literature

The Man from the Forest

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Literature Text

The morning was a hazy gray dejected thing; the clouds had given up roaring at Kharas Morn and wept angrily on it. Light meandered into the village an hour late, cold and cheerless. The rain painted the trees in shades of black and gray, and all the buildings were charcoal, and the road was a jet-black river upon which dully colored vehicles chugged. The priestess made her silent, limping rounds about the perimeter of the village with her gray-clad girls following solemnly behind. They waved hissing black clouds of burning sweet-reed to appease the mourning sky gods, that they might pour their vessels of rain just enough to feed the forest, but not enough to flood. They added a lilting trill begging that the Sky Kings’ vassals guard the sharp turns into and out of the village limits.

Perhaps because the vassals were so busy guarding the road, they forgot to guard the borders of the town.

The man who hobbled into Kharas Morn from the trackless Forest came in a rain-soaked gray cloak. He had a prominent limp and an ill-carved crutch under his arm, but walked without looking left or right. His tail was short and blunted at the end, as though the tip had been sliced off, and strangely textured, as thought the scales didn’t overlap correctly. He was hunched beneath the drizzling rain as everyone else was hunched. The moment he struck the city limits, he gravitated to a crowd of businessmen with umbrellas, opened his own, and stood with them. The Kojra policeman making his rounds turned in his direction, but after flicking his tongue out a few times, continued walking by. Beneath his umbrella, the man let out an uneasy whistling breath.

The taxis came, and in the confusion of businessmen rushing to claim limited seats, the strange man took up his walking staff and limped behind a group of chattering housewives crossing the street.

“Do you smell that?” one of the women asked her friends.

“No,” one of the friends said. “What?”

“That musky smell,” she said. “Like a wet fuzzball.”

“I smell nothing,” said the friend. “Probably in a trashcan in the alley.”

“But it’s so strong.” The first woman sniffed deeply. “Like it’s on the street.”

“Oh, Haki, what a sensitive nose you have!” said the friend, amused. “Just wait until you live here a little longer. You’ll get used to the smells.”

“I suppose,” said Haki, and glanced over her shoulder. The forest man ducked his head and tried to hide his crutch behind his leg for one painful step. It seemed an eternity before her glance flashed away.

He slowed his pace, put distance between them and when he came to the end of the street, he was standing before the Wayside Inn. He swayed there a moment as though undecided, and finally hobbled around the building to where a little tin storage shed stood. It had a big padlock on the door and cheery blue-plaid curtains in the tiny rectangular window.

He leaned his umbrella on his shoulder, dropping it over his head until only the shape of his neck was visible. With the dripping umbrella blocking his face from the street, he pulled the stained handkerchief from over his snout and bared his nostrils. He licked his lips and breathed deeply; dim light lit upon his face. A casual viewer might have been taken aback for a moment, for although his face was very Hajja-like, it was not completely so – the nose was too narrow, and the jaw too slender, and the nostrils too close together. But as soon as they saw him, a reassuring feeling would move in; they would begin to think of all the duties lying before them for the day. Soon they would have forgotten him entirely.

His nostrils flared open and he held his breath – held a scent on his tongue. What might have been a crest rose beneath his hood, and he hummed deep in his chest.

“The time’s closer than I thought,” he said to himself. “I must be here when it happens.”

He turned to face the street, alone and dark against the white wall of the inn. A breeze blew the cloak against him; he seemed so thin and so alone, almost dreadfully so. When a group of mahouts leading two lumbering cart-beasts and their calves toward the cart-yards rumbled by, he slipped in behind them. One of the cart-beast calves looked over its shoulder at him and grunted uneasily, and the young mahout on his neck slapped him on the forehead with a reed rod.

“Look where your fat feet are going,” said the boy. “You can’t get spooked at every little thing!”

By then, the forest man had turned down an alley and was gone.
A section of Ghost I'll probably never use.

For those not in the know, here's a Hajja and a Kojra: [link] The Hajja is the tall stocky one and the Kojra is the small slender one. They are aliens.

The Man from the Forest is some funky shape-shifter guy.
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TwistedAlyx's avatar
Is this guy the same one from the segment you showed us ealier?