DAY 1 IS OVER. SHIO TAKES FIRST PLACE, RHIA TAKES SECOND PLACE, VAHN TAKES THIRD PLACE. Probably. I wasn't actually around and PPA won't tell me his progress. He seems doubtful.
VAHN POSTED HIS STORIES IN A NEW THREADS BUT MY STORY DOESN'T GET TO HAVE A LIFE OF ITS OWN. I only write bad stories about bad people anyway. And literally nothing happens yet. I hope it's purple enough.
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The woman woke from her slumber to the sounds of five crows circling above. She sat and searched her surroundings for the source of this noise, finding only the rotting carcass of some unfortunate dog's prey. The wild dog had been her prey the night before; the animal that could best sustain her, trapped as she was in this god-forsaken forest. Even the dogs had mostly learned to stay far from her territory, save for one or two fools who did not realize that she was a thing to be feared. But she had no use for that which was already dead. She supposed the crows feared her -- as they should. Nevertheless, she wished they would quickly silence themselves and take the wretched dead thing if they wished to so greatly. She certainly had no desire to stop them.
Though, the more she thought about the dog, the more sympathy she felt for it. The fact of the matter was that the entire forest was her territory. It was her land to walk, and within it she had few boundaries. There were few parts of this forest that she could not walk upon -- they were the lands where the seasons still changed. Here in the heart of the forest, it was autumn eternal. In the small fragments of forest beyond her reach, it could very well be a bitter winter. Where else would the poor dogs go to find their prey?
She recalled a memory from the time when she lived in the nearby village: without exception, during the winter months, the wild dogs would enter the village and attack anything living, and they would have to fight them off with their meager farming tools. It seemed like such a distant memory, now. The woman had no knowledge or awareness of how long she had stayed here; in this forest without the changing of the seasons or even the rising of the sun.
Where she grew up, they had a phrase that was often used: "Once in a blue moon." It meant something that happens infrequently, as it referred to the appearance of a second full moon in a month. There would never be a blue moon in this forest. Nothing unlikely or rare would ever happen here, so long as the dried autumn leaves crunched beneath her every step. Just as there was no winter in the forest, there was no night. Endless autumn, endless sunset.
She was taken abruptly from her thoughts by the stirring of the reddened leaves that still remained on the trees, and by the frenzied flapping of wings. She turned to where the crows had been circling and saw the four of them flying away. She wondered what had startled them so. It can't have been her, surely. If they had not fled when she first sat up, the slight movements she had made since then would not have been cause enough for alarm. Perhaps they had been surprised by a squirrel jumping suddenly from branch to branch. The squirrels certainly were not the smartest or most elegant of animals that lived in the forest. In fact, they were probably the stupidest, the clumsiest. She had seen many a squirrel miss their jump and fall to their deaths. The ground is too far for such small creatures. So why was it that they continued such risky behaviour? She could not comprehend the actions of lesser beings.
Humans, too, she found, were no longer comprehensible to her. Whether this change happened suddenly with her ascendance or gradually as a natural result of her seclusion, she could not know. Part of her did not wish to know. But part of her longed to understand that which she once understood -- a byproduct of the memories she had from when she was still human.
Though she felt that she had ascended into a higher form of existence from humans, a far superior living being, she wondered at times if her particular situation made her nothing more than a caged tiger, pacing endlessly back and forth in its tiny enclosure, waiting with great impatience for an opportunity to break free from the chains that bound such a great being to a life of such mediocrity.
She stood and began to walk through the forest, with no set destination. She did this often, though she was not yet sure if it was out of boredom or genuine interest in the current state of the forest, with all its proclivity towards the unending. At times she had toyed with the idea that her part of the forest had lost its flow of time, that it was trapped in this endless moment which just so happened to be close to the end of the day near the end of a somewhat warm fall season; but were that the case, the only living creature left to wander amongst the trees would be her. They would all be consumed by each other and her, and with no passage of time there would be no reproduction. Furthermore, she herself would be truly immortal -- an ageless being by virtue of existing only within a timeless realm.
As she walked, still occupied by memories from her time as a human, she began to hum a song. It was a song the elderly humans in her village often sang, and though she did not know the lyrics, she could still remember the title: "In the Gloaming." Such a title seemed fitting as she walked through the dead leaves, bathing in the minute twilight the sky-consuming trees permitted to pass through. She heard the scurrying of small animals fleeing at her arrival, and, startled by the sudden noise, ceased her humming. The existence of this song seemed meaningless to her now, anyway. Once she might have even sang along with others, but things were different now.
She soon reached a wide, rushing river that cut the forest in two. It was wide and fast enough that no creature incapable of flight or lacking expertise in swimming could possibly cross it, and on the other side was the land that could hear the season's call. It was not yet winter on the other side. Rather, it was mid fall, on a sunny day. Perhaps even morning or afternoon; she could not tell the difference.
She sat at the river's edge and put her hand into the water. The current was strong as ever. She wondered just how deep the river was, and what sorts of living creatures it housed. It was certainly wide enough that one would expect it to be home to some fairly large fish, but if it was too shallow there would be no chance of anything of a decent enough size for her to call a meal. It was at least as deep as she was tall -- she had found out that much by jumping in one day. Unfortunately, she could not swim well enough to resist the current's pull, and she never found out any more than that before being swept to the boundary of her territory, whereupon she was gifted with an immense pain like a bolt of lightning shooting up her spine, and then inexplicably found herself in the very center of the forest.
The first thing she did upon her so-called ascendance was, indeed, a testing of her apparent limitations. That is simply what one does when they are told they can not do something. The very first thing that they absolutely must do in such a situation is the very thing they were warned was impossible. Each time she came into contact with a boundary, inevitably, that was what she experienced. The pain followed by the perfect and complete disorientation of suddenly finding herself somewhere far from where she was just a moment ago, with no loss of consciousness to precede it. Her first experience with the boundary was followed by another attempt to cross it, which left her just as befuddled as the last had. After that, she ceased to entertain her delusions of escape, and resigned herself to her fate: an eternity in the forest of everlasting autumn twilight.
She gazed into the water, at what little she could perceive of her reflection on the water's surface. It was not much. Such a constant, violent disturbance offered her little of what she had hoped to perceive. There was a large mirror in a spacious shed she had cleared out and cleaned up, regardless. If she wished so strongly to see what she looked like today, she need only walk back and glance at the mirror. The shed had proven itself well worth the effort of cleaning out. Though shelter from the elements was never a concern in this forest, it was the only safe place she could put the apples she gathered from the trees. Anywhere else would end with them being eaten -- either by the crows or the numerous rodents.
Uninterested in attempting her previous experiment with the river's depth again, she stood and began to walk back the way she had come.
Next time a thing probably happens.
LCN WRITING WEEK, i had not a better name, sorry world.
Mar 25 2013, 03:00 AM
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Shiokazu LCN WRITING WEEK Mar 25 2013, 03:00 AM
