Private Tales The Bard's Song

[Elinyra Derwinthir]

The full moons shone down brightly on the forest floor, their serene light unfettered by the branches of the decayed trees. To any mortal eyes, it was just another dead, dangerous part of the Balewood to be avoided; to those of the fae, who had an innate sense of the flow of the energies of the Leylines, there was no doubt that another powerful force was at work here.

In the ghostly nocturnal luminescence, the ring of small toadstools was nearly alight. Hidden within the deathly visage of the blighted forest sat a fairy ring - a natural result of the presence of fae folk, and a boundary between the mundane and the world of the faerie. A doorway into the unknown.

But this gateway was not unguarded; on the other side, a recently-blighted treant wandered amongst the weird, wild growth of Tir Na Nog, muttering in incoherent tree-speak to itself, its attention only vaguely focused on the boundary it was meant to protect.

Zakarias

 

[Zakarias]

From one ring, to another, did the curl toed shoes of the Red Jester step through. The twinkle and sparkle a mesmer and shine as the magicks of fae did weave and twine.

Through the ley, with changed willow wand in one hand, did the proud horned clown appear. A sword of amber glass there in the other.

"My, Lahuronth, the years have not been kind to you have they?" the treant turned, its blighted form twisted and bulged with burls and knots most wicked and foul. Wronger than any wrong the wylds would bring. "But I suppose," the Jester said sing song behind his mask. His sword come up like needle point whip. Wind fast behind it. "It is not your fault, is it, old chum?"

Lahuronth gave no word before they turned to anger. Boughs swung back as strange mouth yawned and gave shout.

A twift, a snakt, and a sinking fang went the long blade guided by Jester's Red hand. Gale winds howled fast after, sharp as guillotines, each gust sliced through.

Elinyra Derwinthir

 

[Elinyra Derwinthir]

Lahuronth charged. Its mind was far gone, its body guided only by cursed madness. Though fierce and hardy in its own right, the corrupted treant was slow compared to Zakarias and cumbersome compared to the winds that he commanded. With a snap and a groan of falling wood, what had once been a proud treant soon fell before the onslaught of blade and current. With its branches cut away, Zakarias could see the treant's darkened heart exposed within the cavity of its trunk, a festering thing that could not be healed.

---

Damn this rain! Will it ever cease? Elinyra thought from her relatively comfortable perch in an ashblood tree. It seemed that a week or more had passed, and still the clouds bore down on Tir Na Nog. Even she had taken to moving between the branches of trees or over stones to avoid the muddy ground and growing pools of water. She'd tried to communicate her wonderings to Mother through the plants, but had received no real answers. As silent as the day Elinyra had decided to find the strange stag that haunted the woods. No love between them to lose, she supposed.

Her thoughts were broken by a sudden disturbance that rippled through the entire forest and up through her spine. Bolting upright, she turned towards the south-west.

"What now?" she breathed, sensing that something large had fallen. Another visitor? Thusfar those who had wandered into her home had been harmless - even helpful, but...

Her shoulder ached.

Taking up her bow and quiver, she jumped down from her tree, trying to find the path of least resistance through the thoroughly-soggy landscape.

Zakarias

 

[Zakarias]

How it beat. How it pulsed. How it writhed, fleshy and strange, and corrupted by such wrathful death and hate. The Treant's heart.

Zakarias' eyes narrowed behind the mismatched slits of his mask's eyes. His painted smile, ever-fixed in its wrath twisted glee.

"My, my, my," he tut his tongue, and pointed lazy with the tip of his re-forged blade, his long frame languid as he leaned back, and stabbed, poked, prod at the still-beating heart. "If that isn't a nasty thing he's done to you, Lahuronth, truly, and utterly vile," his voice simmered with amusement.

Till the blade ran through the Treant's heart.

Lahuronth cried out, and shook the leaves of those trees about them. Set strange things to stir and take flight.

Zakarias whipped free his blade, and flicked the spoiled ichor onto the baled earth. Gave a flourish of his weapon, and sheathed it at his hip with a little stamp of his foot. His red horns flopped and his bells a-ring.

The strange willow branch shook in his hand. Its blighted fingers reached out, like a hand flexed to spread. Twitched and rattled in his own gloved hand. He smiled all the wider behind his mask, his eyes curled happy and true.

"Well, that feels... familiar, doesn't it?"

All the rain did pour, and while bitter and bleak the landscape may be, Zakarias found those tears of the firmament, poetic.

---

From the distance, the melancholy sound of an old lyre's strings did sing through the steady downpour of rain. The wind warmed, and its voice joined the somber melody.

 

[Elinyra Derwinthir]

While the welkin remained dark and grim above, the dull lights emanated by many of the plants and creatures guided Elinyra's way through the rain, through this pathless stretch of wilderness. Cold raindrops ran over the cloak Mother had given her, leaving the fleshy half of her body blessedly dry. Still, she felt a deep chill settle in her bones. Something almost familiar.

She reached out with her mind, tapping into her bond with Tir Na Nog's plants and animals, hoping to get a better idea of what had wandered into her domain. She was struck first by a sound she didn't recognize - something pleasant and... musical. Soothing.

Do not trust your senses. He will use them against you, a voice in the back of her mind whispered. It sounded almost as real as the melody floating in the wind. She wondered if it was just her intuition, or if Mother had deigned to have some semblance of concern for her wayward daughter. Or if was that other, stranger part of herself that took hold of her from time to time.

"He?" she asked the air, knowing that Mother's precious and almost ubiquitous blood blossoms would carry the query to her ears. Still, nothing but the white noise of pattering raindrops on leaves reached her.

Whatever it was, she could not ignore the anxiety that she felt, despite the lull of the music drifting across the dale. She decided to take a cautious approach, coming up the valley along the dense tangle of roots cast out by protective thickets of mangrove-like trees growing along a running stream, weaving in and out of the grove along tracks carved out by large beetles she called buchod gwraidd. Swollen from the recent rains, the stream crashed noisily against the rocks.

This was a darker part of Tir Na Nog than most. Willing a cloud of fireflies to act as her light, Elinyra readied her bow as she followed the source of the eerie music.

---

The nearby woods shared Elinyra's tension and lashed out, almost as if to test Zakarias's strength. Writhing roots tried to snare and entangle his feet, odd coral-like mushrooms expelled their confusing spores, and creatures shrieked at him from the night.

Zakarias

 

[Zakarias]

Come the rumble of earth, the gurgle of bulbs, and the blare of spore clouds come wheeze through gills and fins and spouts from those things about him.

The song did not stop.

String, plucked, tender, sweet, sorrowed with each back step, and hop away from the hook of root's snare, and the billow of spore's cloud and menace. A backheel kick saw the red-horned clown flip, and tumble as his lyre held its long note.

A spring of foot, a gust of wind saw the duanann arc through the air, like wild leaf on the wind. Left to stand on the bent boughs of strange tree. His song played on in wistful melancholy.

Elinyra Derwinthir

 

[Elinyra Derwinthir]

The aberrant plants thriving here made their animosity known to him, ineffectual as they were, while his bittersweet melody echoed through the bent and sinewy branches. Even the few luminescent flowers at his feet and fireflies dancing nearby went dark at his mirthful approach.

It proved difficult for Elinyra to get a very good look at the intruder through the gloom. Away from the turbulent stream, the haunting tune filled the spaces the silence normally lived in. She had felt the forest's moods many times before - hunger, curiosity, anger - and this was a very odd mixture of feelings. A strong dislike, to be certain, but also a painful familiarity that stabbed through her spirit like an old wound.

Up went the masked figure as a sudden gust of wind breathed into the rain. Now perched like a strange crimson bird on the limb of a touch-me-not, he kept up his performance, for whatever he was performing for. The tree's only comment was the usual folding of its long, sword-sharp rows of leaves at the touch of feet on the branch.

She waited, almost content to continue listening until she remembered the warning in her mind. Focusing on the figure instead of the enticing song, she began to notice the distinctive scent of Tir Na Nog's blood about him. That, and.... what was that branch in his hand? It almost looked like a piece of a woewillow.

"By my eyes, no friend of Tir Na Nog," she whispered fiercely from her hiding place in the hollow of an old stump, a remnant from a time she couldn't remember, and readied her bow for a shot.

Zakarias

 

[Zakarias]

Winds whipped and lashed about the Red Jester as his fingers plucked the last strings of his song.

The leaves, sharp as knives, and just as cruel, tried and tried to stab him through. Slice him and bleed him and let him feel the pained sorrow that fed them. Changed them. Gave them will enough to fight him and all they deemed did not belong. Here or anywhere their twisted roots did lay.

But the wind, ephemeral as it was, did not come cut across blades of leaf and grass. Baleful as they were. The whisper silk strands of air that came calling to cull about the Bard twist, and spiraled, and whipped out from the points of his toes, like cone of tiny tempest, that turned aberrant plant to malformed mulch.

"Settle down now, you cantankerous creeper," he said, and gave a stamp of his foot.

Another burst of spiralled wind about him, and the tree's branches, above and bellow the clown were left bald. The leaves set to stream along the currents of wind that curled and snaked about the masked fae, whose hand, set to lazy loops, seemed to conduct the course of the wind's whip.

"Can't you see she's got her eyes on me?" he said to all who would listen. A cruel glee there in the star-fire bright of his eyes.

Elinyra Derwinthir