- The Great Woods were truly massive: Thousands of square kilometres of primeval woods, most of them absolutely uninhabited, with only a few outskirts settled by a few hermits and a group of Selkie known as the Children of the Great Woods. They had been place of many battles over the many centuries of Selkie-History.
One of them had been the Rape of Milleadh, a little village, that had become the target of a Captain of Silverport's Militia during the War of the Great Woods.
His men had pillaged and plundered and killed and did unspeakable things to the villagers - one of which cursed them and their kin, according to legend: The Ghosts of the men, who attacked the peaceful village, would move out of their camp once every full moon in summer, to rape the village, but they would not find it, for its smouldering ruins would soon be forgotten, the husks of houses reuniting with the earth blessed by Rhiannon.
Enraged by the sacrileges commited by the raiders, Carman Fea Herself took the matter into Her own hands, the Goddess of War and Science punishing these men with the curse laid out by the villager.
And soon, the story became legend in the deep woods.
Fast forward roundabout a thousand years...
It was the newest craze from abroad: WhoTubers would go out and challenge the wilderness of the Free Lands of the Selkie, in particular of the Great Woods, by camping out there. Quite a few had uploaded videos of fun trips already, many of which had been rather undangerous (with the exception of one, who had confused the Selkie-Waitress in an inn on their trip there with a waitress from his homecountry, his friends filming, how he had stroked her rear as she had bent over the table to distribute the food, end result being said WhoTuber's arm being stapled to the table with a dagger by his sleeve) and quite amusing. Most of them even had Selkie-WhoTuber or two with them, who of course knew, what to do and not to do in their homecountry.
This group did not have a Selkie with them.
Walking down the dusty street towards their camping spot, the only thing in their way was an old man in green robes, a brown padded tunic underneath it. He sat on the path, a quiver full of arrows on his back, sitting in the bright summer sun, temperatures of nearly thrity degrees. A bow rested on his one side, his legs folded under him, his eyes closed.
He knew, what WhoTube was, but he had no interest in that - he was a Child of the Great Woods (for a given definition of the term 'child', as the case was).
When the group passed him, he mumbled out loud: "The animals are restless.", he spoke, his accent in English thick, rolling Rs and dropped vowels, sounding a lot as if he had a shoe in his mouth. "A storm will come this full-moon night."
