The bite of the medium-game trap held Allouette's leg in a predator's grip; the lightly rusted iron teeth had wedged themselves in between her tibia and fibula, causing the total fractures to compound outwards. She screamed. It was, all-in-all, a traumatic and blood-curdling affair. Five arpents south, her hellish shrieks echoed through the eerily foggy mid-morning forest. It was early Kuthona, and a mild storm had rolled through two days ago.
In fact, the first several weeks of winter so far had been shockingly mild - in contrast to the past quarter-dozen centuries, this year had featured weather that melted permafrosts above the treeline of Droskar's Crag, and unseasonable migrations of all sorts of beasts. The ladies of Falcon's Hollow kept their summers' dresses on until early Lamashan, the bonfires of vigorous youths visiting from Olfden had burnt well into Neth, the pumpkin-spiced meads from Carpenden continued to pour into the local taverns til the ides of Rova, and Stanislas thought all that had made autumn far better this year than it had been for the past decade. He suppressed a devilish grin as he beckoned the bold woodsmen and loggers he'd "happened" to stumble upon as he searched for haplessly helpful men to aid in rescuing his poor trapped "cousin".
One of the loggers shouted, "Écouter! <Just a bit further! I can hear her now!>" He was a bold one, standing head and shoulders above the rest, with a booming voice. The others nodded in stern agreement. The whole heroic sight nearly had Stanislas in stitches, but he locked it in.
"Affirmatif! <My cousin is just up ahead!>" Stanislas' voice wavered, though he had these feral frontiersmen convinced that it was from exhaustion and terror, rather than his haunting sense of meta-humor.
The group of twelve approached within a score toise of the trapped young woman. Half a lieue ancienne above the earth, a witch gazed upon them. She delicately balanced upon her broom; it was a gnarled, knotty, twisted limb that had once belonged to a vile treant highwayman who had become corrupted by Mokravud, the vile lieutenant of Treerazor. Mokravud had ordered this treant - a terrible old oak named Darklily - to waylay a nearby coven from Bellis. The witch on the broom, and her coven, had been summoned by sendings to aid their cousin-coven. They had followed through on these summons and secured a great bounty of favors in return.
One such reward whistled through the wind between the witch's knees as she rolled over into a dive toward the canopy below, pulling her coven's cloak of invisibility over her body, such that only the broom was visible - it floated in eerie silence three pied du roi above the leaf-spattered forest floor. She followed the group as they stumbled across the densely intermingled tree-roots towards the trap that lay ahead.
