[ Shattered banners and broken blades. ]

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[ You can hear the banshee's cry under the chimarae moon. ]

In time your thoughts were drawn back to memories of your childhood. A shadowy and curling intonation began with a disembodied whisper through the back of your mind, like a hound scratching at the door, "shattered banners, and broken blades. You can hear the banshee's cry under the chimarae moon..."

Everything went inky in that moment. Your eyes freezing over in an overwhelming abyss of shadow and silence. Strange whispers of pain coming and going from nowhere. The old words from that story beginning and ending the same way as they came and went in the moment. You could hear the sobs of distant banshees. Every little sensation mingling with static noises and bleeding pain flowing through your being.

A triad of cracking and shattered moons high above the treetops were the first image to strike you as your senses returned. Your body laying in the flowing glow of cold shimmering veins in the sky. Bathing coldly in the image of moonlight spreading through the eternity of the forest surrounding you. Slow, shuddering glimpses of the eternity eating into your eyes from above.

Your gaze slowly drawn to the stained old banners of scraped flesh draped over the branches of the cold rotting willows. Flags from long ago coated crimson with the blood of your long dead ancestors surrounding you, and hanging over the ancient battlefields of this long abandoned break of this frozen forest you've woken in. The shattered glories of dead men mingling with the ancient cloth of brotherhoods left behind in the frost after untold years in the void. Lost history among the ten thousand shards of blade, glinting bloody shards and glazed memories coating the frost below, all from the long and fruitless battles that led here over the eons.

Cold shafts of pale, lambent moonlight echoed downwards through the tops of eternally rotting trees that grew from the frost like blades of grass, the aura of the pounding veins of an endless sky mirroring the sensations in your chest. The broken and corrupted eternity of this violated place eating at you while you tried to calm. You can hear the drums of old wars beating from your now damned veins the moment the howling began some distance away.

Voices eating your skull, screaming that the hunters can already smell your blood. Long before you could realise that you've been nicked, the drums have warned you to start. Old and rusted bushes of thorns that felt like razor wire damned you in the night, your slow crawl bringing your doom when you tried to be quiet in the dark rather than simply sprint away from the huntsmen.

The howling had already begun, the hunt was on, and you were already trailing behind the hunters in your cold and weary ignorance. The slices along your tired and infected veins spilled your scent onto the ground, making your flesh obvious to the eternal nightmares in the quiet lonely dark. Their hounds know where you are now, truly and without flaw in their lidless gazes. They can hear your ancestors, voices screaming at you to run while you still can. As loud to them as it was to you. And now in the frozen light of the twilight days you've fallen into, they come.

The huntsmen had no more need for darkness, nor subtlety, here in this abyss of cold and confusion. There was nowhere left you to hide anymore. You will die here, rang the endless and reverberating chorus of the freezing mists and aether feigning at being something else. The wild hunt had come to finish the job their masters began so long ago. The bloodlines that spawned you will be snuffed, one way or another your line and fate was to end here. The fae had decided that long ago when their transgression against your kind first began.

The rotting forest of cold around you was not truly forest, nor was the bleeding sky of lambency a sky, or your rotting oily blood your blood, or your endless fearful death truly a death. Just a twisting torment of unravelling forevermore, and it will be worse for you than it was for those who came before. Your linguistics are lacking for the words necessary for the endless dreamscape you've fallen into. A horror where you find yourself surrounded by ghosts of things that never were. The ghost of your living self hunted by never-born things from an abyss that god tried to forget. The floor of dead leaves lit by a sky of something that wasn't light, in a forest where even the air had become murderous, you bleed your family's history in the frost below, and you already feel yourself unravelling in the non-existence. The void here was always trying to assimilate you into itself, like everything else it once had.

Your mind tries over and over to adjust to the chaos of this place. Your flesh forces itself further onward. One foot in front of the other. Your legs pulling the rest of you on despite the confusion fogging you. Your very soul demanding an escape from this fractured corruption pretending to be reality. Sprinting in the glow of moonlight where once you merely dreamed of crawling in the hopeful darkness.

The fae have come for you seeking a debt you never truly owed. Cruel of them, but that was their nature at its core. This was to be three days and three nights. A cyclical madness that will never end, and that truly would never begin in the first place, as was their trick. Their hunt would be endless until they became bored, even though you know they never would with their game. All you had to do at its core was the impossibility of an escape. Slip the pursuit of their huntsmen as well as their hounds.

You know this nightmare will be the rest of your eternity, if you fail. Even a single misstep, a stumble, a stride out of synch would damn you here. To fall in this eternal escape attempt would be worse than having been born in the first place. They'd do far, far worse than simply kill you if you slipped. One way or another. You knew that deep down from the day your grandfather told you the story of your family's damnation so long before you were even an inkling... It would be the end of more than one story if you fell here.

[ For the wild hunt draws near, and so does the end of your years. ]