(--) omg omg omg omg
Myrika is by Raze!
Her dream was interrupted by a rude shaking on her shoulder. Her name was being whispered, over and over again. Myrika was awake with frightful quickness, sitting up so fast she nearly knocked Kaena aside. The old woman took a stumbling step backward, nearly losing the burning light she held. The tawny-furred coyote blinked, her eyes unused to even the dimly glowing and flickering light of the torch. The old woman smiled, but it seemed to Myrika a grave sort of expression, made even more solemn by the criss-cross pattern of scars. A call at the borders, the Evocati explained as she led a vaguely groggy Myrika toward the entrance of the schoolhouse. No voice I know, but it calls for you.
The fire Kaena must have been sitting beside was burning low, little more than glowing embers. There was a muffled horse noise from within the barn and the endless whirring of cicadas, but otherwise, the night was quiet. Perhaps Kaena had hallucinated the call entirely -- or perhaps Myrika was still dreaming. Inconspicuously, she pinched herself on the arm. It hurt, and so she knew herself to be awake. Where? she asked, stretching sleep away from long limbs. The old woman, already settling back down beside her fire, looked up and seemed to glare, though perhaps it was simply firelight reflecting on her remaining eye.
South. It was faint. Probably by the forest. Myrika was sour at this -- perhaps Kaena was only hearing things? The redhead moved toward the stables all the same, sticking an arm into pat Militades on the head. The colt attempted to shrink away from her, but as he shared a stall with his mother and room was tight, she patted him squarely. The colt laid his ears back and bared his teeth, only to be reprimanded by a sharp snort from his mother. Myri was surprised to find her horse tacked and ready -- she tugged a strap here and there to ascertain the job, and found it satisfactory.
Leading the tall horse out of the stables and corral, she paused to thank the old woman for readying the horse before waking her. From there, it was only to quicken the horse to a fast trot. She guided the horse south, taking him along the beach. All the while, her ears were perked skyward for the noise of a second calling, though she heard nothing but the pound of hooves and the noises of night. She had plunged her horse through the second stream she must cross to reach the borders and was nearly to their skull-lined border when she smelled something that made her stiffen in the saddle.
Cahal smelled it, too -- or at least, the most obvious part of the smell. It was a stink more than anything, the distinctive flavor of long-dead, half-rotten meat. Myrika recognized this from having stumbled upon the dead in nature and did not find this in and of itself so disconcerting, but the other scents she recognized immediately thereafter were. There was blood, old enough to have dried to a dull red crust. This went with the scent of death, of course, but the underlying hint was only barely recognizable to Myri. It took her a long moment, and only with the tossing of her horse's head, his snorting and pawing, did she realize what it was. Although old as the blood and fading fast, the smell of abject terror was perhaps more pungent than all the rot and old death. And perhaps that, too, was only so terrible because Myrika recognized the faintest undertow in the air of a scent she could never have forgotten.
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