France, the Final Frontier.
These are the voyages of the Flying-Brick ‘Gnome’. Its continuing mission: to explore our world, to seek out new life and shoot them, to boldly go where no gnome has gone before...
Episode 6: Sky and the Trail of Death.
Our mission: To boldly go uphill quite a lot...
Fear not! This is not the face of Death. This is just Sky, hunter of small furry animals, seeker of fetid filth, devourer of unpleasant excrement, man’s best friend.
It all started here:
We had returned from Sky's adventure in the snow the previous evening. The sounds of the valley were haunting. The stags were rutting and their groaning roars bounced and echoed hauntingly off the valley walls.
The sounds elicited tingling waves up my spine. This time of year in the Pyrenees is unique in its mysticism.
For the Gnome, this was a day of rest. For the rest of us, it would be a tad more difficult...
The path forever upwards turned out to be somewhat energy-sucking, who'd 'ave thunk?
After half an hour of risking cardiac failure and respiratory collapse, we arrived at a large open space. My heart was racing, my lungs bursting and my spider senses tingling...
Sky's nasal passages were tingling too. There was an eerily distant smell. An obscure odour.
It was the bittersweet scent of death....
[OK, here we, the editors of this blog, have had to intervene. Here were meant to be multiple photos of corpses. As we consider this to be even more distasteful than the usual crap that this so-called photoblogger normally puts out, we have substituted a photo of a dead tree...]
We often walk in the pyrenees, we occasionally see dead animals, especially in spring when the half starved deer attempt to give birth, and fail. But this was different. These were shepherded animals, cared for by man. Or, in this case, not so much.
We saw eight dead sheep scattered next to the trail. They were long dead. Only one had a multitude of insect life in attendance. The others were bone and leather, even Sky was not that interested and preferred continuing her mole hunt.
We carried on up the steep slope, hoping to distance ourselves from the smell without allowing our circulatory system to throw in the towel. 
Once clear of the pong, we began to wonder what exactly was causing this ovine genocide. Could it be the multiple fungal fruiting bodies that were springing up around us?
Nope. As I said, these sheep were long dead. Something killed them months ago. Bear? Wolf? Mint sauce?
We continued onwards and upwards...
After nearly three long hours of almost vertical slog, kludging through mud, scrambling over felled trees, fighting off random trolls, smiting evil wizards, we eventually arrived at the summit.
And there we found a possible cause of the mass killing...
Dark magic.
Here we found a ring of sepulchral stones. Their aura smote our internal energy balance, our chi was quelled by their quantum resonance.
This must surely be the cause of the massacre below.
Bollocks.
It was a ring of bleeding' stones for christ sake!
Sky, looking on with her bemused expression, knew the truth.
These sheep died because walking up these sodding mountains was bloody murder!
___
Next: Journey into the Plague...
Keep Trekking 🙂
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