Echoes of a tragedy...

[Noa]

AldrickFV
Sometimes the good
guys wear black
Posts: 207
(5/5/02 8:56 pm)
Reply | Edit | Del All  Echoes of a tragedy...
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The limbs of the great tree creaked as they were stretched wide, the smaller branches spreading out like fingers as Xanuusus payed homage to the setting sun, wind softly rustling through his leaves.

He was one of the ancient ones, and his roots ran impossibly deep, capable of drawing water from the distant rivers during those rare times when Karana denied the plains his lifegiving downpours. Though he could see quite a distance from the top of his trunk, almost to the well worn road the merchant caravans used, he could also 'feel' events that transpired throughout the plains, his roots carrying the knowledge slowly back with minerals and nutrients. But, as all trees, time was experienced in a manner far different to that of men, and what seemed an eternity to them was to him, but a blink, leaving him unable to interfere on Karana's behalf save when events occurred very close by or when the events themselves continued on for quite some time.

Such it was that the great tree 'felt' a man stepping off the screaming bridge (as the Treants oft referred to the enormous wooden bridge between the Eastern and Northern Karanas, crafted from the rotting carcasses of their slain elders). The man felt familiar, one of the many farmers who lived in the area, returning from a trip to the outposts in Eastern Karana.

Across the plains, the tree also 'heard' the screams of a woman and child as the wooden door of a farmhouse began to buckle under the beating fists of the ghoul outside. The sky was dark and full of heavy clouds, making the eerie glow of the Jack O' Lantern's face even more horrifying as it peered through the windows, laughing maniacally, seaching for the residents within with the unholy light spilling out from it's eye sockets.

It was still an hour or so before the farmer finished the journey back to what was now the burning wreckage of his farmhouse. Xanuusus felt the man's anguish as he looked in horror at the nearly unrecognizable forms of his wife and daughter.... He felt the trees nearby struggling to recoil from the orange flames which lept into the air from the crackling wood frame of the house... And he heard the haunting echoes of the jack o' lantern, laughing maniacally, it's head bobbing up and down as it paraded around the plains continuing it's merciless slaughter...