Soft music plays hauntingly in the distance. It is carried by the melodic voice of a singing piano, coming from far, far off beyond where the shadows, which his feet move across, begin. A soft crackling of warm fires can be heard, the pops and snaps echoing around the far too large room that he finds himself inside of.

“Ah, hell,” mutters Hineni to himself, coming to wakefulness as he feels a familiar pull.

— The man stops dancing, finding that this time nobody is there to accompany him.

Hineni blinks, rubbing his face to look around the space that he’s in.

He was just at home, talking to Rhine about some stuff, and… now he’s here. He narrows his eyes, his mind shooting to dire lucidity.

“Frogs…” hisses the man beneath his breath.

So it’s finally time. The frogs have finally made their move against him, their fourth move — the last one that they have left.

He looks around himself.

He’s in ‘the palace’, as he’s called it so far, for lack of a better term.

It’s the large, empty hall that he had found himself in during those dancing dreams he had been transported to months and months ago. This is where he assumes that ‘the big frog’, who he has heard nothing from since then, resides. “I already told you,” says the man, talking to the emptiness. “I’m already spoken for, and you just aren’t my type.”

His words move across the grand chamber, but he doubts that they even come close to reaching the end, let alone echoing, despite the vast emptiness.

Hineni looks around himself, waiting to wake up, assuming he will do so at any minute, as had been the case the last times he was here, upon realizing the nature of the dream.

But he doesn’t wake up.

Hineni looks down at himself, pinching his arm.

It hurts.

He moves his fingers, looking at them. They move exactly as he would expect them to, outside of a dream.

“Shit,” mutters the man. Has he been kidnapped again?

How?

With the military guarding their house, with Obscura’s growing power, with everything that’s going on, how the hell did the frogs get to him?

He has to get out of here. He has to see if the others are all okay.

Hineni looks around himself. The ball-room is shadowed, illuminated only by the cool night-glow that comes in through windows, which are far too tall and high to reach or make use of. There is a crackling of fire, but he doesn’t see anything. All he sees is a vast, empty, marbled-floored room with a grand, ornate door on either side of it.

He lifts his finger, pointing at one of them, and then bounces back and forth between the doors three times, until he picks the one he had pointed at first and starts walking towards it, having chosen it ‘at random’.

Five minutes later, he reaches the end of the room and the door, which has gotten big enough for a giant to traverse through.

The man, to his surprise, has no trouble opening the massive door, which is taller than the old house was.

Everything goes white.

“Shh…” hushes the woman, holding a finger softly against the mouth of the baby that she’s holding in her arms. “Shh…” she repeats, humming a soft song. She’s standing in a small, somewhat messy room that appears to make up the full entirety of a small cottage, rocking her body back and forth to soothe the creature that she’s holding.

A crackling fire burns in the hearth, filling the space with a comfortable, homey warmth. This is where the sound of fire had come from before.

Another person, a young girl with long, sooty black hair, sits hunkered down in the corner next to the bed, her knees held in her arms.

The woman lifts the baby up, placing a kiss on its forehead, before turning her gaze to the window.

Hineni looks together with her, seeing that outside of it too, fires crackle together with the voices of people collecting out there.

— A rock flies through the window, violently shattering it.

The baby starts to scream again, but she places a finger against its mouth, shushing it a third time, and the baby falls silent, babbling instead and grabbing the finger to hold it in fascination.

“You take him and you hide, okay?” instructs the woman. She kneels down toward the girl by the bed. The girl, who was sitting by the bed, reaches up, grabbing the fabric of the woman’s dress. The woman shakes her head, pulling the hand off of herself. “You take him and you hide,” she repeats.

The voices outside grow louder.

She bends down, kissing the girl’s forehead too. “What will you do?”

The girl lifts her gaze, rubbing her wet eyes. “I’m going to take him and hide.”

The woman nods, content. “You’re a good girl, Nekyia. Don’t let what they’re saying about you or him ever be true, okay?” she asks. “Don’t give them the satisfaction of being rig-”

— The door crashes open and the woman jumps to her feet, grabbing a knife from the table next to the bed.

Before she can respond to the attack, there’s already a blade through her own chest, blood leaking out of it, splashing dripping to the ground with a wet tone that is oddly reminiscent of the crackling fire just next to it. The two sounds intertwine, the dripping and the crackling, as if they were in a dance.

The woman falls over dead.

The elf, who had barged into the house and killed her, looks around the room, seeing only the baby on the bed.

She walks over to grab it, sparing a moment to look at it in disgust.

It babbles incoherently, lifting a hand to touch her long ear in curiosity. She pulls it off of herself and takes it outside. The elf walks past Hineni, entirely unaware of his presence, as if he were a shadow in an old memory.

Hineni stands there, watching as a moment later the girl with the black hair crawls out from beneath the bed, staring at the dead body of her mother.

Torches fly in through the broken window and the dance of fire and blood, at play in the small house, is overtoned.

Everything goes white.

The elven woman stands there in the forest, holding the baby at a distance with a look of revulsion on her face.

— The baby babbles on, unbothered by her expression.

It reeks.

It seems that it’s had an ‘incident’ of sorts. She can’t give it to the owl-god like this.

The woman looks around herself, finding a river that babbles much the same. She walks over towards it, holding the baby at a distance and never losing the skeeved out look on her face.

Holding it beneath the arms, she leans down and just sort of submerges the baby’s lower half into the waters of the river to just hold it there for a minute, in the hopes that the current will take care of everything for her.

— The baby starts to cry, and she stiffens up as she puts its legs into the icy river water.Her long ears twitch in annoyance.

There are predators in these woods. The owl-god keeps her people safe. But it will not interfere in the laws of the hunt. She looks around herself, turning back to the baby. “Quiet! Be quiet!” she hisses.

The baby keeps on crying.

“Shut up!” she whispers angrily at it.

The baby does not shut up.

– Hissing, she submerges the baby down below the water of the river entirely, looking around herself in fearful panic.

The forest doesn’t stir.

It looks like nothing has heard them.

Her eyes wander back down to the baby in her hands, still held down beneath the water. She needs this thing. She needs the blessing from the owl-god so that she can finally have the means to leave the forest.

She pulls it back out of the water. It spews wet out of itself in a contorted mixture of screaming, crying and undrowning.

— The mess on its body is only worse than before.

The elf swears to herself, doing her best to silence the creature by appeasing it with anything else she can think of, from funny faces to odd sounds.

Nothing works.

Desperate, her eyes wander over the forest, watching for any rustling bushes, until they land back on the body of the water, where several flowers of vivid pink float. Water-lilies. She rips one out, holding it to the baby’s nose in an act of desperation, hoping that any stimulus at all will do the trick.

— And, for whatever reason, it does.

After a while of flailing and gagging and a little vomit that runs down her fingers, the baby seems to tilt its head oddly close towards the flower and stays content, playing with its petals and simply existing, as if nothing had ever happened at all a moment ago.

She sighs in relief and then grabs some leaves, realizing that she has no choice but to clean it up the old fashioned way.

Afterwards, she grabs a few of the water-lillies and takes them with her, just in case it starts crying on the way again.

It has been several days since she took the baby.

The forest is long and slow to traverse when one stays off of the roads. But this baby is a powerful offering, she can’t let the others know that she has it, until she is within the safe confines of the all-protecting and seeing vision of the owl-god.

She isn’t able to feed the infant, not really having the physiological capacity to do so at the moment. So instead, she does as the birds do with their young and chews up some berries into mush to feed to it with her fingers.

It seems to be working, as far as she can tell. She’s never dealt with a baby before.

— It yanks on her ears.

She pulls it off of herself, scowling at the monstrosity that has a smear of berry-paste on its cheek.

She sighs. It has to be presentable for the owl-god. The elf wipes it off, and the baby grabs her finger, chewing and sucking on it.

— She pulls it away.

The baby begins to cry.

“Fine!” she hisses, letting it have her finger back, which seems to immediately stop any problem that was perceived to have arisen.

The baby quietly chews on her finger as they awkwardly walk through the forest, continuing to coo and babble.

They’ve arrived.

The elf stands within the domain of the owl-god, holding her tribute against her breast. As a gesture of respect and reverence, she holds her head down low as the line slowly moves forward towards the great tree, on which sits the powerful owl-god who has control of the forest.

She stares at the ground, doing her best not to look at the annoying thing she’s holding. It continues to reach up, trying to grab her ears. But she doesn’t let it. The baby begins to well up; she can tell that it’s about to cry. She can’t have it do that here, not in the presence of the owl-god. Rolling her eyes, she tilts her lowered head, letting it reach one of her ears to pull on.

What a brat.

The elf stands like that in line, listening to the oddly satisfied chewing sound of the toothless creature, nibbling on the end of her long ear, until the line moves forward far enough for it to be her turn.

Feeling a severe presence bearing down on her from above, she lifts her gaze, looking at the owl-god. It’s massive and terrifying, a shadow that hangs heavy over the world during the darkness of nights.

She gulps, lowering herself down to present the baby – her offering. It takes a moment after her knees reach the grass for her to finally extend her arms, but she does and waits.

A satisfied hoot comes from above.

The elf exhales, relieved. She slowly lowers the creature down to the pile of offerings that others have brought for the owl-god.

– Immediately, she’s thrown to the side as someone rams into her, grabbing the baby and running off with it.

The elf tumbles across the ground, losing track of the commotion as she tries to reorient herself, her head ringing.

A piercing scream comes through the air, followed by another.

One belongs to a young girl with black hair, who she can’t identify, and the other is the shrieking of a bird that makes her wince. The elf fights with herself as she rises back to her feet, the smell of water-lilies in her face, present because of the crushed flower she had with her that had been pressed against her neck in her fall.

— The baby cries and whatever it might have been in particular that happened in her head that day, happens.

The woman yells incoherently to herself as she runs forward through the crowds that have gathered to watch whatever is happening with the owl-god and grabs the baby that is laying in the grass, before running off into the forest with it, holding it against her chest as they vanish into the underbrush.

The two of them escape the forest and move towards the far north, far outside of the domain of the owl-god and away from all of this.

Everything goes white.

There is a vision of a pond in a forest.

Water splashes as a body lands in the murky waters from above, disturbing the frog song being sung there by hundreds of frogs.

The mangled girl with long, sooty, black hair floats there in the tepid, stagnant waters. Blood pours out of her missing appendages – one leg and three fingers on both of her hands – as she sinks down beneath the water, her eyes looking up towards the stars.

She’s going to have to apologize to their mother in a minute. She messed up. Her promise to the woman didn’t even last a minute, and then, even worse, she couldn’t even make it right. She wanted to save him, her younger brother, but she just couldn’t. It just wasn’t in the cards.

Nekyia drifts down beneath the water.

— Frogs croak.

They croak for so many reasons. They croak their songs to communicate, to find partners, and to warn of threats and rivals; they croak to sing, and they croak in fear of the disturbance of the owl that has flown over their heads.

Owls eat frogs.

There are many, many frogs. But the owls are also many. They, the frogs, are outnumbered and at a disadvantage, as they are unable to fly or move at the speeds at which owls glide through the night. They don’t have sharp talons and strong beaks.

— However, the frogs do have one thing.

They see the girl sinking down into their pond, filling it with the mess of her death, and the pond intermingles with her, flowing into her mouth and nose and ears as she drowns – the girl who is an enemy of the owl-god.

The frog chorus croaks, quickly collecting together as they come to an unusual, rare agreement, one that is quite odd for frogs to make of their own volition. But such is the nature of things in the deep-forest.

The frogs all dive into the waters, hundreds of them, one after the other, as they swarm around the girl, as they claim her as their own in order to use her as a tool of retribution against the owls.

Everything goes white.