May Vignette #2

[Jasmine]

You have 1 week to complete your Vignette as per the new rules.


While traversing through an unusually creepy forest, your character encounters the one creature in all the world that terrifies them the most. What happens?


Remember you have until midnight Alaska time Saturday night to post (that's 4am Sunday for you east coasters). Good luck!


NOTE: This will open at Midnight this Saturday, May 12

[Enigmatic Immortal]

Now open!

[Etheryn]

It was the stuff of bedtime stories. A distant, forgotten place of preternatural, permanent dusk. The forest had light enough to allow travel without a lantern, and yet was swathed with enough dark to conceal its denizens in shadow. It was a place where one’s very presence was an offence to the soil. A footfall an insult. A broken twig became a broken bone, and every tree to witness the assault shivered in disgust. The forest, in all its esoteric madness, was not a place for travellers.

Dan stood transfixed. To his front was a wall of cobwebs. To both sides, an impenetrable thicket of thorns and writhing ivy that hissed and snapped when he got near. Behind him was where he’d already been and he knew better than to reverse whatever little progress he’d made. “Progress” was something he defined loosely in this context; any step toward the twinkling red lights in the distance was good enough.

Move it or lose it, sucker, thought Dan. Gonna squash that son of a…

He closed his eyes and gulped a lungful of air that tasted like quagmire and rot, and charged reluctantly through the webs with combat knife slashing wildly. It didn’t help his skin from tingling at imagined bites from thousands of tiny bugs, all with too many legs to be of the friendly variety. He sheathed his knife and kept on walking, all the while sweeping away remainders of the ghostly strands.

The ground itself shifted in spite. Roots that were metres clear of tripping Dan came alive and slithered closer, just for a chance at seeing the intruder lose his footing and twist an ankle. Every possible thing that could come at him did so. Branches snapped clean off to fall on his head, and sometimes brought impossibly putrid things down as passengers.

Twelve-eyed frogs all covered with warts that oozed tar. Lizards with an extra head where the tail should’ve been. Tree snails the size of a rabbit that with human thumbs for antennae. All of the creatures, all of the plants, all of the forest existed for one purpose only; to curry Dan’s surrender.

Vile as it was, the forest couldn’t keep Dan pinned down for long enough to take him. He followed the lights for hours and hours and hours. The terrors grew milder and less frequent until Dan lulled into a false sense of safety. A vine, laughing and giggling by its non-existent mouth, finally snagged him about the legs. Dan tumbled end over end and hammered his shoulder into the base of an ashen grey pine.

“Ha! That’s it?” Dan bellowed at the canopy. “That’s all you can throw at me?”

The tree loosed its needles. They clattered and dripped in all the ways something green does not. Dan covered his head with his hands at the sting of their falling. When it stopped, he opened his eyes to find rusted nails that dripped with blood. He pried one from the webbing of his hand and cast it aside.

“It is not,” warned the croaking voice that sounded too much like a long dead friend.

“You’re a cliché!” Dan shouted at the whole of his environment. His step quickened. Anything that came near him suffered a quick slash of his blade. Anything that could be crushed became paste beneath his fist.

“And you are a petulant, blabbering child full of hot air and false courage,” spake a bubbling creek of brown and stagnant water. It spat fish bones at Dan as he leapt over it.

He grew more defiant and moved faster. Soon he was running with ducks and weaves and an occasional pirouette feint, just to show off. In the past, he’d faced down swordsmen and dived headlong through a whole battalion. No angst-ridden shrubbery or amphibians with birth defects would beat him tonight.

The red lights were closer now and Dan knew he’d make it in time. His breath grew ragged with effort and his heart pounded with thrill. Cold mist rose ankle high and rushed and curled behind him like the wake from a boat. A stone rolled uphill against all logic just to get in Dan’s way and he slipped on the lichen moss that covered it. Down he went in a great belly-slide, yet he rose up with renewed vigour.

And moments later it was there. The target of Dan’s chase. Gargantuan, oversized, too impossibly big to live and too terrible to die without tormenting someone along the way. The enemy. The black and mottled brown moth was the size of a horse and furry around the thorax like a shaggy dog. Its fire hose of a proboscis stabbed deep into the brilliant blue tree upon which it perched. The bark wept as the moth pierced it in other places with its hooked, chitin plated limbs.

“Liviol,” Dan said. “What you’ve come to take.”

“What is mine to take,” reminded an eyeless vulture that nested higher in the tree.

Dan knew the desire of the noxious spirit that infected and spoke through all parts of this forest, and in doing so, effectively defused its only angle for trickery. The nonsense made sense to him. None of it was real.

“You’ve failed!” Dan cheered. “I’ve made it in time!”

He drew his knife in the left hand and held it in reverse, with his pistol crossbow in the right and balanced over the steady platform supplied by the blade arm. Both weapons had their tip pointed at the moth.

“What do you make of this, intruder? Do you know who I am?” the voice said, multiplied a thousand fold like it were spoken from a thousand different sources.

Dan shook his head. “Not who you are, but what you do!”

“And what is that?”

Dan’s finger hovered at the trigger. His blade shook with eagerness. “You suck the magic from all that is good and use it to spread fear!”

“Are you not scared of me, Dan? Has my fear not spread to you?”

Dan narrowed his brow and grit his teeth. His bald head glistened with sweat. Each and every one of his muscle fibres burned with simultaneous fatigue and the urge to attack.

“Of course I am scared,” Dan confessed.

“Then turn and run! Run, little man! All the way home!” the voice roared and jeered and heckled, all at the same time.

“What would I say? I ran away from a moth?” Dan said.

He jumped back half a step as the great insect beat its vast wings and set itself to launch. It withdrew its proboscis from the Liviol tree, dripping with globs of glistening sap and flakes of broken bark and timber shards. The tree bled from the wound.

“That you ran from your greatest fear! There is no shame!” the moth said now, gurgling from its proboscis, the only orifice that could conjure voice.

Dan shook his head, now resigned to action. “Not a chance. If anyone knew how scared I am of moths…”

He skewered the putrid beast through one baleful red eye with a crossbow bolt. It blinked out and went dark. The moth shrieked and screamed and shot up the sky with a single powerful beat of the wings, spraying concentric rings of dust and debris like a pebble in a pond. Dan rolled over his right shoulder, came up running, and zipped behind a tree to avoid the retaliatory kamikaze dive bomb from the avatar of his most irrational, longest lived phobia.

Had he eaten a bigger dinner the night before Dan would’ve soiled his pants.

The moth, now exhausted from its single quick movement and sluggish with a full belly, was unable to fly again. It stood weightily, wings parallel to the ground, and oozed some kind of translucent pus from its injured eye. Surely it couldn’t see properly. Dan took the only opportunity to melee on the ground with an airborne creature. He broke cover, hunkered down, and ran straight and hard. The moth lumbered and turned too late. Dan used two quick horizontal slashes to rend the other eye completely.

The moth, now blind, was done for. Dan punched and clawed and cut and took chunks of thick fur and carapace and gooey guts. A piercing, shrill scream trumpeted through the forest as soon Dan’s enemy expired. The sound grew louder and more suffocating until Dan’s vision turned white. He dropped his weapons over the motionless carcass, fell to his knees, and pressed his palms over his ears to block it out.

No use, he thought, yet the sound of his own internal monologue was drowned out. The sound is coming from inside your own head!

That was when he knew victory once more. He’d been traipsing all of Raiaera and hunting deep within the Red Forest to hear it.

The white turned dark. Dan woke up on the dewy bed of grasslands at the Red Forest outskirts, far from where he fell. When his eyes blinked open, he knew it; the nameless evil was gone. At least for a while, until Dan inevitably heard of it cropping up somewhere else to try leech from founts of magic—like the Liviol tree in this case. When it did he would have to chase it down and end it all over again.

There wasn’t a chance another soul could know that Dan, a two-hundred pound, magic-wielding, boat-stealing, death-dealing, happy-go-lucky guy, was scared of little things like moths. It had to be him to hunt the badness down when need arose again.

[Hysteria]

“Gramps! Gramps! Tell us the story of the scary forest!”

Three children bounded into the lap of Grandpa Talen with excitement. Talen old face feigned discomfort but shone with joy at the attention of the youngsters.

“You not going to get scared Jimmy?” Talen wrapped his arms around the children as Jimmy fought to escape his grasp.

“Of course not gramps!” Jimmy pulled himself free and sat down next to his grandfather.

“Alright, Tommy, Jenny, make yourself comfortable, because this is the story of a lifetime. My lifetime actually.” Talen's hands lifted into the air in a showy display.

“It all started one dark and dreary night. The forest was cold, damp and quite stinky. Like rotten eggs that have been left in the sun too long!” Talen poked his granddaughter in the stomach as she scrunched up her face at the thought. “But that was the least of my problems...”


* * **
Talen Shadowalker in
The Curse of the Black Bunny
* * * *

Talen pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders as he trudged through the muddy road. He had been travelling for days, and had been walking through the same dirty and smelly forest since sunrise. It didn't seem to matter how fast he travelled, or long he walked, he could not see the end.

“If only I could find some place dry and didn't smell of old rotting eggs left in the sun!” he exclaimed with annoyance and odd narrative quality, “But I have found neither. I shall keep walking until I do.”

The trees on either side of the road seemed to lean over the road, and the moon that stood high in the sky failed to give more than a passing illumination to the path. It seemed that at any moment out of nowhere the thing Talen feared most could jump out and shake Talen to his very protagonist core. The boy however remained momentarily alone, and only his stirring sense of frustration remained the only plot device.

hoooooot...

Talen nearly jumped out of his skin as the owl released his hyperbole causing call. The youth gripped his chest in an unusual show of audience-stirring personablity. The bird flew silently from its perch and across the path in front of the stricken boy.

“F$%king bird.” Lamented the censored youth, “I could have a heart attack.”

Talen looked around the dark and creepy forest and tried to sigh in relief, but managed a raspy semi-cough. The youth was not enjoying himself at all. The growing anticipation of immediate danger broke not only Talen's rules about feeling in oxymorons, but also his determination to continue his fruitless journey. Seriously, he had naught but even an apple for nearly a week now. Remember this is set in the past, so fuit is like candy or something to old people.

I digress. Talen turned and looked at the forest, and decided that if he were to set fire to several of the trees he could not only cheer up the place, but also keep himself war. With his mind made up, mostly of brains and some fluid, Talen lifted his hand towards the nearest tree and unleashed his sticky power. A jet of black liquid shot from his hand onto the nearest tree, coating it with the viscous oil. Talen moved to the next, and the next in a quick progression of pyromaniac intention. With a flash his hand burst into flames, which in turn spread across the across the liquid and the trees. Surrounded by several flaming trees the youth felt somewhat more at ease with his situation.

“Who dares bring flames to my forest?!”

The antagonistic voice boomed through the forest. Talen looked around with shock at the powerful voice that demanded answers he didn't really feel comfortable giving.

“Bolt of lighting M'Lord” he replied, struck himself by a sudden urge of cockney.

“Bolt of lightning?” replied the voice.

“Yes M'Lord”

“What? No I saw you do it!”

“No I didn't!”

“Yes you did! There were flames and everything!”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Yes you do! You totally do! You were all 'I'm going to burn down these trees' and I was all 'who dares to burn down these trees'!”

“If you're so smart, how did I do it? I ain't got no matches or nuffing.”

“Magic.”

“Magic?! You can't explain it so its just magic? I suppose you'll be telling me you believe the Easter bunny too.”

“What Greg? He's my cousin.”

Talen swivelled as the creature revealed itself. The monstrous and underestimated creature stepped out into the flicking light of several small trees and showed itself to be a a small back bunny.

“Now defend yourself!”

Talen lifted his hand and it was engufed in flame once more.

“Alright bunny, bring it o-gher”

Talen stumbled backwards after a blur of black passed in front of his neck. The youth tried to speak, but only a spurt of blood from his neck came forth. The youth twisted to see the bunny spit the chunk of neck onto one of the burning trees. Darkness slowly fell infront of the youth's eyes as he fell out of one world and into the next.


* * * *

“And that’s how I died!”

The children looked at their Grandpa with confusion.

“Next time I'll tell you how I was killed by the giant fish of the dark forest. Its similar, but with a fish, oh and I die.”

Jimmy leaned closer to Tommy and whispered “I think Gramps forgot his medication again.”

[Jasmine]

Thanks for participating!

The winners are:
Hysteria 600exp 200gp
Etheryn 240exp 175gp

Congrats!