Change

With a sharp sniff and a twitch of both thumbs, Stitches pale green eyes flutter to a groggy opening. The morning blue gray sky greets him, and he unties his legs from themselves and sits up to free his back from tree bark yet again. His fingers meet the cold ground and clutch at the wet grass, and his knees bend to, in a moment, assist him in standing. Amidst the soft humming of the breeze, his steed offers him a cordial huff and snort, shaking its head at his arising.

It is black, just as the nights in which the moon itself hides, and the stars blot from a mass of clouds. At first perhaps that is all it is, just the night sky and air. Perhaps its closed eyelids. Yet, a flame hovers in the far off, and a figure next to it, indiscernible at distance. Stitches tuts his tongue as he stares at the shape the orange light outlines, and steps closer, carefully, as he feels the ceiling may be close to his head. After a long blink, he himself holds a torch in hand, and it lights his surroundings, including him on the secret of where he is.

Long and untrimmed fingernails brush up against the bark of a soggy tree as tall and bare fingers fumble with a rope to tie it in a secure but undefined knot. The rope follows back up to the horse it holds, and the black Clydesdale gives Stitches an unamused neigh, follow with a huff and a trod of the ground with a frustrated hoof.

Stitches lifted his feet quickly along the muddy path, splashing through puddles as he approached Hengstacer farm. The sky is bleeding crystals, and the ground;s firm nature would suffer from it. Stitches would not tarry, lest his new boots get covered more in muck than need be. He picks at his new tunic and trousers and reaches to his head to readjust his hat, which of course is no longer there, and has been replaced with the gray hood of a cloak and mantle he had made for him by a local seamstress not too long ago.

(Beginning of Part 3)

Dru mentions the time soon thereafter and they stand to depart. As he did a few nights before, he offers to keep her company on her walk home. He never saw her home, and he doesn't expect to, but somehow being around someone, speaking with them consistently and in a way that makes him feel new things seemed more enticing to his slowly more and more active mind than working the fields. 

(Beginning of Part 2)

Another eventual hour of small talk, Dru putting up with his ignorance when it comes to social interaction, and Stitches giving her a cloak for the chill, they wind up at another door of conversation, this one rather out of the blue. Stitches had been wondering this for himself, so his unfiltered brain asks Dru for insight.

"What do you dream of, Dru?"

"As I sleep? Or for my life?" She asks in response.

Just a few days before Drubainbess and Stitches were separated, and she went missing, they met for a final time. It was another chilly winter afternoon, the fractured sky gilded with sparse clouds that decorate like a menagerie of  spirals and cracks, a compendium of golden to lilac, from a twilight to a brilliant vermilion.Stitches was left off the evening shift and came straight to Bree in search of his friends. A feeling had been tickling him all day in the fields, and it urged him that something was incredibly wrong.

Reidun had been out riding, looking at the herbs and spices that grow in the wilds of Bree. She figured the river below looked lovely, and sought a safe path down, leading her horse carefully. As she makes her way forward, she stops suddenly at the form of a man on the ground. "Uh...hello?" Is her shaky inquiry, muffled through her mask.

It has been two days and well into noon, by now. Despite so, this did not trouble Nenusidh, perhaps it was one of the reasons why he had to set out so quickly, which was the journey will be a while in itself. He has made way into the steep hills of Nan Amlug, the area where the forest breaks into hill and deep valleys.