(mild cw for ??? themes. a little violent daydreaming. idristan belongs to @roses-and-grimoires and helivant is @thedarknesssings
all of this was written and posted on mobile. help)
The hunt is underway. Somewhat.
You, Huntsman, you crouch atop the goliath remains of a Shroud treant, hunkered down into the gnarled grey branches of its crown like an opo-opo in the midst of its myriad games. The treant’s petrified husk sits at rest on the crest of a slope overlooking Larkscall, the perfect vantage point if you have a quarry to find and the patience to burn. Today you have both, each objective tied neatly together by a simple, unquestionable, unfailing motivator: Helivant is waiting.
Somewhere on the winding paths of the forest’s eastern reaches strolls your day’s prey, some pale thing with a sneer engraved on his high-boned Ishgardian face, like a quail puffed beyond its station. You know without knowing how that he will pass by here on his way to wherever his business demands; the only question left is the when. This is where you come in, Huntsman, rifle against your shoulder unmoving as the treant in which you have perched since the early morning. It is up to you to sound the signal that sends the quail fluttering.
Luckily for you, you are good at waiting, and the dead don’t sleep. Despite this, you still drift. You wouldn’t call it sleep by any stretch of the imagination, yet it is still an absence, a removal of you from the moment. Sometimes when you close your eyes, you imagine you can still see with both. That the empty socket of your right still holds something that isn’t the cold curse that has followed you out of slumber and into the Black Shroud’s twisting confines. The forest’s fragrant leaf rot isn’t enough to break the illusion of the thought when it comes, and oh, when you blink against the afternoon light filtering down through the canopy, it comes.
You dream in vivid, violent pieces, glass shards of memory small but razor-edged. In this dream you can see for malms, with an unbroken clarity bordering the impossible and if you just squint you swear you could pick out the veins on the leathery wings of a wyvern wheeling in flight through the cloudless sky of a frigid Coerthan morning. You see everything.
In these little dreams, you imagine yourself smiling with a cocksure tilt to your mouth when you assure yourself aloud, I could take it. You see yourself hefting the familiar weight of the rifle in your warm hands like a threat- not to yourself, but to the gods and the dragonkin gliding unaware over the painted mountains. In these dreams, you are not alone. In these dreams, there is always someone beside you, a dark figure in your periphery you can never quite catch enough of a glimpse of to identify. You can only determine that their presence is a warmth in itself, a weight in this dreamworld to balance your own and every time you try to turn and see, to look, you open your eyes.
Wake up, Huntsman. Wake up, even though you do not sleep in the dark of the night nor in the quiet of a warm day. You’re never certain if what you feel each time you awaken is relief or regret. Memories or dreams, you’ve grown to dread the coming of these contextless slices of a life that is not your own, these shades of an existence you cannot recall. Waking is a blessing. Waking is a relief.
Nothing has changed on the shrouded paths when next you open your eyes. It has only been moments since you blinked. It has only been seconds. Your imperfect vision renders the forest around you in a smear of greens and shadowed trunks like pillars marching out of sight and out of your limited range. Cataracts cloud your remaining eye, painting the world in a haze as though you were looking at it out of smudged and frosted glass, but the figure that has appeared to stand below your perch, the sharp lines of Helivant himself, you can see in perfect clarity.
Here is where your piecemeal dreams cannot compare:
Helivant cuts a vivid, violent figure in the ruined cast of your vision, the lines of his limbs so sharp you could cut yourself on them. Point of fact, you have. Sometimes, like now, you reach out for a lock of his raven’s wing hair but stop short. Your hands are stained, Huntsman, blood and gunpowder caked into the cracks and creases of your fingers under the forest dirt and you cannot touch anything so clean, so neat without staining it irrevocably, so you don’t. So you, empty cold you, must settle with merely watching the sway of his gleaming black hair where the breeze touches it, soft as a lover’s sigh. You watch it until movement on the paths below snags your peripheral like a jagged hook and pulls you back ‘round.
An elezen with pale hair walks the Shroud, and for a moment, for a breathless instant you see overlaid on the world a steel corridor, blockaded by men in shining white. In this waking dream a man with white hair is pointing a pistol at you and you, you, you, the you in the Shroud and the you facing down this execution line, you are deafened by an unending tinny tone squealing on and on and on in the tight confines of your skull. Wonder, distantly, if this is what panic felt like. Your rifle is heavy in your hands; you don’t remember picking it up, but its weight is reassuring, and your finger hovering over the trigger brings you an easy peace precious few things inspire in these grey days.
Breathe, Huntsman. Between one blink and the next, the corridor vanishes, but still you raise the rifle’s stock to your shoulder and level it on the white-haired elezen below. Breathe. Imagine the satisfaction, the vicious fucking relief that surely awaits at the end of your barrel if you could just pull the trigger and render the man below into pulp. Imagine that you still remember what victory feels like. Breathe.
This is not your prey, Huntsman. Pull up, force the barrel out of its deadly focus and up into the trees. Stealth is not the priority here, remember; this is Helivant’s sport. This is a chase.
You fire into the sky. The explosion of the rifle’s report sets the Shroud to buzzing as its denizens scramble to flee or prepare for a fight. The shriek of the countless birds churning above drowns out the roar of your shot, a thousand throats and the beat of a thousand thousand wings making the canopy roil in deafening waves. The underbrush some fulms to your side erupts in the same instant and the space where Helivant had stood only seconds ago now churns, the land crushed under the weight of something serpentine and vast that coils around your dead treant and the surrounding trees before it vanishes into the forest gloom with a terrifying speed.
Breathe, Huntsman. Savour the uneven judder of your cold heart, this palpitation that damns you as much as it blesses you. This is not your quarry, not your white-haired gunman who turns off the light of your broken memory in easy violence, but it is still your duty. Shoulder your rifle again, slide free off your perch and hit the ground running; the quail has taken flight, has fluttered off the path and into the forest maze in his fright.
The hunt is underway.
