An Afternoon In The Woods [Cuidadio]

[Lumino]

The sun was warm and high in the afternoon sky when Roa rode into the opening of trees, decorated by the dancing spots of light filtered through the tree tops.
She made her horse, Happle, stand still - taking only three gracious attempts - and swung herself off into the soft, mossy ground.

Ignoring the thirst scratching faintly in her throat from all the riding she grabbed her bow and ducked underneath a tree in which three birds sat. She did not know their name, she should have checked the family library first, so she committed the feather dress of blue and white to her memory so that she could look them up later and perhaps find out what they sold at.
Her bow was drawn and aimed at the branch the feathered creatures found their resting place in. They jumped across it, and chirped carefree noises. She could feel her heart beating in her chest, like a hammer on an anvil, and wiped her sweaty hand on her outfit.

Calm down, she commanded herself, It´s just a bird! Doesn´t matter if you miss...
Taking a deep breath she let her arrow zoom into the tree, scaring the birds away and catching exactly none of them.
Shit.
She turned around to her horse, watching her with unimpressed eyes.
"Don´t laugh at me, you try and shoot an arrow! Asshole." Happle gave no response.
More bothered by her failure than she perhaps should be, she sat down against a tree. After looking through her rations, she had to find that her water was almost empty, a single apple was all that her pockets had to offer. Well great, now she had to find water as well.
For a second she closed her eyes. She could fall asleep like this. But she knew she´d never hear the end of it if she took a nap right in the forest.

Instead she took her belongings and decided to walk along the trees, perhaps she could locate a river. Or some more prey. Potential prey, she reminded herself.

The forests got deeper at this point, the soft bright green from before was replace by deeper, darker shades, the air got heavier, lonelier, perhaps even secretive.
She soon found herself at the border to what she liked to call the ´forbidden woods´. Not because they were, but because they might as well be. They just looked as if they should be. At least that´s what she told herself instead of the more accurate description of ´I´m too scared to spend longer than five breaths in these woods, woods´. But that really didn´t have a nice ring to it.

She always felt like someone was watching her in here. Bears, or wolves, or even worse, monsters, who could tell, her bedtime stories and warning certainly had been full of those.
Happle had gotten agitated as well, dancing on his legs and pulling on his reign.
"Yeah", she said to him, "not today."
Just as she was about to turn around she heard something rustling in the nearby bushes. Her body froze, then heated up really quickly.
With her stiff hands she grabbed her bow again and aimed it at the branches.
Please be prey, please be prey...

[echtronis]

As it happened, there was an old, douglas-like fir that also considered this neck of the woods forbidden, but mostly because it was a cantankerous, proudly perennial sort that generally liked to be left alone. It wasn't always like this, of course, the old tree considered itself quite a springy, rather pliable sapling in its youth, and was settling into retirement quite peacefully over it's span, until its neighbor started growing. An upstart pine, hardly two meters away, began audaciously springing up over the last countless years. It had absolutely no sense of personal space, spreading its roots like an unwelcome guest reaching over the table for the biscuits set clearly within your reach. Douglas decided then that this was a forbidden place, and has been dedicated to reminding the arrogant pine this as it continued to grow taller and taller, the reckless sap.

With all of that, what Douglas hadn't considered, was that perhaps the grove really was cursed. Not until he watched that... thing traipse across the forest floor, terrifying the local hares into the world's cuddliest stampede.

"What was that?" Expressed the Pine.

Douglas said nothing, having rather be logged than to give the pine the satisfaction.

Some distance away, before her two blue eyes, did Roa witness her internal wish granted, in a sense, as the brush she trained her bow upon practically exploded with a mad march of hares, scattering wildly in what might be presumed absolute, leporidaeic horror. Moments later, something else hopped out of the foliage, soundlessly and without a hint of rustle. It was, perhaps, the worst rabbit to have ever existed. It's eyes were set too low on its face on either side of a nose far too pointed. Its ears seemed to start from even below the eyes, yet still pointed upwards. Its hindlegs didn't quite bend where they should have, and the thing seemed to be mostly pushing the front half of it towards the ground, so wrong was its proportion. It was truly like a child's first attempt at drawing a rabbit, come to wretched, wretched life.

It's nose twisted curiously at the sight of Roa, and it put it's front paws up strangely like a person, and waved them as if it was keenly aware of the bow and arrow, either pleading not to shoot, or to beg please, by the gods of this realm, do.

@Lumino

[Lumino]

Roa had heard many stories of the huge black bear, snatching children in the night, the enchanted pack of wolves, that devoured those with impure hearts, even the literal lord of demons living in these woods. Those were scary, sure. But this thing... this thing was downright terrifying.
Something was wrong about it and the longer she looked at it the more she saw. The ears in the wrong place. It´s legs were too long. It´s eyes...
Even Happle stood still like a statue, as if he too couldn´t fully realize what was standing in front of him.
She didn´t have time to finish that thought as the creature moved it´s arms, pulling her back to her senses, as if she had entered her body again.
The tip of her arrow was pointed between it´s eyes, and she would not miss. Not this time.

But then the thing...gestured? The hairs in her neck stood up and she got a horrible, horrible feeling in her gut. It knew. It understood. Whatever this was, it wasn´t a monster, it was worse. It was an equal.

She had killed before.
She hated doing it, something she was often made fun of for, but she had done it.
When she helped her brother hunting for food. Birds, squirrels, deer, twisting their necks to put them out of their misery after one of their arrows hit them.
Even as a child, when one of the hens had to be cooked and sometimes by accident, when she stepped on a bug and cried about it for hours.
She always felt pity with whatever she killed, but she had done it.
She had not murdered before.

She was about to murder, was her thought when she let her arrow fly, aimed, maybe intentionally, a tiny bit too low.

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@Cuidadio

[echtronis]

Perhaps it was one of those unique moments in nature where curiosity lends into trust despite the dangers. Perhaps it was because it wanted to be seen more clear in its gestures. Perhaps it was bad luck, or just the unfortunate way this misshapen creature moved when it startled, but as the arrow was released, the rabbit had started forward. The angle of the arrow's flight would have otherwise sunk into the dirt just before it, but with a thick thud, and no other sound, did the missile plunge straight into the worst rabbit, piercing through and into the ground as if pinned in impalement.

The rabbit's little forearms flailed frantically, then they grabbed at it's throat, opening its mouth that horribly just appeared to be a black cavity besides its two seemingly exaggerated front teeth. It's eyes rolled upwards, and then it seemed to slump, dead upon the shaft of the arrow going through it's fluffy coat.

And then it decided it had enough of that, and waved again, shaking its head as if in apology before it passed one of its paws through the arrow shaft a few times. It then hopped to the side, as if either it, or the arrow, didn't really exist at all. There was no blood, and the horrible little creature gave a beckoning motion, before leaping away into a bush, not a single leaf disturbed. Roa would see it hop up into the air, giving another beckoning motion before disappearing behind the bush again.

Nearby, in the secret of world of trees, a tall pine inquired that surely a neighboring douglas fir had to be seeing all this, but it was as if speaking to a wall, or a sycamore. The pine resigned to its solitude.


____
@Lumino

[Lumino]

She took a moment to take a deep breath and consider her options. She could follow that thing, sure. If it wanted to skin her and steal her sould it could have done so right here. It wasn´t like it had to wait for a chance to ambush her if she couldn´t hurt it.
But then again who knew what it wanted from her. Maybe it didn´t want her dead, but something else...

As much as she pleaded with and pulled on Happles leads, he did not want to go.
He was pressing his hooves into the ground and producing loud, nervous noises of protest.
She finally gave up and tied him to a tree. Maybe her curiosity was damming her to commit a horrible mistake, but she knew she had to at least attempt to follow it. After all, even if she fled it could very well follow her, and appear back at her home, to terrorize her. And even though she was shaking, she would much rather be murdered knowing it was coming than in the middle of the night, after being pulled from her sleep.

Digging through her pocket she pulled out the apple and cut it into two halves, giving the bigger one to Happle so that he would maybe calm down a bit, and putting the other back into her pocket. The knife she kept in her hand as she made the first step into the thicket, determined to follow it.

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@Cuidadio

[echtronis]

The worst rabbit seemed to have been pleased with the eventual pursuit by Roa, hopping wrongly into the air as if to celebrate the girl's decision to follow it deeper and deeper into the woods dubbed by few as forbidden. If it weren't for the midday summer's song of the forest's population of birds, the utter silence of the rabbit's movements might have underlined the quietness of this particular expanse of trees.

Fortunately however, if such creeping, unsettling thoughts were beginning to form, they would have been perhaps soothed by the faint sound of a strange, gentle singing; a foreign lullaby. With one more beckoning hop and wave, the worst rabbit leaped over a final congregation of thick shrubs before a small clearing on a mild slope. Unfortunately however, the worst rabbit would not be the last oddity Roa would witness on her chancy nature walk this day.

Ruined cakes, and alarmingly disrespected desserts and confections were littered around a small area around a hollow tree stump, said stump being stoically stationed by a slumped and slumbering snotling, snoring soundly. A greenskin, a bogeybrownie, a goblin. Their kind had many names in many places, all of them as nasty as their twisted faces. This one had honey and bits of cake slathered over its face and hands, asleep with its back to the stump. It seemed to have possessed a spear that laid in the grass and fallen leaves just a bit down the slope from the creature. It couldn't have been no less than a foot shorter than Roa herself, but its slack open jaw was positively jammed with a thoughtless arrangement of pointed teeth. Above it, the source of the lullaby; a goblin-sized man covered in buttons hanging upside down by a snared, hairy foot, dangling from a tree limb. He waved, much in the manner of the worst rabbit earlier, except upside-down, which somehow looked more rightside up than the poor rabbit. The worst rabbit, of course, traipsed soundlessly to the scene, and seemed to blow a horrible kiss to Roa before exploding in silent puff of glamour.

The little man waved with a smile, and then put a stubby finger to his lips; the universal sign of "Hello there, nice to meet you, please don't wake the murderous kobald"

__________
@Lumino

[Lumino]

So this was a call for help, she supposed. Quite a way to call for help, using the height of abominations to get someone to save your life, but that was for a later time to question. The man dangling from the tree was at least just that - a man. And little threat seemed to be coming from him, thus Roa decided she had to help the poor fellow.

Signaling that she intended to get him out of this fiasco via a nod she surveyed the area to make sure she wouldn´t step on anything that might wake the goblin.
Holding her breath she started slowly tiptoeing around the the clearing, careful to avoid slipping on any cakes, and always with an eye on the slumped creature. So far it was still snoring, so she seemed to be doing fine. With every step she took she threw a look back at it, just to make sure she was still in the clear.

After what felt like a small eternity, she was finally close enough to the man to make out his features, if upside down. His face was friendly enough despite the obvious frown this situation put on it.
The other thing she was close to of course was the goblin. She could feel it´s warm breath on her skin and she said a silent prayer that by some miracle he would not smell her and wake up.

She knew that she couldn´t possibly hope to climb the tree with that thing next to it, if she fell it was over for the both of them. Instead she opted to try to hand the knife to the man so he could try and cut the rope himself.  Preparing to pull an arrow from her quiver as soon as he would take it, she held it up as far as she could falling on top of the goblin.

Here was to hoping the man trained his abdominal muscles.

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@Cuidadio