[HR] Winter's Howl (excerpt)

<a target="_blank" href="My grandfather was a patriotic man. That is to say, he served his due time and then some in the army. He started as a boy fresh outta highschool, right to front lines to give those traitor bastards down South the what-for; then to due his due diligence helping slaughter the Sioux people in the late ‘70s - this one never sat well with him, so he would tell me, he believed it imprinted something foul upon the land; another story for another day he would say - he would help how he could in the Spanish-American conflict, but the scuffle against the Chippewa is the one of significance for today.He fought valiantly as ever that day,“Sent countless reds to whatever deers or mock gods they got waitin for em in Hell,” he would say before hacking out another glob of chew into a small, hardly translucent, yellowed mason jar. The more he drank and chewed the more intense his accent got.“Was all said and done before too long. Th’night after it was all finished was strange, I tell ya, boy. Th’camp was usually tense, most everyone was awake and on edge, those asleep were enough so that a thrown pebble could woke them. Was usually mighty quiet at night, just the drone of crickets and the occasional howl of some far-off Coyote, but a loud quiet, y’hear?”And I would nod in interested agreement.“Well, after we littered the land with the dead, the night was particularly quiet and - at first, mind you - calm. Lots of men slept very soundly relatively early. Some men including Lieutenant Brant, Myself, Daniel Shauckel, Iseah Marlton - the latter two having been rookies at the time - as well as little Smithers stayed up and celebrated. That Smithers boy lied his ass off to get enlisted and I knows it, never pried it out of him but the boy couldn't have been on the North side of sixteen. I d’gress, we sat round a bonfire passing a hearty jug of moonshine and smoking the tobacco those Indians had like chimneys. The older of us shared stories from older campaigns, I told them some about killing them damn traitors. We laughed, kept respectful quiet when someone started getting emotional, cheers’d maybe two dozen times to names I’ll never remember.Little Smithers even started opening up, talking about some honey he had waitin’ for him to come back to Maine. Said he couldn't wait to ‘bark up that tree’ and by goodness that got our drunk asses cackling like witches flyin’ past the moon. He jus’ lowers his head and turns ‘bout as pink as a cunt, I tell ya!”At this point, my pap usually had himself chuckling pretty hard at the mere recollection.“Yeah, but, right, we talked and shot the shit for hours that night. The moon was massive and a bright, cool blue in the sky. The whole night felt incredibly surreal, even before the weird shit started happening.”And I would take the bait like a starved trout every. Single. Time, “What weird shit?”“Well, God knows the time but deep into the night, probably early into the morning in all reality, Little Smithers went terribly quiet. We were well past the point of emotional drunk at this point, all of us being flat out stupid silly wasted. You know how a bunch of men get when they get that fucked up, each of them thinks what they’re saying is the most important thing in the entire world. Sufficient to say, him going so silent was damn strange. I took notice of it first, asking the boy if he was alright. He didn't acknowledge me, so I clumsily waved a hand in front of his face and shouted his name even louder. He didn’t move a muscle, he just fought through sputtering breaths, ‘Shaukel, Marlton, Brant, Laine, can you see that?’ So naturally, we all direct our gazes in the direction as he; Four-Eyes-Marlton and I having to be the sorry suckers to turn around to see the spooky monster. But there was no monster, just a light. A small but incredibly vibrant, glowing blue light. Its center was the truest white I’ve ever seen, practically blinding, and it shone with a deep hue of cold ocean blue. It casted a faint glow onto surrounding trees and bushes and seemed to float perfectly still, maybe three feet up off the air.We all stared at it in stunned silence for a while, unsure what to make of it. It didn't seem like any threat, it was along the edge of the woods and probably thirty some odd feet away. It was just the damn strangest thing. Then it started singing.”A visible chill would run up his back.“It was beautiful in all honesty, but the thought of it today…I struggle with it, boy, you know that?”And I would silently nod in agreement, signalling him to continue,“It had a high pitched, almost operatic…voice. It was almost like an opera singer warming up, it would sing in a tone that would rise and fall like a wave. Inquisitive, curse filled muttering poured from each of our mouths. Except for Marlton, who was a devout Catholic and was quietly praying, and Smithers was still entirely tongue-tied. The Lieutenant was the first to stand, shocker, and this big brolic bastard shouted,‘Hey, we see you there! Make yourself known or be treated as a hostile!’The goddamned fool was shouting this at a disembodied light in the woods! I don't know what all walks this Earth, but I know it gets stranger than we could even begin to imagine, and that man was in active denial of that fact. It just kept on its singing, and before too long, Shauckel also took to his feet. He grabbed his gun, always ready to pucker up to Brant’s shit-stained asshole at any given chance. I followed suit, leaving my gun on the ground. God knows we all knew it was stupid, but the three of us started walking towards the light. After a couple final muttered prayers, Marlton would too stand and join us with a fix of his glasses and an iron grip on his golden crucifix necklace. When we got…I dunno, too close for it's liking, I guess, it started drifting away. Along the edge of the forest it just drifted along. Marlton had let the cross dangle on his neck and a newfound sparkle of discovery glinted in his eyes behind those giant spectacles. Shauckel raised his rifle. I know damn well I was beyond intrigued, an almost child look whimsey filling my mind at the prospect of discovering this strange entity. So we followed it.Before we could get out of his line of sight, Smithers managed to snap out his trance and put a flame under his ass to catch up with the rest of us. Its singing was beautiful, I can’t beat that home hard enough, boy, genuinely tempting. Like a siren’s call in the ear of a virgin sailor. Almost irresistible. As we followed it along, it started drifting away from the woods, over the corpse-laden land. That blue glow on the empty faces of those Indian men…I pray ye never have to see anything quite like it boy.But we continued to follow it. Whether from curiosity, fear of being left behind, some deeper, vague temptation, we kept after it. Stepping between bodies that bore holes the size of my fist, sometimes accidentally slushing your foot into a pile of bloody, sometimes intestinal muck. It feels and sounds like stepping in dogshit, you know?We followed it the whole way to the edge of the lake, probably about a mile from our camp. We all stopped at varying distances from the lake’s shore, Brant up front, Smithers in the back, us other three scattered about between them. But that light just kept on a going. Out over the lake, all the way out over the very center of it. All along the way, even as it hovered there suspended over the lake, it sang…”The corner of his mouth would twitch and his eyes take on a milky quality, lost in the weeds of vivid recollection.“Its reflection in the lake was really something to behold, boy. It was like that of a second moon bathed in that deep blue, not terribly far from the reflection of the actual moon. It just hovered there and sang its beautiful song, us idiots just stood there gawking at it. Its song got louder with time, in retrospect, it was probably getting impatient.Lieutenant Brant shook his head and rubbed his face pretty damn intensely with an aggravated growl.“Gawd-dayumn-IT,” he shouted in three very distinct syllables, and without lookin’ I already knew that made Marlton cringe, “don’t listen to it boys! That's just…Goddamn silly! Don’t go, fellas, keep your feet planted on the grass, for your fuckin’ mothers’ sake!”Brant just kept on his loud-mouthed tirade of such things, Shauckel seemed about as flustered as I was; shakily keeping his rifle trained on that light, he was practically begging the Lieutenant for answers. I turned around, and seen Marlton was on his knees, his knuckles white with his crucifix in hand. He was babbling countless half-baked prayers to God, Jesus, The Holy Spirit, and every Saint he could remember. The shouting and singing steadily got louder, as did Marlton’s prayers; not to mention more interladen with tears. The last look I ever saw on Little Smithers face will stick with me forever, I can see it clear as day. Sometimes I do, on restless nights full of dreams crafted from meandering memories. On his face he carried a particular sense of glowing, childlike intrigue. Coated with a fine layer of nervous confusion and a vibrant spark of ambition in his eyes. I tried asking him if he was alright, and instead of responding, the boy just started trucking along forward, eyes locked on the ball of light, entirely lost to Its song. He tripped over Marlton - who hardly noticed anything had happened at all and just kept to his prayers - and barely stumbled before regaining his footing and keeping on along his path. I tried calling out to him, asking about his girl he mentioned earlier, and begged him to at least acknowledge me, but he just approached me with that dead look in his eyes. The closer he got, the more I saw how the boy’s light oak-brown eyes had turned into the swirling grey-blue of the maelstroms even the best of sailors fear. Not just his irises, the Pupil, the whole damn thing, just this swirling, windy grey.When he got close enough, I grasped his shoulder and tried for a moment to talk some sense into him, find out what the Hell exactly it was that he was doing. The boy ignored me, shaking my grip off with a gesture that was equally gentle as it was demanding. It was impossible not to respect it, practically instinct. I still wonder sometimes what the other side of the grass looks like, if I had just kept my head attached and held on. But, even if the rest of us weren’t going in there with Smithers, I do think we were all under that thing’s spell to some degree. We all served the exact purpose we were meant to, that being to stay the Hell out of Smithers’ way. I tried to go against it, boy, I did, but I couldn't. I tried, you believe that, don't you?”I would nod silently. My pap would take a second to gather his now shaking breath.“Yes…well, he - Smithers that is - wandered right on past Brant and the equally frantic puppy dog Shauckel, and stepped into the lake without an ounce of hesitation. My stomach fell down into my nuts and then further, this weird warmth crawled up my back and gripped me by the shoulders. I tried to shout for him to stop, to turn, to realize that he was so young and had just survived a vicious battle against the savages, he would go home to his girl a hero. But, like a nightmare, I found it impossible to make use of my voice, only managing a soft pahhhh of air out of my gullet.The boy just kept going, keeping his body straight, path equally so, and stride strong as his form sunk deeper and deeper into the lake, drawing closer and closer to that blue dot of light. Down to his knees then his waist, up to his stomach, deeper into that frigid Stillwater surrounded by tall Oaks. All any of us could do - even Brant and Shauckel, who’d finally stopped their blabbering when they saw Smithers go past - was hold our breaths as we watched him go chest deep, neck deep, then disappear entirely into the navy blue in the still silence of that eerie night. No bubbles rose at any point. We all stood, waiting, unbelieving.It stopped singing as soon as he was entirely under the water, and at some point, presumably by the time the boy had somehow gotten directly beneath the thing, it shifted slowly from its deep blue, to a magnificent, royal purple, finally to a similarly deep but violent red. The light sank down towards the lake, plunging in without disturbing the surface to any degree. The red glow that cast from it projected out of the water for a few seconds, growing dimmer, dimmer, and dimmer still. Then it too was gone……We never did see Smithers again. None of us ever did serve anymore after that. We all reported it to the one above us, it made its way up the grapevine, and some rather well-dressed, stern-faced men told me that my time in the military was up. They sent me home with a hearty little check in my pocket and I never asked another question, never told the story to anyone outside the family. As per certain…agreements and demands.”If he had a glass, now was the time he’d sip it; down the whole damn thing if he got lost enough in that haze of memories.“What I’m tryin’ to get at, boy, is that there’s some weird shit out there. Like I said, stranger ‘n you could ever even hope to imagine. So when you think you might understand this world you’re livin’ in, just you remember that it don’t give a damn about what you think you understand.”" title="[HR] Winter's Howl (excerpt)">full image</a> <strong> - Repost: [HR] Winter's Howl (excerpt)</strong> (<i>from Reddit.com, [HR] Winter's Howl (excerpt)</i>) <br><blockquote> My grandfather was a patriotic man. That is to say, he served his due time and then some in the army. He started as a boy fresh outta highschool, right to front lines to give those traitor bastards down South the what-for; then to due his due diligence helping slaughter the Sioux people in the late ‘70s - this one never sat well with him, so he would tell me, he believed it imprinted something foul upon the land; another story for another day he would say - he would help how he could in the Spanish-American conflict, but the scuffle against the Chippewa is the one of significance for today.He fought valiantly as ever that day,“Sent countless reds to whatever deers or mock gods they got waitin for em in Hell,” he would say before hacking out another glob of chew into a small, hardly translucent, yellowed mason jar. The more he drank and chewed the more intense his accent got.“Was all said and done before too long. Th’night after it was all finished was strange, I tell ya, boy. Th’camp was usually tense, most everyone was awake and on edge, those asleep were enough so that a thrown pebble could woke them. Was usually mighty quiet at night, just the drone of crickets and the occasional howl of some far-off Coyote, but a loud quiet, y’hear?”And I would nod in interested agreement.“Well, after we littered the land with the dead, the night was particularly quiet and - at first, mind you - calm. Lots of men slept very soundly relatively early. Some men including Lieutenant Brant, Myself, Daniel Shauckel, Iseah Marlton - the latter two having been rookies at the time - as well as little Smithers stayed up and celebrated. That Smithers boy lied his ass off to get enlisted and I knows it, never pried it out of him but the boy couldn't have been on the North side of sixteen. I d’gress, we sat round a bonfire passing a hearty jug of moonshine and smoking the tobacco those Indians had like chimneys. The older of us shared stories from older campaigns, I told them some about killing them damn traitors. We laughed, kept respectful quiet when someone started getting emotional, cheers’d maybe two dozen times to names I’ll never remember.Little Smithers even started opening up, talking about some honey he had waitin’ for him to come back to Maine. Said he couldn't wait to ‘bark up that tree’ and by goodness that got our drunk asses cackling like witches flyin’ past the moon. He jus’ lowers his head and turns ‘bout as pink as a cunt, I tell ya!”At this point, my pap usually had himself chuckling pretty hard at the mere recollection.“Yeah, but, right, we talked and shot the shit for hours that night. The moon was massive and a bright, cool blue in the sky. The whole night felt incredibly surreal, even before the weird shit started happening.”And I would take the bait like a starved trout every. Single. Time, “What weird shit?”“Well, God knows the time but deep into the night, probably early into the morning in all reality, Little Smithers went terribly quiet. We were well past the point of emotional drunk at this point, all of us being flat out stupid silly wasted. You know how a bunch of men get when they get that fucked up, each of them thinks what they’re saying is the most important thing in the entire world. Sufficient to say, him going so silent was damn strange. I took notice of it first, asking the boy if he was alright. He didn't acknowledge me, so I clumsily waved a hand in front of his face and shouted his name even louder. He didn’t move a muscle, he just fought through sputtering breaths, ‘Shaukel, Marlton, Brant, Laine, can you see that?’ So naturally, we all direct our gazes in the direction as he; Four-Eyes-Marlton and I having to be the sorry suckers to turn around to see the spooky monster. But there was no monster, just a light. A small but incredibly vibrant, glowing blue light. Its center was the truest white I’ve ever seen, practically blinding, and it shone with a deep hue of cold ocean blue. It casted a faint glow onto surrounding trees and bushes and seemed to float perfectly still, maybe three feet up off the air.We all stared at it in stunned silence for a while, unsure what to make of it. It didn't seem like any threat, it was along the edge of the woods and probably thirty some odd feet away. It was just the damn strangest thing. Then it started singing.”A visible chill would run up his back.“It was beautiful in all honesty, but the thought of it today…I struggle with it, boy, you know that?”And I would silently nod in agreement, signalling him to continue,“It had a high pitched, almost operatic…voice. It was almost like an opera singer warming up, it would sing in a tone that would rise and fall like a wave. Inquisitive, curse filled muttering poured from each of our mouths. Except for Marlton, who was a devout Catholic and was quietly praying, and Smithers was still entirely tongue-tied. The Lieutenant was the first to stand, shocker, and this big brolic bastard shouted,‘Hey, we see you there! Make yourself known or be treated as a hostile!’The goddamned fool was shouting this at a disembodied light in the woods! I don't know what all walks this Earth, but I know it gets stranger than we could even begin to imagine, and that man was in active denial of that fact. It just kept on its singing, and before too long, Shauckel also took to his feet. He grabbed his gun, always ready to pucker up to Brant’s shit-stained asshole at any given chance. I followed suit, leaving my gun on the ground. God knows we all knew it was stupid, but the three of us started walking towards the light. After a couple final muttered prayers, Marlton would too stand and join us with a fix of his glasses and an iron grip on his golden crucifix necklace. When we got…I dunno, too close for it's liking, I guess, it started drifting away. Along the edge of the forest it just drifted along. Marlton had let the cross dangle on his neck and a newfound sparkle of discovery glinted in his eyes behind those giant spectacles. Shauckel raised his rifle. I know damn well I was beyond intrigued, an almost child look whimsey filling my mind at the prospect of discovering this strange entity. So we followed it.Before we could get out of his line of sight, Smithers managed to snap out his trance and put a flame under his ass to catch up with the rest of us. Its singing was beautiful, I can’t beat that home hard enough, boy, genuinely tempting. Like a siren’s call in the ear of a virgin sailor. Almost irresistible. As we followed it along, it started drifting away from the woods, over the corpse-laden land. That blue glow on the empty faces of those Indian men…I pray ye never have to see anything quite like it boy.But we continued to follow it. Whether from curiosity, fear of being left behind, some deeper, vague temptation, we kept after it. Stepping between bodies that bore holes the size of my fist, sometimes accidentally slushing your foot into a pile of bloody, sometimes intestinal muck. It feels and sounds like stepping in dogshit, you know?We followed it the whole way to the edge of the lake, probably about a mile from our camp. We all stopped at varying distances from the lake’s shore, Brant up front, Smithers in the back, us other three scattered about between them. But that light just kept on a going. Out over the lake, all the way out over the very center of it. All along the way, even as it hovered there suspended over the lake, it sang…”The corner of his mouth would twitch and his eyes take on a milky quality, lost in the weeds of vivid recollection.“Its reflection in the lake was really something to behold, boy. It was like that of a second moon bathed in that deep blue, not terribly far from the reflection of the actual moon. It just hovered there and sang its beautiful song, us idiots just stood there gawking at it. Its song got louder with time, in retrospect, it was probably getting impatient.Lieutenant Brant shook his head and rubbed his face pretty damn intensely with an aggravated growl.“Gawd-dayumn-IT,” he shouted in three very distinct syllables, and without lookin’ I already knew that made Marlton cringe, “don’t listen to it boys! That's just…Goddamn silly! Don’t go, fellas, keep your feet planted on the grass, for your fuckin’ mothers’ sake!”Brant just kept on his loud-mouthed tirade of such things, Shauckel seemed about as flustered as I was; shakily keeping his rifle trained on that light, he was practically begging the Lieutenant for answers. I turned around, and seen Marlton was on his knees, his knuckles white with his crucifix in hand. He was babbling countless half-baked prayers to God, Jesus, The Holy Spirit, and every Saint he could remember. The shouting and singing steadily got louder, as did Marlton’s prayers; not to mention more interladen with tears. The last look I ever saw on Little Smithers face will stick with me forever, I can see it clear as day. Sometimes I do, on restless nights full of dreams crafted from meandering memories. On his face he carried a particular sense of glowing, childlike intrigue. Coated with a fine layer of nervous confusion and a vibrant spark of ambition in his eyes. I tried asking him if he was alright, and instead of responding, the boy just started trucking along forward, eyes locked on the ball of light, entirely lost to Its song. He tripped over Marlton - who hardly noticed anything had happened at all and just kept to his prayers - and barely stumbled before regaining his footing and keeping on along his path. I tried calling out to him, asking about his girl he mentioned earlier, and begged him to at least acknowledge me, but he just approached me with that dead look in his eyes. The closer he got, the more I saw how the boy’s light oak-brown eyes had turned into the swirling grey-blue of the maelstroms even the best of sailors fear. Not just his irises, the Pupil, the whole damn thing, just this swirling, windy grey.When he got close enough, I grasped his shoulder and tried for a moment to talk some sense into him, find out what the Hell exactly it was that he was doing. The boy ignored me, shaking my grip off with a gesture that was equally gentle as it was demanding. It was impossible not to respect it, practically instinct. I still wonder sometimes what the other side of the grass looks like, if I had just kept my head attached and held on. But, even if the rest of us weren’t going in there with Smithers, I do think we were all under that thing’s spell to some degree. We all served the exact purpose we were meant to, that being to stay the Hell out of Smithers’ way. I tried to go against it, boy, I did, but I couldn't. I tried, you believe that, don't you?”I would nod silently. My pap would take a second to gather his now shaking breath.“Yes…well, he - Smithers that is - wandered right on past Brant and the equally frantic puppy dog Shauckel, and stepped into the lake without an ounce of hesitation. My stomach fell down into my nuts and then further, this weird warmth crawled up my back and gripped me by the shoulders. I tried to shout for him to stop, to turn, to realize that he was so young and had just survived a vicious battle against the savages, he would go home to his girl a hero. But, like a nightmare, I found it impossible to make use of my voice, only managing a soft pahhhh of air out of my gullet.The boy just kept going, keeping his body straight, path equally so, and stride strong as his form sunk deeper and deeper into the lake, drawing closer and closer to that blue dot of light. Down to his knees then his waist, up to his stomach, deeper into that frigid Stillwater surrounded by tall Oaks. All any of us could do - even Brant and Shauckel, who’d finally stopped their blabbering when they saw Smithers go past - was hold our breaths as we watched him go chest deep, neck deep, then disappear entirely into the navy blue in the still silence of that eerie night. No bubbles rose at any point. We all stood, waiting, unbelieving.It stopped singing as soon as he was entirely under the water, and at some point, presumably by the time the boy had somehow gotten directly beneath the thing, it shifted slowly from its deep blue, to a magnificent, royal purple, finally to a similarly deep but violent red. The light sank down towards the lake, plunging in without disturbing the surface to any degree. The red glow that cast from it projected out of the water for a few seconds, growing dimmer, dimmer, and dimmer still. Then it too was gone……We never did see Smithers again. None of us ever did serve anymore after that. We all reported it to the one above us, it made its way up the grapevine, and some rather well-dressed, stern-faced men told me that my time in the military was up. They sent me home with a hearty little check in my pocket and I never asked another question, never told the story to anyone outside the family. As per certain…agreements and demands.”If he had a glass, now was the time he’d sip it; down the whole damn thing if he got lost enough in that haze of memories.“What I’m tryin’ to get at, boy, is that there’s some weird shit out there. Like I said, stranger ‘n you could ever even hope to imagine. So when you think you might understand this world you’re livin’ in, just you remember that it don’t give a damn about what you think you understand.” </blockquote> <hr><h3> <hr><strong>Mining:</strong> <br> <a title="Cryptotab browser" target="_blank" href="https://cryptotabbrowser.com/12/4000343"><u>Bitcoin</u>, Cryptotab browser</a> - <a title="Pi Network, CLOUD PHONEMINING" target="_blank" href="https://minepi.com/cusidore"><u>Pi Network</u> cloud PHONE MINING</a> <br><a title="Fone, CLOUD PHONE MINING" target="_blank" href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloud.earning"><u>Fone</u>, cloud PHONE MINING</a> cod. dhvd1dkx - <a title="Mintme, PC PHONE MINING" target="_blank" href="https://www.coinimp.com/invite/86d61388-18f9-4f8b-8561-8962c67e7166">Mintme, PC PHONE MINING</a> <hr><strong>Exchanges:</strong> <br> <a title="Coinbase.com" target="_blank" href="http://coinbase.com/join/occhip_8?src=android-link">Coinbase.com</a> - <a title="Stex.com" target="_blank" href="https://stex.com/?ref=27877494">Stex.com</a> - <a title="Probit.com" target="_blank" href="https://www.probit.com/r/46858290">Probit.com</a> <hr><strong>Donations:</strong> <br> <a title="Done crypto" target="_blank" href="https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/140e9bb6-c4ef-4156-92cf-9c87a88fd259">Done crypto</a> </h3><br><br>