manslaughter
by marapozsa.
Fran and the Wood. Pre-game. Enjoy.
-
"The Wood is savage; it sings as well as smites." - Yjrn, viera wanderer, to Opareid Owain's daughter, Lady of the Manse.
They came in the summer, and the plains floods did not hinder their progress. Curious humes, with steel scimitars, men of the west that knew only soft viera, enslaved viera, and nothing of their wild counterparts, but wanted to capture them nonetheless. An inexperienced drunken group of men - alas, they would have been harmless if not for the bloodlust casting a glaze over their dark eyes. That gleam in their eyes, which made Fran's throat close up, and caused Fifr to murmur softly, "Look well. Coeurls are tame compared to these beasts."
They would never have dared to defile the Wood, if not for that wild foolishness. They would never have laughed so boisterously, as if every moment they lingered was not a moment where they came closer to death. They would never have joked so loudly of taking viera wives, or hacked away at foliage so confidently with their bright curved blades. And they would never have gotten away with it, but for the hiss of the Wood in her children's ears as they readied for bloodshed: "Waitmychildren-Iwilldealwiththesefilth-Iwillnothaveyousullyyourselvesfightingthem-beatpeace-Iwillsmiteyourwouldbecaptors."
So Fran and her sisters lowered their bows and put away their arrows and darts dripping with poison, and sheathed their knives, loosened their grips on their thick staves. Such was their trust in the Wood, and the delight they found in Her ferocity. When the Wood went to war, She went to victory.
-
As the day wore on, she saw how where they walked they left a trail of ash and tobacco. Her nostrils flared; they smelled of smoke and flames, like walking bonfires in the countenance of mortals. In the sun, her vibrant red eyes saw the way their bare skin gleamed with sweat; and how as they walked they drank spirits, burning their insides – their caring, hume hearts – to cinders.
But their tongues were fluid and though they moved through Golmore with the lumbering steps of fools, they sang the songs of birds and called beasts to flock to them. These they shot, but only a few did they keep for food, until at last no more came, knowing the danger. The viera hissed at the frivolous folly of these humes, but would not touch the carcasses themselves, only staring at the waste with lips upturned from disgust.
With them, the humes brought viera, and when they saw this Fran and the others almost picked up their weapons again, despite the Wood's reassurance. Their hands bound with biting steel, the viera were jeered at and pushed to the head of the party. It was when the first one triggered the first of Eruyt's outer defenses, her body burnt to a crisp by the strong enchantments, that Fran could not look; repeatedly, the humes were saved from certain doom by the slaughter of vieran slaves.
She could not look, she could not bear it - but she could wish plagues on the hunters' homes just as easily with her eyes shut. So from her perch in the trees, Fran clasped her hands together until the brown flesh turned pale and cursed the hunters with every breath of her body, and every molecule of her innocence. Foolish, cruel humes. She heard again the Wood's promises to smite them, and promised that ten times over, and all around her, her sisters joined her with voices of fierce assent.
"They will all die," Djur snarled, pale eyes blazing, and did not look sorry at all.
A nod. "Yes."
-
"Wait," breathed the Wood.
"Wewillhaveourvengeanceyet - "
-
When at last the hunting party rested, they had advanced almost halfway through all of Eruyt's defenses, bringing them down steadily, cheering like barbarians whenever a viera fell to the ground, poisoned or petrified or riddled with arrows.
Where once there had been fifteen viera, however, there were now only four. These slept apart from the humes, huddled in a mound of chilled bodies, scrabbling at trees, seeking purchase on bark that seemed to withdraw from their bruised frames, and asking the Wood for salvation in hoarse, rasping whispers. One, the tallest and thinnest, kept watch over the others, limping, a crude splint improperly set to her broken calf. Behind her, she left streaks of upraised dirt on the ground, like the tracks of some injured beast, carving a furrow in the earth as she paced around her sleeping sisters.
It was this one began to keen in the early grey morning. Her split lip ran with blood. Red dribbled down her chin as she scraped long limbs over thorny brambles, hugging the cruel spines to her chest. Her shrieks drew the worried exclamations of the humes, but the viera did not stir.
It had been something in the air as they slept, something to dull the senses until they no longer knew who they were. Golden pollen visited their dreams and swept away their souls, a parting kindness from the Wood, a reprieve before the carnage at last began. They smiled and stirred no more: a cairn of bodies heavy as stones.
Fearfully they sent one man to check the pulse of the closest one, but something lingering in the air struck him when he came near, and was not so kind to him as it had been to the viera. They called his name desperately - "Kir-Numen! Kir-Numen!" - but he did not hear. Black blood flowed from every orifice of his body, staining his clothing and tinting his skin. His golden hair billowed in a pool of his own rotting fluids. He was dead within minutes. Nevertheless one of his companions gave a great cry and ran forward to caress the corpse, his tears mixing with blood as he suffered the same fate.
After that they learned quickly, these humes. They did not come near their dead companion or the viera. They left them for the carrion beasts to find, and made motions to their heart and cheeks, whispering prayers under their breath.
-
In the trees, the viera of Eruyt raised no mourning cries, though the dead viera and murdered humes both made tragic scenes. Silent, they looked with opaque eyes on the vengeance of the Wood.
"It begins," Yjrn said grimly, and crouched on her ankles, waiting.
-
Soon the prayers ended. The humes muttered of ill omens instead of gods; and then finally they dared not speak at all, gripping their weapons tightly as they continued into the forest. One held before him a small wooden relic on a leather thong, the cord quivering in his hands as he motioned in front of him with it - trying to using one spirit to ward off the wrath of another. At this, and at the way the humes shook in their boots, Fran heard her sisters laugh derisively. The Wood was toying with them. Their weak gods of gold and stone were nothing in this, the most sacred of the Wood's temples.
Picked off one by one by the Wood, the group of almost twenty waned as the sun moved across the sky.
Fran and the other wood-warders watched as She went to war. Beasts with fur like dirty spun gold hunted the hunters, running swiftly on three paws and slitting throats with the other. Rifle butts melted like wax under the cloying breath of malboros. One man's skin formed lesions where gnats alighted, and another foamed at the mouth within hours of being bitten by a massive serpent with the hindlegs of a coeurl. Tendrils of leafy nightshade - like vines but with the greasy look of tentacles as well - reached down from the trees to grab at tufts of bright red and yellow hair, baring pale necks for the sharp talons of hawks no bigger than hummingbirds.
The assault was so brutal Fran could have wept for its victims, if the Wood's cries had not rung so loudly in her ears, a cacophony that drowned out the humes' screams and made her blood boil.
The Wood sang of blood and ended lives, calling madly in its sibillant warble, "Youwillallburn-youwillalldie-Iwillnotletyouharmmychildren-Iwilldestroyyou-Iwillrendyourfleshfromyourbones-youwilldie-my children will be safe-youwillalldie!"
And Fran could not close her eyes to the carnage, for there was no point. It would have taken years to wring that discordant, cruel, throaty laugh from her ears. To no longer cower from the touch of the Wood, and be comforted once again by Her murmurings. To learn again to be savage and wild by choice, and to love the Wood despite its cruelty. She saw again and again the despair in bloodshot eyes, hume spines wrenched to opposite sides and taken apart like puzzles, the earth drinking blood like rain - not necessity, not protection. Only slaughter in their name.
And each time the urge to close her ears grew, until at last, she could linger no longer.
-
"Wait," Yjrn called to her.
Fran turned.
"It is unsafe to travel alone."
And Fran saw her sister bearing traveling gear, but no wood-warder helm on her temples. They embraced, wordlessly, and made to leave.
-
"Theywerenochildrenofmine-Iamaprotector-therecanbenomercy-theywerenochildrenofmine - "
The Wood did not regret anything. Two were no great loss, compared to the last stronghold of Her power, and the last living place of Her children.
Then She remembered, pulling the memories sluggishly from the recesses of Her thoughts, the fifteen. The ones She had sent death in their sleep; the one who slept with a necklace of brambles cutting into her bones; the ones who fell to Her children's traps and Her great magick. And a lump grew in Her throat, and with far-seeing eyes She watched in silence the departure of Her children.
"Wait," the Wood breathed.
But this time they could not hear Her.