His dreams were a respite. The days in which darkness came in the night to attack his mind's eye were, for the most part, gone. His demons had become a part of him, never exorcised, but willing to halt their violent assaults on his personage, as long as they were accepted and respected.
Whether specters of the past came in the night, or not, however, it was only for the company of the most loyal of animals that Kellen could sleep soundly while on the road. It was also the comforting touch of one such creature that let him know that all had been fine throughput the passing, and rising again, of the blue sky's bright star.
His eyes came to and he could feel that his fingers rested warmly on the chiseled and sloped shoulders of Rosemaine -- a beautiful canine, with a coat of brown tinged carmine. The man trusted the dog, and her compatriots, implicitly to alert him of any dangers that appeared while he slept. He had known few animals that had finer noses or better ears. He had often suspected that what a man on fireguard might miss his dogs would just as rightly awake from even a deep slumber to root out.
Flighty and pitched birdsongs held dominion over the air. The bright white of opaque, and dancing-pollen filled, sunbeams filtered through the shamrock and rough-barked giants of wood that made up the underframe of the emerald canopy overhead. Kellen could smell the life on the air, with the resinous breaths that he took brushing with detectable weight against the delicate hairs of his inner nose.
"You can sleep a bit yet, girl," he told Rosemaine, the dog promptly opening her tired -- yet alert -- eyes when he moved to stand, before slumping her maw back into the soft grass upon receiving his grant of permission to do so.
When Dantes, the second of his three hounds, approached him, Kellen knew that their was no point in telling the wary creature to return to sleep. Just as the man knew that Quel -- his final canine companion, who was now also raising his head to follow the commotion -- would rather stay by Marrel, the playfully spirited camp horse, so proud and duty bound was the dog's innate temperament.
"Hey there, boy," Kellen welcomed Dantes' approaching muzzle fondly with the pad of his hand; the dog reciprocated with a groggy lick that ran up his master's gritty fingers.
The man wiped the residue of the dog's affectionate greeting from his flesh and made his way to Marrel.
"You did good," he said to Quel, in the sturdy intonation that he knew the dog would respect and value.
"And you, missy," he spoke to the unsaddled horse. "Are you ready to get tacked up?"
Marrel merely snorted in return and tried to nibble at her rider's grey peppered beard. This elicited a light scoff and a humor filled turning of the head from Kellen, followed by a gentle pat on the muzzle for the equine.
"Yeah, you're awake," he said playfully.
Placing the horse's saddle, reins, and bit back onto her aging form wasn't an involved task; it was merely routine. It wasn't long before the horse, her rider, and her procession of canine followers were back on the well paved forest road. The steady clopping of her large hooves could be well-heard from quite a distance.
There were moments that, as his hips rocked back in forth in the saddle, that Kellen's eyes were drawn away from the road ahead. It was in the bushes, then even the trees at times. He knew it was there, that it had been nearby since even the night before, but it didn't appear to bother him or his dogs.
He had been called to deal with, what he presumed was, a different sort of creature. From the letter that he'd received, he could only guess so much as to what it was that he'd be facing. Common folk weren't always the most reliable when it came to describing devils, ghouls, and beasts, but what he'd read from the plea-filled missive had been particularly strange -- especially so for the forests of Ravencrest.
