Thursday 9 May 2024

Wicker Valley, episode 33: Dogs and Ponies

It's all been a bit chaotic recently, starting from when we all got an invitation to dinner from Arthur's family. It all started out pretty normal, with Elizabeth and me getting taken to the conservatory for some girl talk, but then the storm started. The others had been taking Michael out to the stables, which I doubt he was too keen on, and then the storm in the shape of a horse with a glowing eye happened.

Most of us got out of there pretty quick, and after a bit of teleportation taxi services, so did Arthur, along with a mysterious box. The glowing eye in the cloud horse was supposedly some kind of chaos orb, and it needed finding, so Elizabeth and me set up the scrying circle. There were a few suggestions about what to use as a focus, but given our tendency to set things on fire, I didn't want to use anything important, and got out a My Little Pony with twinkle eyes.

Good thing too, since it caught fire. We didn't locate the orb, but I did have an exciting vision of some kind of wizard putting things in a cauldron.

Then, if things weren't complicated enough already, Rusty showed up, which meant explaining my jerk of a brother to Eddie. Chaos orb bad, we new that, but he did have a lead for us. One of my uncles had got hold of it at some point, and it had done bad things to him. So talking to him meant paying a visit to the slate mine.

I could see how creeped out everyone else was as we made our way down into the darkness, which is fair enough. My family are bad enough when they're in their right minds. It wasn't hard to find my uncle. We knew the orb made people's worst fears manifest, which reminded me a lot of last Halloween, so I wasn't surprised to find him shouting about angels. I couldn't remember if he'd ever known me as Scarlet so I introduced myself as Agnes, and he did know who I was. I wouldn't say we learned a lot, but it was a start.

We had other things to deal with though. Strange monsters being seen at the local scout camp. Arthur was staying with his family for the moment, but the rest of us loaded up Vanessa and went on our way. The only description we had was of a big dog, so we grabbed a few books to read along the way. We learned of two types of black dog sightings - malevolent ones like Black Shuck, and protective ones like church grims. Not very helpful so far.

At the campsite the scout leaders were doing their best to act normal while we took a look around. Michael found a pair of crosses concealed under grass at the base of a tree. A little further off we found an old cottage, almost completely covered in plant life. Then we had a collective vision, of two little boys, probably twins, running hand in hand. But Elizabeth saw something more. An older girl, with part of her face burnt.

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