Scene 7

From her vantage at the north end of the valley, Bird could get a pretty good idea of what was going on. While she couldn’t see the village, she had a decent view of the trail that led to her cabin. This meant that she would have fair warning if anyone chose to come and bother her on her mountainside. The cabin itself, being on high ground, was quite defensible. If somebody ended up sneaking onto her little piece of land, she also had many routes of escape that would guarantee her safety.
She had nestled her cabin right up against the edge of the Waste. This was a risk that she was willing to take. The Waste, being the domain of the Wendigo, protected her from an approach from the west. The locals were scared to death of the Waste. Bird was too of course, but she was familiar with the dangers that it held and regarded superstition around it in a rather pragmatic way. As long as she was careful, the Wendigo would leave her alone and act as a de facto rear guard for her little fortress.
The approaches from the north and south were rough pieces of land that made trespass impractical. The south was impeded by a rocky creek and a steep hill that ran all the way to the valley floor. The north was similarly difficult to traverse, and ran uphill into truly rugged country. This meant that she only really needed to keep an eye on the eastern approach. Her cabin was oriented so that the front door faced east, so she could sit on her porch and keep an eye out and feel reasonably safe.
The view from her front porch was dominated by the eastern hills. Over the winter, she had noticed some strange goings on there. Every night, for a couple of hours, there would be a light show. The light itself was of a quality that she had only seen a couple of times in her life. She was used to light from the sun or a fire, or what she deemed natural light. This light was decidedly unnatural.
When she was a child, there had been a stretch of months where the northern sky had lit up in the dead of the night. Vast sheets of purple and green hung down from the stars and dwarfed the mountains that, until then, had been the largest things she had ever seen. Her father had insisted that the gods must have been hanging their laundry out to dry. Even at that young age, Bird knew a load of bullshit when she heard one. This didn’t detract from the sense of awe and wonder that the phenomenon inspired though. When she grew up and learned the truth about those lights, their mystery only deepened.
The mystery lights she saw across the valley had a similar quality to the ones she had seen as a child, and were obviously a trap. They were crafted to inspire curiosity in the feeble minded and lure them to their fate. Anyone with half a brain in their head would be able to see this. This was probably why the lightshow had gone on for so long. No takers. The valley was full of crafty, wary individuals, and they were no doubt giving this phenomenon a wide berth.
There had been word of other strangeness in the valley as well. A youth had gone missing over the summer and his older brother, Hunner had taken it upon himself to get to the bottom of the mystery. It was an understandable reaction, but Hunner was a rash and dangerous man. He had the bad habit of always following his gut despite the fact that it was usually wrong.
Bird had despised him since they were children. Unlike Hunner’s, her gut feelings were usually right, so they tended to be on opposing sides of any given situation. Another way that she differed from Hunner was the fact that she could admit when she was wrong. He did not have this capacity.