The soft forest floor was littered with vibrant bushes and flowers. Combined with the mystical columns of sunlight which managed to get through the leaves above, it was an eerie yet beautiful place.
Two people disturbed the scene somewhat, however. They pushed through the underbrush as quietly as they could, disturbing the slumber of small animals as they cracked twigs and rustled leaves with every step upon the soft, earthy ground.
A young woman was apparently leading the way. Faith was her name, and 19 years of age she was – not old by most standards, perhaps, but well into adulthood by theirs. She was a slender figure, barely covering her soft, lightly-tanned (if a little grubby) skin with an assortment of roughly-cut leather garments and poorly-made cloth leggings. Her boots appeared to be of higher quality, cut from soft leather and elegantly sown together with white stitching. She probably made them herself. Her scruffy, brown, shoulder-length hair occasionally dangled in front of her attractive face, which sported a pair of wide, dazzling green eyes.
The bow she carried in her left hand, and the fact that, despite her skin being soft and radiant, she was marked with dirt all over, suggested she spent a lot of time outdoors. Which was odd considering that typical women of the Ravenclaw tribe would traditionally have been ‘given’ to a husband by the age of 14. Her father was far from traditional, though. It may also be of some surprise that this forest dwelling girl was the daughter of a very powerful nobleman, though she rarely told anybody. Including the man called Vigil, who now followed her through the underbrush.
This fellow who followed her looked most uncomfortable in this natural environment, unlike Faith who appeared to revel in it. He was a noble, 35 years of age. He wore a decidedly more elegant, yet wholly impractical set of clothing. A white wrap-around toga-like piece of fabric covered his pale skin. It appeared to be made from silk, but by now it was so dirty and torn that it could have been made out of anything. Vigil was cautious with every step, apparently fearing the attentions of some imaginary carnivorous creature. This man had obviously never left his servants behind on any trip in his life.
“You stink, peasant!” Vigil suddenly blurted out, referring to the ‘natural’ odour which the woman carried with her. Years of exploring the forest and sleeping rough could do that to a person, of course. He was mostly irritated that yet another branch had torn into his silk clothing, though. Each time it happened, he found something new to complain about.
“There are no servants to bathe me out here, sire,” Faith sighed, not even stopping to look at him. “Ordinarily I would have taken a bath in the nearby river, but ‘somebody’ here in this forest has an inexplicable fear of nudity… besides, some people quite like the smell…”
“Well it is common dignity!” the man harrumphed. “You do not simply strip off in a pond – it is simply not done!”
“Dignity?” Faith said thoughtfully. “That’s what nearly forced us to turn around and go back to the city because you couldn’t excrete without the presence of a dozen servants and a golden pot, isn’t it? Seems like a pretty useless concept to me.”
“That is why I am the noble and you are the peasant,” the man said abruptly. He appeared pleased with himself, though it faded quickly when she didn’t respond how he might have liked her to – she allowed a branch to whip back into his face, lashing his forehead.
The two kept walking for some time in silence once again, pushing through the lush forest at a decent pace. It was quite obvious that Faith was physically fit, having lived outdoors for the majority of her life. The nobleman was on the opposite end of the spectrum, having never lifted a finger in his life, and thus his slightly protruding gut was more of a hindrance than anything else. He puffed and panted, sauntering along quite slowly as he occasionally tripped on logs, and sweating so much he rivalled the moisture of the world’s largest waterfall.
Faith sighed as she heard yet another tear followed by an angry growl. Any second now…
“Are we nearly there yet? Do you even know where they are?” he shouted. He stopped walking as she turned around and furrowed her pretty face into an uncharacteristic scowl.
“Listen here ‘gold toothed man’,” she snapped. “This entire forest is my home and I know it better than anyone alive. If you would stop moaning loudly enough to attract the attention of every single predator in the entire forest, we would get there a lot sooner!”
Vigil looked angry at first, shocked that any would speak to him in such a fashion. His face then suddenly turned to an expression of child-like worry.
“Every… single… predator…?” he gulped. She pulled her full lips up in a mischievous grin as she saw his face.
“Oh yes,” she nodded. “Can’t you smell them? Or hear them? We are being followed by many wild cats, and even a couple of bears I would say.”
“…are you certain?” he asked.
“You really can’t smell them?” she asked. “They are definitely there. We are downwind of them, fortunately, but you carry on shouting and you’ll give away our position. You must stop talking – I can’t shoot them all, there are too many!” She tapped her bow gently, and thought to herself, nor can my sanity take much more of it.
“But we must…”
She stopped him by holding up her hand, looking around as she heard something.
“What now?” he demanded nervously.
“Shh, I can hear something,” she whispered, cupping one of her ears. She dropped to a crouch, dipping into the underbrush. Reluctantly, the nobleman did the same thing.
“What is it?” he hissed.
“Can’t you feel that? The ground is rumbling, ever-so slightly…” she said, placing her delicate fingers against the ground and digging them into the soil. “A herd of animals is nearby, I think. Big animals. And can you smell smoke…?”
She turned her head and sure enough, a big plume of black smoke was forming aove the trees some distance behind them. Even Vigil heard a loud explosion coming from that direction. He nearly jumped into a tree as he span his head in response.
“Let’s run in that direction!” Vigil whispered loudly, pointing in the exact opposite direction to the plume of smoke and the strange sounds.
“Very brave of you, sire,” Faith said mockingly. “No, we must head that way. If it is a forest fire we must douse it. If it is something else… we must warn the city.”
Despite his protests, the two began the long trek towards the plume of smoke. They stopped only for a drink as they passed a lake, and then continued towards it. The closer they got, the louder the sounds became and the more they could feel the ground shaking as though a herd of elephants were running nearby. It wasn’t until they were quite close that the sounds simply stopped. The two paused for a while, waiting in the bushes as they imagined some large predator was going to jump out at them at any second. But nothing happened, and the plume of smoke began to get thinner as the minutes went by.
Faith was the first to push some branches aside and look into the clearing. The crackling of fire was quite near now, and tantalisingly curious. She fell backwards and began to breathe quickly almost as soon as she did.
“What is it?” Vigil asked, working himself into a panic.
“I… don’t know,” she gasped. “I have never seen anything like it before. It looks dead, but…”
Vigil plucked some courage from deep within himself, and stepped forwards, pushing aside the bushes.
He was presented with a curious scene. A large clearing in the forest, apparently not a natural clearing, had apparently become a graveyard for a large number of peculiar creatures. These creatures were not like any he had seen before, though. They were huge metal beasts, with no recognisable features whatsoever. They had a series of wheels beneath them, with strange belts stretched around them, and large, thin ‘noses’ protruding from the front. Or at least, what he thought was the front.
All of the metal corpses burned, with smoke and fire spewing from their various orifices, their metal skulls cracked open horribly as though hit with the force of the gods themselves. Some of them even had what looked like dead people hanging out of their ‘heads’.
“They look to be dead,” Vigil whispered back. Faith stood up and cautiously poked her head out of the bushes, as she reached to her quiver to obtain an arrow. When she was satisfied that she couldn’t smell, see or hear anything other than the flames that burned on these strange creatures, she stepped out into the clearing for a closer look and nocked the arrow and aiming her bow up a little. Vigil stepped out after her, apparently taking cover behind the woman like a coward – whatever spark of bravery he’d momentarily found had apparently dissipated.
“What manner of beasts are these…?” Faith pondered out loud. She reached out and gently touched the hot metal husk of one of the beasts with her fingertips, half-expecting it to roar to life and devour her. No such thing happened. It was cold to the touch.
“They look like man-eating monsters, made from metal,” Vigil said, and pointed at one of the ‘monsters’ that had a dead man hanging from a hatch on the top. Though charred and disfigured, the man wore dirty green clothes of a style neither of them had seen before. “Look, it has regurgitated one of them in its death throes.”
They surveyed the devastation, avoiding the masses of debris while looking at each of the beasts in turn. They were nearly finished looking at each of them for clues as to what they were, when Faith dropped down once again.
“I hear something, coming closer,” she whispered. He nodded, feeling the vibrations in the soft ground also. A deep rumbling sound, growling and growing louder by the minute. “Get back behind the trees, quickly.”
The two scrambled across the ‘graveyard’, jumping over chunks of metal and shattered logs and plunged back into the forest.
Their timing couldn’t possibly have been better. No sooner than Faith’s soft leather boots plunged into the underbrush did one of the massive metal creatures smash through the tree line on the other side of the clearing. It rumbled and growled menacingly as it moved rather mechanically on its ‘tracks’, its head and absurdly long nose turning from one side to the other. Faith held up a moistened finger, making sure they were downwind of the enormous, menacing creature. Two men – dressed in similarly bizarre clothes to the one protruding from the dead beast – walked ahead of the beast, carrying strange black sticks purposefully in both hands.
Another creature burst out just behind that one, following it. They dodged whatever debris they could, or simply smashed into the broken husks of their fellow species and rammed them to one side. Seven of the creatures rumbled across the clearing before disappearing into the forest on the other side, leaving a foul smell in their wake. They appeared to stick to areas of the forest with young trees, so they could simply plough their way through. But this meant that it would take them a very long time to get even close to the city.
“You have to return to the city, while I scout around for more of them,” Faith said after a while, standing up once the metallic monsters were gone. “Do you remember the way?”
“Did you see those people on the tops of those creatures…?” Vigil asked. “They looked to be controlling them… and those people walking ahead of them were doing so without being attacked…”
“We can think about it later, but you have to run,” Faith said. “They didn’t look very friendly, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they killed those other creatures. Now go!”
Vigil looked panicked. He was still tired from their many days of hiking. He had no idea where Faith got her energy from, but now it was his turn. He struggled to bring his considerable mass up to a high speed as he burst into a sprint, following their trail back home.
Faith walked back into the clearing and watched him leave, and seemed to calm down a little. I’d rather have monsters of metal than that fool following me around, she thought, as she set off in pursuit of the rolling creatures. She had to find out where they were going, what they wanted, and how much damage they were doing to the forest.
((Map of the lands that Tribe Ravenclaw inhabit:
This is happening somewhere in the southern area of the Great Northern Forest, where it meets the Big Open.
The peoples of Tribe Ravenclaw have been isolated from civilisation for thousands of years and have technologically stagnated. There are less than a million people on that entire island.))
