[open quest] if you go down in the woods today...

[Anuya]

This dream is quickly turning into something of a nightmare. No, it wasn’t the trees that seemed to want to kill her. Or the freakish body that she was trapped in or the super weird pants she was wearing. Before her eyes flowers begin to grow and Anuya feels like she’s back in her first home. The super shitty place where she had 500 older siblings and they all lived at home and they weren’t nearly as fun or pretty as some of the gigantic families here. And where flowers glowed and almost everything you touched was ridiculously poisonous.

There is a brief, powerful desire to turn around and just let the trees tear her apart. Or maybe that moose will return and she’ll get pleasantly trampled to death instead of being forced to take this trip down memory lane.

For some reason she is undoubtedly going to regret, the fae-turned-mountie decides to move forward and follow the path up the mountain.

Taking a lot of care to avoid the flowers on the way.

For a while, it seems like it’ll be fine.

So she starts humming to herself. Almost immediately as soon as she does, she hears stones on the mountainside begin to shift. Totally normal right? Nothing to worry about Anuya. Just because this place looks like your old home, doesn’t mean some mutated monsters are going to come burst out of -

Okay so that’s exactly what’s going to happen. What she first mistakes for a large snow ball tumbling down the mountain unfurls itself to reveal a giant monster. Its elongated body sports at least a dozen legs (she gives up counting) all sharp, icicle-like points. And the head, which is currently roaring at her, reminds her of a misshaped bear - if a bear had a mouthful of hundreds of needle teeth.

This sure would be a good time for a certain moose to show up - but dear Bullwinkle seems to be MIA so Anuya just runs. And trips a lot in the process. And on the fifth or hundredth time she stumbles to the ground her face lands in a flower patch and she jumps back from the glowing plants as if they’ve burned her. And she is just realizing that she is, in fact, unharmed from any poisons when ice-dagger jaws bite into her neck and pick her up.

She screams, obviously, which only seems to make the creatures angrier and it tosses her further up the path.

Her red coat quickly becomes even redder as the wounds on her neck bleed but Anuya very suddenly just Does Not Want to Die Like This so she scrambles back to her stupid legs clothed in these stupid pants and continues to flee. She loses track of how many times she's fallen and by the time she collapses into a thick blanket of fog, she's drenched in sweat and blood and her clothes are tattered and caked in mud. Anuya can hear the tink-tink-tink of the many icicle legs on the stone ground as the creature enters the fog with her so she claps her hands over her mouth to cover the sound of her sobs and breathing.

The skittering sound comes closer before retreating further into whatever land she's found herself in. She does look around, but it's from a horizontal position as she lies down to catch her breath and have a good cry. And from this position, everything just looks grey and dark. Which is fine, because even if she was wandering around it would look grey and dark too.

Anuya