Bramble Falls down the trail to somewhere

Halloween RE, for anyone who wants to meet Cézanne!
Walking through the woods, you hear some strange noises. Dusk, light rain — Current Temperature: 39° F/4° C

The shadows had ceased to chase each other across the ground, for there was no light to cast them. Clouds lay thick across the sky, and the sun had disappeared in the west, lingering somewhere on the murky horizon, but unable to break through. A thick, moist kind of gloomy darkness had taken up residence beneath the trees, her breath steaming into the humid air, mist gathering like an ethereal veil just along the forest floor. It swirled around her wet limbs, rising from the earth even as the drizzle tried to tug it down again, clinging to her fur and turning it cold, and clammy. The pitter-patter of rain drops falling on old leaves muted out the other sounds of the world. It almost seemed like the world held its breath, growing quiet and distant, simply listening to the incessant rain.Her fur steamed, too.Compelled by the silent force of the world Cézanne grew motionless, ears and eyes sweeping around, but seeing nothing—finding nothing. Slowly her head tilted to the side. When you stripped life down to the bone, it was simple, even as a lone wolf: the basics were the same. Food, heat. Security.Her lips were set into a grimace.She had nothing, now. Belly empty, fur wet, night approaching; out in the rain. Her breath rose in front of her eyes. Life was simple, but it wasn't easy. This, she knows.But being a wolf means being tough.

A breeze rose from the depths, ran its cruel fingers through her fur, combed it for heat and snatched at it greedily. It smelled stale, of something too-far decomposed. It wasn't even an attractive scent, more like something bloated and destroyed. A waste, her stomach informed her, and her lips peeled back further—a flash of bony white in the gathering dark. The playful wind stroked her face, breathed its rotten stench in her nose, then, with a startling force it wheeled around, pushing at her from behind. Claws scrabbled against wet earth, soil and mud staining legs and belly, and Cézanne kept worming through the wet woods. Tonight, with her fur plastered against her strong frame, she felt more like a maggot crawling through life's corpse than a queen pacing her halls, a kind of metaphor that suited her slinking gait and rhythmic, rolling motion. You could never be too light on your feet when your nose was blocked and your ears, too.Fifty paces later, a rushing noise had her pausing, ears playing to a sound much like thunder—but there was no heavy rain, no lightning, and the air didn't smell of static. Her nose drew in the air, but it still smelled of water and something dead, and it was the kind of choice you had to do at least once every day: take the risk, or take the safe path?Cézanne wasn't meant for the kind of life that meant you grew old.In fact, at times like this, she marveled that she'd come this far at all.With the bitter wind in her ears, and the rain in her fur, she forced the frost-blackened growths to flatten beneath her paws, moving from trunk to trunk with eyes gleaming in the dark—so alert now, tasting every breath before expelling it again.The noise grew louder.

Her walk was more of a crawl, a skulk through a world she didn't trust, with wet branches dragging along her sides. She'd thought she'd left that forest behind, abandoned it and its clinging embrace, but it seemed like every tree loomed in closer, bending in over to cage her; the fog ran like liquid over the ground, driven by the strengthening wind, urging it and her towards whichever fate awaited them: trunks groaned and it whistled through the hollows. There was no way she could keep slow when the world told her to run. Startled by a sudden, cold push, Cézanne bolted forward a few steps—and nearly fell into the roaring river, digging her toes in at the muddy bank, catching her balance while eye-to-eye to with the bloated, fish-eaten corpse of an elk.And still the forest sang its haunting hymn, as if the cold winds heralded the arrival of one of the Underworld's lords.

Edit: the elk is shored up against a trunk/roots or something trapped in the river, otherwise it wouldn't remain in place. xP

(This post was last modified: Nov 06, 2013, 08:47 AM by Cezanne.)

From the combination of drizzle, diving temperatures and murky dark, the night was a miserable one. And yet, there was something in the air. A tension spread out over the area, thick but invisible and adscititiously nameless. If one were to ask him to, Erebos would not be able to describe it, but his most primal instincts understood clearly. Inside of him, this electricity reeked of menace, and that was what kept him out of cover and traveling deeper through the coppice.

Surely something impressive would be occurring tonight; such an atmosphere would encourage and ensure it. Erebos was on the hunt for such a happening, looking for anything that could snag his attention and thrill him, even if only for a moment. The anticipation pressed his gait into a trot, his entirety on high alert for anything unusual. There was no wait; the deeper he traveled through Ghastly Woods, the louder the air crackled with that occult semaphore.

His surroundings became identical to the ones his father would describe when sitting down the Argyris brothers for a haunted tale. A chill worked its way through his skin, and a new feeling settled in, one that made it seem as though he were approaching a precipice of sort; as if something incredible were about to happen. It occurred to him how fabricated these physical emotions most likely were, but he pulled out his inner optimist and thought maybe what he was sensing was very much real.

Then something broke the spell. Over the odd sounds and through the ethereal galvanism came a burst of solid noise as another beast broke cover and rush forth somewhere to his left. Erebos froze for a second, caught off guard, before breaking his own transfixed stride. He charged toward the sound, breaking through the tree line and onto the running clays of a bloated river bank. Just as abruptly, Erebos dug in his claws and came to a halt, lifting sunrise eyes to take in a woman and a putrefying carcass caught at the water's edge.

Odd, but he'd take it.

"If the fireflies were still alive, this could be romantic," he joshed, keeping his position; he didn't wish to get much closer to what was left of the elk.

The stench of wasted death was all up in her nose, digging its tiny hooks into her senses and washing through her mind. It was unpleasant, the clammy head glistening softly even though there was no light; Cézanne balanced precariously on the edge, and on her toes, for a moment longer before rocking back into safety. She even went so far as to sink down on her heels, a tingle passing from the cold ground and up to her nerves as the fog slid past and onto the vivid waters.It was almost disturbing. Certainly, one of the stranger things she had experienced.Noise had her bouncing back up on all four, a fluid motion somehow propelling her backwards at the same time. Stance ready, paws wide, her eyes snapped onto the source with a predator's accuracy—for a moment he could've been the spitting image of death, clad in pale ivory and streaks of darker gray, with eyes just barely betraying the burning fires of Hell.. but he was just another mortal. Mortal, just like she.His voice was a contrast to the setting, and something about it struck the spot which always fired up her irritation. Fireflies? Romantic? She hardly found weird, liquid-like fog and dead, stinky elks, romantic. Someone else might've thought who am I to judge?, but she is Cézanne—she is the world's judge, condemnation always close at hand in her bright eyes.

» Hardly, « she replied, voice cool. Slowly she abandoned her splayed stance, lifting her head up and ears forward. The distance between them was nothing, when you considered the vastness of the world.

Or maybe not he thought in the face of her frigid reception. It only served to make things truly uncomfortable as her dismissal of his amiable attempt created a near-suffocating space of silence. His gaze inevitably wandered back to the ultimate source of discomfort; that waterlogged carcass. He wondered mildly how it came to be there, but the circumstance itself wasn't all that interesting. It was merely how unnatural its current presence was that caused an unsettling feeling to dominate the air.

Exhaling audibly, Erebos once more tuned into the woman that shared this scene.

"My mistake, then," he responded dryly, voice free of the forced humor it had previously held. If she wasn't going to be bite, what was the use in throwing out a line? He supposed he'd let this be a boring encounter if that was what she so desired. Shame she couldn't enjoy a joke, however.

"Do you care for company?"

It sure didn't seem so, but he supposed he'd risk asking. The worst she could do was give him a snappy no, and at that point he'd dismiss himself. Or maybe she'd grudgingly allow some interaction and things would prove more entertaining than one could expect. It certainly never hurt to play with optimism.

Ugh, Céz. You're the kind of character that makes it hard to thread, you know that?

He knew his place, now—at least, so she hoped. The bite of her voice had silenced his idiocy, a blessing upon her ears, and now if only the rest of the world would shut up, too: the water gurgled and roared, the trees creaked and swayed, that hymn filling the entire forest... Her teeth were locked together. In the face of this, she was powerless.Bright eyes remained upon him, even as he looked away, and Cézanne's lips curled into a grimace of sorts. Why did she always land herself in strange company? Or was it simply so that the world was full of idiots, and her old home some kind of well-bred sanctuary?Oh, but you forget, Cézanne—you've done away with or corrected those with offensive behavior.We're all a plague on this earth.That orange gaze returned, and the she-wolf felt the fur on her neck bristle slightly. Audacious. She should bite his nose for it—but she didn't move. Stoic and frigid, she refrained from replying. Only fools needed confirmation of the own truths they spoke. And—what's that? An ounce of sense, of keeness, a kind of honesty she hadn't met in a long time. Interest caused her ears to perk and twitch, lantern-eyes sharpening as they honed in on his well-framed face. A male, with courtesy. Where she gladly would have discarded his company, the very question asking for it had her wondering if maybe, just maybe, he couldn't stay—for a little while.

The cold, rugged wind blew harder.» That, « she began, eying him all the while as the wind blew through her thick fur,
» —depends entirely on your..ambitions. « It wasn't quite what she had intended to say, she realized, and furrowed her 'brows. She, however, refused to look away from him, even when contemplating the way her tongue had softened the blow of her capable mind—or maybe it was just interested in her own survival. Commanding strangers sometimes had unfortunate side effects. Quietly, with the same keen kind of strength behind her eyes, she watched him, trying to read his reaction.

(This post was last modified: Nov 17, 2013, 11:18 AM by Cezanne.)