#pastoral au tag placeholder

[windupnamazu]

i can't sit idly (no, i can't move at all)

ffxivwrite2023 #15: portentous of or like a portent: a sign or warning that something, especially something momentous or calamitous, is likely to happen.  

Lunya/G'raha. Pastoral AU. 582wc. ⮞ Some people hear a scream in the middle of the night and close their curtains. G'raha runs toward it.

The moon hung full over Corvos that night, drenching the summer meadows and their sprawling patches of daffodils in silver light and casting long, deep shadows where it could not reach.

G'raha fiddled with the latch of his hut, uncertain why he was so on edge. It wasn't his first summer in the pastures and it would not be his last for many more years to come, and with experience came a quiet sort of calm that eluded him this time when it had never before. Out in the field his flock was quiet as they slept under the watchful eye of his loyal sheepdog, Lyna, and the only sound was the gentle whistle of the wind through the ash trees.

Before he could fasten the lock and retire to bed to shove the strange anxiety hanging at the back of his mind away, a scream broke the peace of the night.

Immediately he was back out the door, crook in hand and barking a command for Lyna to keep watch. He tore through the thicket, lantern swinging as he tumbled down the slope towards Elftrudis's pastures with a healing spell already on his tongue.

He found her on the ground, panicked but otherwise unharmed as her own guardian dog circled her flock, hackles raised. In the pale moonlight that drifted between the trees into her section of the meadows there laid a giant direwolf, its hulking body split in twain, and standing above it…

A woman—one he'd met once before in these very same meadows. Lalafellin, possessed of moon-white hair in silken plaits and eyes of twilight flecked with crystal, skin brown as sugar and dotted with white freckles like the myriad stars overhead, impossibly beautiful in a way that made her seem not of this world. She stood over the corpse of the wolf five times her size as it bled out into the soil, cradling a lamb in one arm and in the other the arm of a scythe as tall as she was, formed of aetherial light rather than steel and dripping ichor. Two hounds flanked her on either side; the first a mutt that was nearly invisible in the dark with its pitch black fur and the second an Ala Mhigan hound with golden fur and piercing blue eyes.

When last he saw her, the very first time, she was a traveler who misheard his kulning cry as one in need of help and came wandering from the treeline like one of his flock at sundown. She warned him the pastures were dangerous at night and he laughed it off, having spent more than half his lifetime slogging through the wetlands in the pitch dark. Back then, she seemed eccentric but no more than he was and he found himself charmed by her open-bite smile and the wit with which she bantered with him until he had to return to his hut. At worst, she was a little misinformed but clearly well-intentioned. But before there weren't wolves of this size. Before, she hadn't had the scythe.

"What are you, Lunya?" he wondered, mouth dry.

"Me?" the girl asked with a voice like bells, luminous and intensely strange beneath the moonlight. She smiled toothily at him; her canines were sharp, fanglike. A bracing wind tore through the meadow and rattled the daffodils at their feet, sending her braids rippling in waves that revealed a pair of wolf tooth earrings hanging from her softly pointed ears. "I'm an omen."