Rueka
Restriction
A stone road winded through a forest that wouldn’t be named. It was an odd forest; the colour of the leaves and the greenery didn’t seem right, being more of a turquoise than any healthy shade of green. Large machines with pipes and tubes were attached to trees and rocks, and they glowed with a blue eerie light. Above all of this, she had the inexplicable notion that she was going to buy bread from a market somewhere.
It then occurred to her that she didn’t like markets, and a forest is a bad place for a one. It also occurred to her that she had never bought bread in her life, and she probably never would. A feeling of anxiety shifted into existence, as if it had always been there and she simply overlooked it. Figures began to appear from behind the trees and she thought them to be people she knew, but she couldn’t recognize them. Their faces were warped, devastated by some unknown nightmare, their forms shadowy and their bodies disproportionate.
To Exist Alone
The menacing, buzzing whine of spinning saws was deafening to Rueka as she padded a circle around the mechanical goblin construct, her nose clogged by noxious black fumes that gurgled their way out of steel pipes, making her eyes burn and itch. Rueka snorted angrily, raking the forest floor with a furry boulder of a paw. The shredder looked more like a metal demon than anything else, its torso a maw of fire below two burning green lights. “Shoo! Get movin’,” shouted the goblin. “I wouldn’t mind skinning you, you big dumb animal!” The goblin’s bright voice cut through the din, his little hands making dismissive gestures at her in between working the controls of his infernal contraption. Rueka experienced a smug amusement brought on by the midget-greenskin’s ignorance, letting her gaze momentarily drift to the Warsong Lumber Camp looming behind him under overcast skies.
For the Sake of a Smile
The hunter comes awake with a violent startle, sitting bolt upright and meeting the timber wall with his shoulder. He rebounds to his feet and stands bristling and panting. His eyes make slow sense of the shapes in the dark. At the far end of the room a small hearth glows softly with burned down coals. His breath fogs the air in front of his face and he shudders, clammy and sweated from sleeping under furs.
Abyss
The parched dirt of Desolace cracked under Rueka’s slender boots, mountains in the distance trying to take away the horizon from the sky like huge, greedy fat fingers. The wild druid trudged along a whispered path of which she had no will to resist, like someone who had fallen into a great wide canyon of which there was no way to go except down. One could not escape the gravity of fate.
Although in truth, Rueka had no idea of what fate she was marching towards, only that she was heading towards a room where there were no windows to see what lay inside. Only walking through the door could she understand.
