How the Willow Came to Weep

It's not done yet, but it's a story for a friend in this project thing that I started and then lost time to play with

 

Chaptire 1

As tree after leaning tree fell, the pale green dryad standing at the foot of her very own willow tree ached to weep or to express her grief in some way. The branches surrounding her leaned and leaned but their tips still aimed up towards the sun, grasping for life.

                Perpetually silent as was her nature, she grew more and more envious of the water nymphs splashing and laughing amongst each other in the chuckling brook that seemed eternal. She gazed on, cracks of anger flaming in her eyes. The branches of her tree whipped through the air, threatening the happy-go-luckies down below. She knew her beloved was only trying to accommodate her and was responding to some of her own rage.

                Seeing this display of bravado, her eyes softened and she caressed the rough bark of the willow until it was as smooth as a baby’s butt beneath her fingertips.

                She sighed with her tree. They were both on edge lately. There was a strange disease flooding the forest, and her fellow dryads were all in hiding. Nymphia (the pale green dryad) could hardly see the sense in that, as her own life was linked directly to the survival of the tree.

                No, now was certainly not the time for hiding. The questing twigs balled into ragged fists, and the carefully smoothed bark curdled. Nymphia grinned as the subdued bark grew stiff. She chuckled silently, with her shoulders moving up and down. Her tree was flexing.

                Nymphia was extremely happy with her willow and was content to live out the rest of eternity with it, so now there was only one problem: figuring everything out.

Chaptire 2

                “Ow! Ow! Stop it! Com now, she was perfectly willing, begged me in fact. OW! Is what I did really so bad. I mean she’s the one who took vows. Are you familiar with the story of Adam and Eve, Sister? Sister MaryAnn seduced ME.”

                THWAP!!!

                “Mm-ah-mm… F**k! My head! Sister Josephine has a mean right hook,” gurgled Peter, brushing the swimming white flashes out of the black beneath his eyelids. He opened his green eyes wide--- and then shut them again. He tried to restore the blurring scenery and determine where those damnable nuns had left him.

                “She was hardly worth it. Virgin meat is the best meat, my a*s,” he proclaimed to the air, and his vision promptly swam into view. He was on a beach, thankfully of the sandy persuasion, or the slight rug burn marks that he had, would have been replaced by long scrapes and bruises, and perhaps a concussion caused by bouncing off of rocks. Judging by the tracks in the sand, he had been unceremoniously pitched from the back of a still moving horse.

                “Well, that’s Christian compassion for ya,” Peter growled.

                Perhaps they had hoped that he would remain unconscious while the waves had ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed until he was overtaken by the waves and promptly drowned in his nun-induced sleep. His whole body trembled as tiny bits of sea foam tickled his toes and brought this realization to life.

                His stomach growled abruptly, shattering his pondering of the attempts at his life, and bringing about the understanding that his death was just as imminent. He was an orphan with no real skills, who had just betrayed the one establishment that had taken pity on him and had offered him free room and board in exchange for learning the ways of and eventually becoming a priest.

                Fat lot of good That “skill” would do him when he attempted to earn a decent meal. Peter decided that it was time to get up. By this time, his feet were completely submerged, and the water was only getting deeper by the second. Besides, he had to see if his legs still worked or if the nuns had decided to trample him a few times with the horse just for good measure.

                Dragging his hands up towards his shoulders across the prickly and now dampening sand (good, it appeared that at least his arms weren’t broken) he laid his palms flat against his sides, knowing he would need all the extra leverage he could get to get back up from the sand.

                Cursing the nuns and the whole Christian religion under his breath, he pushed up from the sand into a sitting position, and fearing he would soon lose his resolve, kicked off the ground to stand although feebly as the scenery swirled and the ground tremored beneath his feet.

                Maybe Sister Josephine had hit him with something rather more blunt than just her fist, Peter thought blithely as he felt himself falling and turning and flipping into utter darkness. He heard only the crashes of the waves and the distinct cries of young maidens accompanying him along his surprisingly lengthy voyage back to the sandy and unforgiving ground that had once lay at his feet.

Chaptire 3

                He awoke with a smile on his face and a song firmly stuck in his head. “Gravity works slowly if you notice it at all, some of us are getting mighty lucky,” muttered Peter dreamily.

                “What?” came the curious call from the same young voice that had echoed out to him from outside his dream earlier.

                “Oh, it’s this marvelous song, you really must hear it,” he fell naturally into his former role of champion of the golden tongues. “It’s done by…” he faltered, “Well, anyhow, it goes…” The words that had once seemed so familiar fell away like straws through a loose grip. “Oh well, made it up, I guess, then.” He drew his hand up to run it through his hair to cover up a rather embarrassing performance, and pulled it back in horror when he found no hair and only a brittle and suddenly reeking bandage.

                “Oh! I had hoped that we could go a little longer Without you discovering that. Your hair was so very pretty. It was extremely frustrating to have to cut it all off.”

                “Cut it… off?” He looked up at her for the first time, and instantly had his horror renewed when he took in her breathtaking beauty. It wasn’t so much her features that did it. Left alone her honeyed blonde hair and startlingly green eyes peaking out beneath curls would not have made him feel breathless in the slightest. There were plenty of women out there that chose this particular style from the fashion fountain at the edge of town, but she seemed to contain something more. Perhaps it was the compassion for the loss of his hair positively eking from her eyes (only women were permitted to visit the fashion fountain) , or the look of forced reserved bemusement at his former attempts at offhanded charm in a completely non-familiar terrain, but one thing was certain she had something. Or maybe it had just been too long since he had seen a woman not covered from head to toe in a loosely hanging smock…

                “Yes, I had to. You took quite the fall, you know, and I had to bandage you up. It’s a wonder you didn’t’ end up with a concussion. What happened to you?”

                “I did battle with a group of Extremely angry nuns.”

                Abruptly she lost her reserve and tipped her head back and laughed. She didn’t stop laughing until she was clutching at her sides and wiping the tears from her eyes, while Peter was perfectly content to lay there and drink it all in.

                “All right,” she gulped, “I understand, you only just met me, how rude it was of me to even ask it of you. Thanks for the laugh. I haven’t laughed quite like that in a while,” she said, blushing quite freely now.

                Finally, Peter found himself back in his element. He opened his mouth to offer a rebuttal, and let out a most pathetic eek, that he desperately hoped had been masked by the cause of it. The door was thrown open and the single-paned windows jiggled and rattled in place indignantly as a monster of a man threw the door open.

                “Ou are you?! Elodie, what er ou doing? Bringin straggers in ere egin? The eet all me food, and I never geet a penny in return,” he growled, his six foot wide frame seeming to expand with every pause for breath.

                “Ah, daddy, drop the act would you? He knows full well that you can’t possibly have an accent. Just because it scares some fool down in the market doesn’t mean that it is likely to intimidate any civilized society members,” Elodie trilled.

                “Civilized society member?” he raised on eyebrow high up on his forehead, but had at least dropped the accent. “He doesn’t look particularly Civilized to me.” He looked Peter up and down with his lip curled in disgust. “Is that you that’s stinking up the place?”

                Peter was still too embarrassed by his eeking and the fact that he had in fact been tricked into being intimidated by Elodie’s father’s fake accent. So he just waited for Elodie to respond. She looked a little disappointed in him, but said, “ Of course it’s him, but he can hardly help it. You would smell too, if you had been through what he has.”

                “And just what Has he been through then?”

                “Well I… I’m not sure… But it must have been bad. Look at the state of him.”

                “Okay… That’s enough. “He” can talk, you know?” Elodie blushed, but her father continued staring at him with his lip curled up. “I was in a fight.”

                “Oh? A fight, huh? With who?”

                Not wanting to lie out-right, but not wanting to tell the truth either (it wouldn’t do to tell this man that he had been beaten up by a bunch of nuns) Peter hesitated for a moment.

                “Well? Come on now, I don’t have all night. You’ll either provide a good story or get out of my house!”

                So that was it then. Peter drew in a sigh of relief. This man didn’t want the truth, he could care less what happened to Peter, he just wanted to be entertained. “Well, I was in an alleyway.”

                “…Cause That’s original.”

                “Well, I can hardly help where it’s at! Now just sit there and listen!” That might have been pushing it a little, so Peter tried not to appear nervous, but still waited for a response from the gargantuan. Surprisingly, the guy’s face softened considerably and he sat down on the edge of the bed, astonishingly careful not to sit on Peter’s injured leg.

                “So, I was in the alleyway, minding my own business, crossing between the square and that one road with the meat locker on it,” he waited for Gar (we’ll just call him that for now) to correct him, he actually had no idea about the layout of the town, as the nuns had wanted him as far away from the nunnery as possible, but Gar just sat there blinking stupidly, so Peter continued.

“When I tripped over what I thought was a stick or a piece of trash or something, and all the sudden gravity failed and rather than falling down, I fell up. You see it had actually been a rope that was now digging deep into my skin as I hung swinging in the breeze from one ankle. That’s when the empty alleyway became suddenly cluttered. They were horrible creatures, some kind of cross between humans and marsh animals, all slurping in air as though it were a thick substance and making slushing noises as they moved quickly across the stone floor.”

“I was getting a little nervous at this point, so I asked the open air, ‘Um, you weren’t planning on eating me, were you? Because I’m here to tell you that I taste Horrible. Believe you me, there are much tastier things out there for you to dine on, and if you just get me down from here, I can show you some of them.”

“Hmph!” Gar scoffed. “Trying to weasel your way out of a situation, huh? Very honorable,” he chuckled into his flask which had appeared out of nowhere.

“There wasn’t a bloody lot that I could do hanging from my ankle, now was there? I had to find a way to get down from there, and then if need be, I could smash a few skulls.”

“I see, and that’s why it’s your skull that got crushed then?”

“I was getting to that! Now, may I please continue?”

Gar took a long swig, and sat there looking at Peter expectantly, so he continued, “This lot was a dumb as they were smelly, so they immediately formed a cluster down below, all hurriedly trying to find a way to release me. As I was watching that, one of the most productive of the lot, was climbing up a wall of trash to get at my rope. I was hanging about five or so feet up, so when he bit through the rope, I took quite a tumble, straight onto my head, I’m lucky that my neck’s not broken. And that’s it. Not a very thrilling story, but it’s what happened, none the less.”

“Okay, but, then…” Elodie faltered.

Backtracking, desperately trying to see where he had slipped up, Peter asked with what he hoped appeared to be a wry grin, “Didn’t you like my story?”

“Oh yes, very much. But, it’s just that I found you on the beach… And there is no meat locker in this town anyhow. We have no need for one. None of us eat meat here, Peter.”

Trying desperately to appear nonchalant in a panicked state, Peter replied, “Oh, I am such a terrible story-teller. I was trying to repay your hospitality with a few laughs and a good story, but it appears that I will have to find some other way to earn my keep around here. What really happened is extremely unexciting. I was a at a bar, flirting with a dazzling young girl, and another man came up and socked me in the gut, we battled for a while, and I can only hope that he is as bad off as I am, and that the fool didn’t rape Mandy,” Peter finished off his second lie with a sigh for good measure.

Now Elodie’s eyebrow flew up. “And that’s the truth this time?”

“Completely.”

“So why on earth were you on the beach? And who’s Mandy? I don’t appreciate liars, and if you think that---“

“Elodie!” Gar clamored, “Just what is that you think you are doing? He is a guest; you can’t nag at a guest. Now, go do something useful and cook some dinner or something lady-like.”

“But I---“

“Elodie!”

“Yes, Father.” Elodie threw murderous looks at both her father and Peter, but got up and left for the kitchen.

“Hey, thanks a lot,” Peter said.

“Shut up and go to bed! You have a long day of honest work ahead of you tomorrow. Think your a*s’ll be all healed up by then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, now keep your mouth shut, and work hard, and we’ll see what we can do with you.”

 

Author's Note

Just keep in mind that it's Not done, of course I hardly ever finish anything, so....

Reviews

[Angel Bird]

Wow - for a story - this is one hell of a story!!!

I'm wondering how this will continue. You have an enormous potential wow!

I can only hope that you will find new inspiration to continue. Please send me a read request when the next part is ready, for I don't wanne miss it.

Thumb up. Fantastic work!