Side A – Nia
Nia has never been hit by every single tree in the Darkwood but as she opened her eyes she was pretty certain she knew exactly what such a beating would feel like.
“Okay, that was not my best idea ever,” she said, blinking and struggling to get her eyes to focus properly.
“We’re not falling any more at least,” Yasgrid said before adding an uncertain, “I think.”
Nia succeeded in both opening her eyes and getting them to focus on more or less the same point together.
Which seemed wrong somehow.
Because she was seeing trees. Not the graceful pines of the the Stoneling lands she’d grown used to over the last few months, but trees which looked like they’d be right at home in the Darkwood, except they were much too big.
Or she was much too small.
She looked down at her hands to confirm the horrid guess that part of her already knew to be true.
“I have squirrel hands,” she said. “Why do I have squirrel hands?”
“To go with the rest of you I would guess,” a wren said. Or Yasgrid. Because wren’s can’t speak and the voice Nia was hearing was clearly a familiar one.
“Are you a bird?” Nia asked. They’d been through a number of weird experiences together, but this one felt stranger than most.
“I seem to have feathers and I believe a beak, so tentatively I am going to say yes.”
“What…what did I do?” Nia said.
“Learned something new about Shatter Drumming?” Yasgrid suggested.
“Is this a thing that can happen?” Nia asked.
“It hard to argue that it can’t give our current situation isn’t it?” Yasgrid hopped down from the branch she was standing on to land beside Nia who found herself in a nest about halfway up one of the great housing trees.
Above her no lights sparkled, suggesting that they weren’t in the one of the inhabited portions of the Darkwood. Or at least not inhabited by elves.
“Okay, if I’m not the first person to mess up this spectacularly, then does that mean there’s a simple method of fixing it?” Nia asked. “Or any method?”
Yasgrid looked around at several different things which were not Nia.
“There might be, but if so I don’t know what it would be,” she said. “Also we might be the first to do this. We. Not just you. If this is a mistake, I’m just as much to blame. Maybe moreso. Unfortunately I don’t recall hearing about anyone else Shatter Drumming in their dreams and getting any magic out of it.”
“Uh, really?” Nia asked, dreading the response she knew was coming.
“Dreaming about drumming isn’t uncommon. For serious players, it’s a serious part of their life and we tend to dream about things that are important to us,” Yasgrid said with a shrug of her birdy shoulders. “I’ve had lots of dreams with drumming in them, usually either I’m messing up a song at a concert or dropping a drum off thousand foot cliff. I don’t always notice the lack of magic in the dream, but when I wake up its really obvious that I wasn’t playing a real drum.”
“Uh,” Nia said. “Then what the heck was I doing?”
Side B – Yasgrid
It was a fair question Nia asked, just not one Yasgrid had anything like an answer for. Also, it didn’t seem to be the most pressing concern before them.
“Do Troubles typically eat squirrels and wren’s?” Yasgrid asked.
“I don’t think so, who do you…oh,” Nia said letting her gaze follow Yasgrid’s down to the forest floor where a squad of five Definitely-Not-Elves were marching in single file.
“That’s not how Troubles usually move,” Yasgrid said.
“No. Not it is not.” Nia said, visibly resisting the urge to scramble down the tree after them.
“Yeah, I want to know where they’re going too,” Yasgrid said and took flight.
It shouldn’t have been that easy, and yet one moment she was perched on a branch and the next she was aloft, her body understanding perfectly how to make things work.
“Try to stay out of their sight,” Nia said. “Even if they don’t normally kill forest animals, we might be the exception.”
Yasgrid suspected they wouldn’t be. She had nothing to base that on, but her intuition seemed to think they were well hidden in their current state.
Diving down to build up some speed, she flitted around a tree and through the branches of another before finding the parade of Troubles again.
They each bore the semblance of an elf, probably the one they’d sprung from. The semblances only went so far though. In one, its outlines were smeared, as though it were drawn from a dark ink and wiped partially away before it managed to dry. Another moved not by walking but rather oozing from one step to another, as though it were a viscous blob only approximating the shape of its originator. All the rest had similar signs that they were malignant sketches of the elves they’d been split apart from, and none of them made Yasgrid feel like she wanted to get closer or spend more time in their presence.
Not by their outward appearance at least.
Down deep though, once all the twisted, agonized magic was stripped away from them, Yasgrid knew something else lurked within.
A bird’s heart didn’t seem capable of carrying those fragments, nor were her wings configured to bear a crystal sword, but she drifted down to a lower branch anyways to follow them more closely.
“Those did not come from the same elves,” Nia said, catching up with quick squirrel leaps and bounds. “They’re built for different hunting styles too. There’s no reason they should be working together.”
“There is one,” Yasgrid said. They were away from the cities and villages of the elves, in a forgotten corner of the Darkwood. There wouldn’t be anyone here for the Troubles to feed on. Which meant there was a compulsion in play. Someone was ordering the Troubles to walk they path they did and stay at peace with one another, and Yasgrid knew only one person who could manage that.
“Let’s go find Elshira,” she said and took wing once more.