"People forget. That’s what they do. It’s easier to forget, to ignore things, to pretend that we were never scared in the first place. But in forgetting, we let those things slip back in, unnoticed and unheeded. And the important point is this - just because we forgot about them doesn’t mean that they forgot about us..." Follies; Everard Hemp of Hammerhal.
"...the Goddess took her eye, long ago, and so much of her leaked out of that hole that she is almost faded out of the worlds now and has to live beyond the thrice-nine lands in the kingdom of the Grey Marches. She’s a poor thing now, a shadow of what she used to be. No more the Three-in-one, now the hag alone."
Stories of the Realms; traditional.
Her missing eye ached, but then it had ached for years untold now and it especially ached when the cold drew in. And here in the thrice-ten kingdom, it was always bleakest midwinter. She had lost so much through that missing eye, that hole in herself, when the Everqueen had plucked it from her and cast it away. The pain and the sense of diminishing, of lessening, had become commonplace.
Still, she had survived. That was what she did, survive. Hoarding scraps of power, scraps of herself, watching the Realms move on from the depths of the forest and the snows with her one remaining eye. Watching. Surviving. Waiting.
She turned the skull over and over in her wizened ancient hands, long fingers moving like spiders over and into it, exploring every crevice and aspect of the gleaming bone. She muttered under her breath as she inspected the skull, nonsense words and rhymes flowing into hexes and prophecy and back again. The winds whispered around her and her head tilted, grey hair spilling as she seemed to listen. Nodded as if hearing something to her satisfaction.
She raised the skull to her face, cradling it as she would a lover, brought it closer. A grey and withered tongue crept like a worm from behind teeth the colour of old iron and gently, obscenely, began to probe an eye socket.
Her tongue drew back behind those ragged iron teeth and her sole eye narrowed as she contemplated what she had tasted in the skull’s death. She crooned into the empty gaze of her skull, singing under her breath as she reached up with long arms and hung the polished globe of bone from her crooked staff.
Smiling to herself, still singing in a ragged low voice, Mother Aldwynter shuffled off into the snowbound and skeletal black trees around her. Above her, swinging from her crooked staff, the skull began to whisper its secrets.
The Darkwood Court
in Painting and Modelling
Posted · Edited by KnaveOfScribes
"People forget. That’s what they do. It’s easier to forget, to ignore things, to pretend that we were never scared in the first place. But in forgetting, we let those things slip back in, unnoticed and unheeded. And the important point is this - just because we forgot about them doesn’t mean that they forgot about us..."
Follies; Everard Hemp of Hammerhal.
"...the Goddess took her eye, long ago, and so much of her leaked out of that hole that she is almost faded out of the worlds now and has to live beyond the thrice-nine lands in the kingdom of the Grey Marches. She’s a poor thing now, a shadow of what she used to be. No more the Three-in-one, now the hag alone."
Stories of the Realms; traditional.
Her missing eye ached, but then it had ached for years untold now and it especially ached when the cold drew in. And here in the thrice-ten kingdom, it was always bleakest midwinter. She had lost so much through that missing eye, that hole in herself, when the Everqueen had plucked it from her and cast it away. The pain and the sense of diminishing, of lessening, had become commonplace.
Still, she had survived. That was what she did, survive. Hoarding scraps of power, scraps of herself, watching the Realms move on from the depths of the forest and the snows with her one remaining eye. Watching. Surviving. Waiting.
She turned the skull over and over in her wizened ancient hands, long fingers moving like spiders over and into it, exploring every crevice and aspect of the gleaming bone. She muttered under her breath as she inspected the skull, nonsense words and rhymes flowing into hexes and prophecy and back again. The winds whispered around her and her head tilted, grey hair spilling as she seemed to listen. Nodded as if hearing something to her satisfaction.
She raised the skull to her face, cradling it as she would a lover, brought it closer. A grey and withered tongue crept like a worm from behind teeth the colour of old iron and gently, obscenely, began to probe an eye socket.
Her tongue drew back behind those ragged iron teeth and her sole eye narrowed as she contemplated what she had tasted in the skull’s death. She crooned into the empty gaze of her skull, singing under her breath as she reached up with long arms and hung the polished globe of bone from her crooked staff.
Smiling to herself, still singing in a ragged low voice, Mother Aldwynter shuffled off into the snowbound and skeletal black trees around her. Above her, swinging from her crooked staff, the skull began to whisper its secrets.
"Gorgo, Mormo, moon of a thousand forms..."