Post by The Mouth on Jun 9, 2014 17:26:54 GMT -8
June, 2014
The grief hits him like a rock from the clear blue sky. He recalls the most scared, the happiest he's been. What he is chasing, will chase for decades more. It twists him up, scatters his purpose and his will, crippling his drive. But he will not let it go; like a drowning man with a gold bar clutched in his arms.
18th October, 2013
Jory took to archery like a fish to water.
We’d arranged a night hunt on a private park; she had her bow and I just stood back to watch her shine.
Jory was an awkward girl; I suspect that she transitioned back and forth from male and female, possible as a result of some part of her faerie heritage. But she identified as she, for the moment, and was always put off by Hannah’s stark beauty or Rabbit’s sheer charisma.
Jory was also the oldest, at eighteen but always seemed younger, smaller than she was. Red hair, and truly red at that, dark clothes, combat boots - She wasn’t exactly unusual for a girl her age. But she didn’t look a the world as though it was something to experience but something to fear.
But when she picked up that bow she started to shine - Literally started glowing. Her focus and concentration was absolute, her heartbeat calm, and when she released it was a fluid precision that left me in awe. This girl who stared at her feet the entire time I knew her…
She was alive, young, and beautiful, the long limbs lost their awkwardness and the slim body was like a stooping hawk. She became speed and grace when challenged with her bow.
So, of course I went and spent some bloody great sums of money on a bow. You do things like that to make your children shine.
Christ, what was happening to me?
All natural materials with modern design techniques. Horn, sinew, glue made from plants and animal bones and fish skins. The string is twisted sinew, tufts of beaver fur on each string to make the bow silent. It has these odd little limbs in front to add more power; stained black and red for her colors and made of ash.
It’s kind of bad ass as the kids would say.
It also throws an arrow out at three hundred feet per second, but only because Jory is enormously strong.
We are stalking deer in the forest; a hunting preserve for the lords going back nearly six hundred years - Even before the English conquests. In a bizarre way it was the wealthy who were concerned about the environment, more so over the middle and labor classes who had a greater concern of getting enough coin or growing enough food to eat. Tracts of forest were either board lumber to sell or animals to harvest. An ancient conflict going back hundreds if not thousands of years.
I’ve been told that there is a stag in these woods of immense size and is at least 12 points. I doubt this, as it is a selling point, but it is impressive if true. The moon is full and we are moving through a world of greys and blacks in stark contrasts. Her eyes are slightly luminescent, like a cat as she searches for sign.
We are silent, predators, stalking through the woods. Jory pauses, rigid for a moment, then slinks into a shadow. Her arrows are in fur lined leather tubes across her back so they don’t rattle, and I hear the slight scraping as she pulls one out and knocks it on her bow.
I move a little closer and I catch sight of a herd of does with a couple of antlered males. They are all bedded down in a section where the trees are a little thinner, and standing above them all is a massive beast with a crown of thorned antlers, eyes red and aflame. I blink and the creature is just a giant fucking deer.
A giant fucking deer staring at me.
Contrary to popular belief herbivores are not inherently harmless. Nothing holds off predators like wolves and bears to the point where they only prey on the sick and weak without having the means to enforce it’s personal safety.
Like a large rack of antlers, for example.
We humans focus on that part, the pointy bits, but a deer can leap, straight up, it’s own body height plus some. They are fast when they hop through the woods on their spring loaded legs. And this deer is nearly half a ton - The kick will send send a predator into orbit.
I hear a slight creak as Jory pulls her bow back. She is holding her shot, nearly seventy yards, in the dark, under cover - No way she can make it. She is softly chanting something in Gaelic… And she relaxes the bow.
And the Old Man of the Forest, the huge beast, lowers it’s head, like a bow, and then whuffles. All the deer come alight at once and bound off into the deeper trees.
I walk over to Jory and she is crying. She moves to throw her bow down but my sharp “Whoa!” stops her. “Just because we are upset does not mean we break expensive and lovely tools,” and she sniffles and rests the bow against a tree.
“What happened there, Jory?” I speak to her as if she was a spooked animal. I’ve seen Jory go from moody, to crying, to enraged. I don’t like enraged; she ate her bed by unhinging her jaw like a snake and using rows of sharp teeth that weren’t there a minute ago to shred the mattress down.
“It was a thing of faerie. I couldn’t kill it…” She is looking at her shoes, her too long nose peeking out from her hair.
“Well, yeah. I probably should have stopped you, but it would have been incredibly rude of me to challenge your judgement.” I pat her on the shoulder.
“So, you ain’ mad at me?” She sniffles, she is the least conscious of her affectations but is potentially the most endearing. She routinely fails at my deception training but is definitely getting higher marks in her leadership skills.
“Why would I be? It was your shot, to take or not. And he was…”
“Magical? Beautiful? Majestic?”
“And many other descriptions. You were eyes on the ground, and our objective to stalk a deer in the dark. Taking meat home is just a bonus.” I give her a brief smile.
She hugs me, fierce and hard and my bones creak and I nearly collapse with my epiphany.
What I had with Casterly was not family. This was family. My girls, and they were mine, were family. Casterly… He made me, he was my great-grandfather, but he also enslaved my mind and my will to his whims and was so gone himself he didn’t realize that it had been done to him as well.
I’m lost in this for a moment. Because I want this, the belonging, more than anything, even vengeance is in the back seat. But I have to let them go, I have to finish my job, I have to because if I don’t they will die. The Baron will find them like he found my other children as use them against me or turn them to tools of his purpose.
But will I remain someone who deserves them, this trust?
I hug her back, and we separate, somewhat embarrassed at our emotional display when I hear the sound of something big moving through the brush. I know it is big because it was making a hell of a lot of noise and it just knocked a tree down.
Jory has her bow in a flash, and I just say “Your call.”
She heads for the noise.
And I follow.
The noise turns out to be a truck, and the sound of crashing trees were in fact trees being cut down; the how was really odd. Strange misshapen men with poor fitting uniforms, five of them, were spraying something on the base of the trees, a slime, that ate into the trees, which then fell over. The men were clearly something other as they were dragging the trees to the truck with brute strength.
At the edge of their lights we saw the Old Man, four feet planted, a little splayed, his majestic antlers coated in red, held at bay by a enormous pig.
“Grandfather, what should we do?”
“Your call girl…”
She pauses for a moment, then whips an arrow on to her string, pulls, and releases in one smooth movement.
Her arrows have leaf shaped broadheads made of sharpened bronze, steel being too uncomfortable to her. I catch a flicker of it as the arrow hisses down and catches the pig just above the shoulder at a downward angle. The boar squeals in rage, coughs blood, and blindly goes for the Stag. For it’s part the Old Man goes deeper into the woods and Jory follows them.
Me, I pull my pistol out, attach my silencer, and go hunting the strange monster men.
***
An hour later I find Jory limping back to me, her bow broken. I’m not much better off, I’ve got scorched clothes, some very odd spines in my back that I am guessing are coated in some sort of poison, and most importantly a terrible taste I can’t get out of my mouth.
Jory is bloody, her gear is ripped and shredded, and she has a nasty gash on her calf. We look at each other and giggle a little bit. “So, not what I planned to do tonight,” I toss between us.
“No…” she starts. Then a rush of “OhmygodFrancisdon’tbemadIbrokethebowstabbingtheboaranditbrokeI’msosorry!”
She turns a bit red when I start laughing. “Darling child, I’m a soldier first and a hunter second. And a soldier knows tools will be used and broken in the name of victory. A soldier just hates a tool being mistreated or let go for lack of discipline. Yeh won with it, and God knows I can afford another for you.”
“Oh. Well. I’m sorry. It was beautiful.”
I nod. “Well, clearly, we both survived. Let me look at your leg,” I examine the wound with a small penlight, and I was right. “Well, no tendons or blood vessels, but that is a nasty muscle tear. I need to bind it up to stop the bleeding and then I’m going to carry you out of here.”
“No, I can walk out of here, I bloody walked in, I can bloody-” and that would be when the adrenaline started wearing off and the blood loss was sinking in.
“Bloody what?” I start to cut the sleeve off my flannel as she slumps against a tree.
“Bugger that. God knows what’s on your shirt, just use mine.” She awkwardly removes the last of her shirt leaving her bloody, pale, and steaming in the moonlight; the blood almost black against her pale skin. Thankfully she’s wearing a sports bra or I’d be in trouble with the law if they caught us out here.
“Deal. Just, if you wouldn’t mind, using your glove hand, could you pull these spines out? They itch like crazy.” I turn my back and four quick tugs later I can feel my blood doing the sluggish work of closing the irritating wounds.
I use my knife to cut her shredded shirt into a compress and tie it down. “You know Francis, the boar might have been worth it but it tasted awful. Astoundingly terrible. All I got were the tusks as a trophy,” she rattles them in her game bag, “but I was hoping to bring Hannah some meat.”
“Tell me about it. Those guys… It was like drinking motor oil mixed with raw sewage and spoiled orange juice. I still have the taste…” I trail off. Hannah and Rabbit really don’t like me reminding them that I am an undead fiend forced to drink the blood of the living.
Jory just pats my cheek. “Grandfather, I know what you do to survive. I’ve done it to, you know.”
“Drank blood?” I’m a little lost here, I don’t want her getting scared. If she runs off into the woods she could go into shock and die.
“Sort of. I ate a whole person. His name of Gilly, and we would pass through his village every couple of years. I was twelve and hadn’t realized what I was yet, and I was walking down the road; I was late coming home because I’d been makin friends with a town girl and we were talking about some boy band or another…”
I was seeing where this was going, and I really didn’t like this road. My Beast didn’t like this road.
“Jory, you don’t” she kept talking like I hadn’t said a word.
“He drove by, gave me a lift. Stopped at his house for something, asked if I wanted some tea. I said no, but he dragged me inside… He stuffed twenty euro in my hand when he dropped me off a half mile from camp. He said no one’d believe a Traveler girl, they was all sluts and liars and whores.”
“That’s a lie Jory, people are people, just the same.”
She looks at me instead of her feet. “Oh, I know that Francis. I never tol’ anyone. Theres rules in the Camps, and they might have driven me off I thought. So I never told anyone. Two years go by and I come into my new life and then we are in that little village. I walked that road every night for a week hoping he’d drive by and he did. I got in his car, and we go to his house again. He said something about he knew I’d liked it and that I was a whore and then I ate him.”
She smiles at me, with a mouth too large for her face, teeth sharp and square. “Gobbled him right up. Thought it supposed to make me feel better; but he tasted awful, different from the pig, but still no good, like his evil was poison in the meat and bones.”
She gulps for air for a moment and then tears track through the blood and mud on her cheeks, “So, I know what it’s like to eat someone. And I know you have to do it to live, not like I did because I was hurt and alone. And I know it hurts you and makes you alone…”
She’s shaking. Confession sponsored by blood loss, shock, and post combat fatigue. I wipe the tears from her cheek and give her a big smile with my fangs, “Not so alone now dear. Not at all. Let’s get us home and cleaned up, get the taste of the night out of us.”
She nods. I cradle her in my arms and walk out of the woods, takes about two hours. Fifteen minutes after we start she murmurs something and falls asleep.
I think it was ‘I love you Grandfather.’
Oh God! Let it be anything else. Because I have to leave her behind…
June 2014
Seattle, WA
He left them behind, but can he be the man he would have to be to meet them again? Corkscrewing barbed wire runs through him at the thought.
The grief hits him like a rock from the clear blue sky. He recalls the most scared, the happiest he's been. What he is chasing, will chase for decades more. It twists him up, scatters his purpose and his will, crippling his drive. But he will not let it go; like a drowning man with a gold bar clutched in his arms.
18th October, 2013
Jory took to archery like a fish to water.
We’d arranged a night hunt on a private park; she had her bow and I just stood back to watch her shine.
Jory was an awkward girl; I suspect that she transitioned back and forth from male and female, possible as a result of some part of her faerie heritage. But she identified as she, for the moment, and was always put off by Hannah’s stark beauty or Rabbit’s sheer charisma.
Jory was also the oldest, at eighteen but always seemed younger, smaller than she was. Red hair, and truly red at that, dark clothes, combat boots - She wasn’t exactly unusual for a girl her age. But she didn’t look a the world as though it was something to experience but something to fear.
But when she picked up that bow she started to shine - Literally started glowing. Her focus and concentration was absolute, her heartbeat calm, and when she released it was a fluid precision that left me in awe. This girl who stared at her feet the entire time I knew her…
She was alive, young, and beautiful, the long limbs lost their awkwardness and the slim body was like a stooping hawk. She became speed and grace when challenged with her bow.
So, of course I went and spent some bloody great sums of money on a bow. You do things like that to make your children shine.
Christ, what was happening to me?
All natural materials with modern design techniques. Horn, sinew, glue made from plants and animal bones and fish skins. The string is twisted sinew, tufts of beaver fur on each string to make the bow silent. It has these odd little limbs in front to add more power; stained black and red for her colors and made of ash.
It’s kind of bad ass as the kids would say.
It also throws an arrow out at three hundred feet per second, but only because Jory is enormously strong.
We are stalking deer in the forest; a hunting preserve for the lords going back nearly six hundred years - Even before the English conquests. In a bizarre way it was the wealthy who were concerned about the environment, more so over the middle and labor classes who had a greater concern of getting enough coin or growing enough food to eat. Tracts of forest were either board lumber to sell or animals to harvest. An ancient conflict going back hundreds if not thousands of years.
I’ve been told that there is a stag in these woods of immense size and is at least 12 points. I doubt this, as it is a selling point, but it is impressive if true. The moon is full and we are moving through a world of greys and blacks in stark contrasts. Her eyes are slightly luminescent, like a cat as she searches for sign.
We are silent, predators, stalking through the woods. Jory pauses, rigid for a moment, then slinks into a shadow. Her arrows are in fur lined leather tubes across her back so they don’t rattle, and I hear the slight scraping as she pulls one out and knocks it on her bow.
I move a little closer and I catch sight of a herd of does with a couple of antlered males. They are all bedded down in a section where the trees are a little thinner, and standing above them all is a massive beast with a crown of thorned antlers, eyes red and aflame. I blink and the creature is just a giant fucking deer.
A giant fucking deer staring at me.
Contrary to popular belief herbivores are not inherently harmless. Nothing holds off predators like wolves and bears to the point where they only prey on the sick and weak without having the means to enforce it’s personal safety.
Like a large rack of antlers, for example.
We humans focus on that part, the pointy bits, but a deer can leap, straight up, it’s own body height plus some. They are fast when they hop through the woods on their spring loaded legs. And this deer is nearly half a ton - The kick will send send a predator into orbit.
I hear a slight creak as Jory pulls her bow back. She is holding her shot, nearly seventy yards, in the dark, under cover - No way she can make it. She is softly chanting something in Gaelic… And she relaxes the bow.
And the Old Man of the Forest, the huge beast, lowers it’s head, like a bow, and then whuffles. All the deer come alight at once and bound off into the deeper trees.
I walk over to Jory and she is crying. She moves to throw her bow down but my sharp “Whoa!” stops her. “Just because we are upset does not mean we break expensive and lovely tools,” and she sniffles and rests the bow against a tree.
“What happened there, Jory?” I speak to her as if she was a spooked animal. I’ve seen Jory go from moody, to crying, to enraged. I don’t like enraged; she ate her bed by unhinging her jaw like a snake and using rows of sharp teeth that weren’t there a minute ago to shred the mattress down.
“It was a thing of faerie. I couldn’t kill it…” She is looking at her shoes, her too long nose peeking out from her hair.
“Well, yeah. I probably should have stopped you, but it would have been incredibly rude of me to challenge your judgement.” I pat her on the shoulder.
“So, you ain’ mad at me?” She sniffles, she is the least conscious of her affectations but is potentially the most endearing. She routinely fails at my deception training but is definitely getting higher marks in her leadership skills.
“Why would I be? It was your shot, to take or not. And he was…”
“Magical? Beautiful? Majestic?”
“And many other descriptions. You were eyes on the ground, and our objective to stalk a deer in the dark. Taking meat home is just a bonus.” I give her a brief smile.
She hugs me, fierce and hard and my bones creak and I nearly collapse with my epiphany.
What I had with Casterly was not family. This was family. My girls, and they were mine, were family. Casterly… He made me, he was my great-grandfather, but he also enslaved my mind and my will to his whims and was so gone himself he didn’t realize that it had been done to him as well.
I’m lost in this for a moment. Because I want this, the belonging, more than anything, even vengeance is in the back seat. But I have to let them go, I have to finish my job, I have to because if I don’t they will die. The Baron will find them like he found my other children as use them against me or turn them to tools of his purpose.
But will I remain someone who deserves them, this trust?
I hug her back, and we separate, somewhat embarrassed at our emotional display when I hear the sound of something big moving through the brush. I know it is big because it was making a hell of a lot of noise and it just knocked a tree down.
Jory has her bow in a flash, and I just say “Your call.”
She heads for the noise.
And I follow.
The noise turns out to be a truck, and the sound of crashing trees were in fact trees being cut down; the how was really odd. Strange misshapen men with poor fitting uniforms, five of them, were spraying something on the base of the trees, a slime, that ate into the trees, which then fell over. The men were clearly something other as they were dragging the trees to the truck with brute strength.
At the edge of their lights we saw the Old Man, four feet planted, a little splayed, his majestic antlers coated in red, held at bay by a enormous pig.
“Grandfather, what should we do?”
“Your call girl…”
She pauses for a moment, then whips an arrow on to her string, pulls, and releases in one smooth movement.
Her arrows have leaf shaped broadheads made of sharpened bronze, steel being too uncomfortable to her. I catch a flicker of it as the arrow hisses down and catches the pig just above the shoulder at a downward angle. The boar squeals in rage, coughs blood, and blindly goes for the Stag. For it’s part the Old Man goes deeper into the woods and Jory follows them.
Me, I pull my pistol out, attach my silencer, and go hunting the strange monster men.
***
An hour later I find Jory limping back to me, her bow broken. I’m not much better off, I’ve got scorched clothes, some very odd spines in my back that I am guessing are coated in some sort of poison, and most importantly a terrible taste I can’t get out of my mouth.
Jory is bloody, her gear is ripped and shredded, and she has a nasty gash on her calf. We look at each other and giggle a little bit. “So, not what I planned to do tonight,” I toss between us.
“No…” she starts. Then a rush of “OhmygodFrancisdon’tbemadIbrokethebowstabbingtheboaranditbrokeI’msosorry!”
She turns a bit red when I start laughing. “Darling child, I’m a soldier first and a hunter second. And a soldier knows tools will be used and broken in the name of victory. A soldier just hates a tool being mistreated or let go for lack of discipline. Yeh won with it, and God knows I can afford another for you.”
“Oh. Well. I’m sorry. It was beautiful.”
I nod. “Well, clearly, we both survived. Let me look at your leg,” I examine the wound with a small penlight, and I was right. “Well, no tendons or blood vessels, but that is a nasty muscle tear. I need to bind it up to stop the bleeding and then I’m going to carry you out of here.”
“No, I can walk out of here, I bloody walked in, I can bloody-” and that would be when the adrenaline started wearing off and the blood loss was sinking in.
“Bloody what?” I start to cut the sleeve off my flannel as she slumps against a tree.
“Bugger that. God knows what’s on your shirt, just use mine.” She awkwardly removes the last of her shirt leaving her bloody, pale, and steaming in the moonlight; the blood almost black against her pale skin. Thankfully she’s wearing a sports bra or I’d be in trouble with the law if they caught us out here.
“Deal. Just, if you wouldn’t mind, using your glove hand, could you pull these spines out? They itch like crazy.” I turn my back and four quick tugs later I can feel my blood doing the sluggish work of closing the irritating wounds.
I use my knife to cut her shredded shirt into a compress and tie it down. “You know Francis, the boar might have been worth it but it tasted awful. Astoundingly terrible. All I got were the tusks as a trophy,” she rattles them in her game bag, “but I was hoping to bring Hannah some meat.”
“Tell me about it. Those guys… It was like drinking motor oil mixed with raw sewage and spoiled orange juice. I still have the taste…” I trail off. Hannah and Rabbit really don’t like me reminding them that I am an undead fiend forced to drink the blood of the living.
Jory just pats my cheek. “Grandfather, I know what you do to survive. I’ve done it to, you know.”
“Drank blood?” I’m a little lost here, I don’t want her getting scared. If she runs off into the woods she could go into shock and die.
“Sort of. I ate a whole person. His name of Gilly, and we would pass through his village every couple of years. I was twelve and hadn’t realized what I was yet, and I was walking down the road; I was late coming home because I’d been makin friends with a town girl and we were talking about some boy band or another…”
I was seeing where this was going, and I really didn’t like this road. My Beast didn’t like this road.
“Jory, you don’t” she kept talking like I hadn’t said a word.
“He drove by, gave me a lift. Stopped at his house for something, asked if I wanted some tea. I said no, but he dragged me inside… He stuffed twenty euro in my hand when he dropped me off a half mile from camp. He said no one’d believe a Traveler girl, they was all sluts and liars and whores.”
“That’s a lie Jory, people are people, just the same.”
She looks at me instead of her feet. “Oh, I know that Francis. I never tol’ anyone. Theres rules in the Camps, and they might have driven me off I thought. So I never told anyone. Two years go by and I come into my new life and then we are in that little village. I walked that road every night for a week hoping he’d drive by and he did. I got in his car, and we go to his house again. He said something about he knew I’d liked it and that I was a whore and then I ate him.”
She smiles at me, with a mouth too large for her face, teeth sharp and square. “Gobbled him right up. Thought it supposed to make me feel better; but he tasted awful, different from the pig, but still no good, like his evil was poison in the meat and bones.”
She gulps for air for a moment and then tears track through the blood and mud on her cheeks, “So, I know what it’s like to eat someone. And I know you have to do it to live, not like I did because I was hurt and alone. And I know it hurts you and makes you alone…”
She’s shaking. Confession sponsored by blood loss, shock, and post combat fatigue. I wipe the tears from her cheek and give her a big smile with my fangs, “Not so alone now dear. Not at all. Let’s get us home and cleaned up, get the taste of the night out of us.”
She nods. I cradle her in my arms and walk out of the woods, takes about two hours. Fifteen minutes after we start she murmurs something and falls asleep.
I think it was ‘I love you Grandfather.’
Oh God! Let it be anything else. Because I have to leave her behind…
June 2014
Seattle, WA
He left them behind, but can he be the man he would have to be to meet them again? Corkscrewing barbed wire runs through him at the thought.
