Herbalists' Cache tell me tell me tell me, come on tell me the answer

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The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: gore, implied violence

Few sights were as grisly as this one. She'd been torn apart: limbs broken, life
extinguished. Her throat a mangled mess. Some of the damage by wandering coyotes
and a bit due to natural decomposition. The rest, though—all by way of evil
reminding the world of its presence. Never to cease.

The monster responsible had taken care to put her here, in this aromatic place of
herbs; they masked any culpable scent. But who could find it for the blood? Her
end had come not swiftly but slowly, a grim torture.

No one here knew her name, but it wasn't her fault. She would have made friends,
or at least acquaintances within a pack. Now, she would never get that chance.
Ruin—her legacy was ruin. Just another piece of a hair-raising puzzle. But
this was the way of things; so often the good souls met a ghastly fate, while
horrid souls lived on, free to roam, free to reign in terror.

Murder. It had been murder. And now the scavengers feasted, picking at her flesh.
Appropriately, a murder of crows roosted nearby, looking down upon the carnage.
Nearby, pawprints tinged in blood indented the snow, headed south.

Written by Miryam

She roamed north of the claim. Not because she had to, not even because she wanted to, but more... By accident. Ibis knew where the Emberwood ceased (in part because of Reiko's trunk markings around the claim), but she kept on wandering anyway. The herbal scent of the cache-wood filled her lungs, pungent even with the frost of winter holding the world in its grip. The scents were stronger because of how they contrasted against the wet-cold of the snow, and they reminded Ibis of Elysium. Why she let herself think of her old home was a mystery - perhaps she still wished for easier days, like her simple childhood?

The further she went the more free she felt. No weight of Archdruid duties to worry about, and no buzz of activity around her; she was alone for the first time in the season, and while part of her fought against the solitude, she found herself relishing in the peace as it settled around her. The ache in her chest hadn't abated yet — but she was soon distracted from whatever personal drama spoiled her mood when the scent of stale blood hit her nose.

A momentary confusion snared her expression; it smelled as if someone had been tending to wounds thanks to the mingled herbal smell, but after a few cursory investigations of her surroundings Ibis couldn't find the origin of the scent. It took about half an hour for her to find the trail leading to the body; when she did, she didn't know what she was looking at. Something furry, bloody, fresh — she almost thought it was fortuitous that she find something to eat, as if her luck was turning.

As she crept upon the slackened form and spied the garish red spreading from a torn neck, she realized just what she was looking at, and screamed.

Tuathal happened upon the herbalist's cache by luck of the draw: he had chosen a mountain, crossed said mountain, and descended same mountain without whim for where he was headed, or really a care to know. He wore the vest of a roaming vagrant, and his badges were proof that he'd well earned the title, his form, tall and rangy, his fur, wild and unkempt. There was little need to take care of oneself when there was no one to care.

His earthy scent felt out of place in this forest of aromatics. Like a bum who wandered on the wrong side of Hastings -- wrong, only for him. Cobblestone streets and trees alive with man-made stars was no world for the likes of him.

But Tuathal stayed anyway, for as far as he could tell, there was no one else here. No one to pass him like he was an invisible, no one to shoo him away. The scent of herbs returned him to an easier time, and he thought of Ceara again... somehow, this place reminded him of her...

The scream should have been more jarring. Birds erupted from the trees, and flurried away, and then the forest grew eerie quiet. He lifted his head with quite the delayed response, turned his ears to the source. And sighed.

Shoot, he didn't really want to know what that was all about, but something moved him forward -- a pattern of who he had once been, before his sister's death. Yet he sought the source with a saunter. What he would find on the other end remained uncertain (always did, didn't it?), and he didn't busy his mind with the could-be's and what-if's. Useless to worry like that, he'd deal when he found whoever it was had shrieked, and he would find what he found -- though admittedly, as the forest took on a metallic sting, he realized, kind of too late, that he probably should have prepared...

He caught sight of the living body through the trees. Something else lay in a decomposed heap on the ground. Blood stained the ground around them both, and Tuathal nearly gagged when he almost stepped in a big ol' bloody paw print with his own two paws.

His fur ruffled right on up, and the profanities slipped, "Well, shit, man!" and he stumbled aside, comedic at any other time, his irked out gaze dancing along the ground to avoid any more of the splatter. "What the hell happened here? What the hell is this?"

Blood, so much blood — not warm, frozen, and muddy, and wrong.

The body a crumpled heap. What was it that Bhediya said -- could smell it on her -- all Ibis could smell now was the intense herbal stench of the green around the body. Covering the body. Layering like a pelt where the snow didn't touch the body. Ibis felt her own body shiver.

She needed to blink. She needed to move away, but found herself frozen in place with the dying embers of her shout fading on the wind; she remained oblivious to the rapture of birds from the trees overhead. Mindlessly Ibis sank to her haunches — but that lasted all of thirty seconds, as a force burst from behind the ferns and a voice spooked her to her feet.

Her heart's tempo went from the quick beat of adrenaline to something greater, and she was again overwhelmed, finally turning away from the body and staring at the raggedy man - and out of Ibis came the thinnest, smallest voice in a flurry: Its, she's, th-they-- they're, its a body, they died? There's blood -- there's -- its everywhere -- w-why? Her eyes glimmered as a haze fell over them, wide as they were, and the blue-green of her iris became like an ocean of worry as she fought to stay composed, inevitably failing. Streaks of warm, wet tears began to course down her face.

He panicked, she panicked -- they both panicked, in such very similar ways. The girl with broken, high-strung words, Tuathal, with a string of swears in much the same pattern.

"Oh shit - oh man - oh sh - " he could hardly even contain himself, and then she was crying - "oh no, oh no no no, oh shhh shh it's -- okay, it's okay, you're okay," even though this was absolutely NOT OKAY, and he danced forward on antsy paws, still avoiding the blood and looking at the shredded lady again - the scent alone made him gag again - and rather sought to close some of the gap that separated him from this girl. For her sake, absolutely, and totally not because this was way too much for him right now, and the proximity of anyone (alive, might he add) just made him feel a lot better, too.

But beyond the grisly murder, this poor kid overtook him; she sounded way young, much younger than himself, probably hadn't seen anything like this before - and hell, had he? "Shit, why were you the one... " Tuathal had seen his share of dead bodies, some fresh, some decayed, some stripped clean after years of subjection to the scavengers, those kings of the unmarked road. But he only had to take one quick look at the crumbled corpose to know this wasn't a body like he'd seen before. Only needed to see those paw prints in the snow, big enough to a wolf's, to know that one of their kind had been here. One of their kind had tracked her blood away. He turned around in a tight circle, before he refocused on the girl. "We need to get the hell away from here. We need to go."

She couldn't unsee this. She didn't see the bloody prints and that was probably a blessing. If Ibis had noticed the intricacies of the crime scene she might have lost a few more of her marbles, but for now she was still in shock over the dead body. This poor woman, this lost soul that Ibis could never save — is this what happened when you were on the road alone? Would this have happened to her one day if Okeanos hadn't been with her, or anyone from the Emberwood? How did anyone survive alone if the threat of this gruesome affair was ever present?

Ibis was, in no short order, freaking out completely. Her words had dissolved in to crying and the occasional messy sound, almost like words but not quite, and the man who had come upon her seemed just as rattled. He tried to calm her down - or maybe he was calming them both down - and when he mentioned getting away Ibis nodded slowly, rhythmically.

But then she spoke out against the idea, composing herself just enough to announce: B-but -- but we need to bury her. This can't... We can't leave them like this, this is -- we need to do it, bury her. And she was up on her paws again, barely able to keep herself standing as she hurried around the body. She grasped at the rear-end of the bloated mess and pulled; but then she thought, 'Oh no, what if I hurt them --' and let it go, tried again, again, again, tugging and positioning and re-positioning and getting cold mud all over herself...

And whether the man helped pull her away in the end or not, she'd be too distracted by the fog of her shock and her terror to notice. She wouldn't fight him if he tried; the taste in her mouth made her pale, her body sagging as she mutely sat back down.

She agreed with his plea, until she absolutely didn't, and Tuathal stared. Dumbfounded, face stricken, at a loss, for what he could even say to that. "Bury her? Kid - there's nothing left of her -- " but his voice seemed to fall on ears that could hear no voice of the living, but could only perceive, only touch, only feel those silent tears of the dead.

He leapt after her when she shuffled into position. "Kid, no, c'mon," his heart sunk when she latched onto her haunch. Tuathal paced alongside her. "We have to - " what was left of the woman's body rippled with each tug of effort the girl made to pull the corpse from her frozen grave, and he couldn't - he couldn't watch this - "there's nothing left to bury - "

And he forced himself between the girl and the corpse, and sought to push her away with the force of his bony shoulder. His neck came to rest over her shoulder as he tried to move her out, her face toward the body, his face toward the world. "Please," he begged her, and his vision met the line of trees. Sunlight pierced through the tranquil covering, oblivious to the darkness that festered away from her light. Vibrant, dancing rays. And he thought he saw, between the branches, a streak of glowing red. A body, as bright as fire. A phoenix.

His eyes burned, and he blinked, heat ran down his cheeks, and the vision disappeared. The girl fell back, eased onto her haunches, and he felt her weakness shiver through every edge his own body touched. His heart hurt, he could not handle the sudden myriad of thoughts -- this was someone's child, someone's sister. Someone's family, someone's heart. They knew her only in death, but they were all she had left. You have to bury her.

You have to bury her, you have to bury her, the mantra repeated, over and over, but Tuathal dropped his gaze and let the sunlight leave him. "I'm sorry," was all he managed to whisper, before he buried his face against the girl, the only comfort he could find through the sobbing that seemed to bleed between them both.

Her mouth hung open while she sat there, dumbfounded, feeling the solidity of his body as he wrapped around her and held her tight. The only constant, the only real thing, was the stranger. The dead body was there too, would be there always, frozen and never changing, buried beneath the snow and forgotten — it wasn't fair. She felt the sense-memory of the bloated skin by her face and the tattered, frigid coat where she had tried to grab at it, but already it was fading from her. Melting away because of the man's warmth. He was real, she told herself. He would protect her. This wasn't happening... This wasn't happening...

And then through their shared sobs (which her brain had somehow drowned out too) she heard him pleading; she heard him apologizing, and Ibis shot him a look that was unsettling upon her petite face. It was accusatory and dark, filled with fear for a split-second, as if he had just admitted to doing the deed himself. She couldn't see his eyes because of how he had corralled her and when she realized this, Ibis wanted to distance herself. She struggled a bit against his presence but not for long.

They would sit there for a while yet. And when they were both composed enough, had mourned this lost life enough, she would struggle to her paws and lead him to safety. It was all she could ever do — gather people where they should be safe — but deep down Ibis knew that the Emberwood was in danger too. They weren't safe anywhere.