Who: Ash & Wren What: Bad dreams Where: The woods When: After sundown Warnings/Rating: Trauma, TBD
It was cooler and darker in the woods when you walked off the beaten track and off the rabbit paths and picked your way between the trees and pushed your legs through thick hurdles of fern and bramble and low growing vegetation. When the sun set and the moon wasn't full enough to provide any light the darkness of the woods could be absolute, unless you were enhanced in some way.
As picturesque as it could be during the day, depending on what kind of picture you were trying to take, the forest became eerie and nightmarish when night fell; strange winds moved the branches and leaves and unusual noises cut through the oppressive silence that came from the absence of the background hum of human activity.
A high and desperate sound bounced off the trees and rang out, distorted and echoing; it was blood curdling scream, piercing and insistent, similar to the cry of a fishercat or a fox but nothing a hunter would have heard before.
The sound scared predator and prey alike away from it's source, a split of thick roots that provided a cradle for a little knotted rope of a boy, a bundle of sticks still dressed in the tshirt he'd been wearing for some time and nothing else. He writhed in his sleep against nightmares that had him sending sounds of terror through the woods, his bare legs collecting new scrapes where he kicked out against nothing and hit bark or stone or twig, his already dirty hair knotting and collecting dead leaves.
He'd take a break to pant desperate and terrified before another scream would rip out of him like a tooth being pulled and end in a helpless whine of a sob, trapped, unable to wake until the memory ran itself out.