wander the woods

featuring Aneira

Blackwood, woods between Widow's Hollow and Whitepeak

Spring, Year 766 of the New Age

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She did not stay near Widow's Hollow in the Spring, if she could possibly avoid it. 

It was a dreadful place then, full of squalling babes and proud new parents, preening themselves, bathing in the power that their genitals had given them. Why they had such pride in the awful, awkward sprogs that scuttled about under their feet she couldn't see. Some called her hypocrite for her golden ghost familiar, but they were idiots. A dead fawn was so much more intriguing than a living one - he would not grow up into some posturing warrior with dreams of Kingship, he would not raid Glenmore for their simpering idiot does, he would remain forever at her side, loyal and silent but for that scream, that exquisite and terrible scream!

The screams of their stupid brats were soul dredging, awful, exhausting, and so she left the Widow's Hollow. 

In other times she might travel to Uir's Meadow, or the Shadowgrove, but with her twin disappeared she felt less of the desire to explore those delicious dark places. No, she took herself away to Whitepeak, to pretend to patrol and enact her witchly duties with the minimum of effort. There were places she knew in the foothills, not as safe as the sprog saturated Hollow, but still, home enough. She could make an appearance on the patrol routes through the mountains, tease and tweak the raiders.. entertain herself until the late days of Summer drew in, when the idiot offspring of the prattling parents might at least have become quieter, might at least be tolerable, and then she would not be stranded out in the mountains when the winter came in and the wolves were mad bags of bones driven to attack even a perfect dark doe such as she.

The problem with this plan was the woods. 

Blackwood was the woods, they named it and defined it, but they were so interminably large. She had been walking for days now, oh so many days that it seemed as if it was weeks, and it was simply beginning to feel as if she had not moved at all.  She was tired, sweaty and frustrated, no energy even for magic to amuse herself, no dull witted warriors to pester and prank, just the dull darkness of the trees and the stupid, inestimable distance into the woods.

In the distance, it seemed that Whitepeak was leaning back into the sky and laughing.

Aneira blew a raspberry at it, and walked on.

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Lols Aneira you're an idiot

Soft pastels on sketchbook paper - the colours are slightly duller in real life I'm afraid! My phone camera made them look a bit sparkier and nicer and I decided against editing them to look worse again