You’ve just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As you look around, your gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. You duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? she begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”((How do you respond?))
With slow and careful movements, the character walks up to the proffered seat. Her eyes wander to the candles that blazed and flickered, threatening sinister shadows on the shabby cloth of the tent.“What do you recommend I do, elder?” he inquires of me, looking placid but not convinced. “I have gone through great obstacles trying to find something to comprehend, a purpose. This is the reason I am here, trying to find something that will contrapuntally support the quiet voices that I can hear. But moving further, I still do not have that relic.”
After a moment of stillness, he fixes his gaze again and such rapid movement that it seems he is stifling a scream, succeeds in zeroing in on the witch’s face. Searching for the answers that lie above in the gendered wrinkles. “What do you know about my goal in everything?”
When the hag grips her staff and tilts her head, his mind whisks him away into his early memories: childhood, where the green grass is blurred and unrestrained with the warmth of sun tints and the sounds of laughter and wind dancing with songs. He had lived in a small village that his parents had poured tales of ancient wisdom, of the universe. His mother would tell him about the trees and spirits that lived in them; his father, a ‘remedy’ teacher, made him wish for more than the limitations of the cookie cutter home. But even of is started by the pleasant warmth at those thoughts there always is, a void that craves for more than that type of reality depicted for him.
The old hag pulls herself to a straight position, without a doubt that her age are far more vicious than what she had anticipated.