Post by Crow • ᚴᚱᚬᚴᛦ on Jan 24, 2024 22:59:22 GMT
The cottage at the edge of New Hillborrow is small, even for a halfling village, more shed than home. Like a fluffy bird only halfway hatched, the thatch roof almost seamlessly connects with the ground around it, the rough-hewn wood of the walls and door barely keeping out the cold of the slowly approaching winter. But there is something to this place, clinging to the edge of the village, stubborn and defiant, bent but not cowed. A warm light shines out the single window, greeting the traveller approaching from the evening’s gloom.
The boy hesitates a few times as he meanders towards the cottage. But glancing over his shoulder at the halfling neighbours giving him suspicious stares from between half-closed curtains, he knows he might not get another chance to do this. He swallows his anxiety, forcing it down his throat, and goes up to knock on the door.
Shuffled footsteps, followed by the door creaking open a crack. A small human girl, maybe 4 years-old, thumb firmly stuck in her mouth, peeks through, looking at the boy with big blue eyes full of hope that only children maintain.
“Frida, is that the ham?” a woman’s voice calls from inside, the smell of stew and dried herbs washing out with the warmth of the hearth.
Frida considers the boy for a moment, removes the thumb from her mouth, and ventures, “I don't think so, Mum…”
There is a rush of clothes and Frida is pushed firmly behind her mother, a woman past her prime but still fair, radiating the worry and determination of a mother that has seen far too much in life already and resolved to spare her children from any more of it.
“Yes, can I help you?”
The boy’s mouth falls open, but no sound comes out.
Lady Agnes squints into the evening gloom, then her eyes go wide and she takes a step back. “By the gods… Víðar, is that you?”
Víðar?
Her face is one of shock and fear, as she thrusts her arms out, shielding her child clinging to the hem of her skirt. “How…? He killed you! What is this?”
The boy’s black eyes are as wide as plates. He takes a step back and holds up his empty hands. “I…I dunno…”
The girl hiding behind her mother’s skirt peeks out, one thumb firmly lodged between her lips. With a plop, the digit comes out, big brown eyes peering up from below long lashes at the boy in the door that has her mother so scared. “Mummy, why is Víðar so pale? Did he not eat his stew?”
With a crash and rustle, two auburn-headed boys, maybe 13 years-old, stumble out of the brushwork outside, each clutching a branch with the leaves still on it, as if ready to fight off a pack of dogs. “Mum! What is it? We heard shouting!” one of them calls, then their eyes go wide at the side of the stranger.
“…Vidi?” the other one breathes, mouth hanging open.
“Bernard! Leo! Inside, now!” the mother calls firmly, the edge in her voice undeniable. She steadies herself, looking the stranger over once more. “If you are Víðar… If you are alive… Who did we bury? What happened? You better have some answers for me right quick.” She props her hands on her hips, standing tall in defiance and suspicion after the first shock of the unexpected encounter.
The boy shrinks away from her and slowly stumbles backwards, almost tripping over himself. “I…I dunno… Sorry, I got no answers…” he replies in a tiny voice. He glances over his shoulder at the open path leading out of the village, wondering if this was a mistake. “I-I was hoping you might.”
She looks him over in silence, the moment stretching deep into dark uncomfortableness, before she finally sighs and gives the boy a nod over the shoulder, toward the hearth of the hut.
“Let’s take this inside, shall we? Have to feed the kids. You hungry? I always make a little extra, these days the survivors of Bloody Creek need to stick together, don’t we?”
The hut is a meagre place, but it was dry, and it was warm, and on a day like this, those were not things to complain about. Agnes had prepared bowls of stew for the kids: the twins Bernard and Leo, and the youngest, Frida, and then an extra bowl for the boy who had come in from the cold.
She sees the children fed, and then sends them to bed, accepting neither plea nor protest. When the gentle snoring of the little ones mingles with the smoke of the hearth fire, she tells the boy a story in hushed whispers:
A story of hope turned to woe; the founding of Bloody Creek and the good times of an agrarian community, far from the reaches of the adventurers and their problems; of a mother, who came with her young son to make a new beginning; of a boy, Víðar, happy to roam the woods with the innkeeper’s son…
But then the times turned darker, evil spread from the forest into their little world, and the times grew dire. When the Butcher came to Bloody Creek, it was a village ready for the taking. Agnes tells of those that got away. The lucky few who lived and found their way to New Hillborrow, those strong enough to start anew, to live…and shake their evil memories.
Agnes looks at the boy, head propped on her hand. “…But we buried you. I remember it. The earth of my shovel falling on your ashen face… Yet, here you sit. I don’t rightly know what evil killed you, but I don’t rightly know what blessing or curse has kept you alive either…”
The boy briefly considers thanking her for burying his corpse. He decides that it would be too morbid even for him.
“Your ladyship…and the weans… You’re the only ones who survived?”
She waves her hand in the general direction of New Hillborrow. “A few others got away as well. Some fled all the way back to Faerûn for what they had seen here. Others cling on, having made a new place in this village, unwilling to let the past rob them of their future. But it is only a handful. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but your mother did not make it. Neither did Ned, the hunter. Precious few yet live. I can show you around tomorrow, if you would like? But I fear there won’t be any answers to be found. The living had to leave everything behind to get away… The dead cling on to the truth of what was, and as far as I’m concerned, they may keep it. And there is no need for titles anymore…” She looks at her calloused hands, grown hard from the days’ of labour that must have come as an ugly surprise. “…I buried those along with my old life, in the ruins of Bloody Creek.”
Mother?
The raven-haired woman who appears in his dreams. She whose face and name he cannot remember. She who brought him to these shores.
He catches a glimpse of a recollection through the thick fog of his memory. Gasping for breath with the taste of earth in his mouth. Clawing through dirt with bare hands and numb fingers, uncovering the pallid, crack-lipped faces beneath. The desperate feeling of searching for something, for someone, and failing to. He frowns.
“But…I didn’t find her. Me mother,” he says.
Agnes furrows her brow as she considers this. “We buried those we could find, or what was left of them. Truth be told, some bodies were far beyond recognition. If we didn’t find someone among the survivors, we counted them as dead. Maybe she got away? But then she would surely have turned up… I don’t know. You being alive is a mystery to me, and who is to say whether something equally”—she squints, searching for a word that adequately describes the shock of seeing those thought dead walking among the living, without giving offence—“surprising hasn’t befallen her. All I can say is, she isn’t here and the survivors haven’t seen her. I am sure you searched the ruins thoroughly. Maybe she was taken? Dragged into the forest by gods know what… All I can say is that I am sorry.”
Her face becomes very earnest. There is a cold, untold sadness in her eyes, kept jailed behind bars forged of pure self-discipline, but as she reaches out and puts one small hand on the boy’s cold one, there is also the warmth of a mother that sees, soothes, and suffers with a child in pain.
“I am sorry for what happened to you. To all of us. For the things you must have suffered, and still do. But I am also glad. That you are alive, when we all thought you lost.”
A smile breaks through her steely self-composure like the sun on a cloudy day, and the boy spies a drop of moisture gathering in Agnes’s eyes. For a moment, he feels a connection with another living human being. Feels that whatever has befallen him, he is not quite dead. Feels that there is a part of him still alive and capable of feeling warmth, kindness, and love, and feeling loved in turn.
“I don’t know what happened to you,” Agnes says, “but I want you to know, whatever else may happen — you will always be welcome here. You are not alone. You still have family. You still have us.”
Watching her face, taking in her words, the boy feels a dampness in his own eyes. He rubs at it with the heel of his palm. He opens his mouth, but words of gratitude halt on the tip of his tongue as a thought comes to him. He thinks about the adventurers of Daring Heights and Fort Ettin and Port Ffirst. That colourful bunch, many of whom were eager to cheer him up or befriend him upon first meeting, not knowing his true nature.
She has a right to know. More than anyone, she has a right to know.
“They’re all still here. Those who died, I mean.”
Agnes’s expression changes to concerned confusion. “What do you mean? Are you quite alright, dear? Do you…hear voices?”
He turns away his face from her, towards a window. Agnes follows his gaze. And then she sees it.
Their jet-feathered forms faintly illuminated by the lone candle on the table, crows sit perched at the window. And at every window in the house. A large murder surrounds the building on all sides, dozens of beady black orbs trained silently on the two humanoids within.
“Aye, voices. They follow me wherever I go.”
He sees the doubt and the flutter of fear reemerge in her eyes, but then she bites her lip and gives his cold hand a squeeze.
“Then I hope they watch out for you. That their voices encourage you to live on, when they could not. We have all suffered so much. It is time to look forward, and do something good with the chance we have been given. And that goes doubly for you, young man!” The smile reemerges, and for another moment, the world does not seem so dark and grim anymore.
But this new, gentle light perplexes him. His hand slips away from her warm grip. “You… You’re not afraid of me?”
She shrugs but continues to smile. “I have been afraid for a long time. I don’t rightly know what happened to you, but you don’t seem to mean us harm, and I am choosing to trust you. I think we could all do with a little more of that.” She winks and puts on a stern motherly tone to add, “But if you get any funny ideas, I’m going to have to whack you over the head with a mallet. I’ve gotten reaaally good at that!”
The perplexion grows, morphing into disbelief, then simmering into anger.
“What? You-you don’t think it’s fucked that everyone in the village is now a-a-a bunch of fuckin’ crow demons?” He makes a sweeping gesture at the windows with his arm.
“Language, please.” Agnes sighs again. “I think everything that has happened to us is disastrous, inexplicable, and downright mind-bendingly obscene. But it happened, and some of us are still here and need to carry on. If we don’t, we might as well join the dead in their shallow graves.” She looks out through the small windows of her meagre hut, so different from the estate she used to reside in. “I don’t know what these crows are that follow you. You say they are the souls of the dead… But they don’t mean you, or me, or anyone harm? Have you tried communicating with them? Seek…expert advice? That’s what my husband always used to say. ‘If you don’t know the answer to something, find someone who does!’ I wish he had done so more often himself…”
Agnes pours herself a mug of tea, and offers one to the boy as well. “I have learned that those who mean you harm will show it, one way or another. They may try to hide it, but they can’t conceal their true nature. I dare say, if the crows wanted to harm us, they would do so. They haven’t; and so I am willing to give them, and you, the benefit of doubt. Something strange has happened to you, to us, and it’s still happening. I don’t know what it is, and I will see to the safety of my children first. But you might try to find out? Maybe that is what the crows are following you for: to help put an end to whatever curse has bound them.”
She takes a sip from her cup, and looks at the boy over the rim. “I mean, what else are you going to do? I suppose you are not otherwise occupied at the moment?”
The anger in him evaporates, leaving behind annoyance as he internally concedes that she may be correct. Obviously, he has got nothing better to do. But it means that he has to do something, instead of going on random adventures, pretending it’s not just procrastination with particularly high stakes.
There is a shuffling sound as Frida emerges into the lamplight, rubbing her eyes and clutching a blanket, and proceeds to climb onto her mother’s lap. “Mom, Vidi said ‘fucked’…”
“Well, that does it. I knew you were trouble the moment I saw you.” Agnes throws the boy a look of equal parts annoyance, exasperation, and bemusement. “Time for bed for all of you. You too. No excuses, young man; I can’t rightly send you back out into the cold night. There’s a blanket for you and a place by the hearth. Get some rest. I think you may need it.”
He accepts with a small, silent nod.
Laying in front of the crackling hearth, the boy tosses and turns all night. Víðar. That must have been the name he went by when he was alive. He ought to feel some connection to it. Some kind of familiarity. Perhaps even a sense of ownership.
Anything. Anything at all.
Before the sun rises, the boy is gone from the hut. The fields of New Hillborrow are mercifully untouched by ravening black birds on that day.
Co-written with Ian
The boy hesitates a few times as he meanders towards the cottage. But glancing over his shoulder at the halfling neighbours giving him suspicious stares from between half-closed curtains, he knows he might not get another chance to do this. He swallows his anxiety, forcing it down his throat, and goes up to knock on the door.
Shuffled footsteps, followed by the door creaking open a crack. A small human girl, maybe 4 years-old, thumb firmly stuck in her mouth, peeks through, looking at the boy with big blue eyes full of hope that only children maintain.
“Frida, is that the ham?” a woman’s voice calls from inside, the smell of stew and dried herbs washing out with the warmth of the hearth.
Frida considers the boy for a moment, removes the thumb from her mouth, and ventures, “I don't think so, Mum…”
There is a rush of clothes and Frida is pushed firmly behind her mother, a woman past her prime but still fair, radiating the worry and determination of a mother that has seen far too much in life already and resolved to spare her children from any more of it.
“Yes, can I help you?”
The boy’s mouth falls open, but no sound comes out.
Lady Agnes squints into the evening gloom, then her eyes go wide and she takes a step back. “By the gods… Víðar, is that you?”
Víðar?
Her face is one of shock and fear, as she thrusts her arms out, shielding her child clinging to the hem of her skirt. “How…? He killed you! What is this?”
The boy’s black eyes are as wide as plates. He takes a step back and holds up his empty hands. “I…I dunno…”
The girl hiding behind her mother’s skirt peeks out, one thumb firmly lodged between her lips. With a plop, the digit comes out, big brown eyes peering up from below long lashes at the boy in the door that has her mother so scared. “Mummy, why is Víðar so pale? Did he not eat his stew?”
With a crash and rustle, two auburn-headed boys, maybe 13 years-old, stumble out of the brushwork outside, each clutching a branch with the leaves still on it, as if ready to fight off a pack of dogs. “Mum! What is it? We heard shouting!” one of them calls, then their eyes go wide at the side of the stranger.
“…Vidi?” the other one breathes, mouth hanging open.
“Bernard! Leo! Inside, now!” the mother calls firmly, the edge in her voice undeniable. She steadies herself, looking the stranger over once more. “If you are Víðar… If you are alive… Who did we bury? What happened? You better have some answers for me right quick.” She props her hands on her hips, standing tall in defiance and suspicion after the first shock of the unexpected encounter.
The boy shrinks away from her and slowly stumbles backwards, almost tripping over himself. “I…I dunno… Sorry, I got no answers…” he replies in a tiny voice. He glances over his shoulder at the open path leading out of the village, wondering if this was a mistake. “I-I was hoping you might.”
She looks him over in silence, the moment stretching deep into dark uncomfortableness, before she finally sighs and gives the boy a nod over the shoulder, toward the hearth of the hut.
“Let’s take this inside, shall we? Have to feed the kids. You hungry? I always make a little extra, these days the survivors of Bloody Creek need to stick together, don’t we?”
The hut is a meagre place, but it was dry, and it was warm, and on a day like this, those were not things to complain about. Agnes had prepared bowls of stew for the kids: the twins Bernard and Leo, and the youngest, Frida, and then an extra bowl for the boy who had come in from the cold.
She sees the children fed, and then sends them to bed, accepting neither plea nor protest. When the gentle snoring of the little ones mingles with the smoke of the hearth fire, she tells the boy a story in hushed whispers:
A story of hope turned to woe; the founding of Bloody Creek and the good times of an agrarian community, far from the reaches of the adventurers and their problems; of a mother, who came with her young son to make a new beginning; of a boy, Víðar, happy to roam the woods with the innkeeper’s son…
But then the times turned darker, evil spread from the forest into their little world, and the times grew dire. When the Butcher came to Bloody Creek, it was a village ready for the taking. Agnes tells of those that got away. The lucky few who lived and found their way to New Hillborrow, those strong enough to start anew, to live…and shake their evil memories.
Agnes looks at the boy, head propped on her hand. “…But we buried you. I remember it. The earth of my shovel falling on your ashen face… Yet, here you sit. I don’t rightly know what evil killed you, but I don’t rightly know what blessing or curse has kept you alive either…”
The boy briefly considers thanking her for burying his corpse. He decides that it would be too morbid even for him.
“Your ladyship…and the weans… You’re the only ones who survived?”
She waves her hand in the general direction of New Hillborrow. “A few others got away as well. Some fled all the way back to Faerûn for what they had seen here. Others cling on, having made a new place in this village, unwilling to let the past rob them of their future. But it is only a handful. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but your mother did not make it. Neither did Ned, the hunter. Precious few yet live. I can show you around tomorrow, if you would like? But I fear there won’t be any answers to be found. The living had to leave everything behind to get away… The dead cling on to the truth of what was, and as far as I’m concerned, they may keep it. And there is no need for titles anymore…” She looks at her calloused hands, grown hard from the days’ of labour that must have come as an ugly surprise. “…I buried those along with my old life, in the ruins of Bloody Creek.”
Mother?
The raven-haired woman who appears in his dreams. She whose face and name he cannot remember. She who brought him to these shores.
He catches a glimpse of a recollection through the thick fog of his memory. Gasping for breath with the taste of earth in his mouth. Clawing through dirt with bare hands and numb fingers, uncovering the pallid, crack-lipped faces beneath. The desperate feeling of searching for something, for someone, and failing to. He frowns.
“But…I didn’t find her. Me mother,” he says.
Agnes furrows her brow as she considers this. “We buried those we could find, or what was left of them. Truth be told, some bodies were far beyond recognition. If we didn’t find someone among the survivors, we counted them as dead. Maybe she got away? But then she would surely have turned up… I don’t know. You being alive is a mystery to me, and who is to say whether something equally”—she squints, searching for a word that adequately describes the shock of seeing those thought dead walking among the living, without giving offence—“surprising hasn’t befallen her. All I can say is, she isn’t here and the survivors haven’t seen her. I am sure you searched the ruins thoroughly. Maybe she was taken? Dragged into the forest by gods know what… All I can say is that I am sorry.”
Her face becomes very earnest. There is a cold, untold sadness in her eyes, kept jailed behind bars forged of pure self-discipline, but as she reaches out and puts one small hand on the boy’s cold one, there is also the warmth of a mother that sees, soothes, and suffers with a child in pain.
“I am sorry for what happened to you. To all of us. For the things you must have suffered, and still do. But I am also glad. That you are alive, when we all thought you lost.”
A smile breaks through her steely self-composure like the sun on a cloudy day, and the boy spies a drop of moisture gathering in Agnes’s eyes. For a moment, he feels a connection with another living human being. Feels that whatever has befallen him, he is not quite dead. Feels that there is a part of him still alive and capable of feeling warmth, kindness, and love, and feeling loved in turn.
“I don’t know what happened to you,” Agnes says, “but I want you to know, whatever else may happen — you will always be welcome here. You are not alone. You still have family. You still have us.”
Watching her face, taking in her words, the boy feels a dampness in his own eyes. He rubs at it with the heel of his palm. He opens his mouth, but words of gratitude halt on the tip of his tongue as a thought comes to him. He thinks about the adventurers of Daring Heights and Fort Ettin and Port Ffirst. That colourful bunch, many of whom were eager to cheer him up or befriend him upon first meeting, not knowing his true nature.
She has a right to know. More than anyone, she has a right to know.
“They’re all still here. Those who died, I mean.”
Agnes’s expression changes to concerned confusion. “What do you mean? Are you quite alright, dear? Do you…hear voices?”
He turns away his face from her, towards a window. Agnes follows his gaze. And then she sees it.
Their jet-feathered forms faintly illuminated by the lone candle on the table, crows sit perched at the window. And at every window in the house. A large murder surrounds the building on all sides, dozens of beady black orbs trained silently on the two humanoids within.
“Aye, voices. They follow me wherever I go.”
He sees the doubt and the flutter of fear reemerge in her eyes, but then she bites her lip and gives his cold hand a squeeze.
“Then I hope they watch out for you. That their voices encourage you to live on, when they could not. We have all suffered so much. It is time to look forward, and do something good with the chance we have been given. And that goes doubly for you, young man!” The smile reemerges, and for another moment, the world does not seem so dark and grim anymore.
But this new, gentle light perplexes him. His hand slips away from her warm grip. “You… You’re not afraid of me?”
She shrugs but continues to smile. “I have been afraid for a long time. I don’t rightly know what happened to you, but you don’t seem to mean us harm, and I am choosing to trust you. I think we could all do with a little more of that.” She winks and puts on a stern motherly tone to add, “But if you get any funny ideas, I’m going to have to whack you over the head with a mallet. I’ve gotten reaaally good at that!”
The perplexion grows, morphing into disbelief, then simmering into anger.
“What? You-you don’t think it’s fucked that everyone in the village is now a-a-a bunch of fuckin’ crow demons?” He makes a sweeping gesture at the windows with his arm.
“Language, please.” Agnes sighs again. “I think everything that has happened to us is disastrous, inexplicable, and downright mind-bendingly obscene. But it happened, and some of us are still here and need to carry on. If we don’t, we might as well join the dead in their shallow graves.” She looks out through the small windows of her meagre hut, so different from the estate she used to reside in. “I don’t know what these crows are that follow you. You say they are the souls of the dead… But they don’t mean you, or me, or anyone harm? Have you tried communicating with them? Seek…expert advice? That’s what my husband always used to say. ‘If you don’t know the answer to something, find someone who does!’ I wish he had done so more often himself…”
Agnes pours herself a mug of tea, and offers one to the boy as well. “I have learned that those who mean you harm will show it, one way or another. They may try to hide it, but they can’t conceal their true nature. I dare say, if the crows wanted to harm us, they would do so. They haven’t; and so I am willing to give them, and you, the benefit of doubt. Something strange has happened to you, to us, and it’s still happening. I don’t know what it is, and I will see to the safety of my children first. But you might try to find out? Maybe that is what the crows are following you for: to help put an end to whatever curse has bound them.”
She takes a sip from her cup, and looks at the boy over the rim. “I mean, what else are you going to do? I suppose you are not otherwise occupied at the moment?”
The anger in him evaporates, leaving behind annoyance as he internally concedes that she may be correct. Obviously, he has got nothing better to do. But it means that he has to do something, instead of going on random adventures, pretending it’s not just procrastination with particularly high stakes.
There is a shuffling sound as Frida emerges into the lamplight, rubbing her eyes and clutching a blanket, and proceeds to climb onto her mother’s lap. “Mom, Vidi said ‘fucked’…”
“Well, that does it. I knew you were trouble the moment I saw you.” Agnes throws the boy a look of equal parts annoyance, exasperation, and bemusement. “Time for bed for all of you. You too. No excuses, young man; I can’t rightly send you back out into the cold night. There’s a blanket for you and a place by the hearth. Get some rest. I think you may need it.”
He accepts with a small, silent nod.
Laying in front of the crackling hearth, the boy tosses and turns all night. Víðar. That must have been the name he went by when he was alive. He ought to feel some connection to it. Some kind of familiarity. Perhaps even a sense of ownership.
Anything. Anything at all.
Before the sun rises, the boy is gone from the hut. The fields of New Hillborrow are mercifully untouched by ravening black birds on that day.
Co-written with Ian