The first ringing sound to echo through the depths of Everett's body and soul as she awoke was a shrill 'CLANK CLANK CLANK', followed shortly by a wave of unending silence.
The clanks were chiming unevenly from an old bell, perched high atop a belltower in the far distance.
With the way it was being rung, one would very easily assume that a ratty bird of some kind had decided to peck at it in curiosity. Or fly into it in stupidity, over and over, because birds do not tend to think ahead on their actions.
Everett stood up from the dusted well on which she had lay herself, the soft crunch of leaves underfoot cushioning her weight while she looked around. The woman's neck ached after laying on cold, hard rock for hours on end. Her water had been filled since before she'd fallen asleep yet, while her mouth felt impeccably dry, she did not make a move to sip any of it.
Instead, the woman watched, thoughtless, into the distance of trees and crows and sunset, and began to walk.
A place like this was rather abhorrently large. The kind of size in which it feels almost insulting to its nature to not get lost in it. Everett, however, had no time to indulge the trees in getting lost (as much as she would have been glad to be rid of the world entirely). Instead, she fiddled with the map in her fingers with every step.
Every now and again, her eyes would glance down to the paper to check the pathways- making markings in charcoal on the page where pits, caverns and sinkholes had creased the landscape as a thumb would crease clay.
Twenty years ago, a man had walked these woods with much the same equipment as Everett was lugging around herself. He had drawn expertly precise renditions of the depth around him, and to the life that became of it. He had marked undergrowths and clearings in red ink. Had spluttered black splodges upon places no one ought to climb. He'd even annotated in broken, fast strokes where berries and wells were found.
And, as the young woman was finding out, had been irreversibly, inexcusably incorrect in his efforts.
You'd think that a forest wouldn't dare change all that much in such a short time- especially since trees cannot move, and animals aren't much ones for landscaping as a hobby.
Yet here Everett stood, in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere, two foot from a clearing that is supposed to be two miles ahead of her.
The thought of being lost somewhere like this sent a shiver up her spine. At least she'd stumbled- albeit accidentally- upon what she was here to find.
Between the patches of trees lay an old, decrepit little wooden shack. One wall cut off from the others, having fallen under its own weight many years ago, exposing the inside to the elements of nature around it.
Beside the shack lay a forked stream. One nestled around a large rock that the water was ever so slowly eating away at. Everett wondered, as she stepped closer, whether she would live long enough to see the boulder become a pebble under the current's persistent movement. Whether she could one day watch it splinter beneath a single raindrop from the sky.
As she approached, the shack itself became more and more abysmal to look at. It's roof was partially fallen in on itself; its slats dripping down as drearily as droplets upon a misted lake, and the wood so rotten that Everett couldn't tell whether she was seeing the woodgrain, or looking at an infestation of orange-yellow fungus.
She decidedly did not get close enough to check which.
Not much had been left untouched by time inside- much less so now that the shack itself was little more than ruin- but that wasn't what Everett was here for in the first place.
It came soft, at first.
Soft in the way that a fluffed blanket eases from nothing into warmth. Soft in the way a mother hums a song to her sleeping child.
Soft, in the way a predator pads its feet so as not to be heard by prey.
A 'plop'. Followed by another. Then another, and another, and many thousands more. Rain upon shack, upon wood, upon skin, yet the sky remained clear in the golden hours of the evening.
Red and orange and brown hues etched into the water as it fell, tinting it indistinguishably into a bloody storm of horrid cold water and petrichor.
Everett's eyes fell to the stream, looking in at the dull ripple of her reflection.
She was ashamed to see she looked extremely off putting. No bags under her eyes she had ever had before could compete with the purple laying its claim there now. It almost looked as if she had been scrapping. As if a punch to the face may in fact make her appear more appealing.
And so, before she could traumatise herself into forgetting her woes, she looked away. To where the stream stretched off, rounding back into the forest.
She saw it when it shifted. The woman's hand reached to the scabbard on her hip, and her foot pressed back to balance her posture.
She could still hear it- the soft 'plop plop... plop... plop plop...plop' of something other than rain approaching.
What came second to that sound was always her least favourite part- not because of the sounds of squelching making her want to throw up, but because of how she knew she wasn't yet to see it.
The stream's flow was interrupted around twenty feet away. Minutely. So small someone not looking for it would miss it quite easily.
If it wasn't for the clear lack of fish in the stream, Everett would be under the assumption it was simply a measly tail flick of one attempting to swim upstream.
Then it happened again, closer now- just beneath the surface tension. A ripple, a splash, so small and unimportant in the bleeding rain that even Everett was unsure it had occurred at all.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, sword gripped in white knuckles, raised before her at the space where nothing disrupted the rain's journey to the ground.
Next came the slashing movement of air.
The roll of a pebble ten feet away, that curved unnaturally into view as it collided with another. The rocks began to fold in on each other like sand upon shore, and the tiniest measure of leftover cartilage sprang up from the ground between them.
Everett knew it would find bone here. The sullen mud along the embankment would shore up small mammals and reptiles that struck lucky enough to leave the safety of the trees cover to find this part of the stream.
Ones that got stuck in the evermoving ground, ones that buried themselves in their struggle.
Everett was glad her assumption had been correct.
Its bones slid past one another- the smallest shards cracking into place to form larger parts. One into a claw, then marrow found marrow and etched into wrist and thumb and forefinger. From the tiniest of creatures, grew ulna, grew radius, grew humorous, grew scapula.
Before her, as she swayed on the wet ground, the earth produced a being held together by rings of uneven dirt and moulding clay.
It staggered into half-life, spaces in its cranium where eyes would be rolled into sockets were instead filled with a void of pitch black. Though she was yet to see where it was looking, she knew it was looking at her.
It had seen her before it had formed- before its spine shot ribs into place, before reptilian features made prevalence upon its body, before one bone became three became two hundred and four- became too many to keep count.
Everett's fingers pressed harshly into her blade's hilt.
The rain kept seeping into the cracks, forcing her to hold on with a grip she was rather uncomfortable with.
The Bone struck first.
Lifting a cracking claw into the air, charging like a bull into her face as she stepped aside to avoid it. It narrowly missed, instead the tip of the claw tearing a line into the top of her shoulder as her foot fell into the water of the stream.
It stirred up tendrils of brown and grey, which flowed into her boot and soaked her foot with almost imperceptible cold.
She swung back, striking a rib out of place and stumbling back as a clavicle rotated with The Bone's body and encased her rapier in cartilage.
It whipped around at her, pulling her from the stream with it, and Everett was left with the choice of letting go of her weapon or being flung a hundred yards by the flailing movements it was attempting to use to throw her off.
Quite idiotically, Everett chose to hang on.
Her satchel was tossed from her side as she tore over the thing, breaking bone while she tore her hand out of the cartilage casing on the things chest and tumbled to the ground- narrowly missing stabbing herself in the chin when she landed.
With only a moment to collect herself, Everett shakily stood to her feet, wincing at a deafening 'ACK!' that tore through her throat when she attempted to stand on her left leg.
She had no time to judge if it was broken before The Bone came at her again- mouth open, with far too many teeth for the true animals to have ever really had. She shifted all she had onto her right leg, braced her hand behind herself for the inevitable pushback, and put her sword between herself and The Bone as if that would make a difference.
The Bone hit the sword- the sound of metal scraping solid dry occipital bone scratching her mind into little more than fuzz- and it made a harsh jolt away.
Everett tilted her sword as it did- hooking the blade between jaw and broken eye socket, and pulled.
The Bone's head cracked along the side, and Everett would almost assume the air that was pushed through the gap was a shrill cry of pain if she wasn't entirely all too aware that these things made no noise besides cacophonies of monotonous clacks of marrow upon rock.
It once more made an attempt to push her away, raising a hammering fisted claw to her abdomen with such speed it made her choke on her own breath. But she fought through the innate need to cough her diaphragm out of her mouth, and the shooting pain that bloomed across her ribs, and kicked up at the skull as hard as she could until she heard a 'THWACK' and The Bone stopped moving.
It wouldn't be long until the marrow began to find itself again, so Everett pushed away thoughts of what was broken and what wasn't as she caught her breath in short bursts.
It hurt to fill her lungs, and as she knelt at The Bone's side, she hoped to The Dead God (may she resurrect soon) that her ribs hadn't punctured a hole anywhere inherently important.
Her fingers worked through clusters of writhing white-grey mass to find a small, solid piece of deep crimson stone.
To the untrained eye, it looked much like a tacky gemstone one could trade for maybe a Ptoralin or two- five if lucky- but Everett knew better then to allow its looks to deceive her.
She turned her rapier upside-down, attempting to use her lesser bruised hand to unscrew the small cap attached to the end of the hilt, and placed the gemstone inside it before the stone could find something else dead to attach itself to.
That one was harder than usual. Bigger than she'd been expecting, too, based off of nearby village accounts.
Perhaps if her map hadn't been so badly made, she would have managed to stop the damn thing getting whatever upgrade it had given itself before she arrived.
She could only hope that the changes she'd made to it so far were good enough for her to find the village again before it got to midnight. Sleeping outside with the wolves wasn't exactly her ideal holiday. And some medical treatment would be nice, but that may be a stretch.
Speaking of her map, Everett muttered to herself a series of "Fucks sakes," and "Stupid Bones," and "Where's my damn satchel?-" until she eventually spied it sitting on the precipice of the shacks ingrown roofing.
It took her a short while of throwing random rocks to get it down, but once she'd picked it up out of the fungal infestation and given it a once over wipe, she slid it back to its rightful place at her waist and tightened it for good measure.
Her foot still ached terribly with every trembling step. Everett found herself wishing she'd remembered to bring tape; at least then she may have been able to create a makeshift splint for herself to not damage the torn ligaments more than necessary.
The trek back to the village made her clothes grainy with sweat. That's not to mention the dribbling of blood that was flowing needlessly gracefully in tracts down her ribcage and shin.
She must have looked like a beast herself with how, by the time she stumbled haphazardly into the Inn, the innkeeper simply tutted, poured her a drink, and gave her a free room on the first floor.
He was even nice enough to knock a short while later with food and a local doctor- though Everett insisted she pay him at least ten Ptoralin for the food, and at least twenty to the local doctor for checking her over.
She ended up only paying ten, because what sort of Innkeeper would take the coin from a Forager such as herself?