The Arrival

Midnight. In an open, small, bare field, the naked moonlight shadowed a lone walking figure. The air was a bitter chill, the wind an unwelcome bite of frost; both howling in the haunted night sky. Crispy leaves fluttered against the cold, hardened dirt, a soft breeze sent shivering shrills of spurious comfort to the very Earth's core. Out here, each whispering breath could be heard, every whelp of despair without audience, and all thoughts locked in the mind imprinted unwillingly on a shivering visage. Stars flickered lights of illuminative flare guided the soothsayers and storytellers of the eve along futures stairway, but offered no hope, and dim, dark dirt paths to indolent wanderers.

Hollow thuds thumped the dirt below three times in succession, footstep, thud, footstep, echo the only elucidating voice on a silent eve. A long draping cloth hugged the back of two skinny legs, and swept broken leaf shards in disorganised masses, small oval-shaped craters impeccably imprinted left the lightest of trails in the messy mud. A halt came, the breeze stopped dead, and a heavy cough broke the silence.

"What do you want?" Inquired a throaty voice, hasty and invading.

"Michael, it's cold out here.. And dangerous! Why are you even here in the first place? These people don't need you." Replied a shrill, soft, feminine voice in the darkness. The source of sound seemed to flicker around to each direction, one word ringing from the east, the next the south, and then from within. The mysterious man, Michael, marred by the sudden arrival, was not so hasty to the creature that bother him; its words were what opened his eyes.

"You didn't answer my question first.." Impatience rising with vocal inflection "But they do need me here! They do! What the hell would you know? When was the last time you helped anybody!?" The black ebony walking stick Michael wielded is lifted up from the small dent left in the dirt, and pointed into the tense air, ready to swing and strike. In his other hand was a small chain garnished with three different symbols, the majority of which were squeezed tight in his grasp, little or no light penetrating the wrinkly insides. Such a tight grip made his nerves shudder and shake, his eyes now narrowing to this invasion of privacy; a guard dog beaten into a corner couldn't be more tense.

"Oh calm down old man!" The voice giggles gently, a hint of affectionate teasing in the lower depths of its tone. "What name have you got for yourself now? 'Rotiart' eh? Well you always were a pedant in your ways.." Another soft chuckle fills the air, while a small, skeletal elfin creature emerges from the northern forest, and settles down upon Michael's shoulder, somehow knowing that he wouldn't react, wouldn't bat it away; a case of him accepting it, or him not being able to do anything about it? He had often pondered his choice in these matters; his eyebrows frowned together and knitted at the middle, the raised walking stick acquiescently pushed back into the ground, sighs of defeat the breeze that broke more silence.

"It'll do. Not that I-I'd be staying here long anyway.." His tone stutters, head looking down into the dust below, and his once fierce fighting fists surrendered down by his sides. It was hopeless. Can't fight the system, silly old bastard. The small creature, one of its wings teasing Michael's frayed grey locks of hair, while its skeletal visage absently gazed toward his collar, remained simplistically silent, almost coy and innocent to his words.

"I need to go anyway, I have a.. uh, meeting." He places his palm into his baggy cloth jacket, removing a small, leather-bound black book, that was without name, and viciously aged. Flicking the tip of his finger with his tongue, he perused the pages gently, reaching about half-way before tapping an unintelligible name fiercely, and showing it to the creature.

"Him." He said, dryly.

"Oh, never heard of them." It remained distracted and absent minded, clambering to its feet and launching away from Michael's shoulder.

"Not that you're coming anyway, so it doesn't really matter. See you around.." There was a certain 'wish otherwise' in his last words, now turning attention away from the woods, and slipping the small black book back into his jacket pocket. He sighed deeply. Are you going to be able to pull this off? Or are your ambitions a single raindrop to a raging bonfire? Melancholy rang in the air when the cold breeze and his angry words did not. The creature now had left in as fast as it had arrived. Clasping his fingers around the steel tip of the walking stick, Michael hobbled away, toward the dark northern forests. Whether his intentions lay in the luxurious green foliage of a distant land, in the city next to it, or even an entirely different land completely, remained the enigma. But his mark had certainly been founded upon this ground.