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Post by Theia Lee Aithre on Jul 8, 2015 22:26:41 GMT -5
Theia listened as the old forest spoke in languages forgotten and thought of how, once upon a dream, nature spoke to more than just those who had learned to listen. There was a Leshy in the woods nearby, she had seen him in one of her excursions and spotted him roaming in tall stalks of grass, nearly hidden among them. Thankfully she thought to switch her shoes to the wrong feet and flip her shirt inside out before approaching him and asking for a conversation. The Leshy was sick, choking on gunpowder and smog and with his illness, it was rumoured, marked the end of his forest. Theia thought of him and his inactive stance, thought of how now this great and mythical being was reduced to a coughing, tickling mass, and how it seemed to simply accept the fate humanity has cast upon it. She wished to reverse the pollution, to save the spirit, but she knew it was impossible now, she could smell his dying breath in the air. The smell of sweet smell of decay, of poisonous spores and encroaching scavengers coming to make home in the soon to be ruins of the Leshy's kingdom.
Theia sat up, looking to her feet, dead grass clinging with burs and clovers to her short red hair while she began to hum a lullaby to herself, hoping the dying forest could hear her as she felt she could hear it. Her feet bobbed to the rhythm and she began to sing;
"I know a pla-a-a-ce of fantasy-y-y,
Where the moon-and-the-stars-all-dance
Gleefully-y-y-y
Through their fortunate-luck-and-chance;
They will fa-a-ace eternity-y-y-y."
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Post by Emyr Sayer on Jul 8, 2015 22:38:10 GMT -5
"Who are you singing to?" Emyr asked quietly. He hadn't meant to be watching, he'd just been taking a little nap nearby when the girl he was fairly sure he didn't know had appeared. He had already adopted the forest as his place, in many ways, he'd led other students here when things went south, he slept here, he would defend it from intruders. There were many good reasons for him to feel connected to the forest, and having someone new sneak in and... sing to it? It confused him, and threatened him in ways that he wasn't entirely certain he could explain.
It was almost as if she was trying to seduce the forest, and the idea seemed patently absurd. What would the end goal of seducing a forest be? Was there some kind of forest-spirit that would talk to you, or something? He'd almost fancied himself as the forest spirit, though they hadn't known each other long. And Annabel hadn't mentioned a specific spirit of this forest, though her kind of spirits tended to be dead people. All in all, Emyr was just bemused at the entire situation.
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Post by Theia Lee Aithre on Jul 8, 2015 23:22:51 GMT -5
Theia looked over her shoulder to the boy who was watching her, keeping herself very immersed in song as she lifted a finger to him, either asking for his silence or for him to wait until she was done to be provided with an answer.
"I knew a pla-a-ace of fantasy-y-y
But by blood-and-malice-and-gore,"
she stopped, lowered her hand and looked up to the sky, furrowed her brows, and shook her head. "The kingdom-of-our-romance, reigns no more." She looked back to the boy and approached him, stepping lightly on the grass like a doe, seeming to be at one with the life around her. "The Leshy," she said softly once close enough to whisper, "we've killed him, I'm singing to apologize."
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Post by Emyr Sayer on Jul 8, 2015 23:51:51 GMT -5
Emyr took a minute to consider what she had said, before finally deciding that it didn't exactly make sense. Then again, a lot of witches and wizards were at least a little bit cracked, that didn't make them dangerous or anything. Annabel, for instance, seemed to commune with the restless dead, and yet was the gentlest soul you could hope to meet. He made a decision then to stop comparing the two, for that would inevitably not be fair to either of them. "Is the Leshy invisible?" That seemed like a fairly reasonable question to him.
"Also, why a musical apology? Is the Leshy a musical creature?" He didn't know exactly why he was so curious, but the alternative was to just let her strange statement sit, and he couldn't bring himself to do that. "Where'd you learn that song? I've never heard it before." He thought that was quite unusual, too. He knew a lot of folk songs, he'd collected them on his travels, and he'd never heard anything remotely similar to that one.
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Post by Theia Lee Aithre on Jul 9, 2015 0:18:09 GMT -5
"No," Theia replied in answer to his first question, again soft spoken and encouraging him to follow her example with a gentle hand movement downwards. "He can change his height and shape, he can hide in a forest if he chooses, but you can always find him if you search. Or he will find you, they enjoy playing jokes and laughter," she took out her wand and began lightly tracing its length with her finger, "And the song because that's what the forest gives you, song, listen closely and you'll hear a whole symphony."
She closed her eyes, listening herself, and then letting out a melancholic sigh, "It's Veela, or at least, that what my father told me. It could have been a lie."
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Post by Emyr Sayer on Jul 9, 2015 21:36:09 GMT -5
"And we killed him?" Emyr's voice softened, both out of an instinctive respect for the dead or dying, and because that seemed to be the way that this conversation was going. "How do you even kill a shapeshifter, except by complete accident? Seems like a semi-impossible task to me. And I haven't heard of any Leshy-hunters around here." He also hadn't heard of a Leshy until moments ago, but that was slightly beside the point. He understood the whole song thing, if you listen long enough he had already heard this forest play a couple of different tunes depending on what was happening in and around it. An actual symphony seemed both a ridiculous statement, and limiting on the part of the forest. After all, your average forest had many, many more players in it than any human orchestra. And the music it played was much older, too. "I had not known the Veela to be prolific musicians. Not in the traditional sense, anyway."
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Post by Theia Lee Aithre on Jul 9, 2015 22:05:38 GMT -5
She smiled softly at his naive, though reflective statement. Leshy hunters. How silly. "We, as a collective, acted as the hunters, Emyr." she said his name though not yet having been introduced as a slip of the tongue, she had more than once pried her ways into student records to learn about her classmates, thinking that the information could be helpful in some way or another throughout her life, to know about most all of her peers from her time in this institution. "Prolific may be the wrong word, though every child deserves a lullaby, no matter the race. Or species," she ran a hand through her ruby strands and plucked out a bur with her thumb and index finger, stuffing it into her cape pocket and giggling as something inside moved and let out a soft gurgling sound. "They're forest guardians, and can't be harmed by our traditional methods, though with the rise of smoke, human population, deforestation, the industrial revolution sparked something that we can't reverse and they all try to swallow our smog and fix our mistakes. Sadly, they often die in the process."
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Post by Emyr Sayer on Jul 12, 2015 21:52:45 GMT -5
Emyr thought he understood now. Either she was one of those slightly cracked people that frequently appeared at wizarding school, or she was going on about something that no one else had actually laid eyes on. Or she was being abstract and philosophical in the weirdest possible way. Then he realised that he hadn't told her his name, and his eyes narrowed. His paranoia, hardened into almost a weapon from its long and varied use was blaring at him incessantly. This more than a little weird girl that he hadn't met before knew his name, and how much else about him? Where had she obtained her information? What was her game, if it wasn't singing songs to possibly imaginary forest creatures? "Sounds like a pretty awful job to me," he said warily. There was also something living in her cape. This was rapidly approaching the upper limits of weird-stuff-he-could-handle.
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Post by Theia Lee Aithre on Jul 12, 2015 22:45:16 GMT -5
Theia cocked her head to the side, thinking this over and feeling his discomfort. Well, this wasn't how she'd wanted the conversation to go - and clearly this wasn't where he wanted it to go, so why did he even bother starting it if we was going to bring in this attitude? She sighed, straightened her back and extended her hand. "Aihre. Theia," she gave him a smile and looked back over the forest as the being in her cape let out a long mewling sound and jostled about for half a minute. "What are you doing out here?"
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Post by Emyr Sayer on Jul 12, 2015 23:31:39 GMT -5
Cautiously, he shook her hand and replied, "Sayer, Emyr. But apparently you already knew that." Now her cape seemed like it slightly wanted to eat her. He wouldn't say that it didn't concern him, but as long as whatever it was didn't decide it wanted to eat him, he'd let it be. "I slightly might sleep out here. It's nicer than my dorm, which has a very pitiful lack of stars in its ceiling." It was also a lot more vulnerable to weather changes, but he would worry about that when it actually started to snow. This was definitely the weirdest conversation that he had had whilst attending Cascade so far. Emyr wondered if someone would come along and claim that title in not too long.
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