[open] Crown of Bone and Thorn

[Kreed]

The goat queen had become accustomed to spending the days in the jagged hills on the eastern border, returning to walk the pine forests only at night.  Late spring had chased most, if not all, the snow from the rocky cliffs.  Even the highest elevations began to warm, causing my thick coat to lighten.  Patches of coarse hair dotted my carcass in an unsightly manner.

Sickly almost.

I descend for my nightly rounds, weaving through the salute pines.  Every few paces I'd brush along their shaggy bark, leaving chunks of muddy brown hair to mark my path.  The sensation was quite pleasant, relieving slightly the itch of my skin.  Other than satisfaction, there was no other purpose to doing this.  Though one may assume it to be a scent trail.

The forest is cloaked in a thick blanket of darkness as I move casually through the understory.  Not much grew down here but some briar patches of twisted vines, so navigating steps wasn't too hard even in the pitch black of night.  An occasional crunch of dry needle and pinecone is all that signaled my presence audibly.

Every so often when I ran my body along the tree bark, I would pause to bend my head, jabbing my spiraled horns into the meat of the tree and scraping away a marking.  A warning.  My own personal calling card.

Beware, all who enter here.

Kreed

Crown of Bone and Thorn

Open to any!

[Tiernen]

I'VE WALKED THE EARTH AND THERE ARE SO FEW HERE THAT KNOW
HOW DARK THE NIGHT AND JUST HOW COLD THE WIND CAN BLOW

He hadn’t meant to end up here. He had no ties to the Chamber, and truth be told, he hadn’t yet realized where he actually was to begin with. All he saw were trees, a forest that blurred into indiscernible glimpses of bark and leaves, bramble and lightly trodden paths. The Chamber was an old land, reborn from long before his time; it is not something he would recognize without being told.

His steps were without purpose, and  for so long he has felt unmoored that he is not sure if he can remember what it felt like before it all fell apart.  Everything that he has known, including himself, seems to be gone. His home disappeared and his family fell apart in all the ways a family could, with his father gone, his mother suddenly a stranger (she looks the same, unharmed and unchanged, but she acts as if she cannot remember how he came to be, as if the history between her and his father had been excised from her mind), and his sisters making themselves so sparse they may as well be gone too.

But it is the changes within himself that have been the hardest to square with.

The events on the mountain all those years ago changed him, but he cannot entirely parse out why. He knew only that he was different from before, not just because of the way he could now summon moonlight as a shield or how it now glowed from his side in the shape of wings,  but in other, less tangible ways. It was the way everything was too loud, his eyesight too sharp, and the smells at times overwhelming. It was the way spending too much time in the sun made him feel as if his energy was slowly wilting, and the way his skin would blister if he tried to force his way through it without seeking out the shadows. He is thankful for the fall of night, the shadows like a balm to his nearly constantly irritated skin.

It is as he walks now that he is assaulted by the scent of someone else, likely mostly undetectable to others but to him it is impossible to ignore. The sound of her footsteps on the dry leaves feel impossibly loud, and he grits his teeth to keep from outwardly reacting to the grating sound. He still has not mastered how to gauge how far away the sounds are coming from — it seemed as though the source is right next to him, though it is actually around another bend that he comes across the goat-like creature that is currently carving away at one of the trees.

Immediately he stops, his entire body tightening.
Any sort of interaction always made him uncomfortable, his conversation skills severely lacking. But his curiosity has gotten the better of him, and so he asks her, a bit dubious, “What are you doing to the trees?”

T I E R N E N

@ Kreed