There is an odd sense of home here, Conrad thinks, amongst the crooked and twisted vines that make up the ever-shifting form of the Harvester. A variety of pumpkins lined the way ahead, and amongst them were flowers — yellow ones, the colour of abundance, and there was no question nor doubt as to what that abundance was — that seemed to glow and hum with their own unique, unnatural source of energy.

With a dull clattering of hooves, the Courser leaps from the vine and to a ledge that was only a little higher up than he currently was. A few unopened buds seem to blossom and bloom in welcome to his presence, offering a meager yellow glow that’s largely drowned out by the orange of the harvest moon itself. They were of little interest to him, though, as what interested him lay down down down in the depths of the Harvester.

Red eyes hone in on and focus on those depths, on one specific path that he’d spotted from afar on the beginning of his journey upwards but hadn’t quite been able to figure out a path to — until now.

It was unlike any of the other patches that he’d come across til this point, the flowers uniform in their layout and reminiscent of an army lined for war. There are thousands of them, some pristine and some not, yet for all their thousands there are notable patches of loss, as if the terrain itself had become damaged and scarred over in its healing. 

As the seconds ticked by, the scene seemed to come to life for its captivated audience: the telltale jingle of heavy armour, the clattering of weapons, the all-too familiar screams of Courses and the less-familiar screams of humans.

“We must — press — no mercy!” A voice boomed from the depths, commanding and raw.

“Do you hear them?” Conrad murmured aloud then, ear twitching and tail flicking against his flank. “Do they haunt you, Harvester, these souls that you have collected and that remain with you even in their deaths?”

Above him, the Harvester remains silent if not for the subtle groan that pierces through the air. If he hadn’t been listening for some sort of response to his question, then he would have missed it entirely; drowned out by the continuous sounds of battle, of war, of death.

His eyes flit upwards then back towards the depths. What would await him, he wondered, if he were to venture down there himself? Would the scene burst fully into life, with spirits and ghouls and what-have-you manifesting before his very eyes?

“Was this your first war?” Conrad then asked of the Harvester. “Or, was this the last between my kind and the humans that have long since died out?”

This time, there is no sound at all from the Harvester. It remains wholly and completely silent, something that hangs heavily in the air and threatens to consume him.

There is a scream from the depths.

Conrad stomps his hooves and steps closer to the edge, looking down and around until his eyes catch sight of a way down. It takes little more than a second for him to make up his mind, leaping from the ledge and down to the vine that awaited him, that spiraled down and down and down and would take him onto the battlefield itself.

Where was the fun in simply viewing things from afar, after all?