Blackfeather Woods the haunting

I have no idea why I wrote this.

Titmouse had been the one to take Maegi from her girlhood in to the next stage; she was a woman now, and would be growing heavy with their children. It was something he had wanted, once. To know her so deeply, so intimately, had been a fantasy of his. To think of their cubs growing among the black spires of the wood was, at one time, everything he'd ever dreamed. A family that would love and care for him more than any Redhawk ever did, built on a foundation of deep respect and love — but it was different now.

The boy had waited in the copse where Maegi left him; he had been dazed, feeling strangely empty once he had done the task of bedding her. Maybe he slept. Maybe he had lain there for an hour or so, staring at the swirling darkness. Maybe he even cried a little. But the moment was behind him now — he had eventually risen like the specter that he was and drifted to the Web, finding the smell of the dead air inside, and the chill of the deepening dark, to be preferable to the memory of Maegi beneath him. He couldn't shake the images of her pale body reacting to his flesh pressed up against her — and so he sought out something to help him clear his mind.

Deep within the Web, in one of the smaller corridors he had found, Titmouse had made a discovery. It wasn't a grand new thing to find plants growing across the walls, luminous or otherwise, but this particular species of mushroom was something new to him. He hadn't seen it anywhere else in the tunnels but sought it out now, curious of its effects. The stems were thin and carried drooping caps on high, and the cluster that he found grew as tall as his chin. He sought them out in silence. Plucking one, two caps. Chewing their soft and pliant flesh — then, drifting, he began to roam in the dark.

It was not long before they took effect; they were not as potent as he'd have liked, but softened his mind in the way that a good dose of poppy might. When Titmouse passed through a shaft of light breaking through the stony wall, it was unnaturally sharp. He winced away from it as if burned, but even as he did so, he heard — a shriek; like a gale slowly building, the frequency so high and sharp that at first he couldn't make sense of it. As it grew louder inside his head, it took on a hawkish quality — and so too did the shaft of light, morphing in to a set of talons, wings - spread, a pair of faces merged as one — mutated, three-eyed, each blazing with fire.

As the image came to him he felt terror, so he ran.

---

When he stopped he was breathing harder than ever, gasping for air as if he were drowing in the shadows. His eyes were open and struggling to conceal the immense panic of his thundering heart; Titmouse realized then, he wasn't in the caves. He wasn't anywhere he recognized or had been before, although the calling of the ravens overhead told him he was still home. He turned on the spot in haste, trying to fix his one good eye on anything familiar, and saw a figure among the trees; no, it was the trees. A canid face wrought of bark emerged and contorted before him, reaching with branching limbs as it advanced among the ferns. It wasn't fully formed, he thought. The legs jut out at odd angles, and there were many of them. The face sneered and cracked as if struck, and as the bark split in to two, fell away, he thought he could see fur writhing inside of it.

He couldn't scream no matter how much he felt the urge, and staggered backwards against the encroaching forest. It felt as if the trees were pulling in around him like a net. There were spires behind him that weren't there before; and still, the creature coming for him — calling to him, but the words bled in to shrieks he could not decipher. Growing deafening, filling him with so much dread he wished he could look away but — but —

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When Titmouse came-to, he was deep within the blackwood; around him there were crows and ravens alike scattered in a bloom around him, his pale body the center-piece. Their feathers lay plucked and cast aside, and the birds themselves were almost not recognizable — but their heads were intact, and each pointed inward towards him. As he woke in the center of this monstrous ring of destruction he felt thirsty, and licked his lips, only to taste blood upon them.