'Small Steps' - Tam & 'Nook's Journey (In Pictures)

[I-KP]

[I-KP]

[johnlewismcleod]

Brilliant pics, I-KP...thank you

[I-KP]

[Swift]

You certainly have a talent with manipulation and enhancement. Some of the angles you achieve are also quite stunning.

[I-KP]

[I-KP]

ooOOoo

Stumbling

She could still taste it with every breath and swallow; a bitter metallic taste that stung the back of her tongue and turned her stomach; although it wasn’t a taste that came as unfamiliar to her. Times have been and will likely be again when a bloody sustenance makes for the difference between surviving a biting winter and perishing to its warmth-sapping chills. It was a taste that she even found enjoyable given the proper circumstance, but this was the taste of her own blood and that knowledge had soured it viciously.

Kneeling in the damp mud at the edge of a peaceful river bank she lifted her chin and canted her head awkwardly in an attempt to catch sight of her reflection in the rippling surface of the water’s edge, craning her neck and peering down at her fracturing image keenly trying to snatch a fleeting glimpse of her throat and the ner-do-well’s beweaponed handiwork. Then as if in answer to the Hin’s desires the evening breeze eased and the waters settled into a slivery sheen and she looked upon her own features with a glazed clarity rarely afforded to one given over so completely as she was to a life within wilds. And there it was; a thin, slightly uneven scar line that tracked a contour along the nape of her jaw and throat. The magics that had been employed to seal the gaping wound must have been of sufficient intricacy to not only staunch the flooding drain of her life but also to apparently save an amount of her vanity by obfuscating the terrible injury under mercifully discreet scarring, and perhaps even that mark might fade with time - the physical mark, at least.

Why would the cloud-hamperwing lanky do this anywise, she wrangled in thought. I aint- well I wasn’t his foe. I was only asking, like. They all be born to blunder ‘n weck ‘n stuff, the fallow-minded, buggerpiss-dwinking clackfish. And Dwuff ‘n Man-law be wotten: it weren’t murder, it be wecipwocity and not a bushel or peck more than he needed either, like.

Her tiny forefinger slowly traced along the line of the scar before her reflection was jarringly shattered into a thousand jittering moons as the waters rippled under the splash of a heavy nearby paw.

“’Nook, Ye flea-born lummox-bugger!,” she chided, “I was looking at meself in that.” Her voice still sounded slightly alien to her, dry and gravelly, and every word summoned with it not only the nauseating taste of her own blood but also a spasm-inducing tickling irritation at the back of her throat. The magics had certainly knitted the wound tight but the flowing blood that had threatened to drown her where she lay was left to be evacuated by more innately natural bodily regurgitations, a far less painless and efficient process. She fretted that the taste of her beloved food would be forever sullied and that her voice would never return to the pitch that which she, and her lumbering companion, knew.

The enormous brown bear at her side stood in the shallow waters and swung its heavy, boulder-like head close in toward the comparatively miniscule kneeling Hin and licked at the side of her neck with a level of tenderness that made a liar of the incredible power contained within its jaws. The bear sported several wounds of its own, though none of them life-threatening, each given away to notice by a patch of light brown fur flattened by a mixture of matted blood and saliva.

The little Hin pushed the huge muzzle of the grumbling bear away from her. “Get off, will ye,” she snapped with a brooding irascibility and wiped away long trails of sticky saliva from her neck. “It be well healed, I weckon. There be naught left-“ She coughed, a painful sounding scraping cough, and spat something gritty into the water with a disgusted grunt. “-naught left to lick, like.”

She caught sight of one of the bear’s injuries and strained to shove the animal’s head to the left so that she could examine the wounded shoulder. She touched at the matted fur and pressed gently at the bear’s skin around the wound with the beast uttering not even the most distant rumble of complaint. The knife-inflicted injury was not serious and was not in any danger of succumbing to infection. A mercy of Shee-Lah, she thought.

“This aint the best eve we’ve ever spent on the twail, eh ‘Nook. I aint ever been so close to me end...” Those last words quavered and stumbled from her mouth and the appearance of the hulking bear blurred and rippled, just as her own river reflection had done, as her eyes welled. She shrank visibly into a sigh that formed from a mixture of extraordinary relief and fear, and quickly swiped crystalline tracks away from her cheek with the back of her wrist. “I aint ever going to get ‘em hoople-headed ninnyhammers to lend an ear to a wisdom am I; I’ll get us both killed dead before it. Dwuid Father be wight, it be a daft notion to weckon that I could. I know, the diffewence betwixt Twy and Twiumph be only a bit of -Umph, but I weckon I coughed out most of the umph I had back on that field.” She sniffed up a runnel of watery snot and the saltiness of her own tears briefly cut through the burn of the vileness that lingered at the back of her throat.

Easing herself up onto unsteady feet, scraping mud from her knees and slipping her tatteralls back up over her shoulders to ward off the chill of the deepening evening, she stood for a moment and poured over the luminescent, moonsilver-crested river, transposing the scene onto a remembrance of her home in the High Forest, and spoke her thoughts, as she often did, to the ever-patient bear:-

“Mayhaps the High High Leaf Ladyness and that woodland twee spiwit that plucked me up out fwom harm be wight too.” She turned her eyes away from the serene wooded riverbank and lifted her gaze up the pinnacle of the looming fortress behind her, the Human-built darkstone fortification that sat squat on the top of a rocky outcropping like a menacingly vast curmudgeonly gargoyle. Twisting her head around to regard the edifice immediately triggered a violent spasm of grating coughing into palsied hands that left speckles and flecks of blood, both clotted and fresh, in tiny, grubby palms. With a baleful grimace she tried to lap away the feculent metallic taste that the coughing fit had left festering in her mouth. “Everwything can heal better when the whole makebating bawathwum be swept away, just like the twee spiwit said should be.”

ooOOoo

[johnlewismcleod]

You've gift for prose as well as pics, I-KP...thank you

[I-KP]

[I-KP]

[Blindhamsterman]

yet more great pics, and you were right, that was a great point for a pic!

[Inwintersshadow]

Very nice pics and the writing was great too!

[I-KP]

[danielmn]

The best thing is, if Olaf ever needs a hat, he can always wear one of his boots!

[NESchampion]

The best thing is, if Olaf ever needs a hat, he can always wear one of his boots!