![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Is it wrong of me...
The night became stifling in its closeness, pressing hot-handedly against her like an intoxicated bar-crowd, every shadow like a careless body. The anxiety of it fell hard into her stomach, riling up a nauseous ache that reason would not easily quiet. It seemed impossible that she had somehow wandered further than she realized from town, that its lights would be occluded by the sloping hillsides, that no meandering footpath would gesture the way home. In light of that, however, some part of her mind was lifting a much stronger conviction that the oak tree she now leaned against had not been there before.
Frowning suddenly, she jerked her back away from the calloused bark and whirled on the tree, an irrational sensation that it was to blame for her present befuddlement briefly overtaking her mind. This was totally ridiculous… a hundred year old oak tree cannot appear out of nowhere, nor can an entire town disappear… let alone in mere seconds with one's eyes closed. She hadn't been paying any particularly special attention to choosing her perch when she sat down… the day had definitely left her with some lingering preoccupations as she hiked the short way up into the hills. And in the space that the sun had gone down in, there had probably been some kind of power failure in the lines supporting their community. It wasn't common… she had no reason to believe or disbelieve that anybody was using generators. It wasn't awfully cold, and it was late at night. She would just walk downhill until she got back onto recognizable terrain.
After all, Mad had lived her whole life, here. She'd certainly had to navigate it in the dark before. With that, the young woman struck out, mustering a determined confidence that this would all become painfully clear how silly she had been, getting lost in her own back yard.
Madeleine walked hard, pounding the earth with her boots to fill the night with sound. It was eerily silent… a number of years had passed, she figured, since the last time she'd been out on a late autumn night like this. The large and small beasts of the forest were all about preparing for their winter sleep, hiding in hollows to ward off the last breaths of cold air before nesting or migration or hibernation.
The pace of her steps, and her heartbeat, were beginning to quicken as the trees gathered around her. They blackened the stifle of the night, a heavy mantle thrown unbidden upon her. There was no forest that she could recall between the hills and the church… but Madeleine kept telling herself that she'd just wandered back further than she thought she had, that the woods she was wandering now were just some knotted thicket that had pooled in one of the broad gullies that surrounded the old homesteads. More and more frightened, she continued to tell herself that any moment she would break free of it and see the flank of the church and beyond it the first lights would be flickering on as people's power returned to their houses. She conceived warmly of pushing through the door of her house, roommates questioning her moan as she replied to where she had been with the words "You will not believe what I just managed to do…" It was going to be a good laugh for days. Especially since she didn't get anything written.
Her breath was coming harder and harder, beginning to cloud on the settling air. A hand had risen to her chest unconsciously as her lungs burned a little, she was walking at a bracing pace, and the wood about her was only deepening. Mad stopped, turning desperately to see that she had, in fact, left the hills behind. She was walking the flat land below them, where there should have been a town, and yet all she could throw her arms at in her surroundings were tangled woods, untrodden underbrush that she'd been kicking through for a half hour now.
Through a gap in the trees, she could see the tree she'd been sitting under, rising starkly against a faintly lit sky. The clouds seemed to be lifting slightly, a near-full moon peering sleepily among them and shooting threads of silver through the firmament.
A sound broke the night, stilling Madeleine as death might. Congealing out of the bare darkness and silence of the forest, it was sharp enough to be the serrated grin of a shark; this clanking scrape of metal brushing metal. The rhythm was approaching her from the direction in which she'd been traveling and hardly willing or able to breathe, Mad was picking slowly through the brush toward whence she had come. Silence was slow work… she was no light-footed doe, and this tangling terrain was not doing well for her already trembling legs.
"Halt. You've no need to run from me." The metal sound had stopped, replaced instead by this low-pitched, worn sounding man's voice. Mad turned to take him in, confused and frightened, not sure whether to brace herself for friend or foe. What she found behind her was not at all what she expected, in either case, and seemed to tell her nothing of his intentions or possibility of threat. Her jaw slackened slightly… later on, she reminisced that she shouldn't have thought it strange, after what she'd just begun to go through, but so much of her brain was yet railing against the fact that anything remotely like this could possibly be happening.
"What…?" Came the staggered word of response, met with a tired gaze. He was tall… maybe just over six feet, looked broad and hard. These things tied into the only other thing that Mad took in about his visage, then, the singular detail of his dress… It was certainly from him that the sound she'd heard approaching had come, and then she wasn't sure how she didn't hear him coming from further away. The rattle had been the bottom links of a remarkably authentic looking chain mail shirt striking his plated thighs as he walked. One gauntleted hand was closed around a sheathed sword nearly as long as she was tall.
"Walking that way, it is very clear to me that you do not know this land. It's going to be light soon. You'd best follow me or the day is going to lead you somewhere where you're apt to get in trouble."
There was no game whatsoever in his voice, and the level look from his eyes made her feel as if she was a child's effigy built with ash. "But the sun just set…" No sooner than the words had slid from her did her voice wither behind her teeth.
Frowning suddenly, she jerked her back away from the calloused bark and whirled on the tree, an irrational sensation that it was to blame for her present befuddlement briefly overtaking her mind. This was totally ridiculous… a hundred year old oak tree cannot appear out of nowhere, nor can an entire town disappear… let alone in mere seconds with one's eyes closed. She hadn't been paying any particularly special attention to choosing her perch when she sat down… the day had definitely left her with some lingering preoccupations as she hiked the short way up into the hills. And in the space that the sun had gone down in, there had probably been some kind of power failure in the lines supporting their community. It wasn't common… she had no reason to believe or disbelieve that anybody was using generators. It wasn't awfully cold, and it was late at night. She would just walk downhill until she got back onto recognizable terrain.
After all, Mad had lived her whole life, here. She'd certainly had to navigate it in the dark before. With that, the young woman struck out, mustering a determined confidence that this would all become painfully clear how silly she had been, getting lost in her own back yard.
Madeleine walked hard, pounding the earth with her boots to fill the night with sound. It was eerily silent… a number of years had passed, she figured, since the last time she'd been out on a late autumn night like this. The large and small beasts of the forest were all about preparing for their winter sleep, hiding in hollows to ward off the last breaths of cold air before nesting or migration or hibernation.
The pace of her steps, and her heartbeat, were beginning to quicken as the trees gathered around her. They blackened the stifle of the night, a heavy mantle thrown unbidden upon her. There was no forest that she could recall between the hills and the church… but Madeleine kept telling herself that she'd just wandered back further than she thought she had, that the woods she was wandering now were just some knotted thicket that had pooled in one of the broad gullies that surrounded the old homesteads. More and more frightened, she continued to tell herself that any moment she would break free of it and see the flank of the church and beyond it the first lights would be flickering on as people's power returned to their houses. She conceived warmly of pushing through the door of her house, roommates questioning her moan as she replied to where she had been with the words "You will not believe what I just managed to do…" It was going to be a good laugh for days. Especially since she didn't get anything written.
Her breath was coming harder and harder, beginning to cloud on the settling air. A hand had risen to her chest unconsciously as her lungs burned a little, she was walking at a bracing pace, and the wood about her was only deepening. Mad stopped, turning desperately to see that she had, in fact, left the hills behind. She was walking the flat land below them, where there should have been a town, and yet all she could throw her arms at in her surroundings were tangled woods, untrodden underbrush that she'd been kicking through for a half hour now.
Through a gap in the trees, she could see the tree she'd been sitting under, rising starkly against a faintly lit sky. The clouds seemed to be lifting slightly, a near-full moon peering sleepily among them and shooting threads of silver through the firmament.
A sound broke the night, stilling Madeleine as death might. Congealing out of the bare darkness and silence of the forest, it was sharp enough to be the serrated grin of a shark; this clanking scrape of metal brushing metal. The rhythm was approaching her from the direction in which she'd been traveling and hardly willing or able to breathe, Mad was picking slowly through the brush toward whence she had come. Silence was slow work… she was no light-footed doe, and this tangling terrain was not doing well for her already trembling legs.
"Halt. You've no need to run from me." The metal sound had stopped, replaced instead by this low-pitched, worn sounding man's voice. Mad turned to take him in, confused and frightened, not sure whether to brace herself for friend or foe. What she found behind her was not at all what she expected, in either case, and seemed to tell her nothing of his intentions or possibility of threat. Her jaw slackened slightly… later on, she reminisced that she shouldn't have thought it strange, after what she'd just begun to go through, but so much of her brain was yet railing against the fact that anything remotely like this could possibly be happening.
"What…?" Came the staggered word of response, met with a tired gaze. He was tall… maybe just over six feet, looked broad and hard. These things tied into the only other thing that Mad took in about his visage, then, the singular detail of his dress… It was certainly from him that the sound she'd heard approaching had come, and then she wasn't sure how she didn't hear him coming from further away. The rattle had been the bottom links of a remarkably authentic looking chain mail shirt striking his plated thighs as he walked. One gauntleted hand was closed around a sheathed sword nearly as long as she was tall.
"Walking that way, it is very clear to me that you do not know this land. It's going to be light soon. You'd best follow me or the day is going to lead you somewhere where you're apt to get in trouble."
There was no game whatsoever in his voice, and the level look from his eyes made her feel as if she was a child's effigy built with ash. "But the sun just set…" No sooner than the words had slid from her did her voice wither behind her teeth.