life

The green leafed trees loomed overhead and hung down. Even they had betrayed Stitches, even they reached their malicious and grim fingers down towards him to poke and pry. Each twig and branch picking at his brain, or at the very least, trying to. As these traitorous wood towers get closer, the road itself seems to shrink narrower.

With a sharp sniff and a twitch of both thumbs, Stitches pale green eyes flutter to a groggy opening. The morning blue gray sky greets him, and he unties his legs from themselves and sits up to free his back from tree bark yet again. His fingers meet the cold ground and clutch at the wet grass, and his knees bend to, in a moment, assist him in standing. Amidst the soft humming of the breeze, his steed offers him a cordial huff and snort, shaking its head at his arising.

Long and untrimmed fingernails brush up against the bark of a soggy tree as tall and bare fingers fumble with a rope to tie it in a secure but undefined knot. The rope follows back up to the horse it holds, and the black Clydesdale gives Stitches an unamused neigh, follow with a huff and a trod of the ground with a frustrated hoof.

Stitches lifted his feet quickly along the muddy path, splashing through puddles as he approached Hengstacer farm. The sky is bleeding crystals, and the ground;s firm nature would suffer from it. Stitches would not tarry, lest his new boots get covered more in muck than need be. He picks at his new tunic and trousers and reaches to his head to readjust his hat, which of course is no longer there, and has been replaced with the gray hood of a cloak and mantle he had made for him by a local seamstress not too long ago.

(Beginning of Part 3)

Dru mentions the time soon thereafter and they stand to depart. As he did a few nights before, he offers to keep her company on her walk home. He never saw her home, and he doesn't expect to, but somehow being around someone, speaking with them consistently and in a way that makes him feel new things seemed more enticing to his slowly more and more active mind than working the fields. 

(Beginning of Part 2)

Another eventual hour of small talk, Dru putting up with his ignorance when it comes to social interaction, and Stitches giving her a cloak for the chill, they wind up at another door of conversation, this one rather out of the blue. Stitches had been wondering this for himself, so his unfiltered brain asks Dru for insight.

"What do you dream of, Dru?"

"As I sleep? Or for my life?" She asks in response.

Just a few days before Drubainbess and Stitches were separated, and she went missing, they met for a final time. It was another chilly winter afternoon, the fractured sky gilded with sparse clouds that decorate like a menagerie of  spirals and cracks, a compendium of golden to lilac, from a twilight to a brilliant vermilion.Stitches was left off the evening shift and came straight to Bree in search of his friends. A feeling had been tickling him all day in the fields, and it urged him that something was incredibly wrong.

The weather of the morning light sets a dreary and sorrowful rainy backdrop to the scene before the quiet Bree-Land house. Reidun leads her horse up the steps of the moderate abode carefully, not trusting herself to carry him all the way up. "I wish Kael were here..." she mutters to herself as she tries to offload him onto the top of the stairs.
 

Reidun had been out riding, looking at the herbs and spices that grow in the wilds of Bree. She figured the river below looked lovely, and sought a safe path down, leading her horse carefully. As she makes her way forward, she stops suddenly at the form of a man on the ground. "Uh...hello?" Is her shaky inquiry, muffled through her mask.

Three days ago, on a sunny but cold winter afternoon, Stitches found himself at the West Gate of Bree; ready to retire himself from a shorter day of work before he returned himself to his special hill to speak to the lady in the stars. Before making his way to Bree, while on the road from Hengstacer he had dawned atop his head a crimson velvet hood and bird skull formed mask.