Even Thella's normally cheerful demeanor was quickly dampened as she stepped past the first blackened tree of the many that now lay before her. Though there was fresh snow on the ground, it was far from white. The delicate flakes had transformed as they fell through the dense haze of soot into a murky grey, matching the thin layer of ash that blanketed the floor of the perished jungle. Every step was wet and cold, and the fur on her paws was quickly saturated with the mixture.

As she made her way further into the trees, she searched her surroundings for any sign of life, any hope that this place could maybe one day thrive anew. Maybe a small mouse or the flash of green from a young sapling. Nothing was there.

Wishful thinking.

Sorrow welled up inside her at the loss. The loss of life, of homes. Of beauty. She had passed through lush jungle to reach here and the abundance of vegetation, though currently dusted with snow, was something to behold. It was a stark contrast to her home in the Hollow and she found it fascinating. But this? This was devastating.

@Gauthier

code by scorpixia♡︎ art by muuland

WE'RE BORN INTO THE GRAVE

Beyond the woodland gnarl of the misty rainforest the wilds cast their thorns and their ash, their wicked earth brimmed with smoke and molten fury. Their skins sift with the writhe of beetles, bones, bitterness – their skeletal trees reach for the moonless, sunless bleak of sky. Where the roots entangle a primordial unrest, the worst of its parched flesh is wrought of the wordless dead. In the breeze, their ephemeral whispers. In the gales, their howls. Beneath the greyed muck of snow and ash, the radicle veins of the forgotten grove lay silent, wanting, and the verdant jungle that slips from her heels turns to thorns that ache to be fed.

The march of daylight dares not spill into the barest of glades. The smoke and snow congeal, darkening a canopy-less sky with a dreary haze. Shadows lift from one tree to the blackened next, their charred faces turned to the caricature of life, of sustenance, and the sounds of the songbirds of the forest die into the mute of a distant crackle. There is the groan of a loosened limb, the cackle of fallen twigs, the eyeless grins of skulls from their earthen beds. And between them, the intrusion of her tentative footsteps.

Hushed as the woods that sheltered him, Gauthier watched from the dark of a thousand burnt birch eyes. They turned to her as his own would, a gaze as brumal and cold as the harsh touch of winter’s bite. From his jaws, the smoke of the cursed grounds unraveled from bone-white teeth laced in frost and hunger. Their thirst is his own, their rancorous deep-earth burn resonant to the thrum of his heart. His bronze flesh greyed with their ash, his mane burred with their thorns.

It is here where the day cannot touch – where the gods have abandoned – this cathedral of ash and bones and ancient wrath. It is here that he hunts.

Between the woven shade of the tall, scorched trees he moved undisclosed from the fog-laden wood, carved of the ashen backdrop. Every muscle littered with snow and spent cinders rolled beneath their concealing armor, their dragon scales; he tread low and steady, his meticulous footsteps heavily muffled by the muck of the forest floor. The floral scent of Firnen was long shed away for the smoke-musk of the desolate wilds, discarding the filigree of royalty for the shadow of a heathen crown. It pronounced his brow, the hard cut of his rigid cheek as smoke rolled over angular features, the roughened waste of an immortal grin.

Touched by this unholy demesne, the shadows of the barrens cloaked his prowl through the deadwood that yearned for the kiss of vitality. It was by this shared thirst that he followed at a distance, obscured by the dusky gloom, @Thella ♔ that nearly blended with their damned surroundings. Patiently he awaited his proper time – for the precise moment, the wrong turn, a fateful instant of naivety, that would reward his waiting jaws.

As was commonplace for her in moments of presumed solitude and left to wander within her the labyrinth of her own thoughts, many things outside Thella's immediate senses went largely unnoticed. It happened often as of late so, as expected, she was quite unaware that she was not, as she'd assumed, the only living being for leagues when she had entered the charred forest. At least not at first.

Behind her, the grime under her paws bore witness to her passage, each step distinctly imprinted with the contours of her pads. They would remain for a time, until the snow inevitably resumed and erased them from existence, but for now, they hid nothing of her presence there. Ahead, with an impassive stare, she saw nothing except for the ground and the trees as they passed, knowing naught what awaited her there, so consumed she was by the heaviness of the ruins she found herself in.

She paused when she reached the base of a large tree, and examined its fractured remnants. In its weakened state, it had been felled, snapped wildly apart a few paces high. From a strong wind after the fire perhaps, she mused silently. She sat back on her haunches and placed her paws against the fallen trunk, testing for any give with a slight push. When none came, she leapt up to find some reprieve from the cold wet.

It was then, gazing out into the sooty expanse, that a subtle shift in color caught her eye. No longer was she seeing only unsaturated, dense haze and fog. She stared more intently until a sudden realization jolted through her—a realization that she was not alone after all.

@Gauthier

code by scorpixia♡︎ art by muuland

WE'RE BORN INTO THE GRAVE

In the smoke-dream daze of delirium, the forest breathes. Its murky exhales sift the melting snows, their heavy laden veil mucked with the spoils of a kingdom lost in the throes of desolation. Death lingers, its touch pressed to every scrap of bark, every gleaming skull and dusk-kissed rind of beetles. It squanders its euphoric appetite in the marrow of the beast – swims in the carmine cores of december eyes, their lull upon delightful chimeras of glutted wealth. As the lioness moves the forest moves with her, its smoke pooled along the ridge of her being, dragged along each tender movement in the still.

He crept as she examined the decay and tested the heavy body of the split tree. But it waits, it waits; the ground biding its feral breath, the Ruin eager to see what becomes. Gauthier – the thing made of its ash and famishment, the grimm dredged of its ache – made soft his every sinking footstep, the wilds patient and pliant in his roam. In it he is accepted, embraced, cradled by the steam and the smog as their fine wisping tendrils serve their hush across his ashen form and strip his skins for the mold of their wilderness. He becomes It, its hunger, its thirst, its yearning.

Its ribs swell with the frenzy of promise and the taste of life to savor into its ancient, parched bones.

It reaches, the exhalation of condemned earth – with its spidery fingers, its cinder-mouth eager and full of blackened char-teeth, for its visitor that encroaches upon the sacred spine of its crumbled temple. But it is too weak, too feeble, too ghostly and vulnerable in its abandoned stead, to drag her into its tomb. To taste the ilk of her marrow and the hammering pulse of her heart, to whisper unto it the lull of closing earth as it once has the many who walked it before.

But their patron, their artistry rendered flesh and teeth, their Gauthier, how he is brimmed with their remembered vigor. How they sigh to watch their dark colossus with the whispers of a once-was.

Yet his step hitched as their prey turned her eyes upon him, upon it, the roving island of bones and ash, paled in its ilk. It did not matter. It would not matter. Not here in this sacred place of rot and silence, where the dead reign over the living. His breath is its crypt-sigh, his smile is its bone-white knowing. It shines to @Thella ♔ from the dark of the curling smoke, moon-cut and malevolent. The worms of the barren earth are his crawling flesh, its wasted pines rising along his spine. The ash on his cheeks lift with the mottled stretch of a jackal grin and its hunger is palpable and endless and as deep as its infernal igneous agony.

There was no guilt, no shame in being found in its place. It did not care for repentance from gods that shut their eyes upon its anguish. It did not fear the repercussions for the destruction of an innocent life. The thunder of its Below is the stirring of Gauthier’s smoke-lungs, the low resonant hum of his baritone which through it plained its ageless desires. His heart thrummed with its molten tempo. "It waits for you," he breathed of its wants. "Do you feel it?" But his is a selfish appetite. The wilds will settle for second blood, for remnants, scraps. It did not have children to feed. And still it will be grateful.

"Fugi... vrea o vânătoare."

Romanian: Run... it wants a hunt.

The longer Thella stared, the more unnervingly clearer it became what, or who to be more precise, she was looking at. It was a wicked face. A very wicked face, indeed. The heavy smog seemed to billow away from him, revealing the scarred visage hidden within. She felt her throat begin to tighten at the sight in front of her and a wisp of breath escaped into the cold air with a gasp. Time slowed to an agonizing crawl, seconds turning into hours.

It had been a long time since she'd last seen such a face, one that brought pure and unadulterated horror coursing viciously deep into her soul. The first was the demon that ravaged her family, ripping flesh from bone before her eyes. He cared for naught except what he desired and they stood in his way, so they stood no more. This face though was new and ever more menacing. There was no warmth in that gaze. No hint that this would or could be anything but a hostile confrontation.

Its smile turned Thella's blood even colder, freezing her into place. She dug her claws into the charred bark beneath her and it took everything in her to remain standing from the wave of nausea that swept through. Her vision swam. She wanted to close her eyes, to shake off the vertigo, but she dared not look away.

Then it spoke. Fugi... vrea o vânătoare.

There was no care from her for the meaning of the words, words in a language she did not understand. They were not spoken to receive a response but to invoke an action. And into action she leapt. Blackened remains flew violently off the tree as she pushed off with as much intensity as she could gather. Her mind began racing as quickly as her paws tore across the ground, trying to find the quickest path through the broken columns around her, knowing that the beast was surely close behind. But she couldn't look back yet. She couldn't risk slowing down. She knew not what her end might be then.

@Gauthier

code by scorpixia♡︎ art by muuland

WE'RE BORN INTO THE GRAVE

In the phantasmagoric rift of this realm between realms, that which in gehenna-dream expulses its vicarious waste, there is little but meat and savor. They are gilded, these quiet portions, rendered with vein and gristle and finest of all – of fear. The Wilds drink of it. They delight of it. They breathe once more as it rises in her breast and shivers down her spine and every blackmouth of the pyre flies carve it with glee. The rind of his pale-eyes wax with their euphoria shared, though he does not know her fear has a name, a face. Little means for anything but an end here in this root-rot tomb.

Gauthier’s smile diminished the moment the twitch of movement signified their sacred hunt, stolen away into the slag-breath of the ruined earth. At once he returned to their pulsing thrum, the heat of the wilderness that wrapped its thorns in the mettle of his bones.

He was thrust into the fray of cinder eaten bark left in her wake, ducking the ash and vaulting over the scorched corpse of the tree; into the rise of soot and smoke, mists felled by the force of his gliding form. Thrill blossomed in his core, coagulated with the hunger that stoked – the thirst, the swell of appetite, greedy and rich and full. His lungs flooded with the feverish air, his spidering veins rushed with adrenaline. Speed was an afterthought, a fleeting tragedy to all his bulk in muscle, but he was invigorated by the spell-binding pang of the cursed forest. Its dead brambles reached for her, its ashen ground slipped and slopped beneath their flighted footsteps; the filth, the mottled silt.

It may have not been what he was built for, the delight of the chase - the agility of smarting gazelle or the swiftness of something made of grace, lithe and sweet. Gauthier was built for the killing blow, the cracking hammer, to wrestle and wrangle and war. But this suited him well enough. To be devoured by the ashes of the overgrown wilderness and be borne of it something more, ravager. Ripper. A piece of him lamented, that brief and hollow sore, that his hunt was not shared with the elation of his cunning wife. Tactics would have to make do - the plot of his mapped ruins, their felled trees and low hanging vines, the rotten holes and tangled dead-brush.

His laughter thundered in his throat as he followed @Thella ♔ with all the wolvish clacking of his fangs, feinting with the intention of driving her away from the fringes, to divert her back into the gnarled burn of the simmering woodlands. Back to the obstacles that would slow her, trip her, entangle her. Back to the frivolous beat of the Wild’s hammering heart, where its driest patch of wanting ground ached for the spill of her blood. The altar. His altar.

@Gauthier didn't have her speed, thankfully. Thella was quickly able to magnify the distance between them but she did not slow. She would not slow until she was out of this fallen jungle and back home in the safety of the black maze of tunnels.

The muck-covered ground had done nothing to muffle the booming, maniacal laugh as it slammed into existence around her and bounced wildly off the charred trees, becoming all she could hear over her paws as they squelched into the grime with each passing step—all she could hear over her own ragged breaths. It echoed deafeningly in her ears, consuming all of her thoughts. She cried out in agony as she sought to drown it out and escape it but then she realized she couldn't tell from which direction it came. Was it from up ahead? Surely not. It should have come from behind her. But she'd been so focused on avoiding the hurdles ahead that she was was now no longer certain in which direction she was running. The clouds above obscuring the sky and the speed with which she ran left no opportunity to use the sun for guidance. She was thoroughly disoriented, lost to the deadly wasteland.

She saw the large mess of gnarled roots protruding across the path in front of her and leapt over them with fervor, relieved to have missed them; it was the second entanglement, smaller and occluded by the muck and entirely unnoticeable until she was already in the air that brought about the subsequent pain and despair; it was in the most inapt location of her next footfall and there was no way for her to avoid it. A brief gasp escaped her lips as she landed unevenly, her paw catching in the roots and knocking her off balance. Nails ripped on the bark from the force of her lurch forward and she tumbled over through the cold sludge until she collided into the trunk of a nearby tree. Sharp pains burst up her forelimb and along her back, knocking the breath from her lungs. Clusters of snow pack from the branches above plummeted down, landing both on and around her body.

Her senses felt as hazy as the air around her and she struggled to keep her head up. It felt heavy and she just wanted to rest. Her eyes closed and her head wobbled from the onset of weariness, drooping down to the pile of snow in front of her. For a moment, she had forgotten where she was; she'd forgotten what was coming for her. No! Eyes snapped open in alarm when she remembered and she forced her legs under her to bear her weight. She was covered in the snow-ash mix now and very little dry fur shown through. But she couldn't yet fully stand, limbs shaky and mind still jumbled; all she could do was look back and wait for the monster to emerge from the smoke. This was surely it for her.

code by scorpixia♡︎ art by muuland

WE'RE BORN INTO THE GRAVE

The panged cry that replies the echo of his voice is musical in the cursed forest, a lulling lilt woven between the ash-scarred trees in their sentry patience. The maze, yawned out before them with its jagged cinder teeth, merely widened for her fear with a birch-white grin. Mucked and filthy the grounds slopped beneath their feet, the breeze drinking every far-reached remnant of that splitting yowl. Behind, the grove-beast chose the easier paths by the shadow of his heart, the frail brush trampled and knotted rotvines thrown behind.

No dismay finds him in her every keen bound – relentless as she leapt the tangles of root, dodged the murk of fetid earth soured by stagnant pools. He knew the hunger of the forest and its ancient woes as intimately as the coiling of the heat in his veins and the cold in his lungs. That merciless, swarming growth of depravity in the hollows of need; primal and necessary. It would have her, would make of her the bounty of its remembered victories: of the mice that once dove through its ferns, of the hares that drove into its earth, of the gazelle that brushed along its treeskin only for the same end.

He needed only wait as it had for its aching eternity, bridged by flesh. When had it last enjoyed the savor of death? When had its roots last basked in the tastings of life and all its flourish? Its fine notes? Its soft, decadent hints of a once-upon?

It wanted just as any animal would. It would take, as any other may.

And there it was: the crackle of snapped undergrowth, the snap of bark and a shuddering tree. Like the snapping clasp of a vice trap. Gauthier ducked a tangle of thorned hedge and rounded a split oak, his eyes settling on the mass of her form beneath the reaching pry of snow-laden branches. Fervor spilled through the rush of his muscles as he broke through the shifting veil of smog. Success sparked through the illusioned mind – feverish, maddened, touched by the craving whispers of the wretched wilds. In the mind's eye stretched that preeminent shadow of the mountain, that long gaping grave to which all things ended by tooth and claw and rage.

He leapt without concern for her state, whether weakened, injured, or waiting – he would be rewarded for his patronage to the famished wilds. For the blood he would spill. For the flesh he would share to decay. Foremost, an offering to oneself. Gauthier lunged for Thella from her side, attempting to grapple her to the ground with his upper body and intending to drive his teeth into the side of her neck.

Gauthier vs. @Thella ♔
Minor Maim - Scarring/Muscle Damage(?)
Round 1 of 4
Hits:

Rolling 9d20: 9 + 5 + 7 + 4 + 1 + 14 + 15 + 20 + 16

Dodges:

Rolling 4d20: 15 + 14 + 17 + 19

Luck:

Rolling 5d20: 7 + 12 + 16 + 20 + 2

Thella's chest heaved and heart pounded erratically, threatening to rip open her chest and leave her there, dead; a feast free for the taking for the hunter that was coming. Coming fast. She could hear him tearing through the muck, each bound louder than the last. She brought her hind legs under her and stood to lean back against the tree and steady herself. His dark form burst into view and she got her first close look at him, much too close. He had scars all over, though the most chilling was the one elongating the crazed smile. The smog had done well to hide it when she first saw him. This time, it was unmistakable; a gruesome indication of the monster he was.

A whimper escaped before she could stop it, "No, please."

But he was already on her, having wasted no time in an attack. She barely had the chance to avoid the brunt of his weight as she backstepped quickly from his charge and his right paw still managed to catch her left shoulder, the force of it throwing her sideways. She stumbled before finding her footing and did her best to create space between them to think of her next move. She darted quickly to his rear, wanting to keep as far from his jaws as possible, and aimed to tear at his back ankles with sharp nips.

---

Thella vs. @Gauthier
for minor maim
1 / 4

Hits:

Rolling 3d20: 4 + 7 + 3

Dodges:

Rolling 7d20: 6 + 8 + 11 + 14 + 15 + 20 + 1

Luck:

Rolling 5d20: 12 + 15 + 2 + 20 + 5

code by scorpixia♡︎ art by muuland

WE'RE BORN INTO THE GRAVE

The forest rejoices with the thundering pulse of its cinder-heart, its jagged ash-teeth and pyreflies dancing into the mist – to taste of her the impending doom, the rising fear. No, please she cries, and of its delicious pause every trickle of her dread is relished. The rattle of death seeks her in smoke fingers and ashen palms, every forgotten tree limb shuddered with delight. Of their patron, he does not relent, not hesitate. He yearns for every vein that sings to him, every thrum that wishes him away drags him only closer to their heat.

Drunk on the thrill, the hard pull of adrenaline and the shared heat of the underground, he is carved of the wood’s grim entity and thrived on the smog that fills his lungs with their fervent desire. As she reels those winter-eyes tinge darkest with their bloodlusting pith, their facets glinting with the writhings of hunger. His core churns like the coil of famished black boas, wherein their grasp mercy is crushed like a silenced pest.

"The forest yearns for blood," a madness seethed. Thella slips from his grasp like a fleeing hare and too like the snarling, fastidious hound he follows her movements with the heavy swing of his skull. "I will oblige." As her teeth razored the thin flesh of his hind ankle he made to pivot his body, attempting to counter her assault with a swiping kick aimed to drag its claws deeply across the side of her face.

Gauthier vs. @Thella ♔
Minor Maim - Scarring/Muscle Damage(?)
Round 2 of 4
Hits:

Rolling 9d20: 3 + 11 + 15 + 7 + 13 + 8 + 12 + 17 + 5

Dodges:

Rolling 4d20: 7 + 2 + 16 + 18

Luck:

Rolling 5d20: 17 + 11 + 7 + 19 + 8