Day 2
Current tally: 8/20 8♢
Jokers: 0/2
Roll: 6
Cards: A♠ 10♢ 6♢ 8♢ J♡ 3♡
A♠
I found a small log cabin, built in the French style with vertical logs. It was in poor shape, but had a beautiful harmony with the surrounding environment that my shingle house lacks. The logs still stand among their descendants. Inside, the hearth was burning. I noticed some familiar looking-paper – mostly ash now, but enough remained that I knew it to be from this very journal. How strange, as this is only my second entry.
10♢
I wear high leather boots to help with the brush and rough terrain, and lace them tightly to fight back against the mud’s attempts to liberate them. But the faces in the footprints … with each step another face appeared. Each one with its toothy grin, growing wider. Their features morphed and shifted, moving towards something familiar – at first I thought it was my own face, distorted slightly, but I realised it is the face of my father as a young man. I would never have recognized him if it wasn’t for the picture you keep next to his ashes on the mantle.
I never told you, but I used his name and reputation to secure this position. While I hold no ill will towards the man, I barely knew him, and I embellished with a level of filial piety that went beyond exaggeration into falsehood. I felt no shame invoking my dead father’s name, but I did feel a pang of regret seeing the crestfallen face of the carpenter, Artie. He’d hoped to leave his trade for a quieter role in the woods – since returning from the war he can no longer bear the sound of hammer on nail. But he does not need the woods the way I do.
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6♢
Remember Delilah? Not that I don’t appreciate Ginger’s docile nature and quiet mews, but she is the great-great-great-great-great grand daughter of a much better cat, Delilah.
I saw Delilah today – just as round and fluffy, with delicate peach fur and rounded tips to her ears. She looked at me curiously, then turned away and walked deeper into the woods, swishing her tail. She moved into the shadow of the brush, and I went to follow her until I heard the sound coming from the darkness. A horrific, gnashing sound, like a saw blade cutting through flesh. I did not follow her further.
J♡
The clay in the soil sometimes turns the puddles red – but what I saw today wasn’t that. The stink of rot and iron gave it away. I followed the trail and found the naked corpse of my father, a bloody symbol like a broadleaf – birch, perhaps?-- distorted through water. I found the small knife I use for harvesting plants and mushrooms nearby. Blood had dried on the blade. Whose ashes live on my mantle? Why was the wound still bleeding?
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8♢
I was hit by another ferocious headache – it mars the trees in ghostly halos. But instead of being soothed by the dark, quiet woods, this one grew more vicious until it brought me to my knees. I fell to the earth, and the sawing sound coalesced into words:
BOW TO THE OLD GODS.
PROVIDE FOR THE OLD GODS.
My foraging knife was still in my hand, but now the blood was fresh. Its shape began to change – a skinning knife, blade rounded just so to cleave hide from meat. It brought to mind the butcher’s shop where I worked briefly. I skinned the animals, carved their flesh. It was my duty, but also a comfort – to see the body come apart.
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3♡
“Careful what you seek to unravel.”
There was an old woman at the crossroads – at one of the few paths I’d managed to make stick as most are overgrown so quickly, like footprints washed away by rain or flood.
She was building a cairn. Neatly stacking small rounded stones – a marker. A marker for what? She didn’t look at me when she spoke. I stared a moment, considering, and realised she was in mourning clothes. A grave marker, then. The earth beneath it did not look freshly turned. Maybe that was the meaning behind the warning: the gravestone does not always bring us closer to the dead; sometimes it keeps up separated. I remembered your tales, Mother, of damned men being buried at crossroads, with a large stone on their coffin to ensure they never reawoke on this plane.
A stone for the living to consider.
Another to keep the dead in the soil.
What happens if I move a stone? How will I know if it was for the living, or the dead?
My eyes grow heavy. I will rest now. I hope tomorrow's ventures are not so... trying.