You Will Remember (Vale)

This is definitely the most complicated story I've written in awhile, so if anything is unclear or just plain badly done, please point it out and I'll try to explain/fix it! This covers both some recent RP events and some very old RP events, and a nightmare related to them that Vale had a few days ago.

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You Will Remember

'Here, I burned my father's body,' she had said. The ashes had stirred in answer to her calling; a gust of wind scattered dark flecks across her feet and left them clinging to the hem of her rich golden gown. Yet she had not noticed, as she raised a white arm and gestured with it toward the heap of blackened beams and charred debris.

'I found my mother there, slumped in her own blood, her throat cut with one of her own knives.' Vale had taken the man's arm and dragged him toward another spot, detritus reaching up to entangle their feet, and mice and beetles had scurried away at their approach. The heavy knot of hair that had been piled atop her head with an ivory comb had come loose with the violence of her movements and hung about her bare shoulders, as tangled as the plagued and twisted branches that drew together overhead and shrouded the forest from all but the weakest strains of moonlight.

'And there, I killed my cousin. I cursed him and Ledgic drove a blade through his eye.' She had thrown back back her head, challenging, a desperate glint in the eyes that only a few hours before she had outlined elegantly with kohl. She had belonged to the city, then, to its arts and intrigues, to the beauty that she had woven for herself from the threads of distant lands.

But at that moment, on the ground that had made her, she had been wholly Caan, in speech and action and thought, and as her voice had risen and she had swung her fist in anger at her companion, the branches of the gnarled trees had groaned against each other with laughter, and the dead, those without grave or rest, drifted with the fitful wind and smiled.

*

What have I done?

A day had passed since her outburst in the burnt village, and Vale lay wrapped in blankets beneath a softer canopy of leaves. The campfire had crumbled away into embers some hours before, but still she lay awake, listening to the wind rustling the great trees and stirring the ferns that covered the hillsides with their lush and graceful foliage. Feralas was beautiful, even in the grey hours of the night, but it was not this verdant forest that preoccupied Vale's thoughts.

She had brought someone who was not of her blood to the place where the Caans had dwelt, and the realisation hung heavily over her, whispering and muttering and entwining itself around her limbs to bind her.

She had not only allowed him to stand on the soil of the village; she had drawn him fully into the memory and the disease that clung there. Through all of her words and her explanations, but mostly by his very presence in that place and in her company, she had forced and wrenched him into understanding what no one outside of the clan ever had need of understanding. As far as she knew not even Eothan Dawn, who bore the mark of the Caans on his chest through no fault of his own and whose blood had mingled with her own in the child that she was to bear, had set foot on this ground.

And now, she had wrought something unprecedented. The village was burned and destroyed, yes, and for ten years it had lain empty and ruinous, but the very ground, stained and accursed, was still sacred. It was the ground on which the blood of the scorpion had lived and died for all the generations since the ancient forest had first sprung from its sapling roots, and there was a power there that even Vale could not describe. The Caans belonged to the forest, as the forest belonged to the Caans; their brutal lives and vicious deeds and violent deaths were all contained in the place that had bred them.

A chill stole beneath the blankets, and Vale drew the soft wool up beneath her chin and around her shoulders.

What have I done?

*

She was beneath the black leaves again, the familiar night-gloom of Duskwood settling over her like a worn mantle. A wind drifted from the distant places of the forest, bearing the scents of fungus and woodrot and corruption. The rough log buildings of the village rose before her, looming shapes with gaping mouths where the doors had rotted from their hinges and hung at jagged angles, or had been half-splintered and still clung to the frames like misshapen teeth. This was her home as it had been until half a year ago: rotting and abandoned, but not yet burned to the ground.

Vale stepped forward, away from the cover of the shuddering and sighing trees, and lifted her head to face the looming shadows. A cold finger stirred the skin at the base of her spine, and a sudden shiver washed over her like ice: but this was a dead village, dead if not yet burned, and so she refused to be afraid. She crept among the shadows, passing the shell that had been the hut where her grandmother had brewed potions from strange venoms and lacewing insects, passing the head house with its great yawning maw of a door, from which her uncle had spurred and driven the clan, passing half a dozen ruined hovels through which the wind moaned and murmured, telling tales of things that had happened beneath their roofs, remembrances which Vale steeled herself not to hear.

As she reached the outskirts at the other side of the village, Vale froze: two figures stood facing each other on the swathe of open ground before the long, low barn, their voices drifting distant and harsh through the air toward her. One of them was a girl, standing with a bay horse whickering nervously at her back, and the other was hooded and gowned and had both hands upraised, gesturing.

Who would come here? Vale thought, groping for the dagger at her belt. Who could possibly set foot here? In some dim corner of her mind she knew the answer to her own question, but it was an impossible answer...

And then something gripped her shoulder, and with a shout,Vale wrenched herself away and swung around to drive her knife forward. She felt the impact as the steel entered flesh-

Vale stumbled backward, all the breath gone from her lungs, and looked up into the face of her mother.

Sylvia Caan was as she had been when Vale and her father and sisters had found her corpse. Half-congealed blood clung to the gaping slash across her throat, it stained the cloth of her shirt where it had gushed forth when she had been murdered, it encrusted her face and hair where it had trickled from the body as it had lain slumped across a kitchen table, dripping at last from cold fingers to pool on the floorboards. Yet despite her appearance of death, she was very much alive.

As Sylvia wrenched the blade from her chest and tossed it to the ground, her bloodied mouth twisted in a dangerous smile, one that Vale knew intimately. She had learned to fear her mother most when she had smiled.

'Sa ye'd greet me like a whingin' child, Vale?' The voice was like a whispering of leaves long since dead and dried, scratching and rasping against each other beneath the dust of ages.

Vale clenched her hands into fists at her sides, an action borne from the force of habit, for she knew that she could not force a phantom to its knees with blows. 'I saw y'dead,' she whispered.

'Ye'll fin' tha' don' matter 'ere,' said Sylvia with another tight smile. She lifted an arm, the path of dried blood visible against skin as white as Vale's own, and the wind rose around them again, stirring the brittle branches above with a sound like the rattling of bones. 'Yer walkin' among ghosts in this place.'

'Then–' began Vale. She stopped, turning to the other two figures in the yard. The dark-eyed girl had pressed backward against the flank of her horse and the hooded woman had raised her voice, the sharp tones of her voice gusting toward them on the night wind. Though the words were unclear, Vale knew what they were, and the chill finger gripped the back of her neck once again.

'If I'm dead, why 'ere?' she whispered. She wanted to speak out, for her voice to ring out a challenge against the haunted dark, but her throat was unwilling. 'Why am I seein' this momen'?'

Sylvia studied her daughter, and Vale felt those eyes – fey, green eyes that had changed so often with her mother's moods – searching the depths of her being. 'Oh, yer na dead yet,' she murmured, her tone as soft as the shadows that gathered beneath the trees at dusk.

'Ye remember this, don' ye?' Sylvia's tone rose, dead leaves scratching once more, and she gestured toward the scene. The girl had climbed onto the horse now; the bay was snorting, tossing its head in an animal nervousness that was often wiser than the stubbornness of men. The hooded woman advanced on the rider, her arm outstretched like a priestess of some ancient rite.

Vale did remember. She remembered foolish, frightened Serentha Crimthainn with her travel-stained clothes and her bay gelding, who had stumbled upon the ground that belonged only to the Caans, both living and dead.

'An' d'ye remember wha' y'said to 'er?' The whispering of Sylvia's voice was almost gentle now, the brittle and ancient leaves brushing each other with the delicacy of a cicada's wings.

As the dark-eyed girl turned her horse and bolted down the path, away from the village and from everything it stood for, Vale saw the hooded woman pointing down the track after her; she watched as the figure flung back her hood, as runes formed and glistened in the air; she heard her own voice chanting the harsh words.

'Y'shall know wha' it means t'be a Caan,' she whispered, echoing. 'Ye... shall know wha' it means... t'trespass 'ere.'

Her voice died away, and as the robed memory of herself stood looking down the path, Vale turned with deliberate slowness to face her mother. She had relived every moment of that encounter, yet now, if she were not dead, she had to know what had brought her here, and what had brought Sylvia Caan's ravaged and cruel spirit back from the grave.

'Why are we 'ere?' The words came quietly from Vale's lips, and yet, even as she spoke them, there was a cold tightening in her stomach, and she thought perhaps she knew.

'Ye answered yer own question.'

Suddenly Vale lunged for her dagger that lay on the ground where the spectre had tossed it aside, snatching it up by the hilt and brandishing it, her voice ragged. 'This ground is mine, much as it belongs t'th'dead, it belongs more t'th' ones who're still breathin,' who still got life fer it t'matter what made 'em. I ain' a feckin' trespasser, this is mine t'walk on!'

Sylvia smiled, her bloodied lips curving in a satisfied line. And then Vale knew.

'I brought 'im 'ere!' Her voice cracked, but she pressed on, stepping forward. 'He deserved t'see wha' I am!'

''Ye'll know wha' it means t'trespass 'ere,'' murmured her mother. 'They were yer words, Vale. Hm... wha' else were it y'said t'tha' lass when ye cursed her?' Her voice was so soft that Vale could barely hear it, and yet each word was as edged as a throwing knife. ''No one escapes th'Caans?''

She began to laugh.

Shouting, Vale launched herself forward at the spectre, driving the knife up beneath the ribs, her other hand curled into a heavy fist. Yet even as she tore at the flesh, the scene whirled and faded around her, until she could neither see nor feel anything at all. There was only the endless sound of laughter wailing in her ears.

*

She awoke in the chill hours before dawn to the sound of a mourning dove calling somewhere far above her. As she opened her eyes to let her gaze drift over her surroundings, she breathed out, the quiet, shuddering breath of one being drawn back into the waking world. The ancient forest of Feralas was still grey beneath the shafts of moonlight that drifted through the canopy, but where it had seemed soft in the flicker of the evening's firelight, it now seemed wild and cold. The echo of her mother's laughter seemed to drift forth from the shadows, as if the whole world now knew and whispered that Valerias Caan had allowed a stranger into the dwelling place of her clan.

'It wasn't his fault,' she whispered to the forest, so unlike the forest of her nightmare. 'He needed to know.'

Beside her, Garthen stirred, muttering a question in a voice heavy with sleep.

'It's nothing,' she whispered, and as he turned onto his side to face her, opening his mouth to protest, she shook her head and curled onto her own side. She had promised to tell him if she awoke wanting to scream, but her mother's jagged smile and the rotting, inescapable potency of that place were not something she could put into words now; for once, she didn't know how.

'Just the wind,' she said quietly, pillowing her head on her hand. She felt him move an arm over her, then, and she drew closer beneath the blankets and closed her eyes. This was the waking world, in which she was not alone among the echoes of the past. And with the warmth of his chest against her back, she slowly began to breathe at ease again.

Another well writen piece, this indeed is one of your most complicated works. Many layers which actually made me read it several more times before getting everything, not to mention the questions I asked ingame, but overall I really enjoyed it. o_o

PS: Moar.

Certainly not the best you've done, but.. yeah, that was good. I really got a feel for the village and Syliva's purpose, turning Vale's own actions against her and taunting her with them.

It was a complicated one, but I think it's more structured than you think. I'll have a read again and see if I can offer anything you might be able to touch up. (Mainly because it was a complicated one to read :p)