[WP-002] Murkcrow

[Tiarana]

[imgright]http://matope.pixel-blueberry.com/images/blue/murkcrow_tia.gif[/imgright]Murkcrow slept.

In the dream he stood on a vast, rolling plain of wildflowers and grasses that rippled in the breeze. He felt strangely nostalgic for the whisper of the wheat and the sweet scent of flowers carried on the wind; the distant thunder of racing hooves; the magnificent blue sky that stretched in all directions endlessly. Bees buzzed around him and birds exulted in their freedom. The sumptuous vastness of it all took the buck's breath away. It was a world completely different from the one he lived in, and he wondered why any would opt to leave it for the oppressive hum of the swamp.

"We're here," Murkcrow heard from behind him. "You should explore."

He sighed and turned around. There it stood, the Obelisk of the plains, a jagged black scar jutting until the sky in a landscape where everything was soft and light. A party of kin shuffled around it, and he could see them clearly this time.

"How did they come here?" Murkcrow wondered out loud. Normally, he knew, it should have been impossible. But he had also heard about these expeditions to the Obelisks. They had ventured far outside the Swamp's borders, somehow protected from the effects of the Ache. He moved closer, watching the kin do whatever they were doing. There was a big mare who glowed in odd ways and a stallion covered in mint - Murkcrow paused. The stallion seemed familiar, but he couldn't recall how or when they might have met. Regardless, he thought with a shake of his head, were the Motherfather's Chosen the reason the kin had been able to leave Matope?

Murkcrow watched the kin as they milled around, hopping on and off of the carved stones around the Obelisk, then clearing paths around it. They started running around - what are they doing? thought Murkcrow - the stones glowing brighter and brighter as the kin run between them until the Obelisk itself lights up as bright as lightning.

Murkcrow startled, expecting the violent flood of light that accompanied the first Obelisk's activation, but this one merely glowed benevolently, and one by one the kin around it walked up to it and disappeared. He felt the tug from the Obelisk as well - the certain promise that he could return to the Swamp if he touched it.

But this was a dream. The buck would return to the Swamp when he woke up. So he did not touch the Obelisk.

He stretched into the breeze, watching the clouds roll by, a storm building on the horizon. Murkcrow almost hated the Motherfather for showing him this dream, this plain he would never be able to visit. It felt more like home to him than his actual home: free and empty and full of solitude by day, a group of kin telling stories around a campfire by night. The water and the bugs and the looming trees felt stifling in the Swamp.

Murkcrow stood there until eventually he fell into deeper sleep. When he woke, he felt unusually at peace.