Golden Thorns: chapter five
Cold wind, roaring in his ears. Coran pulled his glaive off of his back, slammed it, point first, into a tree and held on as the ancient plant toppled and crashed to the ground. Here he was in the middle of the emerald forest. He took a moment to survey his surroundings. Nothing. No sound, no movement. Nothing.
"Timber," he called lazily to the emptiness.
He started running. No point hanging around went there was a relic to find. Speaking of which, Coran had no idea what he was looking for. Some kind of ancient temple, that was simple enough, but relic was a very vague term. Thinking about it, this Ozpin guy was, like… cryptic, like… all the time.
An explosion. Gunfire. A plume of smoke rising above the trees. Someone's got themselves into trouble already. Not my problem. Though he secretly hoped that Weiss was involved somehow.
He kept running. For at least an hour he ran. Everything looked the same in this bothersome forest. He had expected to run into some Grimm by now, but he wasn't complaining. He really wanted to just get this over with. Bloody hell, would this forest never end? Coran decided to climb a tree to see if he could find some sort of landmark. He used his momentum to jump up to the first branches, and started his climb. Five minutes and two near death experiences later and he was amongst the top most branches trying to spot any signs of a temple.
Nothing. Wait, there. To the east a small collection of stones that didn't quite look natural. Even if it wasn't the temple it was a good place to start.
"You see it too then?" came a subtle, accented voice from behind him.
"If I didn't know better id say you were following me," he said as he turned to see Marie in the next tree. Blast, if she'd been a beowolf…
"You are a hard man to keep up with, Coran Silverthorne. I lost track of you twice before I caught up."
"That is the general idea." He answered
"Shall we?" she said brightly.
"I guess so." Coran answered bleakly. Still, it could be worse. He could have landed the bully, or the scraggly one.
As they reached the forest floor he listened out. Wings, big wings. Approaching fast.
"Get under cover, now" Marie turned to him.
"What, what is it?" no time to speak, the thing was almost on top of them. Instead he just shoved her under a small shrub and dived in after. Great gusts of wind followed. It was a nevermore, one of the most dangerous types of Grimm. Ozpin really was unorthodox if he let one of these get this close to his school. It passed without incident, probably occupied with his classmates instead. Again, not his problem. Marie was lying very still beside him, hardly breathing. He slowly looked out of the shrub to see if anything was about to attack him. This made him realise that during the commotion he had lost his sense of direction completely. He tried to use the sun to find east but it was approaching midday and the sun was about as high as it was going to get. No luck there.
It was at this point that Marie got up, casually pulled a twig from Coran's hair and said with utter confidence "it's this way," gesturing off into the trees.
"Are you sure?" he questioned
"Yes," she said. And with a wink and another one of those perfect grins, she was sprinting away. Coran rolled his eyes and followed.