fall.>"

A cackle replied, resounding and bouncing around in the echoic hallow like thunderclaps.

Jennifer craned her neck out into the open air and looked at the world altogether different from her own. "<Blessed be>," she mumbled, stepping out and biting back the need to vomit through the intense and hedonistic scent of lavender, trickery and death.

[Jennifer Oakley]

No sooner than her bare feet touched the delicate grass of the Fae world, a swell of emotion rose from her lungs into her nostrils. A sharp twang of pain spiked between either side of her head, as if claws were rending at her very mind.

The images she saw were pale apparition of something old, something much, much older than she could imagine. The voices were familiar to her, but she could not place them.

There are too few words to describe the Tree of Life with absolute respect. Few beings have seen it, and fewer still have lived to recant the tale with oratory magnitude. The fae, and creatures of the forest darker and more dreary still are the only beings to have both seen and survived, and it is a draining boon and an uplifting curse at the same time.

It was fourteen years, nay, centuries, since Faustus had stood beneath it's bough and wavering branches. It had been fourteen years since Jennifer had pranced through the autumnal coloured leaves at it's trunk, shy, innocent and playful. It would be fourteen centuries again before the faun warrior, the Animus of the summoner Oakley would see it again.

How long it would be before Jennifer witnessed it in the last moment of her life...none save the gods could know.

Time had a curious effect on the eternally born, after all. Whilst it gifted an eternity of life to those who transcended it, it often forbade you from witnessing vast skeins of existence for eons; you were gifted enough, Jennifer thought silently to herself, without being allowed the luxury of dining with the gods...in the silence they had travelled to this glade, she had tested the tenets of their burgeoning connection, and had at last, she presumed, found a way to shield her own inner thoughts from her summon. She was momentarily free, in some small way, to live her own life in his company.

[Jennifer Oakley]

"Tell me," he brayed, stopping at the tree's edge to caress the bark gently with spindly fingers. The energy from within lingered in his form and carried across the connection between them so that she too felt a distant, calming warmth. "Why have we come here, now, of all the days and seasons true?" He glanced briefly over his shoulder to catch her disdain, chuckled, and then turned back to bow his head in contemplation.

"Each generation, as you well know, the High Priestess of the day must embark on a pilgrimage to the Tree of Life."

"To what end?" Faustus gazed upwards through the golden canopy.

"If I knew that my friend, we would not be here long," she knelt by his side and let her staff and pack fall from her back, weary and fatigued from the long trek across mountain, river and meadow bloom.

"Shall I light a fire?"

"No," she closed her eyes. "The fire flies and the beat of our hearts shall guide the way."

He shook his head and turned to walk from the Tree's trunk, knowing that she would be in a trance before he could ply his wit to rile hers'. The winter was behind them, for that he was thankful, but as the sun set and the darkness encroached on the origin of Corone's forests and the bridling blooms of distant Akashima, the bitter cold would come with it.

He plucked to pick up the dead wood from the mossy grass. She might be sustained by the proximity to the ancient relics, but he was made of flesh and blood in the winter months, and he thought in silence of the harsher journey that still remained ahead of them both as he kindled the flames.

As if judgement were delivered, a hammer struck Jennifer on the forehead and she stumbled back towards the hollow in the tree. The magic that separate the two planes collapsed, and as if falling through a mirror to another realm, she tumbled out into Concordia in a broken, dishevelled heap.

An awkward silence filled the air for a few moments, before the nausea and sickness faded, replaced instead by her Animus' chuckling, an offer of a hand and a sudden righting sensation.

"I take it the Fae did not take kindly to your arrival?"

[Jennifer Oakley]

The pathfinder resisted the urge to hit the faun, knowing it would only return the pain to her own body. She was a stubborn woman at the best of times, but cutting herself to spite the creature sprung from her own soul was not the path to enlightenment she so wearily walked.

"They showed me the vision I went to see, but I did not expect it to be such a visceral recollection", she reached for her staff, embedded in the arid dust close to hand and leant on it for comfort and strength. "What I just saw..."

The Animus smiled, "I take it we were correct, then? The High Priestess came here, when the Tree was a tomb for Dumlaught proper, and further back in time when it was an anchor to the fae world through which man could walk freely?"

Jennifer nodded, contemplating the echoes of her own ancestor's voice as she glanced up at the canopy of Underwood's vast forest. She closed her eyes, which gave her summons sign enough to stay his tongue, and reached out through the undergrowth and bending network of branches for signs of life.

At the back of her mind, the very notion that she had somehow witnessed a life she had once lived, that she had pierced the veil that oft divided reincarnations awed her. As she snapped together several minds into a coherent, if somewhat unstable flock, she opened her eyes and with charm, snapped her fingers.

The faun broke apart in a rush of light and all about her, in the branches of the Ravensloft, a feast of crows appeared mockingly. They were no omen, however, but a messenger. The pathfinder of the Nina had come to tell the Circle and their heretical notions of toppling the Ravensloft to tap it's power to end all attempts.

She gripped the staff tightly, and walked towards Underwood, where the druid Jan-day lived as a herb and poultice maker, and to the man who had forewarned her people of this dire threat to the very essence of nature and balance on Corone. As she stepped forwards, the flock rose into the air and followed her with a torrent of caws and beating wings.

[Jennifer Oakley]

She strode into Underwood aflame and a aflutter with determination. The allure of her command brought the flock with her, and the birds followed in a series of roosts and short flights, leaping with beating wings from shop sign to fence post in a haywire dance of discipline.

Her footsteps were light on the dusty road that split Underwood into streets, and she walked it without thinking where she was going. She was drawn to the hut at the far end of the lane, a thatched edifice to an ancient cult of Druidic men, who claimed nature was theirs, when no such claim could be made by anyone but the fae.

She approached feverishly, biting her lip to steel herself against the inevitable confrontation. If her ancestor had visited the Ravensloft, and it was still a mirror to the Fae realm, then she had to succeed in warning the Circle away from their course of action, or risk open war with the Druids to save a relic of their culture, a part of Concordia itself.

The birds settled on the roof of the hut, and pecked at the loose dry straw with angry beaks and festering contempt. Jennifer came to a stop before the red cloth that hung loosely over the doorway and set her staff firmly into the dirt. Her breath was heavy and her heart clad in vines, and with all the power of the ages behind her, she pulled the cloth aside and entered.

The smell of sage and cinnamon filled her nostrils instantly, and magic filled the air.

[Jennifer Oakley]

In the face of the druid’s aura, all of Jennifer’s wisdom and experience paled in comparison. The hut was a small circular abode, nothing more than a fireplace at the centre with a few Spartan shelves and a bed lining the circumference of its hedonistic warmth. A young man, much younger than the pathfinder had expected sat huddled by the crackling flames, tending to a pot which sat on a metal griddle over the only source of illumination bar the small smoke vent in the roof overhead.

“Sit,” he said.

Jennifer sat on the upturned log immediately opposite the druid. He looked up as she sat, smiling wildly, before dropping his cowl and gaze into the broth he stirred with a ladle. It smelt; if one were to pay attention through the sage incense which burnt at the four compass points, of rabbit and cinnamon.

“I know why you have come, so do not belittle me with protestations and rhetoric of your people.”

Her concentration waxed, and with it, her grip on the flock that stopped pecking at the roof and suddenly regained their own sense of self. They crowd incessantly for a moment, before they scattered to the wings in a flurry of feathers, caws and scrambling frenzy. Jennifer felt them for a moment after they had flown beyond the confines of Underwood, before her connection was severed and she felt whole again. She wavered with nausea, still transfixed by the youth of the man she had come to enact a stern warning to.

The druid pulled back his hood, and set the ladle at ease on the floor to his left. He pulled back his sleeves and crossed his hands over his lap, to show that he concealed no blades and meant her no harm. She scowled, but relented and crossed her own as was customary amongst the Circle practitioners, and amongst her own people.

“Now, speak plainly, Jennifer Path Finder, and tell me why the Circle should not meddle with what it knows it does not understand.”

Jennifer smiled politely, a tactile attempt to hide her surprised at the druid’s knowledge. Though she was a potent and well-known figure amongst her people, she wondered how he could know her name, and true title.

“The Ravenscroft is a reliquary for the Fae of the forest, it connects the two worlds and acts as an anchor for the good spirits of the wood to remain ever vigilant of our people,” she thought hard for a moment, and watched his youthful smile and olive green eyes as they glimmered with hidden talents.

“Why should we care for your superstitions?”

[Jennifer Oakley]

“Because, druid, the guardians of our people, are the last bastion of defence against the angered winter spirits, who will destroy your people if they are allowed to run amok through the forests of Concordia.”

A chill wind swept through the hut’s opening, and the flames of the fire flickered for a moment. The druid cocked his head, and almost nodded in agreement. He, it seemed, had heard of the tales. He picked up the ladle again and stirred the broth one last time, before dredging a hunk of rabbit flesh, cooked to perfection from the liquid into a clay bowl he produced from between his bare feet.

“The Great Winter, the Endless Snow, the Fimble Season.”

“The time when the Great Fae, trapped in tombs and trees after daring to rise against Y’edda in the ancient days shatter their bonds and take their vengeance on the lands, and on its people.”

The druid did not this time, before passing the bowl over the flames.

“How do your people know of this legend, Jennifer? I did not think the Nina concerned themselves with the old ways beyond their acceptance of their existence and a prayer of thanks at the foot of dying remnants.” There was sarcasm to his voice that she did not appreciate, but she kindly took the food all the same and set the steaming bowl, which was already warm to the touch onto her lap.

“It would appear that you under estimate the Path Finders as much as we under estimated you, Old One.”

The Druid looked up from his second helping, his feverish fingers tearing into the succulent meat without cutlery of etiquette, and with a knowing grin, he smiled. Almost instantly, his youthful vigour faded, and his skin sagged and aged a half century before her very eyes. He nodded, and she heard bones creak and lungs wheeze.

“Very observant of you, but tell me…if you can see my true form, can I not see yours, High Summoner?”

“Ashanti!” A faint voice roared, and Jennifer convulsed and flailed her arms as her animus burst from her heart in a rush of light, which cast shadows of a Fae creature onto the canvas of the hut before dying into embers and mystery.

The Faun had his sword ready in his hand, and brandished its point to the druid’s head without thought for consequence or the safety of his mistress. He flared his nostrils, and with animalistic contempt barely contained behind his gruff voice, he said, in simple common, a greeting that Jennifer did not think was being said for the first time.

“How do you know of this heritage, human? How do you know of the Ancient Days?”

The Druid craned his neck slowly to take a good look at the white fur of the creature that had sprung from nothing before him, and felt as if he had a purpose to his life once more. Free of his duties to tend to the sick of the Underwood populous, the old man poured the juice of his broth down his throat in one clean gulp, a guttural rumble of his full stomach followed it.

"Because," he wiped his mouth clean with the hem of his tattered and dusty robe, "I was there...when Jennifer fell from the Altar of Summer, and became one with the Fae."

[Jennifer Oakley]

With a blinding flash of pain, Jennifer remembered.

Jennifer and Faustus embraced, a longing yet emancipating clasp of like minded spirits and warm, tangled wool and fur. There was no time to explain, and little time to dwell on their decision, it simply had to be done. With a longing caress, she fondled his mane and he touched his wet nose to hers before they stepped back from one another and cast their gaze upwards.

"Are you ready?" She asked, her heart beating and her skin shining in the radiance of the midday sun. "There is no going back, no revoking of vows, no regrets..."

Faustus gruffly replied with a yes, and held out his arms and arched his back and neck upwards, a perfect mirror of his daughter, two souls pushed and drawn to one another atop the tallest heights of the Temple of the Nina. The grand complex rested in silence as a thousand eager druids and layman stared up in wonderment through the falling autumnal leaves and the halcyon rays of the zenith.

"Then let us part ways."

"Let us."

"Blessed be, father."

"Ashanti be praised, daughter."

With a lightning bolt and a fiery convocation, the altar shattered in two between them and they were repelled backwards. Their lifeless forms tumbled down either side of the dais, rolling down the steps in a flurry of arms, staves and ceremonial dress.

A silent breeze drifted through the tall moss laden pillars that stood scattered about the central altar, and with it travelled hushed whisperings and low chanting. The leaves of the sycamore trees and evergreen plumes wavered to and fro, and time seemed to slow and stretch about the momentum of the High Priestess's act.

As their heads fell with a crack to the ancient stone, and the last remnants of their bound lives drifted from their bodies, the chanting rose in pitch and slowly the entire complex became a welling throng of devotion. Higher and higher went the crowd's spirits, and louder and louder grew the ancient verse.

The sun crested at it's height and shone down onto the pan-optical mirror atop the altar, and in a split second, all was illuminated and golden. Separated by the towering steps, Jennifer and Faustus smiled like mannequins to the gods, their time on Althanas spent in the service of nature.

[Jennifer Oakley]

The hut re-appeared, leaving her gasping for breath and reeling from the vivid recollection.

"That was not real!" She said, exasperated and dazed.

The druid shook his head, and reached out a finger to touch her forehead. This time, she saw the movement, and realised that he was sharing his mind with her, his memories, his eternity.

The pain welled up again, and she fell back through the mists of recollection to the steps of the temple once more.

Without any indication of intent, the crowd split into two convex halves. To the right, surrounding the altar on Jennifer's half, the women of the conclave and the priestesses gathered. To the left, at the feet of Faustus the men, haggard and wise individuals and young, foolish braves clad in leaves and vines and all the intent of adventure.

"Haevos, evos, nemmos gammos!" The dual chorus rose up through the tree tops and intermingled with the dawn bird song. Slowly but surely, the crowd approached the two still figures and surrounded them with gentle, searching hands.

As the chorus grew, they plucked up the corpses, still warm and beating with the fading remnants of life and bore them aloft above their heads. As the sun reached the midday stance, they turned the bodies into parallel alignment and rocked them back and forth as if they were floating on an ocean wave.

"Our mother," proclaimed the men.

"Our father," proclaimed the women, their roles crossed and confused by the indistinguishable duality of the spirit.

The wave of bronzed skin and silk rose up the first few steps of the altar, beginning the ancient ritual of rebirth with a slow reuniting advance between family and lovers. The metaphor, as obscure as it was to all but those initiated into the Order of Nina rang out through the forest.

"Let winter be known, let summer be forgotten, let spring reside and autumn reign."

As the chorus dimmed, the two halves of the crowd found themselves reunited at the apex of the altar, as they laid to rest Jennifer and Faustus on the cracked stone. Jennifer came to rest with her head North, and the faun South, semi-curled to form a slightly elongated circle; a cyclical symbol of life.

"Let nature be the judge - let Althanas and Y'edda preside."

With shuffled feet and hushed tones, the conclave withdrew from the altar and returned to their positions amongst the columns and branches, the leaves and the sunlight.