Mort
Human - Fey Lost - Druid: Circle of the Shepherd
Physical Description:
Mort is a young man, nineteen, perhaps twenty. He stands tall and broad, wearing ragged, common clothes that look torn and mended a hundred times over, darned loosely and stitched clumsily. He wears a thin, woollen wescot lined with fur, ragged rough-spun breeches, and an unravelling, wide-brimmed straw hat. His feet are bare, scratched and scarred up by years of rough walking; he seemingly doesn’t notice nor care. He wears asatin sash that stands apart from the rest of his raiment; green, flowing silk, embroidered with silver leaves, hanging from it are several leather pouches, round runic stones, a slingshot and a seven-string harp made of some queer, foreign wood. He sports a haggard pitchfork that he uses as a staff and carries a large satchel over one shoulder.
He has an honest face, rounded and naive, capped with a mop of tangled, straw-like hair. His large eyes seem almost childlike, and though a dull grey— at times they swirl with a deep, forest green, the colour of the woodlands come summer. He bares an easy smile and takes joy in the simplest pleasures, gawping at budding flowers and mushroom circles as though they were newfound wonders. He might come across as a little simple, perhaps even a bit dim, but he has an honest heart, perhaps even naive. But malice and prejudice are as strange to him as shoes and socks.
Close inspection reveals that on his person lives a small family of mice, while sparrows nest beneath his hat. He can be seen whispering and chatting with his beasts and makes little secret of it, surprised, almost, that others do not do the same.
Backstory:
Mort doesn’t recall much of his life before he got lost. He recalls a farmhouse, and his Mam, and animals as well. He could recall a big black bull in his paddock, white ducks by the lakeside and a loyal black and white sheepdog. But he can remember no more than that, no faces nor names nor the colour of their hair. But the farmhouse was laid of stacked stone, and there was a nearby lake. The rest was a blur. For Mort was always a dreamer and was prone to straying from the known path, drifting off on daydreams and chasing dragonflies. When he was small—he doesn’t recall how small, but small with only a few spoken words under his belt— he seemed to wander further than ever before. The dragonflies led him astray, to where woodland and moorland seemed to grow soft and shapeless… in this new place, all the trees— if trees they were— bore twisted faces, mocking and laughing as Mort stumbled his way through the bracken.
The dragonflies no longer looked as dragonflies tended to look, seeming almost human-like in this swirling, ever-changing wood. They bid him follow, and follow he did, expecting at any moment to find his little farmhouse, with his Mam tapping her foot at the door, ready to scold him for his late return. But the forest would not allow it; at least, that is how it felt to poor Mort. Heedless and hungry, the boy wandered on.
But the dragonflies soon abandoned him, growing bored with his meagre pace, and without them to guide his footsteps… this new hellish world seemed insurmountable. Shapeless, disembodied chaos whipped around him like a brutal storm, while form suddenly bore the same function as feeling; whatever he felt, he wore as a cloak. And he felt a lost mouse in a maze of blackening wheat. There were eyes, curious eyes, watching from the dark—and mouths, hungry mouths, waiting to devour him.
He felt lost to shadows, that is, until the Lady found him.
She wore a beautiful form; enchanting, noble and fair. She was draped in a thin, trailing gown of green and silver silks made of so light a material they floated like spider webs on the breeze. She stood tall, radiant and utterly terrifying.
“Mortal,” she named him and held out her hand. “Luck and chance avail you, traveller. Be still. Worry not. For Lady Síorghlas (SHE-OR-LAS) has found you.”
And there he stayed, in an ever-shifting palace of silver glass, shaped by the Lady’s foul, fickle temperament — and his Ladyship’s temper would change often and violently from one extreme to another. In the times her ire burnt hot, he would hide himself away with the many other animals and pets in her Ladyship’s menagerie, of which he numbered but one of many. In their company, he learnt their patterns of thought and movement, understanding their indecipherable calls and cries as a form of speech.
It was there, in the kennels and pens, that Mort found some semblance of safety, a very welcome feeling of home. There were three that warmed most to Mort’s endearing honesty.
Broc - The oldest of the beasts, was a headstrong, gruff old traveller with a thunderous temper; his form shifted from beast to humanoid and all shades in-between. But persistent was his shadowed hue, with crimson eyes and ivory horns. His counsel always favoured might and muscle, thinking a bold offensive ever the wisest choice, and certainly the most fun.
Ashe— A less sinister creature, wore hues of black and white; and he slunk with timid caution and watchful eyes in the darker corners of the feyrealm. In such devouring chaos, if one is small, one must be cunning, and the brave creature counselled always to balance risk with reward. Better to flank the dragon and steal her gold, than to face her fire head on.
Mysti— a beautiful white wisp. She was the most meagre, by far; but she certainly shone the brightest. Hers was a loving light, nurturing and forgiving and always urging calm even in the direst of straights. As water and wind, she could rise above the chaos of the fey, and behold it as a benevolent onlooker.
“Mortal,” his new friends named him, as her Ladyship had.
Perhaps that be my name, the young boy thought, entirely forgetting whatever name he bore before.
Time became foreign to him, for neither days nor nights nor hours nor minutes heralded any change in the glass palace or beyond. And the little he changed was so gradual and minor that he scarce noticed as he grew into a man.
He would be wheeled out and gawped at by his Lady’s guests, odd cohorts indeed, who would partake in all manner of depravities. Ritual slaughters, primordial bedding ceremonies, cannibalistic feasts and grand manhunts, held in the endless hedge mazes that separated her Ladyship’s estate from the unfathomable chaos beyond it. Mort would watch, often holding a platter atop his head, while pouring wine to all her Ladyship’s lecherous, formless friends… and he began to learn some things of the feyrealm, lessons that caused him grave discomfort.
I hate it here, he would brood silently. I really, really hate it here.
Pain and pleasure, right and wrong, life and death— in the feyrealm the difference in opposites was blurred beyond distinction.
In short— nothing meant anything. There were no consequences. No stability, nor consistency, nor rules. He recalled once, long ago, that a table might just be a table. But in the feyrealm: A table could be made of living wood, holding fast to old resentments and bitter memories of the axe, ensuring a generous dispersal of splinters to who ever sat at it. Or it could be a nymph or a fawn in glamours, gaining some fetishistic joy from the deceit. Your cup might gain a mouth one day, and proceed to recite the bitter memoirs it had penned in it’s long years of inanimacy.
Mort didn’t like that sort of thing very much. It raised too many questions, and he had not the wits nor words to voice them.
He wanted home. Where a house was a house. And folk behaved as folk should behave.
Her Ladyship would often console the boy, whenever she saw him in dour sprits. Asserting evermore fervently just how grateful he should be. That boons such as hers were not granted to just any mortalkind.
“Many folk who walk your realm would kill to stand where you stand. To escape the ravages of that grisly mortal cycle. And yet you wish to leave? To pine for home, is to pine for death. Is that not madness, Mortal?”
He’d never know what to say to such words, so he often just nodded and tried his honest best to be more grateful, resigning himself to this bemusing, unsettling existence, for as long as it was granted to him by Her Ladyship.
Until one fine summer season, when seven bright stars were aligning in the ever-dawning sky, her Ladyship bid him and a few of his befriended beasts gather berries from the woodlands; those beautiful goodberries native to the fey world. Beyond the silver glass and the endless mazes he saw to it, without complaint. But upon filling a punnet, three familiar dragonflies scattered from the bushes, hovering head height with wide, mocking smiles. Mort greeted them as old friends, but they did little but beckon, as before, and the farm boy felt compelled to follow. As they went, the dragonflies’ bodies elongated, their eyes bulged, and they buzzed and flew as Mort recalled them doing all that time ago— if time it was, because it felt no more than a day had passed, or perhaps a hundred years. He could not be sure.
But what he was sure of was the hand he felt, radiant and warm, as it took firm hold of his, guiding his footsteps free of the abyssal chaos below.
“It’s time you came home. Your family is waiting.”
The voice felt distant as moonlight, but with one firm pull, Mort found himself taking the first solid step he had taken since he was four years old. He halted. The dragonflies were gone. The hand was gone. The voice drowned out by the chirrup of crickets, singing from the bushes. All was still, suddenly. There were no voices. No giggles and titters from the bushes. It was quiet. The trees bore no faces, the ground did not sway, the flowers did not mock, the grass did not laugh and his beast’s voices were all but silent— having to listen extra carefully to hear them.
Mort realised—he was back. Not precisely back, maybe, but back at least in the world he was born to. He was taller in his return than in his departure, and stronger too. He wore the same clothes even, though they did not fit quite so well as before. His friends, the three fellow beasts from her Ladyship’s menagerie, they complained in one voice— saying that they felt thin and weak, likely to fade away completely… for creatures of the fey, unless they be of great will and resolve, tend towards formlessness in the material world.
“You need not fade away,” Mort told them, and allowed them to walk where he walked, their forms shifting to resemble what native beasts the boy could remember from the farmstead. Broc, whose strength was unmatched, became a black bull. Ashe, cunning and fierce, became a sheepdog; and Mysti, wisest and fastest by sea or sky, took the form of a pure white duck. With their help, Mort inscribed three runestones with their feyrealm names, binding their spirits to them, keeping them close should their help ever be required.
And so the boy found himself lost and alone in the woods, guided by the aligning stars, waiting for providence to show him the way.
The Podcast - Where 2 Watch
Myself and all the folks from ‘A Call to Adventure’ record our sessions every Sunday evening, with the edited video uploaded and streamed every Friday on Twitch and Youtube.
I also, along with illustrating the characters, designed the logo and stream frames and borders etc. This was great fun to do, and I think the end product is going to look pretty bloody snazzy, going by this little teaser image Beej (Dracs) showed me while he was editing.
I shall sign off this post with one last question… Who is your current D&D character?? Let me know!
I am a fantasy author, illustrator and aspiring poet. If you’d like to help support my projects, you can find my fantasy work here. Thanks for reading Greenjack's Journal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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