(complete) Sex, intrigues, lies - the Game is like normal politics, just that now people lose their brain over it. Macbeth meets House of Cards and Game of Thrones in a fantastic ride to the Brexit referendum battled out in the reality TV show envir...
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When Hel came to the camp, she couldn't find either of the two men. She asked around. None of the other members of the Great Hunt could tell her when they might have left. Nor had Matis and Justin left any information with the camp guards on when to expect them back.
Instead, Hel heard reports about how they kept themselves apart, how they had stopped participating in any group activity long ago, and how neither of them had spoken more than a handful of words to anyone for weeks. They tried, the men, women and creatures assured her. They all remembered how they had struggled to adjust to the new situation after their death. But, so not just few confided to Hel, they didn't think the two men were even speaking with each other. Hel's Hunt was worried.
Hel let herself into the couple's cottage. She'd been there just hours ago, but she had taken the short cut right into the main room. She had not wanted to be seen, when she came to tell Matis and Justin about her suspicions. Her father was somehow tangled up in a human mess. Every additional soul hearing the rumor was a soul more to give it credibility. That was the power of press and social media. Even with her Hunt she couldn't risk it.
Even before approaching them though – her safest choice of allies, since they were Flo's friends - part of her had known that Matis and Justin had a hard time coming to terms with what had happened. It wasn't just their deaths, the changes, being acknowledged as a couple living together, brought to their relationship, or the tiny fact of quite possibly being a ghost, if not for eternity, so for very long. The circumstances of their deaths and the impulsive decisions that let to it, gave them a hard time, too. Spending most of her time tending to the Tree – the Hunt's battle-hardened members had usually a way of taking care of themselves - she just didn't have any idea of how hard. And apparently, the fact that they had each other, wasn't helping either.
The other members of the Hunt had almost exclusively died on some sort of a battlefield or another – physical or intellectual - in protection of humankind. Not some god. Not some lofty idea of how future should look like. But for the survival of humans without regard who they were. It was what the Great Hunt did. The Hunt was a last resort to fundamental danger – its presence not an omen, but a sign that a crises of apocalyptic dimensions had started.
The members of the Hunt had been the fiercest fighters of their age, ready to meet death for what they believed in. After the initial shock of meeting Hel and accepting her offer, most of them had simple continued as ghost where they had stopped when alive.
With Matis and Justin the circumstances had been different. It was not that Matis had been the son of Duke Vlad and Duchess Mathilda, who together with her own grandfather, Duke Guthrum, were the leaders of the Immortals or, how they called themselves – gods. Hel, who severed the leaves of all living from the Tree at some time or the other and returned them to nourish new life, had no use for such distinction. She only hoped that one day the time was ripe and she could harvest the leaves of the good gods, too, because that was the circle, in which all life worked.
