Chapter Text
The castle and forest was all they knew. It was all they needed. The castle provided warmth, food, and shelter; the woods allowed for them to fulfill their job and earn their place in the castle. They didn’t need anything else.
(Though they sometimes had a feeling they were forgetting something important…)
Their days always started with them waking up in the kennels with their fellow hounds. The servant would then bring them food and they’d eat for the day. Eventually, the Prince would arrive upon his horse and they’d go on the daily hunt. Sometimes they’d be appointed to guard places in the castle, like the master bedroom or the armory.
They didn’t need anything else.
Right?
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They were sitting by the master bedroom door when the prince’s paramour exited the bedroom, weeping. The paramour looked down at them, knelt down, and pressed her face into their fur while continuing to sob. Bruises bloomed on her wrists and her face (and probably in more places as well). She murmured to them, and though they couldn’t understand what she was saying, she sounded distraught. They could hear the Prince yelling something in the bedroom, something that made the paramour flinch.
She stood up, and beckoned for them to follow her. They hesitated. Should they follow her? They were supposed to sit here and guard the door, but the paramour had given some orders before, and she sometimes took them or another hound with her to roam the castle. After some internal debating, they decided to follow her.
The two of them padded down the hallway, passing by a few servants on the way. None of them glanced at the two of them (probably since the prince would tear them limb from limb if they dared to glance at his consort). When they reached the front door, the guards stationed there started talking with the paramour in a somewhat argumentative tone, with her responding in a pleading tone. Eventually, the guards stepped aside and let both of them through into the forest outside.
When they were far enough from the castle that they could only barely see it in the distance, the paramour removed her heeled shoes, took out a dagger that she’d apparently been hiding somewhere in her dress, motioned for them to follow her, and began running as fast as she could.
They froze for a moment. What was she… never mind, they were supposed to follow her, she’d ordered them to. They took off after her.
The two of them ran through the woods, over fallen trees and stones, and over creeks and ditches. As they did so, the woods began to… change. The foliage thinned out, trees grew taller and wilder, the air colder, and the sky darker. When the paramour eventually stopped to rest for a brief moment, the woods were unrecognizably unfamiliar.
They had a feeling they were being watched.
They looked around to try and determine what the source was, and in the distance, they could see glowing eyes watching them from barrow mounds. They didn’t appear to be moving towards them or planning something, they were just… watching.
When the paramour resumed moving, she was walking now, likely due to being tired from running, and her feet being blistered and bruised from running barefoot in the woods. As they continued moving away from the castle, they faintly noticed how their head felt much clearer here, and the feeling of forgetting something returned.
They put that aside when they saw the wall of thorns in front of them. The paramour seemed worried by this, and looked at it for a while, seemingly trying to figure out where crawling through would wound them the least.
She eventually settled on crawling through a smallish gap that while not large enough for anyone to crawl through without getting scratched, the scratching would be not too severe. She crawled through the gap and vanished from their sight. Hesitantly, they crawled through. Halfway through they collapsed on the ground, with them faintly registering that the thorns were piercing their chest and abdomen.
Their entire body HURT. It felt like molten iron was being poured all over and inside their body. They could feel their bones breaking and shifting, and their muscles tearing and sewing back together. Everything felt cold and hot at once, and their vision faded to a blurry white. The sensation of the ground and thorns beneath them faded away, with the only thing they could feel being the raw and unfiltered agony. This would be it, wouldn’t it? They’d just be lying here in pain until their body gave out, the paramour would leave them to escape, and the prince wouldn’t even bother taking whatever remained of them back once he found them.
Despite feeling like the agony lasted an eternity, the pain eventually faded away. Their head felt… clearer, like a fog had been lifted. Before they could adjust, a deluge of buried memories flooded their–no, her–mind.
She remembered everything. She remembered her parents, her siblings, her home, her life. She remembered how she’d been dragged through these same thorns into that wretched place–Arcadia–and had been turned into a basely creature.
She realized that the paramour was holding her now, and that she looked terrified.
“Christ, are you okay? I thought you were dying when you were transforming back!”
She stared at the paramour for a hot second while trying to compose her thoughts, before she eventually spoke. “I… think I’m okay? My body hurts like hell right now, but I think I should be able to at least walk. Also, what’s your name? I’ve been thinking of you as ‘the paramour’ for a while now, and I’d rather not think of you as the role you were forced into.”
The paramour sighed in relief. “Okay… okay that’s good. We need to get away from Arcadia as soon as possible so that we don’t get dragged back. It’d be rather difficult to do so if I had to carry you. As for my name, you can just call me Freya. I’d like to know what to call you as well.”
She stared blankly for a second, trying to recall her name. “My name’s… Miranda. I think so anyways.”
Freya nodded in approval, and helped Miranda to her feet. Miranda swayed for a bit before her brain reminded her that she’s supposed to walk on two legs and not four. Freya led her by the hand down a path through the Thorns.
The initial area around them didn’t look too dissimilar to the strange woods they’d just been in, though it was a lot brighter and warmer. But as they walked, the landscape, once again, shifted. The grassy forest floor faded to clay and sand, and the thorns–no, the Thorns–gave way to tall canyon walls that made their path extremely narrow. Eventually they found a series of giant boulders that blocked their path. Freya looked at her.
“Should we turn back?” Freya asked, looking rather worried, likely about their chances of scaling the boulders without falling and breaking something important.
“We’re not turning back Freya,” Miranda stated. “We might run into the prince’s servants looking for us. I’d rather take the boulders. Besides, we don’t know if the path we took leads us anywhere safer, or if it leads anywhere else at all. At least this area seems relatively clear of Thorns.”
Freya looked worried about this, but seemed to agree with Miranda’s assessment. She managed to lift herself onto the highest boulder she could manage, with Miranda following. They repeated this process until they reached the top, with their fingers being bruised and their nails cracked, but otherwise not hurt.
The area after the boulders was more of the same claustrophobic canyon, though Miranda could see in the distance a swamp of some sort. As they got closer, a metallic scent began to flood her nose. When they got closer, Miranda was able to see what it was.
Blood.
The frothy red liquid lapped at the shores, in the place of where water should have been.
Freya, understandably, did not look happy at the prospect of going through the area without shoes on.
“…Can you please carry me?” Freya whispered.
Miranda nodded reluctantly.
“Get onto my back, and try not to grip onto my neck too tightly.”
Freya clambered onto Miranda’s back, her arms wrapping around Miranda’s neck and her legs around Miranda’s waist in order to leave Miranda’s hands free.
They somehow managed to get through the swamp without encountering anything, though Miranda did suspect that there were things in the blood-water watching them, and wound up in a bright forest that looked to be in the height of spring. Flowers covered the ground, and blossoms drifted through the air. Freya clambered off her back and looked somewhat happy to be in a more pleasant part of the Hedge. Miranda, on the other hand, felt like something was wrong; she knew now that appearances could be deceiving, and that just because something looked nice didn’t mean that it couldn’t be dangerous, and that–
*Crunch*
Miranda looked down to see what she’d stepped on, and saw something gleaming and white buried in a pile of blossoms.
Bones.
Before Miranda could start screaming or tell Freya what she’d seen, the howling started. The howling cut her to the bone, and made her mind go into a frenzy. Freya also started looking panicked.
The howls got louder, and louder, and soon Miranda could see what was howling. It was some sort of wolf-like thing, but with horribly human-like hands and eerily human-like eyes. It was staring intently at them.
Miranda, not wanting to become its and its friends’ next meal, grabbed Freya by the wrist and started running like Hell. They tore through the blossom filled forest, occasionally tripping over more bones of previous victims. Trees blurred as they passed. The howling followed them.
Eventually, the two of them ran and crashed through some trees, stumbling due to a change in elevation, and found themselves on a wide dirt road. The wolf creatures lurked on the edge of the forest, howling and barking like mad, but seemed unable to follow them onto this path.
“That-that was terrifying,” Freya panted. “We-we should probably stay on this-this path since they don’t seem to be able to step on it.”
“Agreed.” Miranda replied.
Not knowing what else to do, they wandered down the path, with the howling fading away into the distance. The scenery around them shifted, again (gods, why couldn’t the scenery stay the same for more than a few minutes), into a pine forest. As they continued, Miranda started hearing faint voices in the distance. Miranda, not wanting to get nearly killed again, grabbed a nearby fallen tree branch to use as a weapon.
As they got closer, Miranda could see, obscured by some flora, two people talking to each other. One of them looked to be a woman in her early thirties, with feathers covering parts of her body and wings sprouting from her back; the other was a humanoid of indiscernible age or gender, with a body made of darkness and blank glowing white eyes.
Freya accidentally stepped on a twig, causing it to snap audibly, and the two people snapped their heads up and looked in their direction.
“Hey! There’s people over there!”