3. Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa


  • No. No memory, no emotion, no "inklings", no curious sense of deja vu, and ultimately, no vendetta. Abner, it will be as if these past years had merely sssssstopped twice on a very hiiiigh caliber graaade of these papersss and pens are miiiightier thaaaan soooo….

    Long, dark lashes twitched, fluttered and finally succumbed to the thatch-work pattern of the morning sun across his dreaming lids. They parted but a hair's width, catching that brief, precious moment between wake and sleep when light burns through the shifting boughs; all who'd had the good sense on the night before to be below them at morn's breaking would wake to the reward of dancing shadow, a menagerie of light and dark scattered across so much underbrush. A curt, knowing smile teased the corner of his perpetually chapped lips as he languidly sprawled out there among the piney forest floor. It was good to be of the wood.

    "Don't you love when your dreams go to batshit right before you wake, and you'd sell a pinky to remember what the Hell was in them?", he exclaimed, in his standard poetic and eruditic manner, to no-one and all-of-creation in the same moment. Ever the one for action, the young, stalwart man began the day with a firm kick, sending him ass-over-end backward and rolling up to his feet. Before him, the glory of the dawn's raiment sang over a canvas of pristine landscape, adding beauty by beauty's own brush to the wonderland of flora and fauna before him. The aural masterpiece of the canopy above, an unceasing symphony of chirps and chips and calls and hoots, provided an indispensable soundtrack to the beginning of what he oft referred to as "just another day in paradise".

    And then, as if triggered by the stranger's egregious love and respect for the vision of splendor before him, a flip was switched and there was nothing. Silence, not only of the birds but of the cicadas and toads as well, befell the great wood in the gentle span of a heartbeat. Whatever alarm might have welled within the layman was lost on him, as he knew the wood and it's many denizens had perfected the art of sudden silence over many millennia; one species would pick it up, seamlessly cuing the next into following suite, and so forth until the entire ecosystem had gone "dark" for want of safety.

    "Hmm. Methinks a hawk doth approach", he spoke in jest, ever making light of any and all forms of highfalutiny. Without another thought, the dark-haired ranger struck off towards the Den with high spirits and silent footfalls. He didn't entirely miss the families of wrens and sparrows staring directly through him as he strolled beneath their domain. Nor did he entirely wish to ponder that significance.


  • The typically broken penmanship had been gravely exacerbated by what appeared to be some emergent anxiety… but it was His writing. No doubt about it. The message upon the only note now tacked to the board was clear enough:

    "Jerrick. El. Ras. Any. Vash't. Don't know when. Help."

    By appearances, he'd left the Den. Black-ink smudged and hand-printed upon the ground and walls, unintentionally, judging from their noncommital smearing. A tattered pile of crumpled messages lay drowning in an oily puddle, the source of all this mess, beneath the bulletin.

    He'll be stalking, searching for familiarity. And answers.


  • Short, gasping breaths echoed through the damp cave tunnels in a torrent of noise and panic. Vash't Reinhardt sat crammed against the wall beneath the bulletin board, a brackish mixture of tears and sweat now paving the ruddy cheeks of a man with few precious minds left to lose. The trees, the shrubbery, the grass… everything, every step, wrong, wrong, wrong. After such malice, the beginning, the deception, the end, the torture, what then was this? Choking back the very real possibility of total collapse, the seizing heap of nerves that'd been the man made a desperate, ungainly lunge for the ink-well, knocking it to the ground and smattering the soft rock with a creeping, inky puddle. The logs 'round the fire, the smell of the air within the cave, why? What magnificent new horrors lay within the folds of his convoluted existence? Had it not been enough? As the terror-stricken green of his eyes darted between the handful of notes he'd torn from the board, noting the dates, noting the names... stifled sobs of devastation spiraled from the great mouth of the Wolve's Den.