I awoke charging through fire.
Bounding and bellowing through the smoke and flames, calling out to my friends, but all I can hear are pained cries and foul chattering. The sound of metal slicing flesh and chopping bone plagues my ears, while the sounds of clicking and hissing drive me to near madness. I had come back hoping to be greeted with warmth and kinship, but instead, I am left with the sounds of pain, torture and doom.
The fire clears, all that is left are embers and the black remains of my home. I am in my second skin, the skin that was passed down through the generations of my people. Searching, no, pleading for my friends to be safe, all I see are butchered corpses. Strong horses, fair does, mighty stags, crafty raccoons...all dead. Not a clean death, one that a mindful hunter would make out of respect for the beast. No, these deaths were cruel...and they suffered much. My heart is filled with sorrow, and I let out a cry of grief. Then, a sound. A horrid, malicious sound. Laughter. But not the kind, warm hearted laughter one would give after hearing a joke, or seeing an old friend...no. This laughter was hateful...proud of the horrors around it. The sorrow shifts, changing like the winds into something else...rage. I finally spot the source, the cause of all this madness...A lone goblin, its putrid form giggling like a mischievous child. The rage takes over and I lose myself, abandoning all reason as I roar, charging to tear at the monster until there is nothing left.
But the fiend is quick, dashing into the Mirkwood, the edge of my home. Blindly, I run after it, tearing through the underbrush with a feral determination. It grows dark, and the darkness grows deeper as I pursue my quarry, fleeing just out of my sight. I'm unable to see now, and am unaware of my surroundings. The chattering grows...and becomes many. One pair of glowing eyes becomes hundreds, and I am unable to escape. I thrash, claw and bite...the rage never fading...but it is no use, the eyes descend on me...and all grows dark."
-
Volbjorn woke with a start, shooting up from his slumber in a cold sweat, bumping his head on the roof of his structure. He was in his ramshackle of a shelter, made from bent saplings and boughs of cedar. An owl hooted just above, its song breaking the nights silence. Groaning, tired from a restless night's sleep, he rekindled his fire, breathing life into it and basking in its warmth as he sat. Down the hillside some ways off from where he made camp was the town of Combe, a strange place where he had come for reasons he himself still wondered. Its stone towers and smoking chimneys stood stoic in the dark of pre-dawn, silent and void of the normal bustle.
The tower of a man sighed, reflecting on his unpleasant dream. He was reminded of the peculiar elf, a kindred spirit of the land, speaking of talks of dreams and following them the evening before. Grim thoughts entered his mind, for he had lived such horrors. This dream was unlike pleasant dreams of bees and wildflowers, it was a memory. A howl broke Volbjorn from his thoughts, though it was oddly unclear to him the source of the howl. Too shrill to be a wolf, and too uniform and rough for a coyote. He took up his spear, inspecting its sharpness, his gaze lingering on the bear motif engraved in the iron. It was those horrors that drove him this far in the first place, and he wondered if even here, the fell things were beginning to manifest in the land.
