Chapter Text
It was a normal day, as normal as it could be in the Fae Woods. It was a close call with those strange creatures in that pit, everyone seems to have mostly recovered. Normie seems . . . reserved, he never was the most conversational before but I haven’t seen him talk to anyone but me. Though Marsoc’s told me he’s been staying up, writing in that book of his, keeping an eye on people despite the fact that we have a watch rotation for that. Well, there really has only ever been one way to stop Normie when he gets like this. I stand up and stretch,
“Well Normie, we should get a feel for our surroundings, right?”
Normie doesn’t even look up from his book,
“Canada and Marsoc already cleared the perimeter before we set up cam-”
“Too late!”
I grab Tholdrin -it’s strange to think of my friend with his real name, in a good way- by the arm and drag him into the woods to explore! The woods are dense, but luckily my impeccable sense of direction keeps us from getting lost . . . totally, but then I saw this cool bird, and well, Norm- Tholdrin, loves birds, so I ran off to try and catch it. I passed by a lot of really small animals, they all looked like babies, somewhere in the back of my mind a little voice whispered ‘where are their parents?’ but I just pushed it to the back with all the others. Eventually I came to this clearing, it was beautiful, a small river on an elevated cliff fed into a pond via a waterfall, in the middle of the pond was a tall rock, and on the rock was the most gorgeous flower I’d ever seen, its vines wrapping around the rock, onto its small island, and spreading out into the pond. Absently I wondered if it was some kind of lillie pad, but more actively I wondered what I could see from the top of the rock. So, throwing a look over my shoulder to make sure Tholdrin was still there, I waded into the water to get to the flower. The water felt a little weird as it soaked my clothes but everything here was weird, so I ignored it.
“Uh, amer- Jason, are you sure it's a good idea to get close to that flower? It looks magical”
Normie fretted behind me.
“I’m sure it's fine, besides, what's a flower gonna do?”
I get to the small island the rock and flower are on and start to climb up the rock, the vines of the flower giving me hand and foot holds to help me up. I get to the top, the flower about eye level as I look out.
“See Normie? It’s perfectly fi-”
I’m interrupted as the flower shoots out a burst of pollen into my face, I spit and sputter, trying to get it out of my mouth.
“Maybe you were right Norms, I don’t feel ri-”
Once again I’m cut off as I pass out, falling backwards towards the ground, my last thought being ‘well that was rude’.