18 years ago
Perceptions of the Lost
Itself.
Not itself.
Food.
Danger.
Shelter.
Now.
The litany of all that is left in the mind of the creature that was once a girl and now just is. The past is a fractured morass, safest ignored, and the future is meaningless. Hunger is real, pain is real, fear is real. And the trees are real.
In times to come she will be looked at oddly for many reasons, but one of them will be the way she views trees. Before there were trees there was Mother. But mother is part of the past, part of the broken areas of her mind. Not broken because of any mental problems, but decayed and fragmented by neglect. Memory is mutable, malleable, it conforms to our current needs and rarely is an accurate representation of what happened. But ignored and neglected it becomes scattered. Fragments of misty truths, half-truths and vague recollections. And that’s only if you try and remember, it had been long since she had done so. And so there are the trees. They provide shelter, protection, sustenance sometimes. The provide her with her clothes, her nests (a new one each night, staying still would get her killed) and the provided a measure of solidity in a fluid world. Where others had friends, family, acquaintances, she had the trees. Anthropomorphism is not a word she’d have ever understood or been able to say, but it is fundamental to her feelings about the tree’s she passes each day as she moves through the trackless deeps. No names, that would be an absurdity, after all she couldn’t even remember her own, but personality becomes attributed at a subconscious level.
Her clothes are a mass of repairs and expansions, she has grown, though she herself hasn’t noticed it. Leaves, web from the larger spiders used to stick them in place, make up the majority of what she now wears. When a hole wears or a seam gives, she adds to it. Grime, filth and mud are as much a part of her attire as her much repaired rags. They scatter her outline, make her harder to see in the dappled shadow world she inhabits now, and they cover her scent with that of the ground she moves over. The only bright things about her are the blades of the two short swords she still has bound at her waist, though they are only drawn at absolute need. She has become more skilled with them, life in the deeps has forced a lot of lessons on her that would have killed or broken a lot of much older and wiser folk. She is a survivor though, and when the hard winds blew she bent with them and learnt new ways.
She pauses as skittering passes close by. A webber, one of the larger ones too. She’s not seen any of those in a long time, the spiders of the Deeps would normally have eaten one like this by now. Them or something worse. The woods are lighter here too and she doesn’t recognise any of the trees. That’s not unusual in itself, she moves a lot, ranging wide and far, covering more ground in the years she has been lost than most cover in a lifetime. But usually there is a feel to the woods that she recognises. If there is such a feeling here it is muted, faded. She tracks the spider, for a while, hoping to find it’s food store. They poison and wrap meat for later, and if you’re quick and stay away from the puncture wounds she’s found you can eat from their larders.
Then she stops, totally still.
She can hear something odd… something vaguely… voices… She has seen no living man or woman in a long time. Of course time has no meaning to her, to her it is today and it is her tenth birthday and the time between is all just ‘nowness’. She is afraid, but curious. She follows, keeping to the shadows, brushing fingers on the trunks of trees she moves close to. As they travel the woods become sparser. The temperature here is low, she has many extra layers of leaves stuck to her clothes, though she’d have been hard pressed to tell someone, were she to talk, when she started feeling the cold. The sun brightens through the trees and for a while her eyes sting. They adjust though and soon she smells burning, like when lightning sometimes hit a tree in the deeps, but more constant and less wild. The people she is following join others, and she swerves aside, avoiding the crowd of strangeness she now finds herself in.
She approaches a wall, a wooden gate though she can’t remember it’s name yet, words will come to her in time, and she slips through it behind the returning men.
She watches them move off, frozen by hints of recollection and memory. Held fast by vague tremors of fear, of longing. An old woman she had not noticed looks at her, stunned also by the creature she suddenly finds inside her camp.
The two face each other for a long drawn out moment, the woman’s eyes wandering over the girl trying to decide if the nearby guards are needed to eject the feral wanderer. Then she notices the scarring and scans the face again, adding years and times of trouble to a remembered face. Six years ago, a Kumpania left in a hurry. There had been rumour of a run-in with Norwick’s Militia and the Camp would not tolerate any such overt troubles in Narfell. There had also been a girl. A small and weak thing then, cowed by her father the Oath-taker remembered. She flicked through her own memories, and few remembered better than she the names and faces of those that had stood before her and avowed their goodwill to the Camp. Then the name came to her.
“Chakano?” she murmured to the terrified looking girl before her. The girl paused, about to flee but held by the word. She struggled to remember, she knew it meant something. It was a word as well as a name and it was the word that came to her first, a Romany word for a small thing of great beauty. She could not relate the word to herself, not then, but when she struggled to find a voice, made thick and hoarse with disuse, when she finally made her throat work the syllabul free, then the Oathtaker nodded with an odd smile. “yes… Chakano… ‘Star’...”
