Private Tales Early Bird Gets the Worm

[Treyvr Forrester]

Pernrith was near invisible at this hour, and there was not a soul awake to see it. No torches or candles Illuminated the many wooden cabins scattered around the village, because nobody was awake to need them. The area was further darkened by the thick evergreen canopies blocking the moonlight from shining on villagers homes. The only light that existed at a morning this early was that which shined off of the fireflies that dominated the areas population. Not that they shined very far at all.

In the darkness a lone man, with a stubbly brown beard walked through the forestry draped in green, with what looked to be a bow he had built himself. Many men, would find it hard to navigate in the darkness, but he'd had a few years to memorize the terrain, and his former job had left him well prepared for moving about in the dark. Stopping near the trunk of a large evergreen tree he'd take a drink from his flask before slouching downwards to look at the tracks he'd been following for the last hour.

It was a boars prints, and by the looks of it a big one. Back in the day he'd have called a party to help hunt it, nowadays however, he couldn't risk calling the attention to himself. So he'd continue on, besides... If nobody helped, it was more meat for him, and he could feel himself growing closer.

 

[Shin]

Shin awoke to a soft cooing which soon rose to a deafening chorus of impatient peeps—her roommates were up early again. Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she pushed through a wall of black feathers and into the cool morning air. Now at her back, the peeping reached a fervor pitch before falling into an abrupt and contented silence.

Having spent the past month in the same nest, the young pixie did not bother sparing the three blackbird chicks she had come to call her roommates a second glance. After all, their silence meant only one thing: breakfast had arrived. Well, it had arrived for them; Shin, despite not wanting to disappoint her generous hosts, couldn't stomach the taste of freshly caught worm. There was something about the way it continued to move around in her stomach that made her uneasy.

She needed to find her own breakfast today.

Pulling on a short skirt of green leaves around her slim waist and a single leaf across her chest, Shin took one step from her treetop home and allowed gravity to do the rest. Her hair blew back from her face, the forest around her turned into a blur of green, and the rush of the wind filled her pointed ears. Then, opening her wings just as the last evergreen bough fell from her peripherals, her frenzied descent leveled off into a gentle glide. If there was one thing that was sure to banish sleep from the body it was nearly becoming nothing more than a speck of pixie dust on the forest floor as Shin's quickly beating heart could attest to.

Now, normally, the woman would have flitted off to the east of Pernrith where the berries were just coming into season, but today something caught her eye or rather someone did, a man a good distance in front of her. Having spied on her fair share of humans, she could tell that this was no ordinary man. His movements were closer to that of an animal than anything else with the way he seemed to instinctually avoid stepping on the debris that littered the forest floor. And, more to the point, she had never seen this man around Pernrith before and she'd seen everyone.

Suffice to say the pixie's interest was piqued for she quickly elected to sate her burgeoning curiosity in favor of her groaning stomach. Beating her wings, Shin rose closer to the forest's green ceiling and found herself a morning updraft. Riding the lazy updraft, she kept her unblinking eyes trained on the man far below.

Who are you?

 

[Treyvr Forrester]

A few minutes passed before the boar finally came into the rangers view. It stood alone in a clearing about 20 yards out where the canopies of the trees split if only for a moment and allowed the moons light to pass through and shine upon it. He'd been right in guessing its size, if he killed it, it could feed him for weeks. For the first time in a while he couldn't suppress the grin that was forming on his face. Perhaps Pernrith would make a good home after all.

Slowly crouching into some tall grass, and taking special care not to alert the massive pig to his presence. Crouching alone and with a clear view of his prey he'd unsling his bow, place an arrow onto its drawstring, a motion he'd rehearsed a thousand times. Pulling he arrow back he'd let it rest as he slowed his breathing, and lined up the shot. The boar was practically looking at him, although completely unaware of the fact and he could see it's black beady eyes.

And in a moment of instinct he knew before the arrow had even left his hand that he'd hit his mark.

The arrow would soar past the boars ear, and into its left shoulder. A bone chilling shriek would escape it as it frantically tried to run forward before dropping to the ground. It was a clean kill if there ever was one, and for a moment the man felt like a ranger again, he'd let the feeling pass before reslinging his bow and walking towards the boar intending to drag it back to his new cabin on the outskirts of Pernrith.

As he crouched to pick it up however, he heard the angry grunts of a feral beast growing closer. Instinct took over and he'd roll to the side, feeling a powerful brush of air as another pissed off boar dashed past, narrowly missing him. Just regaining stability from the roll, he'd see the hog turning to face him from only a few yards away. Even with Treyvrs skill he wouldn't have the time to draw his bow and knock an arrow, so he quickly drew his short sword.

A man and his sword against a boar and its tusk.

The faint sense of happiness he'd received from his kill was now gone as a very real sense of danger placed itself in his head. The odds were not in his favor here.

 

[Shin]

Thankfully, the young pixie's question did not go unanswered for long.

Fluttering high among the green boughs of spruce and fir, Shin tracked the man's progress through the forest with increasing interest until he came to a stop amidst a sea of gently undulating grass. Just ahead of the man, and bathed in the silvery light of the waxing moon, stood a boar the likes of which the woman had yet to come across even in all her years around Pernrith. When the man drew his bow it all became clear; she had unwittingly tracked not only a tracker but also a hunter.

With the twang of the bow and the shriek of the animal, it was all over in a blur of blood and bone. The boar fell, the man moved in, and Shin turned to leave. She'd seen the work of hunters before and, though she did not fault them for their carnivorous ways, the letting of blood made her stomach lurch in ways it ought not to.

No, there was nothing special about this man, after all—he was just another hunter.

Even as she turned to leave, however, a series of angry grunts drew the pixie's attention back the man in the clearing. The scene that greeted her made her heart beat a little faster. In a bout of morbid curiosity, she expected the grunts to be the last breaths of life leaving the man's kill as he drove his blade into its throat, but what she found was something different. Certainly, the hunter still stood by his kill, but he was not seeing to it as Shin expected. Rather, he stood facing yet another boar that somehow looked even larger than its now diseased brethren.

He's in trouble.

The hunter moved to draw his blade but even Shin's untrained eyes could tell he would not be fast enough, the boar was already closing in. In the same moment the boar stepped forward, the young woman found herself flying faster than she ever had before. As she flew the memory of a particular Pernrith lumberjack's family reunion after a year away flooded her mind; his children were so happy, his wife so loving, and he so joyful. Shin, having long lost a family of her own, could not allow the possibility of such joy to be denied to the hunter's imagined family.

For all her aloofness, she had come to care for the humans she watched day in and day out.

Aided by her unnatural speed, the woman soon found herself directly between the man and the boar. From here instinct kicked in, she felt the desire of a particular village temptress by the name of Lily fill her. More than anything, Shin wanted to save this man and, in a burst of omnidirectional kinetic energy, she did.

Expanding outwards from her along with a brilliant blue light, the sphere of energy would push back all it met. The grass around her was ripped from the ground, long-dead evergreen needles flew into the sky, and both the boar and the hunter—if he did not somehow avoid the blast—would find themselves pushed back by the concussive force as well. Shin, for her part, would remain untouched in the center of the magic-fueled explosion until it reached its fullest extent, three meters in every direction. Then, like a dying star, the light faded from her body and the small pixie fell the last meter to the ground in a pixie-sized heap.

The soft light of the moon was all she saw before her whole world went black.

 

[Treyvr Forrester]

Men like to have plans

Nobody likes to be caught off guard

Regardless, when a plan goes south you make a new one

It's called adaption, and its how a soldier survives

But sometimes, the new plan sucks

Treyvrs new plan sucked. And if it had been allowed to be executed it likely would have gotten him killed, fast as he was his hand wasn't quick enough to match the newer boars speed, the feral beast closed ground faster than he expected and he was forced to watch helplessly in slow motion as its black beady eyes and large white tusks closed the distance.

He'd felt helpless.

And then things got weird.

One moment he'd been staring death in the face, and the next he and the boar were being sent spiraling in opposite directions, as a blue orb which seemed to manifest from nowhere at all crashed into his chest. The orb expanded 3 meters and sent him flying back another 5, all the while barrel rolling through the grass and leaving a dirt path in his wake.

It took him a few seconds to recover after the mystery explosion, and his head was still ringing, but he knew if he was still conscious the boar would be too. And he knew the newfound distance between him and it to be a precious gift, that he could not afford to waste.

The boar was already working on its revenge, moving in a frantic frenzy. The blast had confused it and made it desperate. With speed the likes of which that could only be gained through years of training an arrow found itself knocked on Treyvr's bow.

"3"

He'd count, allowing his breathing to slow.

"2"

He'd say aloud as his arrowhead lined up with the charging boars shoulder.

"1"

He'd hesitate, a moment after he'd uttered the last of his countdown to ensure his shot was true. This wasn't a desperate standoff from a few feet away with a sword. This was a man in his element, with all the time in the world.

And as the boar neared 4 meters he'd release. By the time the boar had reached 3, the arrow head had pierced its shoulder. At 2, the boars feet fell from under it, and at 1 it slid to a stop in front of his feet.

But it hadn't died yet. The arrow, while still an impressive shot, had not been as impressive as the last. The boar was in pain and desperately trying to fill it's lungs with air with each frantic breath. But the hole his arrow had torn through them, ensured they'd never be full again.

"Shhhhh"

The Rangers voice would sooth it as the rangers body mimicked the sentiment. He'd crouch and place his hand between the boars ears, stroking it and petting it before moving down its face and using his fingers to close the boars eyelids as if to send it to its final slumber.

"Rest easy my friend, your fight is over"

The pig seemed to concede. Letting one last huff of air escape its nostrils before letting go.

And then there was silence, and the rangers eyes would drift from his kill to the dirt circle that had been left in the mysterious blue spheres wake. He saw a sea of brown, with a blue dot in its epicenter.

As the distance between him and the dot shortened, the fact that the dot was actually a pixie became more evident. And the fact that that pixie had just saved his life, and was now unconscious, made it his duty to see to it that she woke up alive and well.

So he'd tend to his boars as he waited for her to wake up, all the while keeping an eye open for a possible third, and still on edge from the seconds surprise attack.

 

[Shin]

Consciousness returned to Shin in a gasp of cool morning air. Her chest heaved as she sucked in air like one long deprived of it. Soon each breath came more easily than the last until her breathing finally leveled off into normality. Then, and only then, did the young woman's eyes struggle open under the weight of magical-overexertion.

Laying on her back, all the pixie saw was the night sky. Clouds had since passed in front of the moon obscuring it from view and yet she still saw stars. Red, green, and blue, the stars danced this way and that until they began to fade into the nether of their own accord. Indeed, the longer the woman stared upward the more scarce the stars became until it became apparent that they were never stars at all, but rather the fast-fading retinal echoes of the strange blue explosion.

Wait, explosion?

In a moment of clarity, the pint-sized Shin propped herself up with her hands and glanced around. Or rather she would have glanced around had her gaze not first come to rest on the man from before, the hunter. Instead, her breath quickened, her body stiffened and she froze like a deer in the torchlight—she'd messed up.

Oh...