Plot Picture Challenge # 1

[Hana]

The exercise is simple. Think of a plot, a story, that comes to mind when you look at the chosen image, and write it down. Let your mind and your imagination wander, and go on from there.

'a meeting in the woods', by sergei averkin

Next: Plot Picture Challenge # 2​

 

[Lurcolm]

"That is a fucking big deer."

Rhistah blurted it out before his mind could tell him it was a bad idea to state it out loud when you were hunting it. Well, hunting would mean you're planning on killing it, which he was, but it also entailed planning to succeed, which he wasn't. Simply put, the thing knew he wast there. He didn't know how, he didn't know why it kept giving him tracks to follow or kept in the vicinity, but it was in fact painfully aware of him.

He had realised this at the third night. He had wanted to stay awake and see whether or not he was nocturnal. Sadly enough he was known as Mister Chicken when it came his sleeping habits. Tired as the dead at dusk and up with a vengeance at dawn. It was while he slowly woke up that he realised the deer, already large at five hundred metres or so, was looking at up. Of course that made him shoot up and rub his eyes clean, and when he looked again the thing was sound asleep. He told himself it was just a flight of fancy, a shadow playing tricks with him. Problem was shadows don't do that kind of shit when you look them square in the eyes.

Next indicator was a week or so thereafter. He had ran out of food and was determined to head back to his tribe before the left without him to greener pastures for their beetles to feed on. His tribe was notorious for the size of their beasts. Five meters tall and twice across. Mountainous things that could crush cities, and if the legends were true did at some point. The next morning, a berry bush had fallen on his pack, edible berries. Delicious berries. He just flagged it as luck. He also flagged the fact that the deer seemed to have settled down in the region until he was able to move, luck as well.

Now it had been a month. His tribe probably think him dead, but he was obsessed with that giant deer. The thing was kind enough to greet him this morning by staring him dead in the eyes. The eyes? As large as his head. He grossly underestimated exactly how big the thing was, judging at such a distance.

The thing wasn't killing him though. That was the weird part. It simply looked at him with those huge eyes, trying to figure out what Rhistah was.

Yes. It was trying to figure out what he was. He was of course perfectly fine with situations like these. He gets stared at, at point blank range, by giant fucking dear that could just step on him and he'll die, every other day. Perfectly fucking normal.

Now only if he could believe that true.

Luckily, it decided he was beneath it's notice. It turned around and sprinted away without as much as a huff. He decided that. Quite a big he indeed by the looks of things. It occurred to him then and there that he was, in fact, lost. Two seconds with that belief, he saw smoke coming from a nearby cave on top of a hill. His keen eyes counted about six tents. Bad number. Bad luck at six, but good luck at five and seven, such the ancestors stated. He didn't have much else to go by so he decided to ask them if he could join them.

As he approached, he noticed how pathetic their beetles were, just a foot tall and ridiculously weak. It was a miracle these people survived without the stout protection of the beetles. He was no herder, but he knew a few things about how they kept their creatures in the shape they had. He'd probably be able to use that leverage for a place. Yes, that would be wise.

 

[Elle Joyner]

They were mad. They were all of them out of their minds. It was an honor that should have been bestowed upon kings and dignitaries, the likes of which he could never hope to be... Yet here he was, chosen. One of the few. Pride surged, a wave in him, but so like a wave it washed in and out, ebbing and flowing with increase, with decrease. Anxiety, his mother had called it. Perfectly normal, all things considered. Except it didn't feel normal. It made his stomach clench, his jaw tense and his eyes sting. What if he messed it all up? What if he ruined it? So many years waiting, and all it took was the wrong word, a bow not quite deep enough, a glance too long or too short...

Footfall nearly silent, he trekked along the forest path. Frost clung to the branches, winter's last caress, beads like jewels which had already begun to melt beneath the warmth of the mid morning sun, stretching incandescent fingertips through a thick canopy overhead. He would have liked company, but the Prophet had dictated, with all authority, that the journey should be made alone. And alone, it seemed, he was indeed, for there was not a single bird song, no whisper of the wind's breath through the frame of branches above. One step at a time, he approached The Peering Point, the tattoo of his heart beating wildly against his chest, pumping loudly in his ears the only sound in the whole world.

One foot, then all at once, he was upon the rock that crested the steep, root-choked hill. A breath, exhaled with force, and he turned his gaze downwards upon the creatures below, for there they were already. Two of them, though more were sure to come... But not many, for there were so few of them left. Humans. That was what they were once called. Fierce, wild hunters, chief among all creatures for so long... now barely clinging to existence.

For a moment no one moved, then all at once, the creatures crouched, took their knees to the earth, and as he had been taught, he followed suit, bending deep, curling forward in a bow so low his antlers touched the stone. When he had straightened, he could see them looking up at him, their eyes glistening in the streams of sunlight, the skin of their cheeks damp. The younger of the two, merely a boy, glanced to the elder beside him, opened his mouth, but the grey-crowned man held a hand up, silenced him.

They knew. They all knew... this was how it had to be.

Reaching behind him, the boy plucked the bow from across his spine, an arrow from the nearly empty quiver. Stringing the shaft, he raised it and dragging his shoulder across his cheek to stem the flood of tears, he notched the arrow tightly, feathers touching the edge of his downturned mouth. His father touched his arm, tipped his elbow up and nodded.

There was no pain. The Prophet said there wouldn't be. The arrow flew with speed and strength, struck true and quick and as he collapsed upon the rock, he felt only a strange, hollow coolness cocooned around him as his breath left in a gasp, a shudder.

Sacrifice. It was their calling. Their purpose. To die so that the others might live. It was the greatest gift they could offer mankind, who, so long ago had done the same for them - protecting the last of their kind, until they could rebuild their race. To sustain a village, to bring sustenance for the year to come... To see to it that new generations were formed, were taught the ways of the ancestors...

Slowly, in spiraling shapes and images, the world blurred out of focus and closing his eyes, he let his head fall against the smooth surface of the stone. He was chosen... and he was honored. These were his final thoughts... and then all was still.