Lucero

Lucero

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The Village of Kostroma is requesting aid from the Knights of Anatheum to heal the friendly Harpy named Shoyna and return it back to its home nest in Kostroma.


"We were hoping that they would send Syr Margot Triss. We've heard there's nothing that she can't heal." The village elder said, he stroked his long white beard that looked much like the froth of the many waterfalls throughout the town. Kostroma was known for its clean healing waters that came from the mountains Mheara Mountains and flowed through the Sacred Grove. The village had an inn but was not a bustling town, a place to stop and rest, but rarely a place to trade and make it big. They kept their life simple, families were small, elders were honored

"Ahaha, yeah, she's awesome!" Lucero smiled brightly, facing towards the village elder, Vojin, but her eyes were off-center, staring at nothing in particular, unable to meet his curious gaze or see the raise of his bushy brows. "I am a bit of a prodigy myself, too." Considering she couldn't read any of the medical books or learn easily about flora and fauna that aided in healing afflictions of the body. She could feel toknow, but it would be stupid to send Lucero out in the forest to gather herbs. "Don't worry, Elder Vojin, the Captains wouldn't have sent us here if we couldn't meet your expectations."

"Hmm." He said into his beard, continuing to stroke it thoughtfully. Silence stretched on, only the babbling of streams and the rush of water cascading down rocks filled the silence. "And what does he do?"

"Syr Horoth?" Lucero gestured towards the heavily armored knight with a arm, but it was the wrong arm and so she ended up gesturing to a man in the background who was chasing after his rowdy chiffin. "He's here for the monsters. We did a bit of research, Shoyna the Harpy uses her winds to keep monsters from coming too close to the village." This seemed to have the Elder pack up his suspicions and hide it away in a drawer.

"Yes, my great-great grandmother cared for Shoyna when she was a fledging. A Bumble Cuckoo parasite had infiltrated the nest and pushed Shoyna off. She was only a girl when she braved the risk of getting close to that nest to save Shoyna, ignored by her mother in favor of the Bumble Cuckoo. She nursed Shoyna back to health." The elder went back to stroking his beard. "Shoyna is not like other harpies. She thinks she is human, like us, or perhaps maybe she thinks we are harpies without wings and that is why she protects us." He smiled but then his smile faded.

"We saw when she flew away that her white breast was red. If... if there is nothing you can do, please, still bring Shoyna to us. My great-great grandmother would want her to be buried properly."
 
A big calloused hand gently found Lucero's shoulder to let her know which side he was on as he spoke.

"Young Lucero is being modest, she is easily the equal to Syr Margot, nay, even her superior! Rest easy elder Vojin. We will find your Shoyna and she will be returned to you."

Smiling confidently he did his best to seem professional even as he did not feel particularly at ease with the situation. Harpies were dangerous at the best of times but a wounded one? He was glad he had his trusty net with him, just in case.
Horoth stood then, eager to be on their way.

"Now, which direction was she heading when she flew away? The sooner we are off the sooner we can have her back."

His voice carried to all present, something of the gladiator showman still lived within him.

@Lucero
 
With a easy fluid motion like a wave her opposite arm swung to gesture to Syr Horoth as the other fell to her side. Lucero's smile grew just a bit wider, the glimmer in her eyes brighter, silver sparkles twinkling beneath the misty film like the stars behind the shroud ring. She appreciated Syr Horoth's kinda words, even if they weren't true, his intentions were kind. If only she were at Syr Margot's level, with a name that was known, requested even, then perhaps....

Elder Vojin ushered the two of them to follow, kindly pausing when Lucero did not to move right away. She could see his soul in her peripheral, adjusting her own direction before stepping forward, using the sound of his footsteps to know if she was walking too slow or fast.

"Towards the Forest of Untamable Beasts she went," Elder Vojin said as if it was normal to live next to a forest with such a name. "Legend has it all monsters are born from there." He looked back as he pointed to the dark forest that stretched on and on like a thick, gnarly wall to cage the village against the special waters. "I'm too old to believe such things but I have heard plenty to wonder if it may have been true in the past." He paused on his path, pausing to kneel despite the creaking of his bones. He picked up a feather as white as snow.

Lucero felt the whisper of shroud between each barb, concentrated inside the hollow shaft.

"This is one of Shoyna's." Elder Vojin said.

"Can I have it?" Lucero didn't smile, tilting her head to the side like a bird."It may help me track her down some." The village elder slowly walked towards the blind knight who had her gloved hand reached out in front of her. He placed it in her open palm, watched how carefully she held it betwist her slender fingers. Lucero was surprised to feel the downy fluff, even more surprised when she realized the feather was so tight that there was a surprisingly sharpness, the sort to cause little cuts on fingers if one wasn't careful. Good thing she had on gloves.

"You sure you won't trip about in the forest?" The question was laced with worry.

"Syr Horoth will catch me if I fall." The smile was back. "We'll be off, Elder Vojin, and back before you know it."
 
"Anytime you need me."
Horoth responded without thinking. His deep voice gentle and soothing in it's certainty.

After making their goodbyes they were off and into the direction of the forest. Horoth for his part was there to handle any trouble but he did find himself looking out for Lucero. Despite her second sight and all it was he supposed a bit of a lesson hard learned.

He had known those who went blind before and they did not last long in the fighting pits and arenas so he could not really help being a bit protective of her.

"Has the feather revealed anything to you?"
He asked once the great trees about them had swallowed their forms and obscured Kostroma.

@Lucero
 
Inside the dark wood there was a bounty of silence which the knights disturbed by entering in with their sense of duty. The forest was old, and everything inside it's cold shade were unmoved by modernarity. There was nothing broken, nothing needed to be fixed, the cycle would go on and on because even the air was unchanged here. It was a good thing, the shroud was strong through the roots of all things. When the blind knight focused, the veins around her temples protruded as if she were angry.

"A bit," Syr Lucero admitted, looking down at the feather. Her thumb carefully traced over hollow shaft. "The emotions are still here, Shoyna was in pain, there was anger and fear and..." That much was obvious, any creature would be scared and was not anger a underlying current to it? And if all that it was then Lucero wouldn't have frowned in concerned contemplation. "Grief. Shoyna felt a lot of grief." Lucero frowned. What monsters felt grief? Only ones with human faces?

The deeper into the forest they went, the colder it got.

"I am no bloodhound, but I think on that branch Shoyna rested there?" Lucero pointed towards a thick branch belonging to a pine tree. Lucero couldn't see it but the bark was mostly peeled. Quite a few trees had the bark striped from their trunks, small symbols etched across and around the trunks. There was blood near the roots.
 
Horoth looked up the tree and tried to imagine the white feathered harpy, hurt and grieving. Grieving for whom he wondered. The Elder said nothing of recent deaths or missing persons.

"She must have been frantic."
Dropping his gear he wrapped his arms about the tree trunk and began to climb. It was not graceful or particularly quick but he got up and took a look at the branch and the bark of the tree. The symbols were scratched in with her talons by the look of it. The meaning of the markings he did not recognise but they looked a little like people to him.

"There's something written up here... I think. Marking's I have never seen before. Might be those um, picture-words. Looks like, a kind of person, a man maybe and a bird, no a woman with wings... do you think this is a message?"
He'd seen things like that, crude images scrawled on cell walls to entertain or educate. There were no school halls for gladiators, he was taught by what the others did and with no paper or chalk, a bit of stone rough carved along the plaster of the wall did well enough.

Still up the tree he looked down and around the tree for other signs.
"There's more marking on other trees, and blood on the ground, she did stop here. You were right but not to patch herself, to make these markings... could it be a trail? Meant for others to follow?"

He was tossing ideas like seeds in the wind. He could not know Shoyna's thoughts or motives but if this was any human or elf, he would guess that they are acting in a kind of madness, the kind that took you when reality came crashing down on you hard.

@Lucero
 
A gloved finger was placed on her lips in thought. She listened to Syr Horoth climb up the tree, his explanation of the symbols. She was lucky enough that she could pretend what they might look like. A man, a harpy - could this have been the village elder, the one so close to Shoyna? Her brows furrowed. How would grief tie into that? She put the feather away.

"Curious," Syr Lucero agreed. She never heard of a harpy making pictographs, assumed they used their voices to communicate. Then again, Shoyna had been with the village for a long time, was everything shared through word of mouth only? A harpy probably couldn't write, but it's talons were thick and sharp enough to draw shapes. She wondered if Shoyna was a good artist. It sounded like she had a few things she needed to improve on. "Are they stick figures?" Lucero had to know.

The blind knight came closer to the tree, placing her hand on the tree trunk. She could feel the claw marks, used a finger to try and trace to make sense of things. It was hard, nothing was even, and though Lucero thought she recognized letters, she couldn't piece them together well enough to make a word. Unless x-ocq<tzp**ol was a word. Maybe harpies had their own language after all?

Lucero sniffed the air. Moss. Dirt. Cold. Ferns. She swung her head up, leaning her head all the way back until there was a little bit of pain in her neck.

"Can you pull off a piece with blood? Or show me a spot?" Lucero was running her hands on the bark, but it was hard to tell what held the essence of Shoyna and what did not. The talons of harpies must not be what helped them weave, but blood was like water, a life source. She could always find a bit of the shroud in there.
 
Horoth squinted, trying to make out the markings.
"Yes, they are. It's a bit like a... drawing. The figures, I think they are supposed to be moving, running maybe?"

He could not make much sense of it and cursed his lack of education as he climbed back down and with a gentle touch guided Lucero's hand to a spot where the blood looked freshest, though it dried even before his eyes.

"Here, right here, it's still a bit wet but nevermind, we can clean it off after."
Then he let her do her workings. Magic was a skill beyond him, he was a man of metal and rope and leather. He knew bone and muscle and will and all the things that make up a body but the world unseen was the realm of others.

Though he was not idle as he left Lucero to her ways. His eyes and ears perked up, listening, watching for the wild things, where monsters of those stories told may lurk or the just a real beasts of nature.
He stayed kneeling, waiting and noticed the quiet.

Forests had birds aplenty and they sang in the long days of spring but today they made no call, did not sing for a mate or declare their might to rivals to secure nesting ground. The silence could not have been them, they had not been there long enough. Shoyna must have cowed the creatures of the woodland to silence.

Then a rustling came from deep within the forest, a wind that rocked the treetops.
"You said Shoyna controlled the winds did you not?"

@Lucero
 
The knight kneeled down, feeling the buzz of the shroud over a splotch of dried blood. Harpy blood smelled like animal blood, gamey and less metallic. With her sight, she began parsing through the information given to her. There had been a lot of blood, not a little, the wound was deep, not shallow. The veins around Lucero's eyes became more pronounced, like roots sticking up from the ground. The taste of blood lingered on her tongue though she did not bring it towards her lips, the same worrisome mixture of emotions. The bite of metal marking her chest before it pierced through her.

It hurt. By all the sand near the sea and all the stars in the sky, it hurt. In her heart, in her ribs, in her sternum. There were aches and stings, a dullness and sharpness, the sort of pain that made one delirious. Deeper the hurt went, pressure building in her chest, skin tightening around ribs and neck like a noose. Brown and gray splotches danced around her eyes like water ripples reflecting sunlight. The air hummed around her like an obnoxious fly buzzing around her ears, it made her dizzy, enough that balance felt like a suggestion. Just as she was about to close her eyes, a soft, pale blue sprouted before her, little blooms in her nursery of everlasting night.

Lucero gasped for air, her face turned gray, lips purple instead of cinnamon, her neck looking longer, sucked in, as if it were completely hollow. She held herself up with both her hands on the ground, fighting to keep her concentration. The shroud in the blood, she could see it, there was a path laid out for them, like blinking fireflies or twinkling stars. Lucero heard the gale before she felt it and looked up.

For half a second, Lucero could see the shape of the wind, there was a rhythm to it. One long pluck of a guitar string, a twang that lasted longer than the movement the thumb took to make it. When she breathed in the wind that reached her like a gentle breeze, the gentle pull of a harp, Lucero smelled sunshine and rain, rock and leaves. It was a scent full of contradictions, a scent she had began to attribute to magic related to the wind and air. Sometimes she could even smell salt, wood or grass. Every now and then she got the tang of smoke. The pleasant bitterness of pine needles and musty bark lingered longer than the rest.

"Harpies are masters of the wind, Syr Horoth." She said this softly, coughing into her hand as she got up to stand on her feet. "Not all monsters can shroudweave, but all harpies are able to command the wind. We used to think it came to them innately, but there was a naturalist, a Syr Attinborough, that studied harpies and found it was passed on from mother to fledgling. It was shared through song." Lucero was looking towards where the wind came. "I wonder if a human taught Shoyna, we've not heard a harpy song at all. Or anything else." She started walking deeper into the forest.

"We're still quite far from where she is, but I have her trail now."
 
This was beginning to smell.

Horoth would never claim to be among the great thinkers of the Knighthood but he knew a bad story when he heard it and he was beginning to get the suspicion that the Elder had not told them everything.

"We are gathering mysteries."
He admitted to Lucero as they proceeded.

"I know of no sorcerer in Kostroma... something doesn't add up. Either there is more to this than we have been told or..."

Horoth was resistant to give word to his dark thoughts but they came shackled in his memory for in the fighting pits where held exotic creatures not just to fight but to satisfy dark appetites as well.

"... perhaps there is more than even the Elder knows."

He would not give it voice yet, not until he knew it for certain. Accusations flung carelessly killed as surely as spears.

@Lucero
 
When Lucero glanced towards Syr Horoth she peeked at his soul. Not on purpose, but her use of the shroud was still strong, it thrummed through her veins in uneven waves, tingled at the end of her finger tips, made her stomach feel a bit queasy. So when she glanced over because it was still a habit to look at others when they were speaking, she could his soul, the color of emotions. The colors were not dreadfully dark, but there was a murkiness there, one that could have meant a few things. Lucero looked back to the invisible path that led them ever closer to Shoyna.

"Elder may lead a village, but they do not see all." Lucero agreed. "But Shoyna is older than you and I, perhaps a shroudweaver passed through the village and taught her when the Elder's grandmother was my age? Kostroma has been known for its water," but she had no way of knowing this. So why make excuses or make up a story? Lucero touched the center of her chest. A part of it still felt the echoes of the blade reverberating between bone and sinew.

"Do you think something more nefarious happened? You saw those pictographs after all. Was there a sword or a axe depicted?"
 
"Maybe."

Horoth admitted, trying to open his mind to alternatives before he let his judgement get clouded.

"It would not be the first time the coven of trust was broken by ones who should know better."

As they walked he scanned his mind at Lucero's question.

"Now that I think on it, there was one image, it looked a bit like a sword if a little crude."

Then again all of the pictures were crude to him. He had no experience with fine art, only what he had seen in his travels and usually he was not in the places that held such art. The carving was little more than a wobbly triangle with a line through it but it was enough when given the context of "sword" to become one.

"When we find her and see her safe, hopefully Shoyna will be able to tell us."

Horoth, for all the souls he had sent to the next world, had never been joyous in the face of suffering or pain and so when thinking on the possibility of the Harpy being hurt and alone and scratching markings to perhaps alleviate her pain, to cope with whatever had happened to her he could not help but reach out to her with his heart.

"Nothing in life is ever simple, is it?"

The path was rough where it existed at all and the silence about them deepened while the wood darkened. Horoth had expected some sign, a weeping or a singing as Lucero had suggested. Instead there was the deathly quiet and his eyes often found themselves scanning the treetops, looking for more carvings or other signs of Shoyna's passage but he saw little if any.

@Lucero
 
The blind knight tapped on Syr Horoth's hand when the path veered off hard to the left. Horoth's words left Lucero with a melancholy frown, but she was happy to push away the ferns, pausing in her lead to look towards a clump of mushrooms that radiated in her peripheral. When she had lost her sight the first thing she had seen was her father's soul. There were so many different colors, and the shape of it was constantly changing, sometimes smooth then prickly like a cactus. He had taken her away her sight for forever.

Lucero wouldn't tell anyone but she wished her father's experiment had worked, that maybe it still could work. He was a scientist, and to be a true scientist meant he had to fail if he wanted to know about things he felt stupid about. Other times Lucero wished she could have her old sight back. She wouldn't be a knight like she was now, and her heart ached at the thought of all the lost friendships, but if she had been told that she would be blind then she might have looked at the sky more, or the trees, or take the time to watch how shadows grew long.

Perhaps she'd spend it all to look at her father's face. She was forgetting it now, his wrinkles, the way his eyes crinkled. His face was too smooth, sometimes with a mustache or beard, sometimes the color of her hair or gray, sometimes with or without glasses. Lucero would never see how much her father's face had changed from her memories, meanwhile everything that made his face unique was beginning to fade away.

"There's truth in the saying that we hurt the ones we love the most." Lucero said and then, as an afterthought, "Your hunch may be correct, Syr Horoth. You have more life experience than me after all." The trail led them through a thicker part of the woods, trees coming closer to each other, soon making it hard for them to squeeze in between them. There was a rustling behind them and a growl, sounding close yet also far away. Lucero took a deep breath. "Syr Horoth?" She could feel the prickle of gooseflesh down her thin forearms. "I feel as if we are being watched. If I use my sight again I may lose Shoyna's trail."
 
"A life in chains, you have spent more time under the sky than me."
Horoth mused almost to himself before catching Lucero's warning and checking about to confirm it.
The growl and rustling came from a line beast near as big as a bear with the head of a wolf and a bald tail that ended in a vultures head that eyed them both.

"It's a monster Lucero. Stay behind me. I'll deal with it."

Slowly Horoth unhooked his great helm from his belt and slipped it on then loosened his net from his trident.

The creature watched as he circled it, the thing looked angry and it's growl deepened.
He had faced such things before, born of sorcery and abuse. He felt for them but that did not stop him from knowing that the creatures did not share his sense of empathy.

It's wolf eyes were on him but the vulture kept watching on Lucero.
"YAAAGH!"

Horoth probed at the creature with his weapon trying to hold it into a lunge that he might tangle it and skewer it.

"HAAH YAAAGH! Come on you beast, come to my net!"

@Lucero
 
"Sweet basil,"Lucero sucked in a quick breath.

By the Mother, Syr Horoth could be quite loud! He startled her more than the creature, but of course she couldn't see the vulture head that stared back at her. It would have unnerved her if she could, the unblinking eyes studying her. The growling reminded her of a wild dog's, large and grumbly rather than thunderous rumbles. It could have become a future pet, but Lucero had struggled with her studies of the Wyld. She got enough out of it to recognize the shape of hooves and paws with her fingers and identifying animal sounds with her ears.

Fingers didn't tremble as they curved over the hilt of her sword, the other going to it's sheath on her hip. Syr Horoth was a knight, same as her, but he held far more experience, far more comfortable with a weapon in his hand. Still, Lucero bent her knees, turning her head to better hear the beast begin to step forward. Still, Knights of Anathaeum they both were, courage flowed through both their blood.

Growling wouldn't cease while two trespassers were in the monster's territory. It would have been able to smell them miles away, two things that didn't belong in this forest. It would have found them just as easily it did now, even if it were miles away, but Lucero touched too much and stunk up the forest with her human scent. The lowered wolf head kept stalking forward, the vulture continued staring.
 
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