#those pink forest backgrounds are like the only ones I remotely like in this entire animation | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

valley-of-dyingstars · 7 years

Text

The Witch

The house was lovely, with a large garden filled with flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Greg could spot a brush of big red strawberries, and the sight made his stomach grumble. While every piece of architecture they had encountered while they were lost was aged and weathered, this house looked brand new. Greg and Hanna had to assume the was the house of the woman Meo's Grandmother had spoken of. Greg felt a mixture of relief and anxiety. They were finally approaching a person that could actually help them get home. Though, it wasn't certain that this person was trustworthy, there seemed to be a number of questionable characters in the woods. With a cautious glance exchanged between the two of them, the siblings walked towards the house. The bannister of the house porch was smooth and freshly polished. Not a single floorboard creaked as the ascended the stairs that lead to the front door. There was a shining silver knocker at the front door of the house. Hanna delicately took the door knocker between her fingers and rapped it against the door three times. The two children took a step back and waited for someone to answer. However, for a few agonizingly long minutes, nothing happened. Just as Hanna stepped forward to knock again, the front door was violently flung open. Both siblings yelped and jumped backwards in alarm. An old woman stood before them with a deep scowl on her withered face. Her face was heavy with wrinkles and she possessed a long crooked nose. Her thin lips were pressed into a sour frown as she looked over the children. Her hair was a pale silver but long and straggly. Her long boney fingers were wrapped around a wooden cane that had several nooks and knobs, she was leaning heavily on it due to her hobbling knees. A thick cloak made of black wool was dropped over her hunched shoulders and hung to the floor. The grey cotton dress she wore was lumpy and moth eaten. The only youthful thing about her was her eyes, they were sharp as knives and the colour of spring grass. Greg shrunk away from the old woman in fear. Her appearance was identical to practically every illustration of a witch he had ever seen within his childhood. The idea of approaching her made him want to book it in the opposite direction. The woman looked over the children suspiciously, wobbling forward to examine the children more closely. "You two don't belong here," she stated accusingly as she looked them over, her eyes becoming wide and her face becoming more animated. Her voice was high pitched, raspy, and filled with uneven cracks and fluctuations. "What are you doing at my house?" Hanna stood protectively between the woman and her brother, her hands clenched at her sides as if she was ready for a fight. "Sorry," she apologized quickly to the grumpy woman. "My brother and I were lost, and we were told you could help us." The woman looked them over from top to bottom, picking the two of them apart with those bright eyes. After an uncomfortable moment of the old woman staring them down and the children staring back while contemplating making an exit, the woman's lips stretched into a wide eerie smile. "Why of course I can help you," she crowed with a voice that was meant to be sweet, turning to the doorway and motioning the children to follow her. Hesitantly, Hanna trailed after the woman with Greg right on her heels. Greg was shaking violently as they stepped into the woman's house and he had to swallow the large lump in his throat in order to keep breathing. He didn't think he had so many stressful moments in a single day before. The inside of the house was cluttered with a variety of different antiques and knickknacks. There were several book cases against each wall filled with a large assortment of thick books. There was a single rocking chair with a large checkered quilt draped over the back. On the seat there was a small grey cat with white stripes who sat with its eyes narrowed on the children. Hanna and Greg jolted in surprise when the door slammed shut behind them, without anyone to close it. The closed off exit only served to make them feel more trapped. "You two just wait here," she said, wobbling off to a separate part of the house. "I've got just the thing to get you two home." When she left Hanna and Greg in the front room of the house, the cat leapt off the chair and scurried to follow her. Greg flinched back when the cat hissed at him as it ran by to catch up with it's owner. When the woman and the cat were completely out of sight he was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. With the darkness of night descended upon the house, the only source of light was the lamp placed beside the rocking chair. Long shadows were being cast by each object in the woman's collection, and it made Greg fight in his spot. Caught up in his own nervousness, Greg nearly missed how his sister perused through the woman's belongings as if she were in a store. Hanna had stopped by the small unlit fireplace and plucked something from the mantle above it. Her eyes were wide like saucers as she brought a large pink seashell before Greg's eyes. With a contemplative expression, she repeatedly turned the shell over in her hands. "It's a seashell," Hanna whispered. The conspiratorial look she gave Greg made him very worried. "Why does she have a seashell?" Greg shrugged in response, attempting to dissuade her from overreacting with a nonchalant approach. "Why does she have half this stuff?" he asked looking around the house and the random assortment of objects scattered about. He could see an oddly shaped hourglass sitting atop one of the bookcases and a bowl of fake apples on another. There didn't seem to be any particular synchronization of her household. "Also lots of people have seashells." "But don't you remember what Giuseppe said?" Hanna ranted in a hushed voice. "The seashell with the children's souls in it. What if this is the seashell he was talking about?" Greg gaped at her in disbelief. "That's ridiculous," he scoffed. "You remember how loopy that guy was, right? There's no way that seashell is anything magical." Hanna shot him an annoyed glare. "I seem to remember you breaking a flute and a woman popping out of it," she stated, sticking her nose in the air with a proud stance. "Nobody came out of the flute," Greg hissed, getting increasingly antsy and frustrated. "That Savana lady was just in the tree." "The flute was talking, Greg," Hanna argued. "That thing that was chasing us in the forest howled like a wolf and laughed like a human. This lady looks like a witch. I think it's safe to say there's some magic stuff going on here." "Look, I admit we've run into a few weird things today," Greg grumbled begrudgingly. "But that does not mean that seashell has children's souls in it." Hanna looked at Greg with a blank unblinking stare and then she looked back at the seashell. "Only one way to find out," she replied, gripping the seashell tightly in her hand and chucking it at the ground with considerable force. It shattered into countless pieces upon hitting the floor. There was rush of wind that brushed past the house and the lamp light flickered. It was as if the entire forest released a breath and released a stream of tension all at once. With the brief gust of wind, Greg could faintly hear childlike laughter in the background, though the sound was quickly lost with the rustling of the trees. There was a whisper, one that the children nearly missed. Neither Greg nor Hanna had any clue where it came from. "Well done." After that, the entire house fell into silence. Hanna and Greg stared at the shattered pieces of the seashell with very different emotions. Hanna being awed and astonished at the mystical occurrence. Greg being horrified by his sister intentionally breaking the belonging of the woman that was going to help them get home. Both of the the siblings snapped to attention when they heard the frantic footsteps at the other end of the house. The old woman came into the room with an expression of seething fury. "You broke my shell!" she screeched, looking over the damage in horror. "After I planned on helping you ungrateful kids to get home!" "Uhh," Hanna struggled to find a good response, the impulsive nature of her decision suddenly hitting her. Hanna was unable to explain her actions because before she could, the woman's wrinkly hand shot out and wrapped around her wrist. With a surprising amount of force the woman dragged Hanna by her arm to a remote area of the house. "Hey!" Hanna cried out in protest as the woman pulled her behind her with unbelievable strength. "I'm sorry! I'll clean it up! I'll get you a different shell." Greg tried to pull his sister out of the old woman's grasp, but her hand was curled so tightly around Hanna's arm that her long nails dug into the skin. Hanna's wrist began to bleed as the woman's sharp nails pierced her flesh. Hanna cried out in fear as the woman flung her into a dark room and slammed the door shut. Greg rushed forward on impulse to get the door back open and set his sister free, but the woman shoved him aside like he was a nothing. The woman had locked the door when he managed to get to his feet again. "Wait!" he yelled, rushing forward to try and take the key from the woman's hands, but she held it out of reach. "Please, it was a mistake! We'll pay for the seashell. We just want to go home!" The woman whipped around to face him, eyes wide and glimmering with madness. "What would you do to pay for your sister's freedom?" Greg was quick to find a reasonable compromise so he could get the two of them out of this. He hadn't realized how truly terrifying this woman was until she reacted so violently to a broken seashell. He needed to get Hanna and get away from here. "W-well, I don't have any money on me," he began with a nervous stutter, but he was quick to regain some composure. "But if you let me call my parents, we can-" "I don't want money," the woman interrupted and a vicious and hungry grin curled at her mouth. "I require a different sort of payment." Greg was floored by this answer, and he recoiled in fear as his imagination ran wild with possible payments she would demand. The most consistent theory was her demanding his life, so she could use his flesh as her next meal. "Greg!" Hanna screamed from the other side of the door. "Just run! Get out of here! This woman is crazy!" Despite his fears and his distrust of this woman, Greg pushed down the urge to follow his sister's words. He couldn't just leave her in this place. "What did you want?" he asked, reluctantly putting himself up to take on her request. He wasn't sure what he would do if she did turn out to be a cannibalistic witch. The woman beckoned him to follow her with a long boney finger. Greg swallowed hard as she led him away from the dark hallway he was in. He turned to give a lingering glance to the door. Hanna was still banging on it, yelling at him not to listen to the woman. The woman ushered him back to the living room full of various collectables and she shuffled off, mumbling that she needed to get something. Greg looked towards the the front door for a moment before quickly turning away. The woman came back with a broom, a dustpan and a cloth. She dropped them before Greg's feet with a smug grin. "Your first task will be to clean up this mess your sister made and then you can dust everything in this room," she ordered before hobbling off to the rocking chair and settling into the seat. As soon as she plopped herself down, the little grey cat scurried over and made itself at home on her lap. Greg looked down at the broom in shock before slowly bending down to puck it up This woman wanted him to do chores? After all the horror stories he had came up with in his mind on his way from his sister's prison to the living room, this punishment seemed pretty mild. Though, he wouldn't start complaining. Greg swept up the seashell pieces and soon got to work on dusting the objects and surfaces. With the random objects scattered throughout her house, he had a lot of work to occupy himself with. As he continued to dust over the numerous books and shelves, the woman decided to start a conversation. "Now what possessed your sister to break my seashell?" she asked with narrowed eyes and a grim smile. "Or does she usually run around breaking things?" A bright blush rushed up to his face when he thought of his sister's ridiculous reason for breaking the woman's shell on purpose. "Oh, well, she just-" He paused, wondering if he should lie to make himself sound less idiotic. He thought better of it and settled for the truth. "She thought there were souls trapped in the seashell." The woman's eyes widened a fraction and she simply stared at him before nodding in understanding. "Oh, I suppose that's why it was making all those moaning sounds," she stated to herself in contemplation. Greg's head snapped up in surprise, not believing that he heard her correctly. "You believe her?" he asked incredulously. "You'd be surprised how many peoples souls are trapped in those sort of objects," she replied casually, as if it she weren't talking about a completely ridiculous notion. Greg tried to laugh, but it sounded unconvincing, even to himself. "But that's just a joke, right? It's not real," he said in a shaky voice. The woman gazed at him with a peculiar grin on her face. She seemed to be mocking him with that grin. "You don't know where you are, do you?" The question was ominous with the tone she used. Greg was unsure with his response. "The woods?" "Everyone comes through these woods eventually," the woman said without really explaining her previous question. "Some get lost along the way. Some walk straight through and finish their journey without a hitch. The two of you aren't quite ready for that journey." "What do you mean?" Greg asked, a bit frightened by this woman's cryptic statements and odd behaviour. He paused in his cleaning. "I mean that you're far too early," she answered with a mysterious lilt in her voice. "But don't worry, you'll be ready eventually." Greg stared at the woman in confusion, trying to piece together everything she had just told him. Before he could come up with a reasonable explanation for everything that was happening the woman snapped at him to get back to work. It took him nearly half an hour but he managed to clean every nook and cranny in the living room. Though, shortly after he had finished dusting, the woman ordered him to go outside and demanded that he water her plants. Greg could think of a number of reasons why it would be unwise to water plants in the middle of the night, but he didn't argue with the woman. Unfortunately, there wasn't any running water in the woman's house, so Greg had to walk over to a nearby well in the dark. It was hard on his arms, continuously pulling the pail out of the well and refilling his watering can over and over again, but he suffered through it, eager to get out of this woman's house and debt. Eventually he had managed to water the woman's rather large garden. When Greg stumbled back inside, his arms and legs aching and his fingers caked with dirt, the woman smiled with a disturbing glint in her eye. "Now, for the final task," the woman said with a giddy cackle. She held up a wooden comb. "You need to brush out little Aurora." The woman pointed down to the sleeping cat on her lap. She stroked the cat's side with a fond sigh. "The poor thing has so many mats in her fur." Again, Greg could only stare at the woman with an aghast expression. Despite locking his sister in a prison for simply breaking a seashell, this woman's payment wasn't very steep. Though she was still quite unsettling to be around. If Hanna hadn't been locked away and her safety wasn't being held over his head, he would think this woman to be reasonable. Aurora turned out to be a vicious creature, despite her size. Whenever the comb hit a snag in her fur, she yelped and started to claw and bite at him. The cat tried to run away from him, so he had to keep her in his arms where it was much easier for her to dig her claws and fangs into his flesh. Several scratches and bites later, Greg let the cat run off with her now soft fur. He sighed in relief, grateful that he had finished the final task. The woman stood from her chair with a exhausted sigh, as if she had done all the work herself. "I suppose we should go release your sister now," she muttered, taking the key from her pocket and hobbling off to the room where she had left Hanna. Hanna was still pounding her fist on the door, though it was a much weaker movement. After trying and failing to break the door down as well as being unable to find any window to escape from, Hanna couldn't stop the tears from falling. She thought of all the things that could be happening to Greg because of what she did. She desperately hoped the boy had come to his senses and tried to escape. Hanna let out a screech of surprise when the door swung open. Since she was leaning so heavily against it, she toppled to the floor with a thump when her support was removed. Hanna looked up at her unscathed brother with watery eyes. With a cry of joy, she leapt to her feet and wrapped her arms around his core. "I'm so sorry, Greg," she whispered into his shoulder. "It was all my fault." Greg tentatively hugged his sister and patted her back reassuringly. "It's alright," he reassured her. "Lets go home." The woman interrupted the siblings reunion with an impatient grumble. "Come along you little brats," she said, shewing them towards the back door of the house. "If you want to go back so badly, you need to go this way." With some coaxing from Greg, Hanna followed him and the woman to the backyard. It was when the two children exited the house that they noticed the back door led to a path of shining white stones. "The path," Greg whispered in awe. "It led to this place?" "It leads to many places," the woman answered with a knowing smile that hid a number of secrets. "But you don't need to follow it any further. Your journey ends here." Both Hanna and Greg have the woman a fearful and alarmed look at her ominous words. She only patted their heads in an affectionate way. "Take care of yourselves, Hanna and Gregory," the woman said. "The land of the living can be much more treacherous than this place." Greg was caught between being confused by her odd statement and being worried that this woman knew their names even though they never told her who they were. However, before he could respond to either of these emotions, the old woman took her wooden cane up in her hand and bopped him on top of his head. Greg closed his eyes when the cane hit the top of his head. His entire body went numb with the impact. He fell but didn't hit the ground. He just kept falling through empty space. Greg floated in blackness for a long time before he was finally able to open his eyes again.

#hansel and gretel #good witch #kinda

7 notes · View notes

culturaldriftwood-blog · 7 years

Text

Scorched Earth (pt. 1)

All around the earth is burnt.

We coast along at speeds that would be deemed worthy of psychological evaluation in any developed country, swerving around taxi caravans, nervously gripping the decaying faux-leather of our generic well-worn sedan.

Looking out through our grime-encrusted, permanently fog-stained windows, we are enclosed in an envelope composed solely of horizon and heavens. Black, ash-scattered terrain stretches out in all directions under a sky crying gentle pink. In a single minute, there may be no signs of human habitation visible. In the next, you might see a couple of clay huts straddling the edge of some marbled, corroding cliff, naked without the protection of deep roots that have long decomposed after what had to be an eye-watering, windswept blaze. Lone palms stand like sentinels over bare patches of earth, their bark having withstood several inevitable infernos. Each time the mind wanders on these surroundings, a sharp jolt from a raised steppe in the road returns the body back to the cramped space of the vehicle. As our drivers jabber on in Malagasy, we are left wondering if we are the subject of the conversation - a curse that has been bestowed on all those who haven’t taken the time to learn a foreign tongue. The combination of all these factors makes your head swim a little, to say the least.

Madagascar’s fiery, umber canyons and noxiously red dirt have given the place a nickname - “The Red Continent”- that must certainly be a recent one. Since the 1960’s up until year 2000, 90% of Madagascar’s forest cover was systematically destroyed through a mixture of controlled fires, uncontrolled fires, lumber demand, and jewel mines. In the past ten years, 75% of the remaining 10% of said forest has been similarly destroyed. In a country where 75% of all species are completely indigenous - lemurs, for instance, are found only on the island continent and nowhere else on Earth - this serves as a demonstrable example of blatant greed-fueled environmental destruction.

I find myself fantasizing, on occasion, of driving down a very different road - one where the forest cover stretches dense and primeval around our shabby vehicle - where the limbs of great Baobabs are the only things capable of breaking through a dense layer of moist biomass that houses branches clung onto by wide-eyed mammals long-since extinct. Somewhere in my psyche are aerial views of a quivering green tidal wave that washes away decades of dust and ash and roots that shoot through the soil like cloud-to-ground lightning in a towering cumulonimbus cloud. Hovering above this arboreal sea, I see no indication of complex life - yet I know that somewhere under the canopy, it must be stirring. A newborn is slowly exiting a burden free slumber, dismayed upon awakening to find that inescapable realities of heat and swarming mosquito are indeed inescapable and letting out a wailing that is distinctly mammalian in nature. The aye-aye - a species of lemur famous for its hideously bug-eyed, bony form - taps the thick bark of a rich ebony and listens for the persistent wriggle of a thick, juicy grub. On some distant, moon-soaked stretch of pristine coastline, a colossal leatherback turtle expels egg after egg into a substrate of soft black sand still holds heat from the day’s blaring sun.

Always, I am jolted from such visions when the suspension-less wheels glide over some rut in the hard dirt road. These fits of romanticized yearning for periods of time that no living human has experienced for hundreds of years are becoming increasingly common on my travels. Alternating between appreciating the natural beauty available and letting the mind wander to a place where everything is natural beauty is getting easier and easier.

Our next destination is Ankarafantsika National Park, 330 thousands acres of dry tropical forest scarred by alligator-filled lakes, lazy stretches of savannah broken by sheer cliff’d orange chasms. We had planned on arriving at the park the previous night following an unsurprisingly arduous 14-hour taxi brousse ride soundtracked through top-10 pop efforts of far-away countries throughout the entire duration, nonstop E.D.M beats and Chainsmokers-esque beat breakdowns failing to coalesce with the tin-roof riddled countryside in cause of the driver’s insistence that without this hell of synths he’d fall asleep at the wheel. Our narcoleptic friend tells us he’d highly recommend sleeping overnight at the nearest port town, Mahajanga, owing to previous incidents spurred on by similarly clueless tourists being in places far too remote far too late at night.

Thusly, the next morning, we wander from hotel to street corner to hotel in search of a guide willing to taxi us to the park for a relatively low price - relatively low being the American equivalent of dirt cheap, cheapskate high prices the equivalent of good bargains - and finally come into contact with our two current road warriors through the help of a friendly local who’d been taking english classes in hopes of a future trip to the United Kingdom. After one and a half hours of driving and eight hours of attempted sleep in a tent that seemingly opted for the use of mosquitos as insulation, we can now spend some time exploring our oasis.

Our guide is a towering, shambling man whose deep, calming voice whose commentary serves as light background noise during each trek. He relates to us his name and history in slow, measured syllables (“My name… is Si-mon) and sings a steady stream of wishes of distant travel and latin names of various flora and fauna. Twenty minutes into our first trek, he pauses next to a thin tree whose bark was is peeling in thin white sheets. “We call this the white people tree”, he says laughing. The reasons for that are fairly self-explanatory - the surface of the trunk bares a slight resemblance to all of our backs. Simon’s, I imagine, looks more like the taut skin of a great Baobab.

He leads us with an easy confidence through what is to us a veritable maze of paths, all in different stages of upkeep and grooming. As we continue on through the thicker parts of the forest, I feel as if I’m being digested in the stomach of some great beast. An intoxicating odor of what most be hundreds of years of decaying organic matter is almost nostril-stingingly storng, each footfall sinking a few inches into the earthy blanket. Similarly to much United States forestland, the trees are deciduous, meaning that they shed and grow back their leaves during periods of dryness and wetness. The lushness around is such that if you take time to be still you can hear leaves falling and pattering on the forest floor like drops of rain, and observe them leaving their branches without the aid of wind or disturbance of any kind. The stillness is at once intensely calming and slightly unsettling, as if it is only there to serve as premonition to some deafeningly loud divine trumpet call.

#travel #madagascar #environment #experience #lemur #baobab #road trip #otayotay #gohardaf #acoustic #guitar #or #something

0 notes