RP:Two Tales for the Camp Follower

From HollowWiki

Background

This rp is part 3 of the arc: Old Haunts and New


Downhill from Dante's Throne

Jolie started speaking almost immediately, and the footless ghost-girl started drifting down the hill. “One upon a time..” the necromancer began, “There was an evil ghost dragon…”


“Oooh,” said the ghost-girl. “What was his name?”


Jolie eyed her, “Fred,” she said, using the first name that came to mind. “His name was Fred. Anyway, Fred was a very evil dragon and had taken control of a city by the sea. Far, far away lived a very beautiful necro…princess…”


“A necroprincess?” the ghost girl gaped, “That’s unusual.”


“Quite,” said Jolie, frowning as she trudged back into the mists, “And this … person… was not only beautiful, but very, very clever. And liked pretty things. Like cities by the sea. So when she heard about this evil dragon and the poor city he was sitting on, she decided to gather a great army to take there, and throw him out. So one night, they crept into the city by the sea, just to its very edge, where Fred’s evil guards kept.. guard. And by the use of great and powerful magics and much guile, they tore the tower down.”


“Didn’t that make Fred angry?” asked the camp-follower, tonguing the gap in her front teeth nervously.


“Quite,” said Jolie. “It frightened him out of his ghostly scales. So what do you think he did next?” She paused at that junction, to glance about and see if the rest of the motley company, phantasmal and otherwise, were following.


The man had his hands in the deep, strange pockets of his old black coat, and was keeping up the rear, strolling down the hill. He watched the black-tooth shuffle ahead of him, and the orc scratch fiercely at his own non-existent junk. While the lady told the story the hovering young girl would occasionally whirl around and flash her some expression of joy or interest, keeping forward in the direction she was going, so it was kind of like being led somewhere by a wobbly top. For the most part the man seemed to listen with great intent. Sometimes, though, what he was listening for was not always clear—his eyes on the ground before him, his gait loose and wide, with his listening going deep into the things around him. If he expected something, he did not seem interested in preparing for it. And if he didn't expect something, he probably needn't have shot his mind out through the air, like a great ring of sharp attention, and go looking for the minds of other things. But he probably just wanted to know how the story ended.


Jolie flashed a quick smile toward the wanderer, less for his benefit than her own mollification that he was, indeed, following. The camp-follower had been thinking, in her own dim way, about the question of what the evil dragon had done next. “Did he come roaring out of his den, all fire and sharptooth, and gobble the army up?”


The necromancer shook her head. “One would think. But no. This dragon was old, and powerful, but also very cowardly. So, as the .. princess.. and her army sat about a fire among the rubble of their first conquest in the city by the sea, there came a soldier to speak with them.”


“What. Just one?” the ghost-girl’s mouth fell open, emitting a stink of grave.


“Just one,” Jolie continued, shaking her head ruefully. “A staunch soldier, and brave. And not terribly ugly.. but he –was- a minion of the evil dragon, and had come to tell the princess and her army that on the morrow, unless they turned and fled back to their own lands, the great ghost dragon would emerge from his lair and eat them all up in one swallow.”


The camp follower shivered, which had the effect of making her partially transparent. “And did he? Eat them all?”


“No.” said Jolie. “He waved his magic tail and put the tower back up, as though it had never fallen.”


“Ooh. Then what?”


Jolie smiled, “The princess and her army went home.”


“What?” Stories were not meant to end like that, the ghost girl was sure of it. “Just… went home? Wasn’t there a mighty battle? Glory? Treasure? Anything?”


“No,” said the necromancer. “You see, the necro.. er, princess, was very clever, as I said. She’d never really wanted the city by the sea. She wanted all the other cities to see that she was unafraid of even... Fred. She went home and made her nation mighty.”


“That was a terrible story,” the camp-follower sulked. By then they had all reached the bottom of the tor.


The orc was also looking mighty unimpressed by the necromancer’s tale. “Women,” he spat.


Jolie pursed her lips again, a little cattily. “I think it’s a marvellous story.”


“I want another.” The ghostly whore wriggled footlessly down upon a withered and demi-fossilised tree stump. “A proper story, this time. And I’m not moving until I get one.”


The black-toothed spirit used the pause to attempt to a eat a few passing beetles, and the orc was up front, rattling his mail in protest. The man came up short of the crew, and turned left into the mists. He came to where the wolf was crouched, and crouched beside it. He said, "Anything about?" The wolf pawed his own nose. "Mhm. That's what I thought." He reached out and stroked the wolf once, and the wolf only considered biting his arm off the once, too. With his hands back in his pockets, he went strolling off in a wide circle from the wolf around the group of adults still involved in a very serious moment of storytime. He kept the circle by when he could and couldn't hear them anymore. He shot his mind out in great rings, and cut it through the mists and stones, listening for the minds of others. When he completed the circuit, he walked back to his slot behind the lot of them, appearing from the opposite direction of his departure.


Jolie sighed, as the wanderer set off on his rounds. “Very well.” She sat down, too, because good stories are never told standing up, let alone walking. Or gliding, as it were. “Long ago, and far away, there was a dark, dark forest.” Her voice had grown quiet, as she began the tale, causing the ghosts to cluster about her more tightly as though they had need for proximity to hear her. “Where no holy person ever trod, but only witches. For generations the witches had come there to dance and gather things for the making of charms, and it was told in villages far and wide that forest had a mind of its own, and was not safe for any wholesome soul to wander, and they were right. On the edge of the forest was a tumbledown house, where a woman lived with her daughter. Two witches, they were, and all alone, for it is said that none of the witches who walked the dark forest had luck with husbands, who all died soon after their daughters were born, and thus the witches of the forest had terrible trouble finding husbands. It was a good thing then, that they were all very lovely and charming. No matter the rumours, men came and married them, and died, and the witches grieved, and went on living.”


The man pulled out a silver pocket flask and knocked it back in one quick motion, like a bone snapping and resetting itself. He knelt down and watched the lady tell her story, watched the orc look excited when the peopled died, look conflicted when their deaths didn't sound very violent. The black-toothed woman chittered to herself. The man screwed the cap on his flask and wiped his lips. In the distance a thing with long fingers and big eyes slowly began to strangle itself to death, making good use of both.


The camp-follower had been silent all the while, this story appealing her to a lot more than the last one. Jolie took that as a good sign, and continued: “The daughter of this household was the loveliest of them all. She had not one, but several young men who braved the shadows and groping branches, the whispering leaves and the poison thorns to seek her out when she went to gather berries for her other. Of them all, only one caught her eye, and after a while her heart with it. The night before they married, her mother beckoned to her. “Come and see, dear, I have sewn you two new dresses.” One was white, the other black as night. “For your wedding,” said her mother, “And the other for after.” The girl refused the black dress. She ran into the forest and made a promise to the old gods who slept at its roots, and ran home again. She married her sweetheart, and within a year she had a child – a daughter, of course. And within a year of that, her husband was killed by a bear while he gathered firewood, and all of him was eaten but his head, his hands, his feet and the part of his chest where his heart lay dead as the logs he’d carried.”


John Tall came upon his man from the hill above. He squatted beside him, watched the lips of the lady as the story was told, and said: "Rivers just back. Says there's a few things about. Doesn't know if all of them are about for our sake, but one of them's what we thought. Seems like it came out of the ground from points south, wound its way up to the barrows where the action was. Went north, then West. He said it's hungry, by the look of it. Had a chance for its neck but didn't take it, for reasons he felt would be clear to you." The man listened with his eyes forward, and his chin caught up in his right hand. "Tell Rivers he's to take it with Brig, if it comes that, but otherwise it's in my hands. You go back and get everyone below ground. If it's come out of hibernation for us it'll just be annoyed when it finds you, and you aren't numbering in the thousands. You're no kinda meal and that will make him angry. Your best bet is to hope he's confused by how small you are amid the size of the signals he's received, doesn't come looking in the first place." "Rivers said he saw creepers, too." "I know. One's already made himself known to me, much to his consternation." "Does that mean we might have a hive?" "It does." "Cross-dressing ball-lickers." "Even so." John Tall slipped off and the man's listening remained unchanged, but somewhat more directed, more knowing in its perception. It knew, now, there was something to hear.


As the wanderer and his phantasmal companions conferred, the ghost-girl had sat in rapt attention, her milky eyes wide and her tongue working at her toothless gum-gap like a worm through a nice bit of rot. “Is that the end?” she’d said, making a pouty moue when Jolie stopped for breath.


“Not a bit of it,” said the necromancer, and went on: “The girls’ mother urged her to bury her husband’s remains in the cracked-stone cemetery on the other side of the forest where all the other husbands were buried, and had been for a thousand years, and to get on with raising her daughter according the Old Ways. The new widow, though, was mad with grief. She took up her husband’s heart and ran back into the forest, where she hung it on a low branch of the very oldest tree, above the same place she’d made her promise not all that long ago. Returning home, she seemed to have composed herself somewhat, and bore the funeral for the rest of his remains quite as well as could be expected. But a month later, when the moon hung like a wide, white eye in the sky and the trees could be sworn to be moving about unrooted and restless, or so it seemed to eye and ear in the silver-lit dark, the young widow took her daughter to the Elder-oak’s roots and strangled her, and buried the child among fallen leaves for the ancient trees to eat. As the moon shifted in the sky and light fell upon it, that hanging heart burst open and the shadow of a crow flew out. The shadow flew higher and higher, growing bigger and more featherish as it did so. And when it landed again, it was a proper crow, who cast his gaze down upon the place where the widow had wept, and found her not. In her place was a sleek, blue-black crow wife, who paused only long enough to pick the eyes from a dead child before flapping her wings and joining her husband on their first flight together. And on that night, and on every full moon after, they made dark shapes across the moon’s bright face, as if to mock the world below and everything in it.” Her tale was at end.


The camp-follower was weeping sluggish, ectoplasmic tears. “Now that was a story,” she sniffed. “Worth a treasure.”


The orc looked about ready to murder the lot of them. Even the ones who were already dead.


The wild-haired ghost was loping about, twitching at its various and eternal itches, and the sense of something wicked fingering its nonexistent spine.


The camp-follower rose and glided toward the broken mouth of the nearest barrow, long ago looted for its every trinket, and beckoned the others inside.