• Closed • The Man with No Voice

[Woe]

2nd of Ymiden 722

Rabbit flesh rotted in the sun of the forests, as the outlaw Woe Sanderling left another dead animal in his wake. He didn't need the meat, not being hungry, starving, or poor. He was a fur-trader by vocation, and was an expert trapper. However, as fine as he was at fixing a trap, his one reputable weakness was that he was a terrible shot with his pistol crossbows. He had all the tools and gadgets to make them work, being also a fair hand at gadgeteering. But when it came to firing the things, he could scarcely hit the broad side of a barn.

But his traps were good enough to catch rabbits. In the forest, he'd trapped them near enough to the point of extinction, if it could be believed. Yet even the Outlaw Sanderling wasn't without fear as he went about his business, collecting the pelts of these trapped critters. There was a rumor, of a man who made no sound, had no voice, and would not hesitate to kill if he found another on his lands. Sanderling had set up several man-sized traps for that purpose, on the perimeter of his trapping grounds. There, if he managed to garner the attention of this mysterious stranger, he'd run to one of his traps, and try to trick the man into them.

Unfortunately for Sanderling, he wasn't good at covering his tracks, particularly with regards to the refuse and dead bodies he left in his wake. Flies followed after him, and it wouldn't be hard for him to be found if one wished to bring him to justice.

So there was a note of caution as he tied the last of the pelts to his bandolier, and got ready to return to the town to sell his poached furs for gold. He kept his eyes peeled, watching and waiting for any sign of the stranger with no voice.

[Dandelion]

The Man who was the Hands of the Forest drifted through the trees like a puff of dandelion seeds. The intruder wasn't hard to track. Indeed, from the trail of rotting, wasted, bodies that had been stripped of their skins, and the smell and the flies, one might almost think the intruder was trying to be found. That he was using the devastation and destruction that he left behind as bait to draw the Hands of the Forest to him and steal his skin too, leaving his body to the flies and the scavengers.

The Hands of the Forest stalked and watched and waited, as patient as the trees themselves, and almost as brown. There was a bow in his hands and an arrow on the string, just waiting for the moment to sing its own song of death and destruction in return. There would be only one warning, one chance to repent and repay before payment was taken in blood and bone.

The Hands of the Forest was one with the natural world. There was nothing inherently wrong with death itself, even the devastation brought by overhunting or overgrazing, but he knew the simple fact that those creatures overhunting or overgrazing must be culled until nature came into balance once more and could recover.

He lifted the bow and drew the arrow back until the string kissed his cheek. He took aim and loosed it. Unless the intruder took immediate action to avoid it, the arrow would speed through a gap in the trees, rip its way through the rabbit skins tied to the bandolier, and skewer itself into the nearest tree.

Either way, the Hands of the Forest smiled, thin and deadly, nocked another arrow and stepped out into view. This time, the arrow was pointed, not at the intruder's stolen skins, but at his heart.

Filler Text, Filler Text

"Signed words" Spoken words

[Woe]

Date

It was said that the Man with No Voice, otherwise known as the Hands of the Forest by some who signed his name in reverence, was invisible when surrounded by his chosen homeland of the forests. Yet invisibility was not the same as invincibility. Sanderling, as mentioned, had set traps all over. There were snare triggers and pitfalls, but the triggers and initial execution of these traps were far from the worst they could inflict. Sure enough, there were spikes at the bottom of those fall traps. But the snares also held an untold payload, of poisonous explosives.

Sanderling was intent on drawing the Hands of the Forest's attention, so as to draw his attention away from those snares of well-crafted artifice and death-dealing. Yet, as he drew his bow, and found it hit true against the bandolier, pinning the pelts of rabbits against a nearby tree, Sanderling turned around immediately, he heard the creak of the man's bow...

His hand slid down to grab the small shield on his belt, and with a well-timed lift of the barrier, blocked the arrow that aimed for his heart. There was really something to be said for defending against a master archer, such as the Hands of the Forest. At least one could predict where they might try and hit first.

Sanderling didn't take that save for granted, however, and knew the Hands of the Forest would take other targets, perhaps more mobile than the center of body mass. So he dove behind a tree.

The line between the Hands of the Forest and Sanderling, meanwhile, if he tried to find a vantage on him, was riddled with those poisonous explosives.

He'd have to be careful lest he trip any of them up...

[Dandelion]

The man who was the Hands of the Forest grimaced when the intruder managed to whip out a shield fast enough to protect himself from the arrow, and then dodged behind a tree as if the trees would protect him from the forest. It blocked the clear line of shot, and the Hands of the Forest was not fool enough to waste arrows trying. He needed a better vantage point so, rather than staying on the forest floor and having to fight his way through the undergrowth, he pulled himself up into the tree beside him and circled round through the canopy. It was one of the ways that he stayed apparently invisible to intruders like this - most thought only of the ground, of straight lines and left and right. They rarely looked up. Even so, he became aware of snares attached to certain bent and supple branches, and very carefully stepped over them.

It took only a quarter circle for the intruder to come into view once more, and the thin smile returned to the face of the man who was the Hands of the Forest. Where he had spotted a few traps, there were bound to be more, and the destructive hunting of the intruder suggested that such traps would be bad. He circled a little further, then drew a set of arrows with heavy, round, blunted, heads. They were designed to knock birds out of the sky without shredding their feathers, but they would work for this too. He loosed them rapidly, one after another, aiming this time not at the intruder, but hammering a rain of hard impacting arrows at the ground in a circle around him, and thumping into each snare that the Hands of the Forest had spotted.

Filler Text, Filler Text

"Signed words" Spoken words