[Wendigo-go] cry like guns across the water

[underpinnings]

WHO: Owen Prichard
WHERE: 6I Village - Inn and surrounding area
WHEN: July 27-31
OPEN TO: Aragorn, Bucky Barnes, Rose Hathaway, Peeta Mellark
WARNINGS: Horror/Violence, possible injuries and descriptions -- CHARACTER DEATH IN FINAL THREAD

---

It made sense for the storms to disturb local wildlife, for the tremors to send it down from the mountains to collide with what they already knew. It didn't make sense for it to look like fog lights in shadow, a creature of borrowed parts in a shroud like smoke and dead skin.

Somehow, for all the lost lore of his lifetime, Owen doesn't need the nickname explained to him. It should be a word near devoid of meaning, for something so devoid of a foothold in reality. Until there were multiple sightings, until they had the physical evidence of mutilated prey, the bright-eyed predators chased away from corpses on the plains. Until the sightings grew closer and closer to home.

Funny, how creatures dragging that filament skin could get under his. It helps that the village has been picking him apart at the seams since he arrived, letting people in, making him something like amenable to Kero's raspy, whistling calls.

Kero's ugly; the Wendigo he spots shredding one of Kero's bretheren by the lake is terrifying. When Kero darts back among the houses, Owen isn't far behind, and it's something of that terror--and some of those people he's met--that spur him back to the main village with his heart pounding in his ears. When he sees that kid with the crow, meandering back with another load of peaches, there's no time for niceties--there's barely time to catch his breath.

Pulling the load from the kid's hands, to loud protest, Owen drops the bucket to the ground. "Get Mark," he tells him, knowing that much about the huffy stranger. "Get who you can to the Inn, those creatures are getting closer."

"Half the village is already at the fucking inn," Kira--the acerbic kid tackling survival in the wilderness in flip flops is Kira--says. "Or did you miss the annual earthquake on your nature quest?"

Owen kicks the bucket away when Kira dips to reach it. "So go back to the inn," he grinds out, sucking air through his teeth to catch his breath. "And get us started on the plan to deal with this. I don't know if the thing saw me, and it seems to favor gutting its victims, if you're not very attached to your own intestines." Maybe it's the shove he gives the kid, maybe it's that bitchy is his first language, but Kira seems to rile himself like Owen's cat waking up before it wants to, angry little noise in the back of his throat and all.

"What the fuck are you going to do," Kira asks, slipping out of his shoes and taking them in-hand for the long jog over the river.

"Get the stragglers," Owen answers, Kira marking the first. "Engage if it gets too close."

And, he realizes later, as he circles the edges of the village back to his house, put Kero and Nim in the cellar. Christ fucking help him--help them all--he's checking on the cat.

Comments

[underpinnings]

They've come a ways from startling each other at the fountain, as they ready what supplies they might need. Others among the villagers have kept watch overnight, letting them attempt rest for the fight. No sense trying to shoot the light of baleful eyes in the pitch dark, no sense wasting themselves in the work of barricades and keeping the villagers calm. They have other work.

Which doesn't mean either of them spend much of the night asleep, and doesn't mean they don't both check repeatedly at the window, or in the other rooms. Owen gives up his bed after an hour; he knows how to let exhaustion and necessity put him to sleep standing in a corner.

When the light is good enough, he goes first out the second floor window, using a tree for cover and leverage to reach the roof. He has his bow, what arrows resided in the store room, and a set of pitons and rope. Reaching down to clasp Aragorn's arm in a climber's grip, it's something like nerves, something like focus, that has him reiterating their to-do list.

"There's just enough light," he says, almost to himself, almost to the man sitting at the eaves with him, looking out over the empty paths. "We need to get as many of these metal spikes in the beams of the roof as we can, they'll anchor us if we need to take the rope down to help the others." He holds out the rope, his shoulders sagging under the weight of it and the pitons both.

[onen_i_estel]

Oddly enough, Aragorn has slept quite well since his arrival and for no other reason than making up for the lack of rest he got in the last seven months while his mind raced whirled around the events that happened before and after the Fellowship were forced to part ways. It almost seems like a lifetime when he looks back.

And yet, the Ranger can't help but wonder if this threat, no doubt one of many, is the reason he was brought here, despite the theories of those already there. They all seem unfathomable to Aragorn, though he, above anyone, had a legitimate reason to feel that way.

So for the entire night, Aragorn watches from one of the inn's rooms upstairs, finding that it feels all too familiar to the first time he met Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin at the Prancing Pony and for a fleeting moment, he misses them. This was not the Nazgûl, but a threat none the less and it needed to be removed.

Aragorn takes the rope and without expression, looks at the pitons which were unlike anything he had used before, but he nods all the same.

"Why do you not tie your rope around that stack." he gestures towards the chimney on the far edge of the roof. He did not mean to question the use of the spikes but logic did prompt him to wonder how well they would hold his weight over Owen's.

[underpinnings]

In an already tense situation, some might rankle to be questioned: he'd had his short spats getting a few who didn't like to be herded back to the inn. But the suggestion is taken, measured against what he now sees on the roof. He isn't used to trusting buildings--

Well, he's used to having the time to poke and prod at them before he does, and in the last few months, he's spent more time poking and prodding the local wildlife.

Today, he'll continue that from a distance. With sharp, thin sticks.

"That's not a bad idea," he says, letting the pressure of the task push him to cooperate. "We can still use the spikes to direct it, share the load. Get it started round the bricks?" The man's judgment seems sound enough, Owen puts his attention back toward the rolling fog, the pinking dawn. Somewhere among the houses were a pair of bright eyes, and he'd rather find them at the edge of sight than directly below. "If you leave me the other end, I'll start threading the pitons."

[onen_i_estel]

Aragorn's experience on buildings was generally at a much higher advantage. Still one shouldn't dismiss using whatever one could if it meant saving time, which was what they were trying to do. As much as the Ranger didn't want to offend the other man, he wasn't so sure he could put his trust in those sharp, thin sticks. No matter how many there were.

He moves quickly, but carefully up the edge of the roof where the structure has more support and sets to work on tying a bowline knot for the brick stack, grey eyes watchful of the area down below and the areas further out. When he secures the loop, he looks over to Owen to see what progress he's made.

[underpinnings]

The sense of urgency, coiling tightly through the night, doesn't let him loop the rope more than once around each piton's head, but it's sturdy enough to catch on itself in their heavy needle eye. Owen makes quick work of it, used to working at the detriment of half a hand, and when Aragorn finds him he's looped the last of four, and started walking along the central beam, letting them slide down the length on their own weight.

Setting them in the roof breaks the quiet of morning, but they'd hammered enough windows through last evening that it doesn't seem to attract any new attention. Owen drives them in with a fifth piton--he's made do more often in his travels than he's had the luxury of a hammer.

It lets him trail the rope down past their window, a quick escape for the people inside, or a quick way up if they're at this long enough to fire in shifts.

"Did you see it, last night," he asks, joining Aragorn at the stack when finished. "Twice the height of a man, all antlers and shadow. If you see lights in the fog, the eyes glow. We can fire on them and tell the ground team to move."

[onen_i_estel]

Aragorn doesn't confirm verbally, but he does look in the general area where he saw it and then eyes moved to the other two places he noticed the fog over the next several hours after. His skills are not powers by any means, least not supernatural like what the High Elves and wizards like Gandalf are capable of. They are merely talents honed by first-hand experiences.

"We have creatures similar to it in my world. Not the same yet equally wicked and just as hungry. I did not see antlers though. Perhaps there are two?" Aragorn spoke back to Owen quietly, only looking at him briefly before searching the area again.

There's something of a feeling that the Ranger has that tells him it won't be long, so he moves a few steps over to retrieve his bow he's been using since his arrival.

[underpinnings]

"There were smaller ones on the plains," he agrees, dread as he did the idea of another that size. "Younger, maybe."

Less successful hunters. Less--

Owen moves to the edge of the roof, bow over one shoulder and good fingers curling to the eaves. Good and evil are concepts for children; so are beasts, and magic, and horror. There is the natural, there is the man-made. Both can be shockingly unsettling. "It looks a bit like a man, under everything."

Which explains the pit in his stomach, but isn't helpful. "Maybe it's built like one." He looks back at Aragorn only to share the brief moment, before scanning the village as light filters through the fog. They're both confident enough in their bows to be out here--so he doesn't need to tell him every shot should count. Man and beast can carry a lot of arrows in their backs. "The jailhouse," he adds, pointing them both in its general direction. "The smell of livestock might draw it." A dark figure moves between dark buildings, but between the groffle and moose, he only nocks an arrow to follow it.

[onen_i_estel]

"Not as smart." Aragorn finished that thought. They shouldn't assume, but in all of Aragorn's experience with beasts and creatures of various different sorts, smaller also could mean more and it would not be good if they were swarmed.

Grey eyes looked towards Owen. "And thinks like one." That thought made it hard not to have a few different plans in the event of them finding out that it was any kind of intelligent creature. For now, they would have to be meticulously coordinated without much communication.

Owen's abrupt shift into defensive stance had Aragorn drawing his bow, but no sooner than he did he notices something large enough in his periphery and in the direction of the fountain to move his aim towards it.

He fires off his arrow.

[underpinnings]

Owen waits to see the cause and effect, his stance on the roof's edge firm without going rigid. That's what he's fighting, at this distance--not the creature, but the fear for it. Fear of failure, fear for the people below. This is why they need the ground team, this is why they need a way to quickly leave the roof.

If it's smart enough, the arrows might only attract it.

Aragorn's shot finds something of the mass, and the scream sits just enough on the edge of human to lift hair on Owen's neck and arms. He lines up one of his own, a little higher, firing before the ground team can close in and complicate their shots--with those howls of pain, they don't need to call out a location.

In the perfect calm of his flying arrow, he thinks, and calmly says, "Bad day for someone to arrive." But between the inn and the crops, the fountain park is the best place to engage it. Hopefully whoever might come through will be smart enough to run.

[onen_i_estel]

The sound had Aragorn looking away from the aim of his next arrow; his eyes growing larger in surprise at how uncanny the sound is to the scream of the Ringwraiths. So much so that he had to wonder if they were actually there and not this other beast. Though he knows it is not possible, he can't help but feel this world borrows from his world, though he supposes similar themes would be in any world or realm.

It is after Owen's arrow that another scream sounds and a noise that follows; a sort of snapping sound that follows a low snarl. It's getting closer.

Aragorn releases another arrow.

[underpinnings]

Ugly and unsettling as the cries are, there's comfort in the knowledge that it feels pain. Running from the shore, his skin had prickled with the old fear--not being fast enough, not being able to go on. He had imagined that sublime predator, almost silent, passing through all obstacles. Inexorable and awful, reacting to nothing, focused only on its hideous purpose.

It is ugly, and it is approaching--but it screams. Perhaps they'll even see it bleed.

Below them, the ground team rounds the inn; he can hear them in the grass, footfalls faint between distance and fog. "Last round until the fog clears," he says, holding a moment to time his shot with the swing of what looks like a head. The next scream gurgles, but those snapping footsteps don't stop. "They're closing with it."