[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

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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

[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."