Aria [3]
Wolves in the Woodwork
The Ashryn Territory
Fields. Nothing but fields. Occasionally there was a farm, or even a windmill, like the one they now passed. But for the most part, the world was just a series of rolling, green fields and sprawls of golden stretches of wheat. The stallion walked at a casual pace, as they’d had to sprint they’re way out of the Abbeyford with two riders on her back. Even Puck soared on a lazy breeze above, keeping careful watch for soldiers.
“Aria,” The green-haired girl grunted, sitting behind Aria at the reigns, the girl’s head rested on her shoulder.
“What?” Aria sighed.
“Aria.”
“What?”
“Aria.”
“What is it, Charliza?”
“Do you think they’ll catch us?” She yawned, her head rested on Aria’s shoulder.
The huntress softly sighed through her nose in thought, and looked out into the distance.
“When it comes to decisions based on survival, it’s always a gamble. Like a gambler, hunters will make a decision by weighing the odds. If I had to weigh the odds here, I’d say they’re skewed, not quite in our favour but not against us. The Marksmen are after me because I threw a bunch of apples at em’, but you…?”
Charliza shifted in the saddle.
“My father…he owed a lot of Bellas to the Masters, so he left for the Capitol to find more work. I worked where I could, and pretended that my father was still in the shop so the Collectors wouldn’t hunt him down. But, now they’ll be after both of us…so, I guess I’m headed to the Capitol. I haven’t got anywhere else to go but find my father.”
Long, green stalks grew six meters tall, arching over the dirt causeway and a swaying, sweet-scented hall, noon light winking past the dancing stalks.
“You don’t sound so sure of yourself?” Aria said.
Charliza chuckled at that, a mix between a drawn out sigh and chuckle, more like.
“I’m not sure about anything. One thing I’m curious about, though, is why are you and your shape shifting friend headed to the capitol?”
Aria sunk slightly in the saddle, brushing away the tips of the leaves that brushed the top of her ginger hair.
“Our home…was destroyed. The rest of my hunting clan left in the forest were scattered, I have no idea where they went, but, the elders of my clan are in the capitol…so, that’s where I’m headed,” Aria said with a heavy knot in her stomach.
“What about him?” Charliza wondered, looking the crow soaring in the orange sky above.
Aria peered through the leaves with squinted emerald eyes.
“He tends to go wherever I go,” She muttered softly.
“Why not, go to another one of your…clans…or, tribes, was it?” Charliza wondered.
Aria chuckled, “I thought they were exaggerating when they said townsfolk didn’t know a thing about the clans.”
Charliza rested her chin on Aria’s shoulder. In bored pout, she said, “Tell me, then. Anything to help the time pass.”
They continued down the dancing hall of grass, halfway through.
“Well, there are eight clans left, all of them scattered across Valyrett and the sister continent, Dordathion. There’s my clan; the Silverclaw, we’d hunt deer and spear fish in the river and the small bay where the sea crept inland, the Goldfang are the closest clan to the capitol, they swim free in the Golden Lakes, their trade with the capitol have made them the largest and most successful of the clans, the Dreadpaw inhabit the Dead Falls, they tend to hunt the birds of the area, The Wolves of the Rift have no home but wonder both continents, The Storm Runners hunt the creatures of Terraghar’s desert, The Snowhide call the mountains of Winters Reach home in Dordathion, The Iron Tails isolate themselves in the Iron Titans and Crow Callers dance in their castle of bones.”378Please respect copyright.PENANAKCpDpBDqcr
378Please respect copyright.PENANAR4IJkxlaTO
Aria sighed deeply once she was done, and Charliza whistled.
“Seems to be a tad wolf-centric with the names there,” Charliza mentioned.
Aria ticked her head slightly.
“Way back when, in the Forgotten World, my ancestors, and those of the clans were saved by from the White Fire by the a being called the White Wolf, hence, the namesake of our clans.”
“Huh. How is it, barely any townsfolk know about this, or why aren’t there any books on it either?” Charliza wondered.
Aria faintly grinned, “Well, apart from trade, we don’t get out much. Generally, the hunters and towns or cities don’t mix well. Our boots are designed to climb the bark of the Tall Oak, but they slip on the clay roof-tiles. Our leather and cloaks are sewn to blend in with the forest, but stand out against the cityscape. When we hunt deer, they head downwind so that it’s hunter will lose it’s scent, but, a human will head for higher ground. Besides that, a deer’s mate or kin won’t try to take revenge on you.”
“You…haven’t hunted a human before, right?” Charliza asked, a quiver in her voice.
“No, no…but, there is a group that does. Or did…I think. Well, they’re experienced in investigating events, events like what happened to my forest, at least that’s what I’ve heard about them, they’re called…The Psychopomps, I believe. If I can find them, I can also find out what happened, along with the Clan Elders,” Aria replied.
“And, besides, human wouldn’t taste very good at all,” Aria laughed jokingly, raising an eyebrow at the mint-haired girl behind her.
For a moment, there was only the trot of the horses hooves against the dirt rise, the slosh of water of the rice fields, either side of the sweet smelling grass that arched over them, and then Puck’s distant caw that carried in the lonely breeze.
A strangers voice then rasped, “Are you sure about that?”
Suddenly, from the grass, swung thin, metal rope that wrapped round both Charliza and Aria, knocking them off either side of the horse. Charliza’s horse panicked and fled, and Aria struggled relentlessly, the steel binding her arms by her sides.
“Charliza!” Aria called out as the girl was dragged away into the grass wall opposite to Aria.
Her breath shot from her body as Aria was dragged through the grass wall and through the long grass. She kicked and thrashed about, but the attacker didn’t relent, and dragged her over rocks and mud and muck. Aria felt her heart thunder in her chest, and blood rush through her body, she tried to angle her head back to take a look at her attacker.
Ankle-high brush scratched at her face as they entered the forest. Aria gasped as she heard Charliza’s cry not to far out to her left, “Charliza!” The huntress cried.
Aria grunted in pain and shock herself when a rock jutting out from the mud connected with her head, fuzzing her vision.
Oh, Puck…did you try to warn us? Keep flying, you fool. Don’t try to be the hero just yet.
Aria wasn’t sure how long she’d been dragged, but they were deep in the heart of the wood by the time they reached the camp. The trees hid the horizon, and any indication of what time it was. But when they stopped, the mud dripping from her back was cold and wormed underneath the leather and caked her skin and open back and stomach revealed by her midriff, and not much could be seen, even with the huntresses sharp eyes.
The crackle and hiss of a fire pit, the smell of meat cooking on the open fire, squish of boots against the hard-set mud and dirt and the flap of animal-hide tents indicating that they’d arrived at some sort of camp. Aria tried to peer back at her attacker again, and managed to glimpse a shadowed back of a cloak, the hood raised. The cloaked man then bound her feet, and strung her up by her feet against a wall.
“Wait-wait, who the hell are you?” Aria said, vainly trying to wriggle about.
The cloaked stranger ignored her, and went inside on of the two animal hide tents. Being bound ankles and wrists and upside down, Aria found she was a tad uncomfortable. She peered around, and found, to her disbelief, Altair, Darius and Angela across the camp directly in front of her, strung up the same as Aria.
“This…is your fault,” A voice hissed beside her.
She strained her head around to find Charliza, strung up the same as all of them beside her.
“How is this my fault?” Aria snapped back.
“You just crash into my shop, steal my horse and lead us both of into some trap with these poachers!” Charliza hissed.
Aria wriggled about, sighing in frustration through her nose.
“First off, I didn’t steal anything, we both needed to get out of the Abbeyford, so maybe quiet down and help me figure out a way out of here?” Aria growled.
Charliza only turned away and continued to struggle.
“Altair, Darius, Angela!” Aria called as loud as she dared. The two boys seemed to be unconscious, but Angela pried open her icy blue eyes. As Aria expected, Angela had a ticked off, almost annoyed expression.
“Aria?” She said flatly.
“Yeah, it’s me, this is Charliza,” Aria said, jerking her head to the right, “are you ok?”
Angela shrugged, looking to the unconscious Darius and Altair beside her.
“I don’t know about them, but I’m cool as a cucumber,” Angela said simply, distracted by a firefly fluttering by.
Aria sighed, letting her head hang she closed her eyes.
When Aria opened her eyes, she was lying in a field of orange tulips. The air was warm, and it caressed her freckled skin. Instead of night, dawn swept across the horizon. The tulips petals danced against her sides, and she spied an oak atop the hill she sat below. Softly, silently, curiously, orange tulip petals floated from the sky, drifting atop her fiery hair and around her.
Before her, there was a tree stump, wide as it was old. A strange man, no older than her, sat cross-legged on the stump, dressed in a strange suit, the same white as his hair, the only thing that wasn’t white were his red glasses and mellow, orange eyes. The strange boy had been staring down at a book, but he looked to Aria, a mellow, curious soul reflected in his irises.
He glanced down at his book, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his thumb.
“Remember what the Clan Mother taught us. When your heart and mind races, detach yourself from the situation and use your other senses. Scents and sounds are yours to use to survive. What do you smell?” The strange boy asked.
In a dreamlike state of mind, Aria tipped her head back slightly and scented the air.
“Decay…soiled clothes…rotting flesh,” Aria said, flinging open her eyes, returning to the camp, her breath rapid as if waking up from a nightmare, only to realise the nightmare was reality.
Charliza has passed out, and Angela had pretended to, Aria supposed, as one of the cloaked hunters shifted about the camp, prodding a stick into the fire and scattering the embers mindlessly. Within the blink of an eye, the boy flickered into her vision like a newborn shadow. He bent over slightly so he was at the same eye level as her, the fire’s tongues dancing in his wide amber eyes.
“What do you hear?”
Aria closed her eyes and focused on the forest sounds. The buzz of the fireflies, rustle of leaves and sounds of the unconscious…and, “-the collars, you have them, right? Or when these bastards shift we’ll be up to our fucking eyes in shit and our own blood,” The male voice who she assumed belonged to the man who dragged her here.
A female voice spoke up in reply, irate and half-heartedly hushed, “Are you even sure these savages carry the Lycan gene at all?”
Aria could only listen to the thumping of blood in her head as she closed her eyes again.
When she opened her eyes, Aria found herself sitting in the field of tulips, before the tree-stump and strange boy once again.
Aria twirled an orange tulip in her fingers, and her emerald met his orange.
“Who are you?” She asked, plucking a petal from the flower and letting it float to the ground.
The white-haired boy placed a book onto a stack, one of the many surrounding him and the stump.
“My name is Jeremiah Wonderlock,” He said, introducing himself.
“I’m probably going to call you Jerry, my name’s Aria Silver,” she shook his cold, alabaster hand.
“Please don’t,” Jerry requested.
“I’m probably gonna call you Annie,” Jeremiah said, matching her sarcastic tone.
“Please don’t,” Annie requested.
“What’s…happening, Jerry?” She asked, plucking another petal.
“I don’t know, Annie. We’re sitting here in a field of orange tulips talking about how we’re sitting in a field of orange tulips.
Aria plucked yet another petal.
“They said something about a Lycan gene and collars, what were they talking about?”
Jeremiah hunched down slightly, running his thumb across his lower lip as he scanned his book collection. He plucked one with a dark greyish cover and crimson spine, and flicked through the thin pages.
“Hmm…there’s a section here on Silver Collars, they’re used to bind and trap Lycanthropes, more commonly known as Werewolves, in their monstrous form. Whoever has control of the collar has control of the Lycan, as the collar has silver spikes in it, which can be deployed to weaken and use pain to manipulate the Lycan into submission,” He explained, squinting his eyes.
Aria opened her eyes.
“I’m not a bloody werewolf!” She hissed with clenched teeth. Unexpectedly, the smell of hardened blood flooded her nose, and the sound of a blades hiss met her ears.
The two hunters appeared from the tent, butchering blades in one hand and a strange looking silver collar in the other.
Another four hunters appeared, armed with rifles. They watched their captives with a crooked look, as if daring them to move an inch.
By the White Wolf, they’re going to slaughter us.
Despite the fear gnawing at her belly, Aria thrashed about relentlessly, the blade-wielding hunter approaching. An inch away from her, Aria scrunched her eyes closed and prayed to anyone who was listening.
“Collar that one first, then inflict enough pain to get her to turn,” The female poacher commanded.
The hunter obeyed, and slammed Aria against the wall in an attempt to lessen her struggling. She tried to fight back, but after being dragged through a forest and strung upside down for Haine knows how long, her strength had waned.
He sat on his haunches, his foul breath of soured meat and forest grot making her eyes water. Despite her insisting wriggling, he managed to attach the collar around her neck. Instinctively, Aria tensed, almost expecting a burning sensation, but she was to be disappointed with only the sensation of cold metal.
The poacher stood and stepped back, clearly taken aback. Then, from the darkness of the wood an arrow soared and shot straight through the poacher’s head, leaving him dead before he hit the ground. The other poachers panicked as arrow after black arrow rained down, killing another poacher and wounding another.
The others were conscious, and struggling to get free from the wire. Within a heartbeat, Jeremiah reappeared, his orange eyes the reflected of a fire in it’s dying breaths.
Still upside down, shaking slightly, Jeremiah crouched and took her face into his hands.
There was nothing else in the world at that moment but two, glowing auburn shards that disturbed something inside of Aria. His lips brushed her brow, and he let out a deep sigh, saying, “Run.”
Puck soared into the clearing, black claws extended he somehow swiped through the steel wire that held Aria up, leaving her to collapse onto the ground in a heap. Green eyes blazing like emerald fire Puck’s crow form swooped down again and cut through the wire, freeing Aria.
Her wrists and ankles reddened and sore, she leapt to her feet and grabbed the blade from the dead mans hand, and cut Charliza loose. The arrows still rained havoc in the camp, and the poachers replied with blind rifle gunfire into the trees.
Aria ducked, trying her best to avoid the exchange, and Puck cut free Darius, Angela and Altair.
She freed their ankles and wrists, and for a moment, they all looked her expectantly. Aria remembered Jeremiah’s one simple command, and gave them a small nod. They all followed, crashing and stumbling through the brush and undergrowth, Charliza staggering behind, leaving Aria to take her hand and guide her through the night.
Despite herself, Aria found herself looking back into the clearing, seeing Jeremiah, placid in his suit of white, and orange tulip tucked into his breast pocket, he stood in the very centre of the bloodshed, yet a bullet neither arrow touched him, and nor did he care, for the Wonderlock boy’s amber eyes only seemed just for her. For her, in a way that made something almost guiltily twist inside her gut, but why, Aria did not know.
~ ~ ~
A night of running almost blindly through the forest had left them weak, hungry, disorientated and low on the water ration Aria still carried in the satchel on her back. When the first hint of blood-orange sun appeared on the horizon, the six happened upon a dirt road. Tired, stumbling, scared, without uttering a word, they took each others hands and made their way down the road of stones and ruts, leading and trusting the other to tell if there was a rock or rut ahead.
By the time the sun hung high in the sky, they’d come to know sweat and dirt two be a second or third layer of clothing. When Aria saw clearly, she realized she’d been at the end, and straggling along, but would have been far behind if it hadn’t been for Puck in front of her, wordlessly holding her hand and pulling her along.
Near the peak of hill the others were already on the other side of, Aria stopped for a moment. Her eyes red and puffy, feet sore and swollen in the boots and back bruised, she noticed how he held his side and the sticky crimson dried between his fingers.
“Puck…” Aria began, reaching a shaky hand out to him.
He stopped and turned for a moment, the sun rising behind him making his emerald eyes shimmer like they had a light of their own.
“Ari,” He said, his voice of a man grown, unlike one he’d had back in their forest home. He spoke that one word so well, like any other clan mate might say it, yet how was it that was all he could speak?
Yet in one word, he managed to speak of silence, to hush her concern like how a maiden might fawn over her knight’s battle wounds. It was different, in a way, it was the softness in his emerald eyes that cradled her like sweet smelling herbs and forest scents without a name, a sweetness that told her to concern herself with something else, a conviction that told Aria all she needed to know of the strength that he so well hid, not unlike the graceful stag they’d hunted what felt like a thousand years before.
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