Like a Hawk, Swooping

         Snowy trees gave echo to a feral howl, thickening the cry to a bestial timbre and animalistic fury. Unlike a wolf’s guttural shout, it was but short-lived, and only a solitary sound, much different than the war call of a hungering pack of canines. Even the birds rose to the skies, following the reverberating sound into the star-lit night.
         “Hey,” a scruffy, lithe man with thin hair turned to the other man at the half-constructed campsite, his cheeks wind burnt to a raw crimson. “Did you hear that?”
         The other man, a giant by any man's standards, turned his head away from the miniscule flame he was preparing, squaring his angled jaw firmly with his broad shoulders. His eyes, nearly black, darkened even more after squinting in resistance to a gust of wintry air. Prior to speaking, his tongue flicked across the cracked flesh of his lips. “… Yeah, I heard," he said. " It’s just a wolf. Let it come, I’m hungry anyways.”
         Not so far from the two men, a maple box lay, coated with a light dusting of fallen snow. It was bound shut by way of roughly fashioned rope, and looked to be the size of a casket for a man of average height. It looked to have carved an icy path behind it. The larger man, finished with the task of sparking a flame in the tinder he had been hovering over, gingerly held his biceps after looking over at the crate. Scorn crossed his face, wrath deepened by a pain indirectly caused. With a wince, the muscled man hurried to place his left index finger to his lips. With his voice muddled by the attempt to grasp something with his incisors, he growled out, "Gods be damned, that box gave me a splinter back there.."
         A weak scream, with the pitch of a woman's voice, wrestled with a bit of success against the crackling of the fire for dominance of the tiny clearing's soundscape, almost like a reply to the previous roar, forced itself from the box. Sudden, unabridged, labored coughing cut the cry short, with whimpers in a tongue never before heard by the two men proceeding.
         A seething hiss wriggled its way through the gap in the tiny man's rotting teeth. He stood, grating the yellowing nubs inside his mouth together. “Silence... Silence, gods damn you!” The wrathful utterance entailed him delivering a kick that could have very well crippled a man if placed in just the right spot, to the side of the crate, the steel embedded in the toe of his boots denting the crate just a bit.
         The feminine whimpering died with a fearful shriek.
         A throaty chuckle bounced about the men as the colossus of a man that tended the heating blaze laughed over the display. “Damned nobles," he sighed, continuing with a mock disappointment in his voice. "They can just never tolerate the accommodations of us... lesser folk.”
         Both travelers, finding humor in the remark, howled with hideous laughter, both having a hideous sort of laugh, the thin one snorting sickishly, the thick one chuckling roguishly. .
         A sound much like a cricket's chirp joined in the guffaws echoing in the snowy boughs of the thick evergreens only a moment before a pained surprise exploded onto the burly man's countenance. Only a second after his friend could see the him crash to his knees, the little one's keen eye caught the sheen of firelight on bloodsoaked steel, giving him the stomach-wrenching image of a freshly-watered rose sprouting from his breast, then his upper body had crumpled forth, balancing itself on its head with his rear in the air.
         Locked into a stare by shock and loss, the thin one could only look at the arrow placed in the bleeding man's back, slender with a strong twist carved into the shaft that may have aided in sailing through the wind. The fletching was set tightly into the arrow nock, trimmed for optimal speed and balance. A feeling sprung up from his gut, a bloodcurdling screaming from the most primitive of instincts, ordering him to look to the trees.
         With a quick glance down to what was in front of him, back to the warm light, back to something he could see in, nothing even remotely bizarre fell within his range of vision. To his rear, a dead leaf crackled under some measure of weight, something that definitely sounded abnormal.
         Adrenaline powering his jerky movements, he pivoted on the heel of his left foot. His pulse raced, his blood forced itself from head to toe, his heart pounded...
         The frantic throbbing at his throat would be the last sensation he would feel; a keen edge lashed out from the unlit shadows and caught his throat, cutting the flesh, making the thin one gurgle where a cry wished to rise. Propelled more by himself than his attacker, the man, suddenly frantic over his wound, found himself thrown off of his feet, and put on his back. His hands, moist and sticky from the aortal flow, clutched wildly at his throat, grasping for the location of the gash. By the time he found the gaping wound, however, the sullen fog of shock set in. Lost was the depth of color in his vision, the sharpness of sound, the thought of anything but that flash of arced steel digging into him, opening his neck so much like his grandmother's flawless buttermilk bread... Oh, how he craved that bread, to be anywhere but here with that bread...
         The vigor faded from the man's cheeks, as did the life from his body. Only one being was visible through the nearly opaque visions of his life that flashed before him, standing like the reaper himself with a shorter blade; the silhouette of his aggressor.
         Lips quivering, blue from the loss of blood, the man that lay bleeding out on the blanket of crystalline snow and pine needles mouthed soundlessly at the shade, his mouth forming breathless accusations. Just before his consciousness faded, he knew just what had struck him down, and his friend previous. A ghostly figure wrapped in leathers and bandages loomed above him. The figure was barely perceivable to his blurring vision, all but his knife, bathed in the crimson of his lifebloods. Yes, he knew exactly what had come for them.
         A Ranger.

-=-=-

         Standing above the corpses of two would-be ransomers, Kayrm could not be happier with how smoothly such a hastily thrown together strike went.
         Why, only two hours ago, he recalled learning of the task, and, being the best Ranger of the Order available, the Council of Task-Setters unanimously decided that it should be placed upon him. The task, the council had announced, required a steady hand, stealthy figure, and precise tracking, none of which truly found a use on this particular chase; both men were too dim-witted to notice his warning cry made famous in this stretch of the Selthpach Forest, and neither heard the groaning of his bowstring drawing back.
         Holding the dagger's leather casing on his right side straight with the opposite hand, the hunter swiped the bloodied blade over the tanned hide of the sheath, to clean the arterial spray that could not have been avoided, even by such a fine edge, from the steel. His emerald eyes took in the sight of the deeply buried arrow. With a silent curse, the Ranger turned away from the corpse with full understanding that he would not be extracting the hook-headed missile. Pushing the leathery tail of his split-tail long coat behind him, the platinum-blond archer made his way over the freshly dead men, to the box. Lowered to a single burlap-clothed knee, his hands went to work, deftly unwinding the amateur knots his targets had used to bind shut this makeshift prison.
         Length after length of rope scattered over the thin patches of grass peeking through the snow, and Kayrm began to notice a pressure building from inside the crate. A hushed whisper passed his lips. “… I was told to remove whatever is in the crate… but… Could that really be the best idea here? I highly doubt the safety of releasing something bound in a box rather than led by lashings and a collar...” The ranger finished the thought just short of pulling enough of the rope off to slacken the rest of it while it still bound the chest. The moment Kayrm took one gloved hand to the thick cord, however, the lid lifted itself up with great force, the board slamming into his angular jaw. A howl of pain rang out from his wiry form, chased by a groan, followed by a raspy breath.
         All went dark… His last memory of that night was a shriek, then a hurried feminine muttering of sloshed-together words.
         Kayrm felt himself spinning on his heel for just about one hundred and eighty degrees, whereupon he fell into an uncomfortable unconsciousness.