Post by Crow • ᚴᚱᚬᚴᛦ on Jul 2, 2023 20:52:28 GMT
The boy finds it hard to keep track of time.
Some days, he’d wake up on the thin, filthy excuse of a mattress just as the honeyed rays of sunlight on the floor of this ramshackle wooden hovel were fading away. And he would continue to lay there as night fell, listening to the symphony of the forest and the wind, because what else was there to do. Many days passed like that for the boy. They all feel the same.
Some days, like today, he is woken up by Ned flying in through the window, his little corvid head poking in through the dirty rags pretending to be curtains.
“When are we going adventuring again?” says Ned.
The boy turns on his side, away from Ned and the glaring noonday sun. That bird is not really Ned after all, even though it sounds exactly like him and has the same interests as he did and has all his memories.
The boy sees that Tony has left another sprig of berries next to his mattress on the floor. Eating just one of these tiny, black orbs of citrus can somehow leave him feeling full. Tony — if that really is him — continues to do what he had once done in life: pick berries. The boy’s not complaining; it saves him from getting up to forage or hunt.
Most of the time, he’d rather just lay there.
“Really, mate? How long are you just gonna lie here, doing nothing?” Ned asks exasperatedly. The boy ignores him again, and eventually, he hears a sigh and the flapping of wings.
He closes his eyes and drifts off back to sleep.
Drip.
This time, it is a cold droplet of water striking his eyelid that wakes him up. He comes to his senses to the soft pattering of rain on the roof.
Grumbling, he shoves his mattress closer to the window, puts a bucket under the leak, and lies back down, staring at the moon until sleep takes him again.
The rain does not stop. The boy pulls the hood of his cloak up as he steps out of the hovel, glancing around for materials.
A bigger, older crow flies down onto the muddy ground next to him and folds its wings. “You can take the clapboards from my chapel. See if you can pry them loose,” Father Jonathan says. “You have my permission, child.”
The boy does as instructed, taking Grampy Radley’s hammer in hand and prying one good, wooden plank loose from the shrine to Chauntea.
But looking in Radley’s old toolbox, it seems he has run out of nails to patch the leak with. Hunting around for more in the abandoned houses around the village only yields ones that are much too rusted to survive hammering.
Shivering in his soaked clothes, the boy resigns to the reality that he has to quit lying around and go into town for more supplies soon. As if reading his thoughts, the crows begin emerging from the trees and the bushes, flocking around him, cawing out greetings in voices that he alone can hear.
Well, he’s getting tired of eating nothing but berries anyway.
Maybe whilst he’s in town, he’ll go on another adventure.
Some days, he’d wake up on the thin, filthy excuse of a mattress just as the honeyed rays of sunlight on the floor of this ramshackle wooden hovel were fading away. And he would continue to lay there as night fell, listening to the symphony of the forest and the wind, because what else was there to do. Many days passed like that for the boy. They all feel the same.
Some days, like today, he is woken up by Ned flying in through the window, his little corvid head poking in through the dirty rags pretending to be curtains.
“When are we going adventuring again?” says Ned.
The boy turns on his side, away from Ned and the glaring noonday sun. That bird is not really Ned after all, even though it sounds exactly like him and has the same interests as he did and has all his memories.
The boy sees that Tony has left another sprig of berries next to his mattress on the floor. Eating just one of these tiny, black orbs of citrus can somehow leave him feeling full. Tony — if that really is him — continues to do what he had once done in life: pick berries. The boy’s not complaining; it saves him from getting up to forage or hunt.
Most of the time, he’d rather just lay there.
“Really, mate? How long are you just gonna lie here, doing nothing?” Ned asks exasperatedly. The boy ignores him again, and eventually, he hears a sigh and the flapping of wings.
He closes his eyes and drifts off back to sleep.
Drip.
This time, it is a cold droplet of water striking his eyelid that wakes him up. He comes to his senses to the soft pattering of rain on the roof.
Grumbling, he shoves his mattress closer to the window, puts a bucket under the leak, and lies back down, staring at the moon until sleep takes him again.
The rain does not stop. The boy pulls the hood of his cloak up as he steps out of the hovel, glancing around for materials.
A bigger, older crow flies down onto the muddy ground next to him and folds its wings. “You can take the clapboards from my chapel. See if you can pry them loose,” Father Jonathan says. “You have my permission, child.”
The boy does as instructed, taking Grampy Radley’s hammer in hand and prying one good, wooden plank loose from the shrine to Chauntea.
But looking in Radley’s old toolbox, it seems he has run out of nails to patch the leak with. Hunting around for more in the abandoned houses around the village only yields ones that are much too rusted to survive hammering.
Shivering in his soaked clothes, the boy resigns to the reality that he has to quit lying around and go into town for more supplies soon. As if reading his thoughts, the crows begin emerging from the trees and the bushes, flocking around him, cawing out greetings in voices that he alone can hear.
Well, he’s getting tired of eating nothing but berries anyway.
Maybe whilst he’s in town, he’ll go on another adventure.