Flannghaile's dark eyes snapped open and she looked around, startled. This...this wasn't the cave she shared with her mate and goat. The Usdia was certain she'd been asleep with Al Pine and Una a minute ago, nestled into a bed of pine boughs and blankets as an autumn storm raged outside. At least it hadn't included lightning; even this late in the autumn at these elevations, lightning could wreak serious havoc.
Lightning rent the sky, blazing as bright as the sun, illuminating a leafless forest of black elder trees, and a well-beaten path lined with dense thickets of briars. Flann shivered as a breeze kicked up, blowing autumn leaves up from behind her. And on the voices came the faint sound of hoofbeats, and snatches of voices rising and falling. A song? Which one? It didn't matter; this time of year, on a night beneath the elder trees, one could see the most eldritch things.
The Usdia swallowed uncertainly. Right. A stormy night in an elder wood on the cusp of winter, with winter winds howling through the leafless branches was no place to be caught careless in.
She began to trot along the path, watching for a break in the briars that lined the path, listening for any hoofbeats that were not her own. Over the wind, she could hear the hoots of owls, the only sounds of a living forest in a forest that appeared to be dead. Unfortunately, this was inadequate comfort to the Usdia. The hoofbeats were getting louder, but they didn't seem to be moving particularly quickly. With the hoofbeats now came the clank of iron, presumably from harnesses...though they sounded more like chains.
And the words of the song were beginning to come in clearer and clearer, and, oh, it was not a song Flann cared to hear on a night like this, for all that she knew it was not so dark as the beginning sounded:
Fearfu' saughs the boortree bank,
The rifted wood roars wild and dreary,
Loud the iron yett does clank,
And cryin' howlets maks me eerie...
And around a bend in the path ahead of her, they appeared, the Wild Host. Flann skidded to a halt as a chill ran down her spine. Draped in tattered silks so fine they might have well been woven by spiders, bedecked with heavy iron bells and chains beneath strange iron armor, and snorting plumes of smoke into the cold air, they were every bit as imposing as the legends always said. They stopped, pawing at the earth, watching her with predatory eyes. Flann forced a breath down the lump in her throat as terror seized her.
She wheeled and bolted.
Behind her, the Hunt burst into a headlong gallop. The song had been replaced by the sounding of a horn, high, brassy, and wild, like the legendary carnyx. Lightning flashed, and raindrops pelted her, cold and sharp, like pellets of liquid ice. The wind fought her, cruelly pushing her back toward her pursuers.
Even without the singing of the Host, the words of the song still flashed like fire in Flann's panicked mind.
Oh, are ye sleepin', Maggie?
Oh, are ye sleepin', Maggie?
Let me in, for loud the linn
Is roarin' ower the warlock craigie...
Around her, the breaths of the Hunt closed in, surrounding her with their heavy and oppressive heat. They did not snap at her, but they did not need to, not yet. If she could not get beyond a door, if she could not find her way over a warlock's crag, the crashing waterfall of storm and hunt would sweep her away.
And in her mind, muddled in with the song, her mind was filled with the desperate need to find her way past a door, a threshold the Hunt could not cross, and shelter from the crazed storm.
Then, she caught it.
Some branches whipping in the wind in the briars.
A door. Of sorts.
Flann leaped for it, burrowing through the vines and thorns, feeling them catch in her blood-colored coat, darkening the silver hairs with actual blood. Behind her, the branches snapped shut behind her, and a tunnel through the brambles appeared to open. Here in the brambles, the storm weakened, and, the deeper she wriggled, the less she felt the storm, and the less she heard the hoofbeats and the winding of the carnyx.
Breathless, the Usdia stopped, sides heaving as blood dripped down them. In fact, this deep in the thicket...she couldn't feel the storm much at all. Some leaves had yet to fall here, and they acted as roof and windbreak. She couldn't even hear the pounding of iron-shod hooves and the wild melody of iron bell and chain and carnyx. Flann could hear the confused and cheated screams of the Hunt denied its foolhardy prey.
Taking several deep, slow breaths, she forced her body to calm down. Looking up through patches in the brambles and elder branches, the Usdia could now see that the flashes of lightning were growing fainter, more distant, and had never reached the branches of the elders. The thunder was fading, too, and, with one last frustrated series of screams, the hoofbeats charged away to chase the fleeing storm, the wind riding away with them.
As the air stilled, rain began to drip past the leaves, pattering on Flann, gently washing away the blood. The owls had mostly stopped their cries, but the sounds of a forest on a rainy autumn night began to resume.
And, in her sleep, the real Flann began to untense as the dream of the Wild Hunt began to soften into the peace of a wet night in late autumn, a full lunar cycle before the snow would begin to stick to the earth, rendering the pass along which she lived with her family mostly impassable. But, for now, she slept on, safe in the company of mate, goat, and with the promise of foals to one day fill their cave with laughter and joy.
