(A writing exercise to try and get my inspiration back. Closed to Zook, or whatever character he uses.)
She always found herself retreating to the forests. They felt like home when no other place ever could. Concordia was the most evident of this feeling. She had spent so much of what parts of her life she could remember in that forest more than any other village or city or town. There was something about it that resonated within her and made her feel comfortable. Safe even, if she dared to say such a word within the confines of her mind and hope that no other creature would ever hear it. After all, a murderer should have no need to feel safe in any kind of place, let alone one as beautiful as where she found herself now.
As the long grass and the rocky plains beyond the port city of Talmhaidh faded from her view, Witchblade found herself in one of the thickest forests she had ever wandered through. The trees were monsters that could have been hundreds of years old, easily a thousand perhaps and they towered toward a bright blue sky that dared to shine through cloudless and clear. The smell of damp earth tickled her senses and the feel of the rough bark upon her fingers was a familiarity she had missed while aboard the ship that had brought her here. All she had to do now was figure out what exactly she was doing here.
I need you to help me...
Those words still echoed in her mind, pleading in that emotional way that she hated so much. Eyes that were not hers and yet so familiar to her, which stared at her through a tainted truth of a mirror, begging her. And beyond that, peeking from under the pristine and white dress that had covered a frail and malnourished body poked a symbol all too familiar to the halfling.
A ring of circle burned into the very flesh.
She had the exact same one on her shoulder blade. She knew not what it meant and how she had gotten it. For years she had no even known about its presence. After all, who could see what lay on their back? It was that psychic connection with a person she knew and yet didn’t know, words that had asked her to be a hero for once instead of a murderer and a familiar feeling that had driven her from Corone to Dheathain. And her first steps off the boat and into this country had left her with an unmistakable feeling of déj* vu rushing over her and attempting to cripple her. Even this thick forest called Luthmor felt familiar to her and yet the more she tried to uncover the memories from within her mind the more they seemed to elude her and the more The Malice mocked her from its dark depths.
Just where was she going? Dheathain was easily three times as large as Corone and filled with a vast wilderness and untouched pieces of land that would take her weeks if not months to search for this person, this woman that tickled her mind. But she had to try. To stop the psychic connection, to destroy what had made her weak once more, she had to try. Even if it meant in the end she’d become just another murderer by ending the woman’s life, she had to try. It was all she could do.