{ raining blood, from a lacerated sky

[tobeclosetohim]

WHO: Jo Harvelle, a dead elk, and you!
WHERE: In front of The Inn
WHEN: November 13
OPEN TO: Everyone (Especially those in the inn or close enough to hear!)
WARNINGS: Animal Death's w/ Mutilation, Manipulation, Gore, Blood
STATUS: Open


People have been sticking close to the buildings, to each other, to not being out late after dark if they can help it, and even then, almost never alone. There's a charged air to everything, like a shot about to crack, or like they are strung up and held in a never ending loop on that second of shock the moment after the crack sounds, before the body can relax again.

Mapping has slowed to nothing this week, and Jo's among the many who remind people to be more careful when hunting right now. The Village seeming less and less safe with the animals that had appeared in the wide open of the buildings and fountain, with no one seeing anything, which made the dark, closed in shadows of the forest seems even darker and even more closed in.

She's as much not expecting it as expecting it, whens she opens the door, intending to head to the house she's sharing with Kol and Thorfinn, and there's a huge hulking animal form mountained right in front of the path into and out of the Inn. The same path people walked all day to get food, and everything else.

"Fuck," is revulsion for the smell, black and bloody and something else, the sheer size of the body, the still towering form, with its cracked and somehow dangling antlers, before her hand is tightening on the door still in it and she's calling back inside. "We've got another one!"

Jo goes for the knife in her boot even though there hasn't been an attacked attached to one yet, before she's headed down to the huge beast. It looks like the others have all reported in, and gotten written down by her. Ripped apart by teeth and claws, chunks of flesh hanging here and there, but nothing taken, nothing missing. Limbs twisted and contort in impossible ways, pointing toward the door.

The blood everywhere all around it. On the steps. On porch. On the door.

More like it was thrown than like it sprayed in an attack.

The same as the animal that looks like it was dropped -- no, placed -- so far from where it ever might be found in this place. Leaving Jo looking quickly all around there. The whole wide space of the creeping, settling early night dark of this place.

Comments

[thekittenqueen]

She isn't surprised anymore. Once is an accident, twice is unfortunate, but now a third time means that this is intentional. Is it a warning or a threat? She can't be certain, but Margaery finds herself looking down at the creature as she approached the path, following the others that seemed to be migrating to the area. All wishing to get a better look.

She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Were they being watched? Were the same people who were leaving them gifts now depositing carcasses for them to find? What was this?

"That's three now," Margaery said softly, glancing at Jo.

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo and Kate had taken to trying to wash down the porch as much as possible. The place was nothing glorief, but it was theirs and now it's got shadowed spots. Not red, but dingier than it had been. Jo wiped her hands on her pants, once more, oddly grateful for the fact everything she'd gotten was black. Black was a good color for soaking up and hiding blood. Hers, or anything else's.

"Four." Jo said, looking back at the beast on the ground. There was no real correction, or even tone, to the correction itself. Just a number, a symbol in a ledger she kept too well for all of these people. "They keep putting them in places we'll have no reason not to find them. What's next? Inside a house? The police station? The butchery?"

She hated being fucked with. She hated the lack of a pattern. She hated not having something specific to find and kill to make it stop.

[thekittenqueen]

"Four?" Margaery said in surprise, trying to remember the list in her head. Apparently she missed one. "Who else has found one of these...warnings?" That was the only word that she could think to apply to any of this, aside from 'horror.'

"I don't know. Have they only been left outside? No one has found them inside their homes." As far as she knew. She'd taken to leaving her dog at her bungalow, afraid to let him run about and herd the sheep as he normally did. Since Bushy's death, she felt paranoid and vigilant now.

"There are no sounds in the night. Nothing to let us know that a predator is lurking about. How can that happen? Wouldn't we hear screams?"

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo doesn't list them, because being right or wrong isn't important right now, and because somewhere there's a book with it written, and she'll write this, too, but she feels cold all over right now. It's not the weather and she knows it. Her fingers balled into her hands, nails against the palms of her hand. She wants to strike back, it's the only thing in her blood and her mind, but there's nowhere to hit whatever is hitting them. That keeps coming.

"If it was an animal," Jo said. Uncurling one of her hands to make a gesture at the ground.

Trying to make herself talk, even through the smell and the look of the whole thing has her on the verge and fighting the urge to throw up. Even after all she's seen before this. In that place. It feels like that place again. Horror, and bile, mingled in the back of her throat. "But there are no tracks, and it's torn apart, but none of it looks eaten. Nothing taken."

[thekittenqueen]

It had been the thought in her head when she first spied her ram dead on the ground a week before. It had seemed strange that pen holding her sheep hadn't been disturb. Her livestock left where they were, save for Bushy. It was impossible that some animal had removed him specifically and then left him slaughtered, the choicest pieces of his body left behind. What did it mean?

"What could have done this then?" She didn't want to return to her earlier suspicions that someone from the village was behind this. That didn't seem possible anymore.

"There is something strange about this place. The forests change, these dead animals that defy logic, the mysterious gifts. There has to be some answer somewhere."

[tobeclosetohim]

"Yeah. It's all fucked, and made to fuck with us." Ruins that appear out of nowhere. The week her own body spent flickering on and off like a lightswitch. The lack of supplies and food that had all of them scrambling, desperate, forced to accept whatever they could find, or put together.

She hates this. All of it. Especially right now, having found the next piece. Not knowing where it will come from next.

[thekittenqueen]

She didn't believe Jo or Finnick at first that there was something more at work, but with the recent attacks, it was hard to deny their suspicions any longer. "Do you think there is someone behind this? Not someone from the village but somewhere else?"

Where would they even hide, if they were hiding?

[tobeclosetohim]

"Yeah." It's sharp and fast, but it's not sharp or fast at her. It's at the distorted and twisted corpse.

"I don't know who or where or what, but, yeah. I think someone is doing all of this on purpose."

[thekittenqueen]

It would at least explain that unsettled feeling she got whenever she was in the woods now, bracing herself for something that might not happen again. If someone were toying with them, it stood to reason that they changed the layout of the wild for amusement. Perhaps that was what these animals were as well? Some twisted form of a joke.

"It hasn't escalated at least. It's still only outside that we find these things." Small comfort as it was.

[tobeclosetohim]

She was talking the lack of location, but Jo shook her head.

"Each of these animals should have been able to put up a better fight against whatever it was than the last one before it. They've been fiercer, more aggressive, larger--" She gave a wave at the huge body of the bull elk. The thing that would have to be five to seven times the weight of either of them. "--and they're each taken down like it's nothing. As though they didn't even get to fight back or struggle, score their attacker at all."

It was a type of escalation. It might not have been a violation of a house yet, but it was getting worse still.

[thekittenqueen]

She hadn't considered that and the point drives a shiver up her spine. Such large creatures shouldn't be so easily felled. If they were, there should at least be more signs of attack and a struggle. For the very little she knew about these things, she knew that animals didn't simply lay down when attacked. They fought as well.

"You would think there would be screams at night." It had always been quiet, eerily so. An elk would make noise as it was ripped apart. Her sheep would have screamed. None of those things happened, they were simply found where on the ground. "Do you think we are next?"

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo wants to say no. She wants to say it so badly. But she can't not look at the bulk elk. So many times larger than them, capable of putting up so much more of a bloody, violent, raw, feral fight than everyone here, save maybe Thor. Who lost this fight without a fight, without any chance.




This is the point where you lie. Naivety only helps your murderer then.


There's a chill down her spine, saying, "I don't know."

[thekittenqueen]

She preferred the truth, no matter how dark and frightening it might be. With the truth, she could at least brace herself for the probabilities. There was a threat here that was easy to see, but chilling to acknowledge.

"Will you teach me to defend myself?" She asked, meeting Jo's eyes. "If we have something stalking us, we need to know out to protect ourselves. Help me?"

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo looked at her only the best on one pause, reading Margery's face and making a choice she might not have made in Medietas. But she had made it in the Apocalypse. She had taught an angry, ice blue eyed young girl, who looked more like a model than a monster killer.

But Rachel had been so much more, and become even more than that.

"Yes, but I won't go easy on you," Jo warned. She made a gesture toward the mutilated body on the ground. "There's no time for it now."

Which meant something from a hunter especially, who would have expected death, by any slip, from any hunt, her world and these alike. But there was not even the pause between the beginning and the possible battle coming to them like then.

This one was already on them.

Nothing in the world like so much red blood spilled on virgin snow.

[thekittenqueen]

"I wouldn't want you to," Margaery said deeply serious. Gentleness wouldn't help keep her safe, not against whatever it was causing these mutilations. Somehow she imagined that being a lady would count for very little in its eyes.

Jo was someone that seemed to know how to handle these situations. She was strong in the ways a warrior should be. Having met Brienne, it wasn't unheard of for a woman to be capable in this way.

If Margaery wanted to survive this place, she would need to learn to be like Jo and Brienne.

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo had to appreciate, if it wasn't quite the same as like the reasons for, the hard, unwavering drive in Margaery's eyes. The kind of thing that said the necessity of the situation outweighed anything else that might be involved therein. There was a strength in it. Jo wasn't saying there wasn't any desperation in it, but in the way she stood, held herself, said the words.

There was a core of strength to it. It's own kind of weapon that would see her well, if she didn't have too much pride.


"Have you used any weapons before?"

[thekittenqueen]

She had given up on holding fiercely to her pride after her death and coming to this place. Given how she had thrown herself into the sort of work most other ladies would find abhorrent, she wasn't afraid in doing the same with self defense. Even if she was bruised or hurt, she would weather through it.

This was far too important to be demure and afraid.

"No, I have no experience with fighting."

[tobeclosetohim]

That was not surprising. On one hand harder, but on the other, perhaps, not to have to train her out of except flinching back. And in the right people, who had different aims than a hunter, even flinching back, at the right time, in the right place, for the right reasons, could keep one alive longer, than not.

"Do you have any kind of weapon you think you'd be more comfortable with?" Beat." Or?"

Or was she simply open to everything and anything. Even as Jo's mind began to consider the need for possibly many people being trained, and of the skills among them, and those who might both need and be willing to help those who did need.