>>5779521>>5779506>>5779504>>5779494>>5779484>>5779478>>5779454>>5779449>>5779440>>5779435>>5779409>>5779328>>5779310>>5779309>>5779304>>5779301>>5779298>>5779291>>5779281>>5779277>>5779276When you returned to Hawksong, to the Tower, you were still alive with excitement, exhilarated in spite of the exhaustion of your long walk home. And, of course, you had to inform Logan Pearce immediately—even though by then it was nighttime, and it meant waking him up.
“Easy there, Tips,” he said holding up both hands.
‘Tips’. Your nickname—not often used anymore or even then, but an early one from years prior, and one Pearce had clung to for just such occasions as that. Your ears—pointed at their TIPS—twitched slightly as if in recognition. You scrunched your nose, then shrugged it off, and that gae HIM pause.
“Damn, you ARE in a rare mood,” he laughs. “okay, okay, tell me slowly, like I’m some dumb human or something.”
“You are,” you said with a grin, “but I like you well enough anyway. But here, enough, LISTEN…”
Up on the hilltop, leaned against the old maple and breathing in an incense made of sacred herbs, trimming taken from around the area, and the bark of the maple itself, you had slept, woken, and slept again, eating and drinking little. The only words you spoke were the sacred ones—the old ones, elven ones, at dawn and at dusk. Giving into your natural circadian rhythms, you had woken with the sun, fallen asleep with the sun, and gradually become one with the world—
“Boooring,” Pearce remarked, with a genuine yawn. “You’ll put me back to bed with this elven mumbo-jumbo, you know that?”
You glared, and he grinned apologetically, though he didn’t say sorry. You thumped his arm one, and the sturdy boy feigned pain for your benefit, You continued.
“Well what happened next was NOT boring,” you told him. “See, it was on the very last day before I was ready to give up and head back that I saw it—at dusk!”
What you’d seen had, at first, seemed like a trick of the light. The shadows had moved queerly, seeming to shift in odd angles, different than what the cast light of the rising sun should have elicited. The hue had been wrong, too, and the shadow of that old maple had draped over you—despite being BEHIND you, on the OPPOSITE side of the sun, so that it should have been impossible. And in those shadows you had seen them…
“Spriggans!” you whispered excitedly.
“Yeah?” asked Logan Pearce, uncertainly. “Is that… Good!”
You had spied them in silhouette, in implication, as voids in the thin, rising smoke of your incense, where the uncanny shadow of the maple tree intersected with sun and with that smoke. And the incense, it was dying! You’d hurried to replenish it, but in your haste, you’d knocked it over, breaking whatever spellcraft had wreathed the place. When you looked up, the world was as it had been-normal, material, mundane.
