CHERNOBYL

She's been traveling for a day and a half or so. Meandering and reluctantly socializing with strangers. Only for information and nothing more. She finds no one interesting lately. Nothing seems at all attractive except for information, history, theories, stories, experiences – knowledge. She knows there's something hidden, something so unknown, in those hieroglyphs. Those other women in the cave with her that day knew it too. They're on the verge of discovering something, but what? Of what significance to anyone? She needs a break from the dank, moist halls of the dirty old caves though. Just for a day or two, she tells herself, and then she'll get back to it.

On her way out of the caves, days ago, she noticed another piece of the puzzle. She almost didn't want to acknowledge it at first, there's already so much swirling in her brain she didn't dare load it with more...oh, but she did. Those lines, placed so delicately and specifically, are moving and churning still, infecting her thoughts so she can see nothing else. She's almost like a robot, a shadow of her former more miserable self. Of course she's still a sarcastic dickhead and all, snarly, quiet and rather detached, but the pursuit of this thirst for knowledge has left her more social and more willing to do anything rather than  just hiding away in the lonely snows of the Steppe waiting on a man who will probably never return to her.

Upon her travel north-eastward she finds a quirky stranger in the woods. He's chanting and is followed by a hoard of big black ravens cawing and swooping all around him. She doesn't approach him and intends to skirt around the weirdo individual draped in leopard, caribou, beaver, otter and mink furs. Odd combination. “Come sit with me on my bear!” His loud voice cuts the quiet evening air. She bends an ear and tries to keep turning away as if she doesn't hear him. “Not so fast!” The figure, clinking, clanking and rattling from the charms and bones that hang from his furs and braided hair, comes dancing forward to chase her down. He's small and bronze furred (from what she can see on his legs and face), squirmy and skinny underneath his garb. Antlers adorn his head with moss, bells, feathers, nests, beads, ribbons, flowers gnarled into it. He's a rather indescribable sight, she notes. “Come, come!” He calls out again and this time he's very close, and closer, and now he's shooing her with a bobbing head, to move toward his small crackling fire and his big bearskin laid across the soft moss.

“Only if you tell me something.” She looks him in his ever changing eyes, they swirl with blue and turquoise and then gold and then the same abysmal black as her own. He nods hungrily, laughing maniacally and dancing away back to his rug and fire. “Come, come!” He yells again and she plods cautiously toward him, eyeballing him suspiciously as she sits down on her haunches, as if he's going to change into a demon or something. She keeps quiet and simply watches and waits for the opportune moment to ask him about the symbols. It's dusk now and the light fades fast while the weirdo  dances and tosses things that sparkle and twirl into the fire's licking flames. When will he let me speak? When is he going to speak..? Is this all we're going to do?


The next morning she wakes up on a bed of moss, no rug, no weirdo, she's alone and her ebony body is covered with a blanket of twinkling frost. She assumes she fell asleep...but cannot remember when? She doesn't remember anything but  sitting down and watching the fellow dance and chant and toss flammable things into the flames. At first her dark eyes flutter open happily and she can feel her bones, her mind, her flesh – all of it feels light and well oiled. Suddenly the shock of remembering something and nothing at all rushes into her and she clamors to her feet. A small circle of stones hold smoldering coals...the only clue to her 'dream' not being a dream. Her eyes widen.

“Runes.” She speaks dreamily to herself with a grin, something out of place on her usually scowling face. “They're called runes.” Again she speaks to herself, to nothing, to the stranger that might have been a hallucination.


Summary: She found a weirdo in the woods, a shamanic weirdo who could be a dream, hallucination, or real. Who knows. Not her. She's on the edge of Deep Forest; between Thistle Meadow and DF. But either way her brain clicked and she's discovered what Runes are called. Now she's going to go nuts over them, i'm sure.


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if i had a heart i could love you,
if i had a voice i would sing.