Several hours ago, on the outskirts of town:
The pacing of footsteps sounded incessantly in Griselle's ears.
" Thud, thud, thud." It went, like the buzz of a fucking bee or the nervous drumming of a drum before a big fight.
Griselle looked up, her eyes meeting a dying fireplace, its last embers smouldering out as it burnt the last of the firewood they had collected. But there was no longer a need. The sun was at most half an hour from rising and Griselle could already imagine it peaking over the horizon. Yet in reality, all her eyes faced was the thick canopy of trees above and the darkness beyond. Those and the faint silhouette of a stupid fuck pacing and prowling like a restless child.
Ragnar was not young, well into his days of manhood but yet before every hunt, he would still keep up the bad habit of muttering and pacing. Regardless of prey. Regardless of situation. Regardless of his own growth he would still pace and mutter, wasting precious time and energy. Griselle had done her best to change the habit but it returned every time without fail.
' Why is this clown my student?' Griselle found herself thinking for the thousandth time or so. She bent down and dug her fingers into the ground, rummaging for several moments before her fingers found a small stone. Her arm drew back and the stone flew. A startled cry followed.
Griselle saw the figure get closer until the dying camp fire illuminated the chiseled visage of a handsome young man. He stood tall, broad shouldered and muscular. Two small, brown ears twitched atop his squarish head and a accusing but surprisingly soft expression adorned his face.
" I didn't know….." He said softly, the noises of the forest drowning off his muttering. It was another bad habit he had, Griselle noted.
" What?"
He spoke now just loud enough for her to hear. Definitely a bad habit.
" I didn't know you were awake." His timid voice said.
" Ah.. you didn't know. Do you know now?"
" Yes.."
" Louder."
" Yes!"
Griselle let out a satisfied grunt and looked off over her student's shoulder into the darkness of the woods.
" I've told you many times, it's pointless to pace. You won't get any less nervous and you'll just be wasting energy."
" I'm sorry master."
" Somehow you always are. But I've said before, you should.."
" Apologise to myself, not to you. I know."
Griselle fixed her apprentice with a look. The frustration was written plainly on his face. She frowned. That wasn't very a good a habit either, it would make him easy to read.
But she satisfied herself with the thought that she would nitpick more when they were safely back home.
Her observant eyes returned to the darkness of the forest in the south, the direction she'd looked off into previously. Her eyes scoured the darkness for a long time before a sudden twitch caught her eye. A distortion in the darkness. It was almost untraceable and lasted only the blink of an eye.
Then the forest returned to its still existence for a long time until a figure materialised from the darkness. He stood a distance away, seemingly shrouded in a cloak of shadow. The actual cloak that shielded him from the night's chill was as dark as night itself and was pulled close to his body to keep it from fluttering. If she hadn't known where to look, even Griselle would have had trouble locating the assassin of their expedition party.
She called out to him.
" How fares the tides today?" She said. She purposely phrased it such so as to fit with the tradition of his tribe, who had lived and worked by the seas since times untold.
" Decent. Smooth sailing if we leave early." He replied.
Ragnar made a discontented growl.
" You do know that we see you. Why insist on staying in the shadows like that?" He demanded angrily.
When there was no reply, Ragnar clicked his tongue in annoyance and made his way over, his heavy footsteps crunching the breaking the dried leaves beneath his feet.
" I said. Come OU-"
A scuffling sound followed and suddenly, Ragnar had frozen in his tracks. The orange glint of a dagger reflecting the light of the campfire shone dangerously near his throat. Griselle could see Ragnar's Adam's apple bobbing nervously as he took a step back.
The blade flashed once and disappeared into the folds of a cloak. Another familiar face had appeared. A werewolf he was and his storm grey eyes looked tired as he stared Ragnar down, the latter whimpering as he retreated. The shadow of their assassin stood behind this new warrior, his hand resting on a dagger of his own. Now there were four of them in the camp.
" Griselle.."
" When do we leave? I tire of waiting."
He snorted.
" The longer we dawdle, the longer the princess suffers in the hands of those monkeys." Griselle could hear the aggression in his voice, his spirit raring to go yet she would still bid him wait.
" In a while Kaelen. But not yet."
Her mind drifted off onto the topic of the mission and inwardly, she frowned as the same doubts from when she'd received the mission's parameters began to resurface. Frankly, this mission was strange in itself.
To take a strike team of some of the finest warriors the Beast Tribala had and infiltrate deep into human territory and retrieve the young princess of one of the Five Great Tribes. Griselle was honestly more concerned with how a princess of a great house had ended up in the hands of human slavers.
And to risk breaking a thousand year continuity of increasingly strained peace between human and beastman? Why not solve it with the diplomacy that those old geezers and crones high up in the Tribala's hierarchy so loved? There were too many questions but in the end, she was only a soldier. Her questions were unlikely to ever be answered but that didn't stop her from feeling uneasy deep inside.
Griselle snapped back to her senses and quickly noticed that they had another new face.
A Shoon had landed in their campfire and was in the process of picking leaves from her white wings. Her feathers were the colour of milk but had a gradient of colour that slowly transitioned to caramel at the very tip of each feather. She was a human like form, but instead of hair, a crown of feathers stuck out from her head and in place of arms, two magnificent wings stretched out from her torso.
" Anything to report?" Griselle asked their scout who had been gone since several hours ago.
The Shoon stuck her head out of her wings and seemed to think a for a moment.
" The trees here are shit. " She said, her face burying back into her wings.
Griselle knew what that meant, she felt her palms get sweaty. It was time.
She stood up. It was time.
She moved past her team and began into walking into the darkness of the forest. The colour of the sky above had began to transition and with a little time, her eyes would get used to the dark as well.
It was just a mission, she told herself. A mission like any other. She had been on thousands of them so what was there to worry? It was just an extraction. In and out. In the best case she wouldn't even have to fight.
" Let's go." Griselle heard herself say.
But regardless of what she did, she couldn't help but feel that she was making a terrible mistake.