Disclaimer: This series is an LGBT slow-burn fiction that contains heavy politics and sensitive themes like profane language, murder, war, cultism, fictional religions, non-consensual events, PTSD, racism, substance abuse, misogynistic undertones, a...
The Southern Forest of Graygreen grew darker shadows, the tall and radiant moring pines now clawing like silhouettes of spider legs begging to tear the firmament flesh for more rain, and the rains indeed fell slow and unceasing on the border, blood-washed from both its intruders and defenders...
What once was a tranquil forest turned into a mossy graveyard of after-conflict.
Among the litter of bodies fallen on stained dirt crawls a restless woman, resilient as a roach as she flips each corpse to check their faces. The mud-field area adorned by her sweatful anxiety.
Her nose scrunched from the smell of burnt skin all around, a trace of native magic from charred barks, the roots holding decapitated limbs that she had to feel so she won't stumble. Though, through all the gore, the woman didn't once falter.
The snow never falls in this bloody part of Sovenia, even if Queen Ingrid decreed that all which snow touches in the north is of Sovenian land. This ancient decree from the Frozen Queen sparked the squall between the Graygreen Province and the Barbaric Tribes of Bannar adjacent from the green border, a war raging for generations forgotten and new.
The Graygreens claimed that the Pale Citizens are the true possessors of the forests, but the Bannari raged that the snow fall too far from the woodlands that it shouldn't be under the Sovenian territory in the first place.
She had blindly searched for hours, her right hand holding a candled lamp while the other clasped tightly upon a crumpled parchment- a letter from a lover. Though the Bannari are known for scavenging after a battle, she still risked even with the probable threat of an ambush by the savages.
Her lantern also invites danger, but she doesn't care, she had been in a lot of battles before and anyone who never lose never felt anything. But this time, she is fueled by anxiety, the next thing she knows she had already turned all the corpses in every roots of the forest. She knows that this army was attacked off-guard, caught in a guerilla judging from the ebb and flow of scattered bodies.
She pushed through the fields of rot, further until she realized how she was already in the forest's edge where the armoured corpses stretched even out to the far grassland.
War banners were waving under the open sky and her chest lightened, the person she's been seeking had always fought the frontlines to lead the militia forward. After all, only the bravest could keep up with a woman like her.
Vultures circled the open sky and the crows feasting on the fields did not even fled when she passed them by. Her rush only left a hush rustle of grass for her fleet footwork comes as light as a breeze.
