[Gift] CRAFTING: Wartorn Battleground - Khal/Zanril

It was a sight; a vast empty battleground of a bygone era, hauntingly quiet even to this day. The sky was a hazy gray, with a bright halo of the sun casting around the moons in the sky, bathing everything in an eerie orange hue. Everything felt still here. The yellowed clouds, the trampled earth of countless paws, hooves, and boots. Banners erected in the middle of the field, like a monument of the battle of old. 

Khal has been here before, on the rare occasion, when his legs feel the need to go someplace and always seem to carry him here. With a solemn look, his eyes followed the tattered banners waving in the absent breeze, so bleached from the sun you couldn’t tell who they belonged to anymore. His paws stepped in mud, patches of grass, and puddles of shallow water on his way across the scene.

And following along, was Zanril. Her cloak was pulled up high over her head, eyes looking through the veil of her hair at the scene around her. It was a far cry from her usual scene. No bustling of people, no shady streets, or thieving kids running through crowds. This was all so silent, it was unnerving to the normal folk. Of course she wasn’t among these “normal folk”. But something about this place was off to her. The air was too… calm, for a battle ravaged scene.

Dhaoragan was sitting at a small campfire in the middle of the field. Its glowing embers a speck of light amidst the grey earth and broken spears. He was writing something, it looked like. At least from so far off Khal couldn’t tell. 

Arriving at the small campfire, Zanril took a glance at what he was working on and found it to be a drawing instead. Smudged charcoal, shaped like the mountain range around them, with the twin moons casting a bright light just like it did above them. It was elaborate, with little artistic liberty in comparison to the actual thing. The clouds, the mountains, the moons, all matched to the scene, like noting every detail down to memory.

“What a place to spend your time in,” Zanril commented, looking back at the banners. The place should be filled with spirits, the dead, anything to make a battleground a battleground. But it was so quiet here. 

“It makes the mind wander. Taking in bigger pictures of life lived by those braver than yourself,” Dhaoragan philosophized, passing down empty papers to them both. Offering pieces of charcoal to each. “Helps you visualize things most important to your eye, and makes you really think of it. How did it come to be as it is? What brought that broken wheel here, where did that spear fly?” 

Meditative stuff. Thinking about life and beyond, and other things.

Khal didn’t seem to object to the task, scratching his charcoal across the page in a jagged pattern, before smudging them down to create mountains. It was the earth that drew his mind. The arrows, the broken wheels, the grass and water. The present as close to him as Dhaoragan and Zanril were. He even included a small speck for Dhaoragan’s campfire and the puller himself, like a memory of them walking here. 

Zanril Looked off to the banners. How they rippled and flipped in the breeze, surrounded by broken spears and overgrown grass. Her hand scratched sticks across the paper, all standing vertically. Then squares with pointy ends for the banners, with holes drawn into them. In her mind, there should be some manner of death out here. Skeletons, ghosts, though the former has seemingly been cleared up over the years. But her artistic rendition of the battlefield had no shortage of them. 

“Thinking of the past?” Dhaoragan spoke up after looking over Zanril’s artwork. It was macabre to be certain, but who was he to judge given the locale. “The scene around is so peaceful, it’s almost hard to believe.” Uninterested in his talking, Zanril continued to add to her piece, smudging things, scribbling, filling up the scene with more and more things she saw. 

Khal on the other hand, had finished his simple vision with a few smudge streaks, before looking back to the moons in the sky. In his vision, the day of the battle, the moons were blocked from the sky with clouds as red as the blood below. The heavens, with nothing but the fury of Oris, would look upon them on the ground below at a time like that. Maybe it was a good thing. 

Dhaoragan collected both Khal and Zanril’s pieces and included them in his journal. “Thank you for indulging me. It’s never bad to jog the mind with the solemn past.” He looked off to the fields with Khal and Zanril. It was going to be another quiet night down here, beneath the stars.