Lost Creek Hollow Samhain

her guardsman was under order to stay within the woods, in case word came to him from the peak. it had taken some convincing before he would let brunhild depart unguarded. she was not, she told him. she had the gods on her side.
that's what they all said.

alone, she made good time. from the bypass to the serpentine river, then across. brunhild praised the night mother for granting her safe passage: she looked upon the earth with a brimming smile, larger than life. brunhild could not remember ever seeing her eye so large before.

the sky was clear. the air was crisp. she held hope in her heart and that would keep her warm until morning.

the hollow came in to view soon enough, and as she ducked among the ferns she took a fortifying breath. there was no sign of life, familiar or otherwise, and yet brunhild refused to relent in her hunt.

All the way here he had traveled, through the woods, plains, mountains, through rain splatting like spit from a sneeze through the air, all dark and hooded and readying for winter.

Head nestled in the curve on his right collarbone, Wymond dozes off in the 27 degrees Fahrenheit chill, breath escaping from him in misted chimneys of vapor.

Through fitful and oblique skew lines of navy he first hears somebody's footsteps, then glimpses a moment of silver fur. He asks, who's there? with all the bald volume of the character first to die in a pulp horror flick, hubris blown up on a camera so macro you'd swear you could see the atoms of it on the Spanish stucco when the projector gears whir to life --

-- a crow or raven cruising past, volplaning (engines off) back to the fern and dirt tarmac, just overhead. For a second he can see the sleek and seamless underbelly of death's portent (quoth the raven, nevermore! And so on,) and fear is suddenly a condensate on his palms.

she was not a pious creature despite her mind's tendency to connect with the traditional beliefs of her tribe. she saw natural phenomenae and could only explain it in such a manner.

the light of the moon was the night mother's attenuated glow, stolen from the slumbering sunna. when the dawn came, permeating across the ferns and dancing on molecules of dew, brunhild would bade farewell to one sister in favor of another. 

a night spent wandering left brunhild harrowed. a glimpse of sunna's reaching arms as she climbed from her bed, and she trailed her fingers through the woman's grizzle, silhouetted a retreating raven as it too fled with the night.

  who's there? — a worried call betwixt spires of pine.
brunhild halts, of course. she traces her memory for anything to compare that sound to. her daughter's sweet voice replays from memory, and for a moment brunhild thinks she has succeeded, just in time. somewhere in her heart she knows the words are not right—but a mother's hope can be overwhelming.

ostara?! she brays, looking for any sign of the little girl as she is remembered. soft and plump and so very small. she may have looked upon the man who lay coiled in his bed but not seen him in her momentary panic.