Ragged Wood

[Juggler]

—Some Snippets of Conversation Heard on the Way from Neglafar City to Thomelfair Forest:


“Well if you think of it this way, James—how's anyone gonna steal a big bloody gate?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Cobb?”

“I'm just saying, well...we're gatesmen, right? Protecting the gate and all? How—”

“Shut up, Cobb.”

A moment of silence. “How's your wife, James?”

“Still dead, Cobb.”

Somewhere in the darkness, someone rolled their eyes. A few minutes later, the eye-roller relieved Cobb and James of their purses.

—
“What? You're telling me all your tea-ware is Salvarian antique—not a single piece of it Raiaerin?”

“My dear, I haven't been to Raiaera since I was a child. I did take a lovely vacation with the Missus to Corone a few years back though, the locals were just adorable.”

“Adorable! What does that mean? Just how many barmaids did you bend over your bed, Quincy?”

“Oh, but you are roguish, Adam. No less than seven, I'll admit.”

A two foot six breeze ruffled the skirts of the noblemen and the eye-roller relieved them of their teacups and pocketwatches.

—
“How's Mincy feeling?”

“Still sick. The herb woman was asking 20 coins for a draught, and I told her that was more than we made at market the last three years combined. How'd the turnips sell?”

There was a thump. The thump sounded suspiciously like a sack of turnips being thrown on a table. Then there was silence. Those in poverty tend to talk less—there's a lot less that's happy to talk about. The eye-roller padded away. Whether the theft was aborted out of pity or due to the fact that the eye-roller hated turnips could be anyone's guess.

— ✰ —

The sun shone over the highway like a golden coin. The city gates turned to a black dot, and then the city itself became a pebble on the horizon. Rich merchant caravans turned to peasants with wheelbarrows and the cobbled road devolved to dirt and then trodden grass. At night, the city became a match's flame in the distance, and the moon shone above like the sun's less valuable counterpart. The eye-roller walked towards her childhood home. She walked with the sullen resignation of a pilgrim whose faith in the quest has long since dimmed, but “hey, if we've come this far we might as well go the whole way.” She walked for seven days and slept for seven nights before she found herself on the forest's edge. Thomelfair, the woods of her birth, should have evoked some feeling in her, but nostalgia failed to make a lump in her throat. Watching the red squirrels dance from beech to beech failed to evoke any feeling in the halfling's heart or head. The trickling crystal springs made her thirsty, but she felt no awe at nature's music. The fact of the matter was, she just preferred the city. Was that so wrong?

The eye-roller's name was Mirwood Pine. She hated that name as much as she hated pine trees. Prickly beasts they were, and she still had a sore spot on her head from the last time one had attacked her with a cone. Mirwood was a Brownie—a protector of the forest. She'd become a thief—a protector of other people's wallets. At two and a half feet tall, she was well suited for the latter.

She wandered the woods until she stumbled upon a glade of yellow perennials. Finally! Only a few hours in the wretched forest and she was already sick of it. The only reason Mir had returned here was to perform another sort of theft. She bent down with her knife and started cutting petals off the little flowers. The long trip out of the city and into nature was worth it only for these little blossoms. Their leaves, when brought to the right apothecary, could be transformed into a nice poison for her pretty little knives. If it weren't for the yellow flowers, Mir told herself, she'd have no reason at all to return to the blasted forest.

She stuffed the leaves she gathered in the sack on her back. In an absentminded fashion, she noticed that her family's home was less than a mile to the west. She decided not to visit them. This decision was the same she'd made for seven years running, now.

Oh well. Who cared about family, anyway? Snotty nosed brats and domineering mothers and grandmothers. Brownie couples never had less than twenty children, and she doubted she'd be able to remember half of her siblings names. She rolled her eyes. She tugged too hard on one of the flowers and it uprooted, revealing a nest of earthworms wriggling in the soil.

Disgusting.

[Isylle]

Deeper in the woods, there is a place where the sun does not touch the ground. The multiple layers of pine needles overhead filter light down to ephermeal rays which then squander themselves uselessly on the unyielding barrier of a light pink parasol. Yet in the shadows, there was light. It was a soft, bluish-green light radiating from all seven long leaves of the flower in the middle. A gentle, skull-piercing ringing note came from the closed, blue bud.

The shadow shifted. A fine-fingered hand at the end of a white-sleeved arm reached down and parted the dark brown soil of the forest floor. A finger uncurled and pushed a slightly hairy, yellow, fingernail-sized seed into the hole. Then the hand waved over the hole and there was a sussuration of activity. The soil heaved.

Isylle stepped back and let the sunlight hit the rapidly growing steelthorn vine. It was one of her own strains, with wicked barbs at the end each thin thorn. Under her will, it extended forty feet in half of a minute and spread protectively in a circular mat all around the newly sprouted Gravelight Bell. A faint, satisfied smile crossed her face.

A Gravelight Bell was bred from Winterlight Tulip stock. Whereas the ancestor glowed faintly in cold air to attract grazers as a seed-scattering mechanism, a Gravelight Bell grew especially well on fresh graves. Its roots pierces through hide and skin to directly dissolve the flesh of a corpse. The fine hairs infiltrated bone and ground them to dust. The light and the ringing was brighter and resulted from burning off excess minerals in the devoured bones. At the end of the growth season on the size of the corpse that it fed on, a Gravelight Bell bloomed, its flower self-pollinated, and it created several seeds glowing with a ghostly blue light.

Isylle was proud of these seeds. Every corpse had a trace of the soul that once occupied it and a Gravelight Bell was her own creation to harvest that scattered resource. What to do with it later is still up to debate, but she had a feeling that they would make a useful addition as fertilizer. She looked one more time at the Gravelight Bell ringing gently away in the center of a twenty-foot-wide disc of steelthorn, nodded to herself, and set off through the forest. The puppy that she had found in the forest would probably only take a few days to digest.

A small trail of growing grass, ferns, flowers, and other ground plants followed after the departing fairy as she made for the shallows of the woods. Her journey was checked when a young boy's voice echoed through the clearing.

"Penn?"

Isylle paused, thought on the strangeness of someone calling out in the middle of the woods, and a small grin slit her face. She walked more quickly now towards the source of the voice. The green carpet underfoot thickened noticeably.

"Penn?"

There was a black-headed boy in slightly torn clothing calling out for someone. He waded arduously through the underbrush, quite unlike Isylle's stately glide as branches and vines bowed out of her way. She approached him with a pleasant smile as he exited a patch of mayapples

"Hi miss. Have you seen Penn? He's my puppy and has white fur and a black spot on his back!

Indeed, Isylle has. Penn beneath in the center of a certain circle now. She was about to try to convince the obviously lost boy to turn back when she saw the bunch of daisies sticking out of his trouser pocket. Isylle smiled wider.

"No, but we can look for him together! What's your name?" She briefly plotted. He'll feed at least five Gravelight Bells, but first, she intended to have some fun with the little monster. Begin with vines and poisoned whips, then slowly put into manageable pieces - it wouldn't do to plant the Bells too closely together. And then-

"Arthur, miss. Do you live here?" He was a polite little monster. Isylle approved and mentally reduced it to only three days of playing before planting the next crop. She extended a hand, palm upwards, towards the boy. "Nice to meet you, Arthur. I-"

"She doesn't live here~" A familiar, opiate voice drawled from somewhere behind Isylle. The boy blinked at something behind the fairy, his confusion plain to see.

Isylle smiled and closed her eyes, "Itera. How nice to see you again. What delightful wind brings you out to Salvar?" She turned around and opened her eyes. There was a woman in a purple-and-white dress behind her. Well, half of a woman, anyway, since Itera Namyuul was leaning out of one of her violet rifts. Itera, her face half-hidden behind an opened fan, studied Isylle with golden, amused eyes.

"Nothing~" She turned to the boy, looking past Isylle, "You're so adorable~! I'm keeping you."

There was a flicker of violet as the rift moved. It was an illusion, since the rift simply appeared in a different place without having gone through the intervening space, which contained Isylle. The flower fairy turned back around to see Arthur struggling extremely uncomfortably as Itera-in-a-rift hugged and squeezed him from behind.

Isylle's smile became a little more fixed and she turned aside, looking at the pair with just her red eye. "In your grasp? That boy is doomed, don't you think?"

Itera took a moment away from nibbling on Arthur's ear, "Ohhh~? You care? Maybe I'll return him after two or three days."

"He'll be scarred for life and ruined for marriage."

"I heard that's not possible with human boys. But let's find out!" Itera pulled and the both of them vanished into the rift. Then the rift closed.

Damnit, Itera.

Denied her revenge and entertainment, Isylle nontheless continued to smile pleasantly for a moment at the empty air where her... acquaintance... from Tenger Jerhal had been. A blindingly stupid squirrel took that moment to hop past a little ways away. Isylle glanced at it.

A patch of ground ivy suddenly finished three weeks' of growth in seconds. More curiously, it wrapped maliciously around the squirrel's neck and the stem hardened into a woody texture. The flabberghasted rodent flailed and scrabbled at the sudden noose.

Ten minutes later, Isylle was walking along and contemplating the image of that squirrel slowly starving to death over the next few days if it wasn't so lucky as to get ripped to shreds by a lucky owl. She turned, following some nonexistent path illuminated by the slanting afternoon light, and suddenly her reverie was broken by the sight ahead.

There was some two-foot-tall creature with ridiculous eyes that reminded her of those in Itera's rifts. It was standing in a patch of Noawak Sun Ferrule with a knife out and an uprooted flower in one hand. Isylle gave her most pleasant smile because she greatly appreciated having such a guest.

"Hello. Who have we here?"

[Archanex Jotham]

Archanex had been in Salvar for the past couple of months.

On a research mission for the Ixian Knights, Archanex had agreed to do studies for the mage's guild in Corone and the Ixian Knights proper. Archanex was out in the wild lands of Salvar, somewhat to the west of the Kachuk mountain range. He'd been in the wild lands, traveling in a seemingly aimless fashion. However, his path was anything but aimless. Archanex was in search of a particularly rare herb needed for a certain alchemy potion. The research was necessary for his current benefactors, The Ixian Knights. He was deep in the forest, when something that he had come across disturbed him greatly. They were a form of flowers that were quite dangerous to the living, and most important, to the dead. Coming across an old, abandoned graveyard, The Overmage narrowed his eyes. He had a glow-orb with him, which acted like a torch and gave off an artificial light. Archanex studied The Gravelight Bell for a long moment. He crouched down towards it. The nearest city was Knife's Edge, but there were many farms and ranches along the way. Someone is planting these things deliberately. I've seen several of them along this path already... Archanex thought to himself and he knew what had to be done. He took out a small iron dagger, and began the work of uprooting the bells and carefully disposing of them.

Once the tasks were done, and he completely got rid of the bells, he stood up and observed the freshly exposed graveyard.

Salvarns are not careful where they place their dead. This is a newer graveyard too, someone has been using these bodies for foul purposes. Archanex thought to himself.

He then walked forward where he found a mysterious patch of undergrowth. Examining the growths, it seemed that something unnatural had put the growth there, something not human.

As he examined the undergrowth that appeared at the inhuman's step, Archanex did not have the sensing capacity to sense the threat all around him. Slithering through the underbrush towards his lightly armored form, there was a single mass of vines. Archanex did not notice it when at the last possible moment, the vines lashed out at The Overmage. He growled out loud when the thing wrapped with impossible strength around his ankle. Looking down at the vine, he saw sharp protrusions embedding themselves into his flesh. Blood flowed freely and heat burned through his leg. Archanex knew he didn't have a lot of time. Something wicked hearted was planting the bells, and causing the wild life in the area to react negatively. The Overmage felt a lot of concern about his place there as he was suddenly dragged off his feet. He grabbed his fancy battle staff and attempted to remove the vine by jutting at it with one of the tips. He pushed down with all the strength he could muster, if it came down to it, he would burn the thing with his fire magic. Archanex's eyes were already glowing red with the fury of the power he possessed and the temperature was growing significantly hotter. Archanex struggled against the vine, but he knew he was running out of time...



Archanex Word Count=545

[Isylle]

Three minutes later, Isylle was humming to herself and smiling while taking a small wooden thorn and carefully brushing the tips of a blue-leafed arrowstalk. These were curious plants; they grew a single woody trunk, straight as an arrow, pointy at the tip, and with narrow, blue-veined leaves spiraling around the side. This grove was about a minute old, two feet high, and formed a neat, dense patch on the forest floor.

The hollow thorn was empty now, but she had applied enough of the insect-repellant excretions from it to keep the arrowstalk healthy. Isylle stood up and smoothed down her skirts. A creaking directly overhead intensified her most pleasant smile. The wretched brown creature didn't really take much effort. Certainly, it was fast and the volley from her pair of seven-coloured sleet sunflowers had completely missed. Reacting to, reading the pattern in, and moving to dodge a thousand poisoned sunflower seeds spraying in your direction was no mean feat. For a moment, she thought that she had a challenge on her hands.

Isylle looked aside, towards where four sunflowers were already starting to wilt of age at the edge of a large spread of slender, looping vines. Once that she asked the ground to grow a little more hazardous, though, the brown blur had tripped and promptly hit by the second pair of sunflowers. The hallucinogenic dust from the burst seeds would keep it subdued and crazy for another hour or so, but that was just why things were so fun! When it wakes up, it'll find itself with the ankles tied together with living vine and swinging twenty feet above the forest floor, above the patch of arrowroot. That was punishment enough.

The pink parasol open, Isylle wandered off towards a new sense of unease. She noticed that it was around the same place where she had planted a smattering of gravelight bells. She hadn't made those corpses, technically. The cart that they were travelling on just happened to... slip. Down a hill. After hitting a rather sizeable bump in the road. She had arrived after following the sense of a suddenly injured tree whose newest roots had gotten run over.

That sensation only a little similar to the one that she had now. Someone was digging up one of her flowers. It can't be something eating them; grazers found the light and the sound a bit disturbing and the taste altogether like that of dead flesh. When she found the culprit, Isylle thought, she was going to introduce him or her to the same sensation of being cut at the root and then laid aside to die of exposure. Oh yes...

Archanex had just prepared to burn the vine away when the vine suddenly slowed in its attempts to crush and grind his legs into paste. He looked up. An auburn-haired woman in red, white, and black was smiling pleasantly at him and her eyes - one green, one red - had a placid, motherly look in them. She would have been standing on the edge of the patch of strange growth except that there was a circle of vivacious, new grass and field-flowers around her. In fact, there was an entire path of it headed back into the forest.

"Hello." She angled her parasol back, the better to see the interloper, "They can be very aggressive." She walked forward and folded down her parasol, springing up new plant growth the entire way. She poked the vine gently with the tip of her umbrella; it unwrapped itself and slunk away like a chastened child. Or rather, like a sinuous, green, thorny, and murderous child.

Isylle turned back up towards Archanex, both hands resting on the handle of the umbrella, the tip on the ground where a tiny fern was trying to curl up the smooth wood. "It can be really dangerous out here if you're not careful. Can you please tell me your name?" She said, still with that same polite, smiling pleasantness.