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

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'Going Home' - Trail to the Tall Trees of the High Forest

[ElCadaver]

Hey! Thats not ALFA, is it?

[kid]

read back. ALFA + edit and talent. (:

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Hey! Thats not ALFA, is it?

Half is, half isn't; it's a mashup using random pic (source) lifted from the intertubes.

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Rosehip Trail

She popped a fresh, crunchy berry into her mouth just as a dried tree root snapped loudly under foot; she wasn’t paying attention.

Bollock, she thought, simultaneously cursing and rallying her drifted attention.

She and her animal companion, a seventeen hundred pound Brown Bear, had made good speed for the last two days along the less well travelled trails of Turlang’s Wood in the north-western corner of the High Forest. The pair were bound for the outermost reaches of a place known as Teuveamanthaar before the young female Hin’s momentary lapse of concentration had threatened to ruin an otherwise ostensibly uneventful journey. Even the heavy-footed bear had managed to remain eerily silent in movement through the encroaching undergrowth over the last final few days of the pair’s long journey home, in notable defiance of the beast’s sheer bulk and apparent ungainliness.

She had alerted something to her presence: a denizen of these ancient woods. Only the lucky and the dead were able to speak of such encounters, whereas the skilful and the attentive usually avoided blundering into the bellies and blades of the many and varied threats that prowl within Turlang’s Wood. At that particular moment neither skill nor attention were to play a part in this trail-bound encounter.

Something stood in the undergrowth, barely two long strides ahead, barring her way. It was of little wonder how easily the encounter had slipped through the small Hin’s distracted attentions considering how well the figure merged with its dense, gloomy forest surroundings. Inadvertently stepping on the toes of the figure would be about the only way that the less wilderness aware would be able to locate it – mere luck being the only thing saving the Hin from doing exactly that.

She lifted her head slowly, peering up from under the pointed brim of her tatty and ill-fitting yellow tricorn hat, to look upon the tall, almost naked figure stood before her: a young, athletic, male Wood Elf. His mahogany-toned skin was greased with sweat and streaked with dark green, black and red finger-wide parallel lines of paint; unmistakably the adornments of ritual for likely one of the many rites of passage that every young adult Wood Elf must endure. The small Hin did not know which specific rite of passage that the figure before her was embarked upon, she didn't need to because they all tended to involve the same traditional themes: torturous physical rigour and often seemingly cruel tests of survival instinct. The Wood Elf’s chest began to heave as if his breath had been held and he met the alert, upward peering eyes of the young female Hin with his own.

Double bollock, she thought.

“Or’tel’ - quessir..?” she tried to say, coughing quietly as the acidic juices of a berry that she had half chewed stung the back of her throat. The sweat-sheened, chiselled features of the Wood Elf gave away no clue of emotion or intent despite the Hin’s clearly faultless address. For a long moment, just like the timeless final breath that often precedes a deadly strike from one of the many efficient predators of the High Forest, the small Hin and the young Wood Elf stood watching one another. She was given no second chance to attempt to speak with the Elf - with the turn of the direction of the breeze he was away and off into the deep, knotted undergrowth just as tracklessly and silently as he had appeared to her.

She looked back at her comparatively gargantuan companion almost as if hoping to be provided with an explanation about what just happened from the animal. Little did she suspect that an explanation was indeed coming, but not from the bear.

The small Hin pushed her ill-fitting hat firmly onto her head, popped another berry into her mouth and refocused her senses on the hidden trail ahead – only to come face-to-point with the tip of an arrow protruding from the tall undergrowth. Behind the arrow, a bow; and behind the bow, a pair of experienced, narrowed eyes stared dispassionately along the shaft of the arrow at the petrified Hin.

“Why,” spoke a hushed, male Elven voice from within the undergrowth with a strong hint of disappointment to its tone. He recognised her. The bowstring eased like silk on skin as the tension was gently reduced and the arrow point was lowered toward the ground. The thicket parted and out stepped another Wood Elf, with this one differing from the first as he was clad head to foot in supple, leathery, vine-like armour and his face bore the scars and marks of many countless years-worth of woodland experience. He was unmistakably a Hunter of note given the number of totem and naturalistic charm adornments about his lean person.

She had no right to be surprised that the Hunter recognised her, she would later reflect. After all, she was raised in amongst the Elven communities on the outskirts of Teuveamanthaar and she had met and annoyed a great many Elves – they did seem to be fairly easy prey in this regard, it was a natural talent that she possessed – and Elves had very, very long memories. She was in no position to stroke the Hunter’s ego – assuming he even had an ego to stroke – because she did not recognise him in return; in all honesty, they did all tend to look alike to her.

She smiled up at the overly-tall Hunter, her teeth stained purple from berries consumed thus far, and said, “Or’tel’quessir.”

The Hunter drew in a deep breath and rested a limp hand atop the silvery pommel of a viciously hooked hunting blade sheathed at his side as he spoke to her in the unmistakably gentle and sonorous tones of the Sylvan tongue: “Why. How quickly you forget how to carry yourself within these lands. Your smell met my senses before even that of your companion. I would consider that to be a matter of great shame, but as you are one so contrary I expect you to see this as a point of defiant pride.” The Hunter deftly plucked the tatty yellow tricorn hat off the head of the Hin with the tip of his antler-shaped longbow and looked upon its well-travelled state with the kind of undiluted contempt that only an Elven true blood could accomplish.

Oh how she had missed the accusative and condescending manner of the Elves. Be them Sun, Moon, Wood or Wild, they all be the damn same, she thought whilst hopping up to rescue her hat before it was lifted out of reach. Mayhaps ney the Wild, mind. They would sooner bite ye face off than sneer at ye.

She could have spoken to him in Sylvan, but the impish side of her nature had decided to reply in the tongue that she had since picked up like a bad habit after having left the cover of the High Forest some two years ago: the crude and inelegant common tongue of the Human tradefolk. “Aye, well, does ney matter much. And since ye be awoundparts-“ – the proper pronunciations of languages other than her first taught, Sylvan, still presented her tongue with the occasional challenge – “-ye might as well tell about the twail to Homenest then. Be it safe?”

With barely a twitch of acknowledgement from the Hunter’s eyes and a slight ‘tsk’ of disgust for the vile-sounding, common syllables assailing his ears, he responded to her impassively in Sylvan: “Hollowhole trail is blocked by the filth but the Rosehip trail is safe enough for you and your companion.”

’The filth.’ A term that the young Hin would never forget, yet one she had not heard said beyond the limits of the High Forest. To make a home within the High Forest is also to understand that your neighbours were often beastly, and more often deadly. The filth that the Hunter spoke of with such vitriol were Orckind; a plague within the High Forest and a mortal enemy of Teuveamanthaar.

“Ta,” she said leaving the Hunter to go about his prey. “Oh,” she added in parting, “he hoofed it that way, like,” pointing south in contrary to the first young Wood Elf’s northward tack. Behind her the Hunter vaulted an enormous, ancient and swollen tree root and sped off unhindered by the grabbing tendrils of the woodland thickets – northbound.

With tatty tricorn hat firmly back atop her head the young female Hin and her plodding companion set about joining the Rosehip trail bound for a very particular place where Turlang’s Wood and the region known as the Tall Trees met, a place that her family called ‘Homenest’.

...

[johnlewismcleod]

Thanks for the prose, I-KP...it's as good as the pics

[kid]

I know, right?! awesomely awesome.

[I-KP]

Simlax Briar

Day or night, it mattered little within the deeper regions of the High Forest, particularly within Turlang’s Wood and the Tall Trees. Ancient trees with trunks wider than the houses of Human common folk knotted their canopies far above any head to diffuse all of the sun’s rays and scatter the moon’s silvery glow into a persistent, lingering twilight. Vines, creepers and chokeweeds of limitless species had taken full advantage of the endless ages available to them to fill in all remaining gaps and crannies both upon high and on the ground.

To make good progress through the High Forest one needed to be aware of the web of paths and trails that wind through the thorny thickets and seemingly impassable tangles of tree and vine, and one such path was known as the Rosehip trail. Both the bear and the Hin enjoyed this trail not only because of its historic safety – as far as she knew the filth had never been able to find it – but also for the Harvesttide bounty of berries and cherries that hung heavy on the branches along that route. Before long she had collected so many of the ripest berries that she had taken to storing them within the loser folds of her leafy armour forming a significant bulge about her belly. The bear on the other hand merely filled its belly proper with the abundant harvest.

'Homenest’ was to be found between the outskirts of Teuveamanthaar, the once Elven tree-city capital of Eaerlann, and the eastern limits of Turlang’s Wood. Where the Rosehip trail would continue to thread eastwards leading into Teuveamanthaar proper she would leave the trail at Barrow Creek and head north. Soon thereafter she and her companion would enter into the Simlax Briar whereupon they would come to the largest of the Tall Trees Fairy Circles. After having reached this point the plan was to track eastwards until she found the old repurposed Dire Badger set which acted as a tunnel leading up to the point of her final destination: the familiar stout wooden door of her family home.

The Simlax Briar woods opened out before her into a small, cosy-looking glade thickly ringed by old, blackspot-freckled mushrooms. Such was the age of these growths that some of the older specimens reached over two yards in height, lifting the most succulent flesh of the mushroom well beyond a mere Hin’s casual reach. The fungal perimeter formed a natural wall surrounding a central clearing of short grasses and wild flowers, all fuelled by a rare gap in the canopy high above. She looked up into the pale, spidery pinch of sky, squinting – it was early evening time in the world beyond.

This very Fairy Circle would bare the first sign of her parents living in the area and she wanted to find that sign before any other, and it was not long at all before she found precisely what she was looking for: neat, linear scarring all over the thick skin on one of the shorter, more squat-shaped of the giant mushrooms, as if someone had been carefully harvesting strips of the leathery material throughout the long life of this particular bloom. The sight made her heart throb with longing as she ran a tiny finger along a length of the most recently harvested strip, likely taken by her father barely a few days prior as an ingredient for his many alchemical concoctions and brews. She swore that she could almost hear his multitude of organically shaped glass stills bubbling away in the Homenest mushroom cellar, deep within the erupting and all-consuming tree roots of the eastern trails.

She did not have far to travel now.

...

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Homenest

The merged roots of the great tree, not one of the tallest found within the Tall Trees but certainly one of the most ancient, formed the walls of the homely kitchen. Alcoves, work surfaces and quaint cupboards were irregularly cut into the root walls, shallow enough to not threaten the life of the great tree yet deep enough to be utilitarian, and were cluttered to the point of overflowing with the accumulated accoutrements of a lifelong love of the culinary delights. A large, iron stove sat squat inside an upwardly pointed nook between a pair of bulbous roots that fizzed and crackled with the embers of a not long consumed supper; the appetite-awakening, familiar scent of Feathercap mushroom sauce still hung in the air.

The stout, outer wooden door to the tree-root homestead lead directly into the kitchen. As good food, good drink and family mealtimes formed the core of Hinfolk life it was therefore traditional to have the first room in living places to be the kitchen when entering from the outside. The kitchen represented the heart of traditional family life and both Druidmother and Druidfather were nothing if they were not respectful of those very same traditions. It was easy enough to work out why this was so: the High Forest was not a place where one would expect to find a cosy Hin living place, so what with being so far from the original kinlands it was all the more important to maintain and preserve the traditional ways of wholesome living.

It felt strange stepping into the kitchen with no-one being in, almost as if she felt like she was trespassing. She had only been gone for a couple of years and throughout the years of her upbringing she had come and gone as her heart pleased with neither care nor thought for waiting to be invited in; it was her home, so she treated it as such during those times. This was still her home and she admonished herself for allowing the pang of uncertainty to halt her at the threshold.

The central table was cut from a single slice of Ash, an irregular and only barely rectilinear slab that was marked with the signs of many years of healthy family life. She placed her heavy travel pack on the hardwood floorboards and rested a reverent hand upon the surface of the great table. It felt holy, almost as if it were an alter to the deities of wholesome living; and in many ways it was exactly that. The dark veins of the wood formed familiar, twisted concentric circles – a pattern that she had often seen in her sleep throughout her last few years away from home. She was about to sit a rest her head upon the table when she heard footfalls from the outside; someone was making their way along the old Dire Badger tree-root tunnel that lead up to the front door.

“Watchful Mother,” came a familiar motherly voice speaking in Sylvan from beyond the door, with a tinge of surprise to its note.

’Nook! the young Hin suddenly realised. She had left her companion, a cantankerous, seventeen hundred pound ball of fur and teeth, in the Dire Badger tunnel just outside the door. Of course it was true that her parents knew her companion well, they were Druids of the Watchful Mother after all, and her companion, Nanook, was never anything but well behaved in their presence, but it had been two years since the bear was last here and two years is a very long time to a bear. The young Hin dashed for the slightly ajar wooden door and burst through it into the torch-lit gloom of the tree-root tunnel beyond…

…to discover the bear licking the palm of Druidmother’s hand. “Look, she can still smell the honey on me from my collections at first sun,” said Druidmother, smiling soothingly at the comparatively immense mound of murmuring fur. “I hope you have been watchful of our Tam, as we agreed, young Nanook,” the woman said to the bear with a gentle yet unmistakably authoritative tap on the animal’s snout. Tam had seen the devastating power that the bear could unleash upon her foes, claws that scythed the air like swords and bone-crushing, dagger-tooth lined jaws; yet now, hunched over licking the palm of an elderly yet youthfully effervescent Hin woman, the fearsome beast had surrendered into becoming nought but an overly large, timid house pet. Druidmother had a remarkable rapport with the wild animals of the wood, a touch that Tam could only hope to one day equal.

“Come back inside, my dear,” said Druidmother as she walked past the young Hin on her way through the homenest door. “You should rest, in your condition.”

Tam frowned, following Druidmother back into the homestead kitchen. In my condition? She looked down at her apparently swollen belly, where she still stowed a glutton of yet-to-be-eaten berries and cherries harvested from the Rosehip trail, and realised what Druidmother must have thought. “Oh, this aint what ye weckon it be, like.” Still she spoke in the crude tongue of the common tradefolk. The language had truly become a habit difficult to shift. “I aint got a loaf in me oven, ifn that be what ye fathom. These just be bewwies ‘n that. I aint fat neither, they just be stowed...”

Druidmother tutted with disapproval at what she was hearing. “That was not the condition I was speaking of. And speak in the manner in which you were first taught. I will not have that foul sounding rattle in my kitchen. Speak as you would have Shee-Lah Herself hear you, not as you would a cheap, penny-nabbing scrimshanker.”

Tam did as she was told, “Sorry,” and sheepishly sat at the kitchen table in her old place in front of the stove firewood pile.

Druidmother then shuffled up to stand before the seated Hin, smiling warmly and expectantly. Tam knew what was about to happen; Druidmother always did this when Tam returned to the homestead after an extended period away. The young Hin took off her dirty yellow hat and opened her mouth wide, presenting herself to her mother. Druidmother then set about dutifully pulling the young Hin’s cheeks this way and that with her fingers, peering into her mouth inspecting the state of her teeth. “Good… Strong… Good.” The venerable Druidess then began to widen her prodding and invasive inspection to encompass a detailed rummage through the young Hin’s hair, her scalp, and her ears. Throughout Druidmother was uttering wordless sounds of approval – until she lifted the small Hins chin to examine her neck. Tam instinctively pulled away sharply from the inspection and self-consciously tightened her buckled high-collar.

“Oh my daisy,” said Druidmother soothingly, stroking the young Hin’s long, blonde hair. Doubtless she had noticed the healed, ragged scar that tracked under the small Hin’s chin, almost from ear to ear; a wound suffered at the hands of a desperate man looking for an easy target not long after she had arrived in the Marches after having set off on the first steps of her Walkabout in the great beyond – a fine introduction to the ways of the wider world indeed. A look of sorrow mixed with relief came over Druidmother’s life-worn face: sorrowful for her child having to experience such a terrible ordeal, yet filled with relief that she had survived it. “Never you mind, my child. Never you mind,” she said, almost as if in command. “There be plenty of time. You speak of it when you be good and ready. I will be here to listen, just as I always be.”

Mother and daughter had just begun to settle into a more comfortable and homely conversation when the peaceful moment was shattered by a loud smash of glass, the sound of spilling liquid, and the angry curse of Druidfather from the mushroom cellar beneath their feet: “Damn, bollock and double-bloody-buggery!” A faint whiff of something acrid began to seep up from the cellar between the wooden kitchen floor boarding.

“Mm, your father be in after all,” said Druidmother. “I shall fetch him up for you.” And with that Druidmother stamped the heel of her left boot onto the floorboards three times with the accompanying bellow of: “Come out of your hole and greet your daughter!”

“Wait, woman. Just bloody wait,” came the response from the disgruntled, disembodied voice below as an apparently hurried clean-up effort was under way.

Druidmother merely smiled serenely, and waited.

Nowt much changes, thought Tam, greatly comforted by that unshakable truth. It was nice to have come home again, despite the reasons for having done so.

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[Swift]

You have an incredible knack for capturing a scene. Amazing.

[I-KP]

Cheers.