It’s a beautiful morning in the World of Bones, the air is crisp, and the birds sing lovesongs in the trees of the Screaming Forest as Madeline cuts a swath through it.

The red shoulder pauldron she wears with pride is a badge of honour, and a warning to the enemies of the Village of Genkysou. Madeline was a Mercenary in the employ of the Village council, employed to keep the thin paths that wound to Zarful and the imperial city, clean of beasts, plants, and occaisionally desperate bandits.

Today had been a good day of hunting. She had been clearing out some Venus Mantraps that had encroached over the merchants path, and already claimed some poor traders. As she set fire to them, and they expelled their gorey meals wetly to the forest floor, Madeline had heard another sound… one that didn’t belong in a place as lethal as the Screaming Forest; human voices.

Creeping around, through the underbrush undetected, Madeline, found a spot and listened to the two down on their luck bandits planning an attack on a shipment of tea that they were sure was going to come down this road shortly.

Madeline knew better, there was no shipment of the sort on the manifest today. But bandits were bandits, and the VIllage leader always had spare shells for the heads of bandits camping the trade routes, so long as there was a good story to accompany them.

Madeline had pulled into an expert silent sprint, and was already beside the blonde one. She didn’t even know the mercenary was there till the razor sharp machette had bisected her at the midriff. Two halves of a pathetic bandit fell to the ground twitching.

Seeing the fate of her friend, the purple haired tan bandit fell to her knees and started to beg for her life.
“Please don’t kill me - I surrender!”
She only ceased her desperate pleas when the blade entered her belly and out her back..
“Uuuuuuugghhh” she groaned disbelievingly.
Madeline grabbed the little bitch by the throat to prevent her from screaming. It wouldn’t do to have other predators attracted by the commotion.

Madeline took her time with the bandit, flaying her alive slowly till she died. She made sure that the traitorous wench dishonoured her ancestors as she died, taking pleasure in the fact that she had ensured a torturous afterlife for the defiler..

Her machete sang as she decapitated the dead bodies and hung them by their hair in her loincloth, and set out back for home.

The winding trail led past the thickest copse of killer plants.. Most would stick to the path like Swampsac glue… but Madeline was a badass among badasses. Things like Venus mantraps poses little threat to a goddess of war like her… so she took a shortcut.

She’d be home before she knew it… she always took this way back. All she had to do was be quicker with her machette than the Plants were with their tongues, and to hold her breath when she passed the Bloodflower saplings that had bloomed this season. The pheremones they released had taken her partner unawares last season. Madeline missed Janie so much.

She severed a few pink appendages as they tried to nab her. Madeline had seen her fair share of her fellow scouts fall prey to the voracious plants in the years she’d been a member of the corps, and so she’d learned to be alert at all times, and never let her guard down.

She swung at a slimy pink tongue that had darted down to grab her… but as she did, it darted back out of range. Strange, she thought, she’d never seen a Venus Mantrap exibit such behaviour before. They were usually dumb plants that acted on instinct, and reflex… but this seemed… intelligent?

Madeline looked up to see what kind of strange mutant plant was trying to grab her, but she couldn’t see it through the thick foliage.

And then the tongue struck again, this time from an oblique angle, It came from in front of her, but at the blind spot in her vision that all people have at 15 degrees from the front, the scotoma. She didn’t even see it till it was wrapped around her throat.
Madeline tried to cut at it with her weapon… but the castle forged steel was swiftly batted aside as if the tongue was some kind of trained martial artist.

Choking painfully, she was lifted up into the boughs of the trees, and above into the heavens themselves to meet the most dangerous creature in the entire world.

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