Open The more I see, the less I know for sure.

Given her usual adoption of frowns and glares, of being stubborn and difficult, it was these moments Haelyn felt as if this life to become a Knight Sworn was a hopeless dream.

She stood there, watching and feeling the hopelessness creep in. Stuck on the spot she took up against the meadow green, frozen in her despair.

But you are not useless, little girl.

The lynx slinked around her, body warming against her legs as if to coax her to move.

You know how to heal, shroud or not.

Haelyn's eyes fell onto the wounds. Her stomach lurched, and it took a deep, calming breath to steady herself and set aside all though of how brutal the scene was before her. "Lay her down." She moved, repeating a mantra of encouragement in her mind to keep her going. Haelyn put on a brave face as she neared, setting her face to something of quiet determination.

She shrugged off her jacket. It had holes and tears gaping after her own unsuccessful patching, but it still held warmth.

Shakily, she sunk to her knees and gripped the bottom of her tunic. Haelyn didn't have great strength, and tried not to be embarassed at how thin her tunic was to begin with. As she tore, she winced at the excess strip she managed to pry from herself, but paid it no heed as she began to bundle it and press it against the deeper wound on the pale haired patient. "Please. Help me stop the bleeding? It will make using the shroud easier if we can stop it."

Haelyn arranged her jacket over the one named Mina. Only when she looked up at Venla did she realise she was not shaking, she was not anxious. This false confidence and awareness almost made her falter. Her eyes turned to the one that had been shouting, a momentary hesitation and cower as she watched him and expected them to yell some more. It was only when Mina gave a shudder of a breath that Haelyn looked down.

The Pursuit of Life came easier to her than any other Pursuit, except for the Wyld. Life was the first thing she had studied. It was one thing to read and learn, and another to put it all into practice. Haelyn could heal her own scrapes and sores, but nothing of this magnitude of damage. Slow, steady, she reminded herself. The scrawny squire took a deep breath and called to the shroud, offering a portion of her energy wells. She was alive and healthy, an offering to help the other.

His eye went from Venla to the young squire, he could have struck her face then for daring to ask anything of him when u did his attempt to contain HER problem and now the other one looked to him, helpless.
Must he do it all himself?

"Keep the fool still."

He approached the three eyed child and knelt at her head. Multicasting spells was difficult but the Squire gave of herself and that helped a great deal. He did not waste time asking he took what was offered as if taking it from her giving hand.
Whatever disturbance in the Shroud she effected he did not know if it was from her or the creature but he had no time, if he had time to think...

"Hold this."
He thrust his spear into Venla's hands utterly done with this lack of priority and knelt at the three eyed head, taking it on his knees and placing his hands at her temples.

"Emlock Hathay Mininack!"

The Soothing spell was healing. It revatilised the body, wounds frosted over to be patched and burning pain quieted. The child would wake sore and cold but alive and the worst of it turned into scar tissue. He did not have the time to sustain the healing to entirely mend her but she would not perish from her wounds as they were.

When it was done he looked up at Venla and stood.

"Now..."
The monster thrashed just put of sight, he had to tilt his head to keep it in view of his single eye and counting it as a personal achievement that he had not shouted in two minutes.

"You will help me fix your mess! You have the shell..."
He pointed to where it dangled from the top of the shaft, the one she gifted him on the beach at Unicorn Bay.
"Use it, focus through it and DESTROY YOUR MONSTER!"
Almost two minutes.

As if on que the creature broke free for a moment before Vaaga sent his remaining icicles at it pinning the unsightly totem to the ground like a monstrous worm.

"NOW VENLA, MY POWER IS NOT LIMITLESS!"

In fact it was almost spent.

The world had gone strange.

Mina was cold. Wrong cold. Not the way a person gets cold from wind or snow. Not river cold. That black, heavy blood slid slow and thick over Venla’s hands, flecked with silver dust that glittered faint in the dying light. It soaked into her sleeves.

The glade still stank of heat and broken ice and whatever wrong thing had crawled out of the world a few minutes ago, and somewhere behind her that thing still thrashed. Bones knocking together. Wet mouths opening and closing. A hungry sound, like something chewing.

Vaaga’s voice cut across it all, sharp as a whip.
But Venla barely heard him. She was staring down at Mina’s face. At the third eye blinking slowly open between her brows.

“Oh Mina... easy there, little star.” Venla murmured, voice thin and trembling. “H-hey… hey don’t you be doing that. Don’t you go drifting off on me. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean none of it. You stay with us, alright? You’re… you’re doing just fine. You’re doing… just fine.”

Her hands were shaking so bad the spear rattled where Vaaga had shoved it into them. The shell tied near the spearhead clicked softly against the shaft.

Click.

Click.

Click.

She did not feel like a sorceress with control over her monster. Not in that moment. She felt like a woman with blood up to her elbows and guilt piled higher than the Mheara peaks. Now here’s the thing about magic and shroud weaving. Most folk, like Venla herself, thougth it was all robes and hand-waving and clever words muttered through a beard. Nice tidy little tricks.

But sometimes… it ain’t that.

Sometimes it’s just a frightened woman with blood on her hands, watching a dying girl, and the world deciding that tonight she gets to be the loaded cannon.

Vaaga’s shouting kept going somewhere behind her. The squire was working, brave little thing, pouring life into Mina like someone trying to fill a cracked jug with shaking hands. The shroud pulled thin across the meadow like the stretched cloth.

“NOW VENLA, MY POWER IS NOT LIMITLESS!”

Now, Venla didn’t say anything to that. She was raised polite, after all. And she was busy discovering something.
Turns out guilt and love and terror make for a mighty powerful door. Somewhere deep in the strange, swelling storm inside her bones, she had the passing thought that men had always been mighty quick to announce when they were about to run out of steam. Loud about it too. As if saying it first made it respectable.

Funny thing.

The power flooding Venla didn’t seem to share that particular concern. It didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word limit.
Rising through her bones like something that had been waiting a very long time for the door to open.

The thing tore free of the last of the ice.

It rose up from the ground in a long, obscene coil of bone and mouths and wrongness. Its body bent like a centipede made by someone who had never once seen a centipede before. Deer teeth. Broken pipes of bone jutting from wet flesh. How it could move when its big heart lay twitching on the ground was beyond Venla's knowledge.

And Venla, didn’t know a single proper spell. But she could feel the threads of the world.

Loose.

Thin.

Like a tapestry someone had cut in a dozen places.

So she did the only thing a tavern girl used to pouring ale and yanking stuck doors might do. Again, she just grabbed those loose threads running from the abomination and she pulled.

The whole towering mess of bone and mouths began to slump. Venla made a noise in the back of her throat. Half gasp, half apology. The threads were in her hands now and something vast was leaning over her shoulder, watching how she tugged them.

So she tugged harder.

And the monster came apart.

Muscle slid off bone. Bone forgot how to stay solid. The thing tried to scream but its throat had already turned to something thick and bubbling, collapsing like wet paper.

Down it went.

Venla let go of the threads like someone dropping a hot skillet. Stood there a moment, breathing hard, staring at the puddle where a monster had been standing a heartbeat before.

Then she looked down at Mina.
Then at her own hands.

They were shaking, but with power anymore. Just hands again. Her hands. Hands meant for hauling kegs and scrubbing tables and stitching torn sleeves by lanternlight. They were covered in blood that wasn’t quite blood. Mina. The odd little three-eyed girl Selene of Dusk seemed to guard like a sacred relic... and not person you really don’t want to accidentally get half killed.

Shit.
This was bad.
Not just a little bad.
Not just shouting bad.
Not just stern talking-to bad.

The third eye regarded all. Those twines of fearspun shroud that raveled about the squire. Haelyn. How tightly they wound. Built strength from the fibers she had to give, and gave, however many trembles rattled through her bones, or shook the very valleys betwixt the prints of her fingers.

Threatened then, by the ice crackle hiss of the cold man's voice. How his lines thinned. Glass sharp, each thread of shroud that whispered and whipped before Mina's third eye. Until their threads did come together. Willed, then shaped by words that gave it form.

Like a flurry of winter's snow, come flutter and blanket across the body of Mina. The wounds, stubborn to budge. The sludge, dark and shimmering with all its strange silver, coaxed to seal, slow as molasses come coat across skin, pallid in places it wanted to be sun touched gold.

A breath of ease taken into lungs. The eye, so full of new learnings. New spells. New magicks. Full. Like a thing sated. Started to shut.

Come the soft voice of a kind soul, and Mina's third eye scrolled to regard it. Half lidded. It watched between blinks.

Power there. Raw. Deep. Old. The third eye opened wide again. Watching. Seeing. That thing that leaned over Venla's shoulder. The swirl of things inside her. How it pulled at the threads of the shroud around all of them. Clutching. Tearing. Ripping through the air in technicolor gashes that pulsed the wider and fuller with each hammer of her heart.

A circle.

A well.

A hole.

It drank. And drank. And it would keep on drinking. The healing stopped. The air grew thin. Breath came hard. Spells came undone. The monster. The totem. Afraid. Broken. Grabbed onto by strong hands that would not let go.

Ripped. Torn. Undone.

With a hard crash and spray the creature was finished. What shroud had been woven into its form, crashed across the clearing like a wave come from the splash of a boulder. The healing spell kicked up across Mina's wounds, like a flame fed a fresh long. Only to sputter out. So much fuel to its working that it drowned.

Mina's third eye watched all of it. Wide eyed with wonder. Her breath returned. As if some part of her knew to hold fast the air in her lungs as all the world about them fluxed to the pull of Venla's weaving. And now as the shroud settled, her instinct reminded her to breath.

Her eyes came open. Their pale moonlight stare, fixed on Venla. No judgement there in their gaze. Just watching. They turned to Haelyn next, then Vaaga.

Blinked.

The air felt heavy. Thick and thin as all the shroud about them tried to find equilibrium once more.

Trees and shrubs had died. What creatures that had not been able to flee, or hold on to their own strands of shroud, lay dead across the forest floor.

All the while, the totem, strange and mysterious thing, bubbled and hissed in its puddle of ruin as its fluids sank into the soil.

Fear rapped it's cold, sharp nailed fingers along her spine. Haelyn stiffened before peeling herself away from those she rushed towards. The squire felt as if she had been burned, scrambling only a foot away but her now lip wobbled. Shock. That was what beheld her now.

She could not do this. She could not... Haelyn was too weak, too small, not yet ready to become a knight or to take on the duties the Knight Sworn faced without fear.

She could always run. Use her own Guardian of the Wyld to guide her back to Astenvale, to anywhere but here.

"What did you do?"

The question left her before she could think on it, before she could stifle it behind her facade of frowning and scowling. Before she could try to attempt at shrinking. None of them truly cared that she was here. In fact, Haelyn could not even recall their names prior to names being thrown about.

And yet, her question burned in her lungs, awaiting to be breathed into the air once again.

He was almost about to take a deep breath when the world about them died. The tug of life force pulled through the Shroud soaking into the three eyed one Venla had called Mina. She bloated on at like a sponge, a thing unthinking and shoveling the power into itself until it might burst.

A thing that ate the very source of life without restraint.

Vaaga knew then why his own reserves had left him so quickly. This thing on the ground was absorbing it all, from everything in a desperate attempt to cling to life.

Above them an owl who did not escape fell to earth and died, breaking it's body on the hard earth. Feathers falling off it's shrivelled wings.

"She is feeding herself. Inhaling life to keep her own selfish, foolish existence going."
What else was he to call embracing the monstrous totem than foolish?
"Fool child. She is no longer in danger but she would kill us all to be instantly well. Squire, trust me on this if nothing else. This creature wears human guise but it is not. It is reckless and dangerous. Your Order is charged to deal with such things. I leave her in your care."

He was going to turn his back on her but hesitated.
"You did well today Squire, you kept your head. Moreso than power that is essential."

And speaking of power Vaaga rounded on Venla next, unsure if he should fulfill her suggestion to shout at her or not.

She was shaking, afraid of herself and of Mina and what happens next and it made something in Vaaga's frozen heart crack. There was a time he was not so different but even then he remembered the hard lesson taught by the Wise Woman.

His real eye held her in it and he wondered if she was listening or able to hear him at all in her current state yet still he spoke without anger. There was no use for his fury and frustrations now.
"Venla, look at me. Take a breath, it is done now. The creature is gone, the girl will live and the forest will heal in time."

She was right about him before, this was his calling and while he did not often consider the feelings of others he was not unaware that others had them. He simply didn't seem to have as much and feelings often appeared to get in the way of doing what needed to be done.
But Venla did not need Vaaga the ill tempered sorcerer, she needed an experienced voice to help talk her through what he suspected might be the first time she nearly got someone else killed with her magic.

Haelyn’s voice reached her.

What did you do?

Venla flinched. Her mouth opened. Closed. For a moment she just stared at the squire, eyes wide and glassy. "I…” she started, and stopped again. Her gaze dropped to the puddle of gore. Well now, Venla… you’ve done it proper this time.

“I don’t know.”
Words came out small.
“I didn’t... I came out here so I wouldn’t hurt anyone.” Her voice worn thin. “I walked all day. There weren’t supposed to be people. I didn’t see anyone. I thought I was alone. I just wanted to try...” A shaky sigh. Vaaga’s voice came after. Calmer now. Venla didn’t look at him.

“I wouldn’t have done any of it if I’d known you were here.”

She tried.
Tried to take that breath he told her to take.
It came in uneven, catching halfway like her lungs didn’t quite trust the air anymore.
Her shoulders rose.
Fell.
Again.
Her fingers curled slightly against her skirt.

Then she dragged her gaze up to him, slow like her eyes were lifting something heavy. Her eyes flicked briefly to Mina. To the trees. To the place where the monster had been unmade into something that didn’t even count as dead. Then back to him. And if there was one thing Venla knew, you make a mess, you clean it.
Simple as that.

Her jaw tightened slightly.

“We need to get her back to the monastery. Before it gets night.”

Her face contorted with simmering rage and disbelief.

None of this should have happened. The balance had been upset, and Haelyn, so attuned to the natural order of the shroud, was reeling in the aftermath. An old version of her, one without a guardian of the wyld, would have unleashed her fury and frustration, but with the gentle prodding of her lynx did calm gently wade into her shores.

She looked to all present, and knew none of them could carry Mina back to Astenvale without difficulty.

Her face still retained a scowl, but her voice was void of the bitterness in which she wished to speak in.

"I will call a beast to carry her." It was all she said before she turned her back to them all. Haelyn wandered back to the rowan tree, almost a hundred metres away before she scrunched her eyes shut and took a deep breath.

I call on the dark horse, the one the dark and shadows did not make. I call on the dark horse, the one that guided a young girl home when she was lost.

It had been with Syr Josai that Haelyn learned she had been visited by many Gaurdians of the Wyld before, when she had been a young girl that sought shelter and solitude in the forest behind her village. The dark horse had been an omen, but today Haelyn knew it would answer her call and help guide them home... to the monastery.

There, everything was returning to normal, the Squire even managed to solve the problem of moving the fool.

"Yes Fool, this is pain. It's normal and if you were normal this would not be your first time experiencing it. Try to not drain the lifeforce of everyone around you before they discover what to do with you."

Which Vaaga hoped would be to take her head from her shoulders and be done with her but he knew where his responsibility lay and it was not with the abomination. He did not hunt monsters, he helped manage the Shroud and Venla had upset that so now that she had steeled herself he could be himself again and so his hand leaped forth and snatched his spear back and the other hand whipped around and struck Venla on the back of the head, hard.

"You are not ready to be around people again Novice. The sooner you learn that the safer we will all be."

He pointed to the girl, bleeding a hungry and made dangerous in the fallout of Venla's carelessness.

"This will happen again if you do not master yourself first. More pain, needless death."

His lone eye glared a dagger at her as he spoke.

"This power you wield is no mere conjuring of lights and wind, it is the ability to create and destroy. To do anything, everything. Damn it girl have you been sitting in some tower washing linen these past months or did you think my mastery came with no sacrifice at all?"

His fingers touched the dark marble of his false eye as he began to feel himself get worked up into a frenzy and took a breath.
Ignorance, if there was one thing he could not stand it was someone attempting to do something they had no knowledge of.

"You lied to me about your magic and now I find that you have been hiding here among these tin plated tree huggers, who have no notion of what they live under and worse than that you have learned NOTHING in that time about what you are!"

It dawned on him then that her deception had hurt him. That he was wrong and for a reason he was only beginning to tease out of himself he actually did care in some capacity for Venla. He could have helped her, he asked because he wanted to. It was not just curiosity, the ice hawk had sensed it in being drawn to her, in lasting longer than it was supposed to. She was drawn to places of power. He should have tested her then, made sure but he trusted like a fool and it might have undid the continent itself.

“We leave as soon as the beast arrives,” she nodded to Haelyn.

Venla drew a slow breath and wiped more blood from her hands onto already ruined fabric. It hardly mattered anymore. She looked like a slaughterhouse saint. Red from throat to hem.

The strike caught her across the back of the head hard enough to make her teeth click together.

For a moment she just stood, head lowered slightly. Blood slid from her cheeks in slow, dark trails. Mina’s blood. Monster blood. It dripped from the ends of her hair and soaked her clothes. She looked less like a woman and more like something someone had coughed up. She walked up to him slowly through the ruined grass, boots sinking into mud blackened with blood and melted things. Steam still curled from the bloody mess. Dead things that once had been green crunched beneath her feet.

There are moments when a person realizes they may have mistaken fear for authority. She suspected that Vaaga was having one of those a moment now. She stopped in front of him. Close enough now that he could smell the copper soaking her. Close enough to see the faint red flickers still moving under her skin like embers trapped. Vaaga kept talking. About sacrifice. About power. About lies. There was a time, not long ago, months maybe, which felt like a different country now, when she would have been frightened of a man like Vaaga. She would have felt small next to him. She would have apologized without knowing what she was apologizing for.

She looked at the glade.

She'd done this. All of it. This entire scorched and steaming ruin had been something green an hour ago and now it wasn't and she'd done that without trying, without wanting to, almost without noticing, the way you might brush crumbs from a table.

“You hit me.” she said.

Her eyes held on his, and there was something changed there now how she viewed him. Not rage exactly. Resentment. Venla stood close enough to smell frost and old smoke on him. “That's the last time you’ll ever do it.”

Strange man.

Stranger still for how he spoke to her, as though they had some history written between them deeper than one meeting and a few polite words beneath the sky. She did not know him. He did not know her. She knew his name. Knew his temper. Knew he carried cold magic. She knew the sting of his hand against the back of her skull. That was enough to know exactly how far to trust somebody.

Yet here he stood speaking like she had betrayed something between them. Like she owed him confessions and truths and obedience instead of a stranger who’d crossed paths with her once beneath the open sky. “When we met, I told you the truth.” Her voice roughened slightly now, anger finally bleeding through the exhaustion. “I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t know what I could do.”

She hadn't figured out what she was yet. She knew that. She was twenty nine years old and had just done something to a deer and there were things she'd melted that she probably shouldn't have been able to melt and she'd almost killed Mina and she was covered in what looked like something sipping out of a star and she still didn't fully understand any of it. Venla wasn't going to pretend otherwise.

Blood slipped from her fingertips in slow drops, dark against the singed grass.

“You helped Mina,” Venla said. “For that, thank you. I’ll remember that kindly.” Truth given where truth was due.

"Whatever you thought you were to me when you raised your hand..." Her voice didn't drop, didn't sharpen, didn't do anything at all except stay exactly where it was. "You need to let that idea go right now. Because I don't think it was ever true and I think somewhere in you, you know it wasn't true." She watched his face.

It all seemed to hang, just as the singular blazing star hung against the sky. All breath held for a moment that felt far longer than any breath had the right to be. As if it would go on, and on, until the horizon crept close enough to see how so quickly light truly faded from the world.

Wounds just patched threaten to break open.

But Haelyn. Squire. Looked like her. Right? Same. She was a girl. Young. Like Mina. Brave. Not like Mina.

She was strong.

Venla. Older. Stronger. Surer. She gave comfort. Little star. Easy.

She was strong.

Vaaga. Broken. Not like Mina. Shout. Anger. Hit. Cruel.

He was not.

She would not be like him.

And though her lip quivered, and her eyes went bleary, she would get up. She would move. Step after trembling step, she followed after the squire, Haelyn. She would be strong like her. No matter how much pain she felt tearing through the chords of her strange pallid flesh.

Held tight to the wound. So freshly closed. As if her fingers could hold them tighter together. Stutter step, after stutter step.

The blighted beasts of the woods cried from the dark. Yips and yowls, like the laughter of a crowd too cruel and excited for what came next. They poured across the growing darkness of the woods like floodwater rushing over barren creek beds.

Clawed, they sounded with the screams of the long dead. Like the cry of those woken from the teeth of a twisting nightmare. Only to be trapped everlasting amidst the echoes of blightformed bones, and bale changed flesh.

Things that once were squirrels and badgers, clumped together like tail tied kings so long attached they turned to something cancerously new. No pack. For they moved mindless and rabid with bones that bent wrong, and limbs that reached too far with one stride, and not far enough the next.

One snatched up the bits of ruined totem flesh. Many mouths gnawed and the magicked wreck.

Other things, that looked like blight bloated swine, pustule laden and blight bile oozing, they skittered across the deadzone floor with chittering gnashers and a hunger in the many eyes that blinked up from their oily flesh.

Pests. Oversized. Overly hideous. But the first of he beasts that would be drawn to all the strange happenings there in that copse of the balewood.

Flight or fight?

She did not know all these people, but still Haelyn came to the call of the Wyld and Weaving, had traveled far to be here and to bear witness to something that was a threat. She had to turn her back on Venla after she spoke of leaving at once, once the dark horse came.

In truth, Haelyn didn't know where the forest's lost steed would appear. She had turned away to pretend she was not present, that she was not part of any of this.

But... she had seen what came from Venla. What destruction had been born of not knowing one's extent of power.

Was this not her sworn duty? To report anything that stood to destroy the safety of this land and it's beings?

Fight. That had always been her instinct. Why she was a squire in the first place, to one day be Sworn in. To keep this part of their world safe.

Her eyes lifted, as if noticing something move.

The Dark Horse.

Every step it took was to an cacophony every quiet. Not born from shadow, not born by anything other than the same nature of Haelyn being here. The Dark Horse had been a working horse before neglect and ignorance left him lost in the forest. It was believed he had never truly died, for the shroud enveloped him and made him a spirit to work with those that ask.

Haelyn did not remember what she had asked as a child, but she knew was she was asking now.

"Hail Spirit, Guardian, and Friend." Haelyn spoke as the quiet beast made his way towards her. She held out a hand, his muzzle finding her palm, and the squire did all she could to keep from jumping at the new voice in her mind.

Hail to you, Protector of the Wyld.

Haelyn grimaced before turning towards the others and leading the gentle spirit towards Mina. "Someone should ride with her... make sure she doesn't fall."

At least she was not so uncontained as to destroy him outright but not even Vaaga was arrogant enough to test that twice.

"Be thankful that I did hit you when people start to look at you with fear and you find yourself hoping for at least one soul who does not cowe at you presence and has the will to punish you when you err as disastrously as you just have."

Taking a step back Vaaga lamented this potential loss of her, though as what she might have been to him he could not define and the weakness that he still hoped for it ate at his mind.
Solitude was not always as easy to endure as he liked.

"If you ever get tired of being a threat to everything you cherish I will be waiting at the top of the world."

His time was up, the sun was too powerful the might of ice and wind waned too much for him to stay. He needed to go home, to recharge himself and feel the strong Shroud again in the places of power he knew.

@Venla Thiel
@Haelyn
@Mina