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+--- Thread: Grouse Thicket bigger than these bones (/showthread.php?tid=17379)
bigger than these bones - Ragna - August 20, 2016
she found the bone! hope that's cool. she's dropping it off at the edge of deepwood weald that's closest to chimera fields. tagging @Doe for visibility
She found it near a log. Once the log was a fallen tree, and several feet away its stump wore a thick mantle of moss. The log itself was a moist, rotting thing; parts fell away when she scratched at it. It had been eaten away by the mushrooms and bugs that called it home. The log was not interesting.
The bone was.
It was, for all intents and purposes, a normal jaw bone. Ragna could not identify it as belonging to any one species, but she was not one to care much for that which was already dead unless it was a meal. This was no meal, but it was so delightful to look upon. Something in the morbid curve of it called to her with a great and terrible beauty. On a whim, Ragna picked it up. It would make an excellent offering to Molech, and that might please the red woman.
A great crack resounded far in the distance, as though a tree had shed a particularly large limb. It set her fur on edge. Ears perked, she listened to the following silence and found that there was no such thing. Instead there was a voice, indistinct, as though carried on wind.
Father?she asked the wind, and she knew it to be true.
Father?It was her father's ghost, now growing closer, or louder, and he did not speak but howled and barked. Ragna grew afraid, then terrified. Another crack split the air, and with the bone still gripped within her tense jaws she ran.
Ragnar followed her, him and an army of a thousand vikings. Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes. Why, father? she thought desperately, but there was no answer, only the screams of the warriors.
The voices did not leave her while she tore through the forest, the baying vikings nipping at her heels. Only as she splashed out of the mud of the Frogspawn Swamp did the quiet. Ragna did not trust the silence, and ran farther still. Her heart ached, her mind span as she tried to discern what she had done to displease her father so.
It was only when she reached the river, exhausted, that she realized she was still carrying the bone. Within her heart of hearts she knew it to be the cause of her experience. Disgusted, she tossed it onto the sandy bank of the alpine river.
Cursed!she spat, her skin crawling. It had to be destroyed for the safety of any who might find it, but how?
The least she could do was hide it, and so, grimacing, she closed her mouth around it once more. The feel of it against her tongue was unsettling, and she longed to be rid of it. She delved into the next forest, for there beneath the trees she could make sure it was not found.
In the end she tucked it into the crook of a tree, hiding it among the leaf litter and underbrush. In truth she did not hide it well, for in her haste to be rid of the bone, she only covered it haphazardly. And so it sat, and so it waited, while Ragna turned her back upon the cursed thing and rode out the vestiges of its influence.