Peering over the bank, she saw that they had a small clearing, meters wide, but adjacent to a hillock formed by many fallen and moss covered trees. Branches of living trees had been drawn out and pulled together to form a net of sorts above the underground chamber.
Little to no activity took place in the clearing between the creek and the shelter. Indeed, nothing remained there for very long at all.
Etelka freeing her blood-crusted hand from the foreleg of the deer she had shot, reached down and found the pouch where the ancient alien rings had been secured. Her fingers slid into them. They were too large and her fingers swam in them.
She stepped up and forward, climbing only on feet up the bank, into the small clearing, which was hardly a clearing: the broad arms of the oaks nearly twined (in the way that trees do—never actually touching), all but covering the space beneath.
“I come bringing a gift for your leader, you chief and you all.”
Half a dozen of them stood looking at her, as if she were the alien.
Millenia of special distrust had led them inward, to hide, to find the dark places where humans did not venture. With the ravages of the Time of the Tigers, this attitude was only strengthened.
As she entered their camp, Etelka had slipped the translation ring onto her finger. The fit was not at all good; it hung like a loose collar on her dainty, alabaster finger.
Etelka scraped back her tangled electric blue hair, brown at its roots, from her sweaty forehead. Her strategic bun had disintegrated yesterday. Now it was a twisted mat with an infusion of leaves and twigs.
“I come to you bringing a gift…” offering the meat “…I want to know about you, to put it succinctly.”
The reaction to her sudden appearance, though they had smelled her presence, came almost as a shock to Etelka.
“Have you seen my traveling companion, by any chance? Tallish, human, mustache that he fiddles with when he thinks.”
From a cavernous hole beneath layers of fallen trees, dug beneath roots and dark and full of [earthen] odors, stooped a large one of them, the creatures of the Black Forest.
When his head and shoulders had cleared the logs, he stood erect. He was without any sort of clothing; some of the smaller ones went with bands of leaves around their waists, but this one, this large one went entirely without.
He—clearly it was a ‘he’—stood twice as tall as the ones that had killed the three deer yesterday. Could this be the one that Nila fought? She wondered. It’s member was uninjured—a detail that Nila would contest. Although, her friend had insisted later that this individual—if indeed it was the same one—had powers to induce hallucinations. Etelka determined that she would be wary of mentalism.
Work in progress. Mistakes and misspellings are present. This is a very rough draft. Copyright 2021 Ion Fyr ionfyr.net
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Ion Fyr 