the evil eye has done its work;

Some days passed him by as inattentive as a single breath in an hour, by automation and without thought towards it. Today had felt like one of those, autumn slowly raising it’s arms up to the sky to pull out all the heat and cast it into it’s leaves. This was the best part of the season; just before it’d be an on pour of rain and muck. Before the forest would turn into a slip-and-slide show for the squirrels.

Now, the air was still crisp, the sky slowly turning a purple hue. Aleister found himself on a path just to gather more fun materials for new masks. Wood most of the time, but sometimes he’d find the skull of a fox, or the antlers of a deer. It’d never stop delighting him. Today he’d found a pair of antlers, stuffing them in his bag. Maybe he’d remember today!

Only when he noticed the sun had started to disappear behind the trees did he realize it was getting chilly. He closed off his cape in the front, deciding there and then it was time to start his route home again. Only then did the forest decide to shift around him. The sound of birdsong he’d been so mindlessly listening to fell away, replaced by a silence that was in it’s own way deafening. As if he’d stuffed his ears with cotton. It stopped the mage in his tracks, and his first thought was to put the wooden mask he’d brought with back on it’s place. Even if the company that had arrived wasn’t wanted, he’d still only show his actual form on his own terms. This was his defence, his way of taking some form of control.

Quickly, almost sudden the silence was replaced by the sound of twigs breaking and snapping at mass, as if the forest came alive around him.

Ah. Drat.

Aleister had overstayed his welcome; this was the time of the Blights, and once more he’d forgotten. Every year, again and again, he forgot the beginning of autumn wasn’t just his to enjoy. It paid to be wary, and now he hadn’t been, it was going to become an expensive evening. Realizing he hadn’t brought his staff was the final straw; he wasn’t going to fight them. Instead his attention was caught by another path into the woods, almost hidden behind the bushes. With a final glance towards the now rising pile of twigs, he hurriedly made his way to the shack at the end of the trail. Would that defend him? Maybe not. But it’d buy him time to come up with a plan. Critters like these wouldn’t be affected by his magic. What brain matter was there to manipulate? What shadow on what wall- they couldn’t even do basic math. There was no use.

Well besides actually setting the forest on fire, and as long as Aleister could prevent himself from doing that, he would.

Before he went in, two eyes the size of large grapefruits floated away from him, staying outside the shack. Keeping an eye in the woods, literally. And while Al looked for a weapon of sorts inside, outside the pair were alerted by something else. A lifeform other than twigs, perhaps? Footsteps, and maybe further away, a horse.