crystal;

[arcaneadvisor]

FORM: Sending crystal
SENDER: Morrigan
RECIPIENT: Open
WHAT: Spook podcast 3: Autumn edition
WHEN: Vaguely nowish
WHERE: Sundermount (Morrigan)
NOTES: Threadjack, share spooky stories etc just have fun 'tis the season (for us)

There was a tale mother told when I was a girl.

[Perhaps not unsurprising that her mother isn't so far from her mind. Not so easy to banish her just yet alas yet Morrigan sounds untroubled, a fire crackling behind her; Sundermount is eerily silent come evening at least where her humble abode has been for this long.]

A young woman of the court - she never said what court, let us say Highever for the sake of it - heard it so that there were none who might go into the wilds bordering the lands else they would not emerge with their reputation intact, a command laid down by a mysterious Tamlane. This young woman was not deterred by such a thing and so did she set out to the wilds where she did pick a wild rose; Tamlane revealed himself to her--

The young woman's father noticed, upon her return, that she was very much with child. You can imagine this was far from ideal for her and when she told him it was not even a man from his court… [Well times haven't moved on so far, or so Morrigan's quietly amused tone implies.] Away she went again to the wilds, to Tamlane.

When they met again, Tamlane told the young woman he had been taken by a witch, and no longer was he as he had been, instead possessed by a spirit though fearing he was to be offered up to the demon the witch had made her terrible pact with as she had to do every seven years. But she could save him! If she waited for the stroke of midnight on Satinalia when the witch would ride through alongside Tamlane, though she would have to pull him clean off his horse.

The witch, of course, would not give Tamlane lightly: she had magic far beyond that which the young woman had encountered, and in her grasp Tamlane's form was not his own. He twisted about her as a great terrible serpent to crush the breath from her lungs though as she thought she might gasp her last and then he was Tamlane again for a moment only to leap out of his skin as a wolf as monstrous as all those the huntsman told tale of in her father's hall, snarling with his jaws about her throat. An eagle shrieking, talons to blind her eyes. Stinging wasps and biting gnats. On and on it went as her arms struggled to hold him--

[Her voice is close to the crystal, so close, as if the world has melted away entirely and she's back once more in a simple hut with Flemeth who told this tale to a girl too small to hear it.]

Hold him she did. Marry him she did. The witch was not best pleased but knew she had been bested that day. I always thought this Tamlane such a trouble for but one man, I suspect mother saw herself somewhere else in the tale.

Comments

[utulien_aure]

Ah. Should we then presume the youth was so irritating that she thought 'good riddance' upon losing him?

A number of the ones to be found in the library, yes. And some of the tales heard in the city. Both, I imagine would be a drop in the ocean when compared to all that could be told.