Ogden woke in bed, which wasn’t where he expected to wake. He also didn’t expect to be missing half his clothes, or all the tears and scratches and even bites suggested by the lack, but nothing was expected that Spring. Not the weather, not the loss of comfortable arms, not his mother’s insistence he were something he most assuredly was not, and not the fiery fucking eyes in the woods.
“That was real,” he muttered, ignoring torn clothes and small wounds for the smell of burnt stew. Which he found in a puddle with too many wet animal tracks leading from it when he scrambled to his kitchen. “So are those.” Door left open, he could see the gray of morning and the gentle mist often riding it as it rode right into his living room. He didn’t step outside, however, remembered face keeping him in the doorway, if his eyes studied the trees. Asking, “But were you?”
There would be no answer.
Not because the forest hid during daylight hours, or wasn't quietly observing him from a safe distance, but because he preferred to be sought. To be worshiped, specifically, but hairs need not be split just now. The important thing was the fiery-eyed creature of oaken bark beheld on that unkind Spring evening would not be answering any questions the morning after. He would remain hidden to force the man into deeper wood, preferably with an offering, to find where he nested.
Unfortunately, Ogden did not know this.
All Ogden knew was he'd seen something impossible and the excitement of it, whether the torn clothes and animal tracks were proof or not, electrified. Three years—come Summer anyway—on the hill and in that time he'd heard all the songs of the wild around him and believed he'd seen the sights.
But he'd never seen that and that was worth the small fortune—what little money he'd had—to move into lands he'd never known, to a village so old it didn't register on GPS, to break himself building a new home, to scrape and claw and survive. Sure, he loved the solitude, and did not regret his decision to move out there. To leave a life that didn't want him.
It was just...difficult. Everything had been so difficult and in those eyes, that face, he saw opportunity. Not for fame or fortune, those weren't things he cared for, but purpose. Reason.
Something to make it all worthwhile.
"I knew you were special," he told those woods, laughter strange and high through it. Back into the house for fresh clothes, sturdy boots and a hiking pack kept ever-prepared, he tended to his meager scrapes while stealing glances of the trees through windows. Out the door, leaving it open and the mess of stew untouched—for the animals—Ogden sighed at the treeline before trudging toward it. "I just hope you're friendly."
He stalled at the stumps. While having kept shallow, taking but the ash closest to the clearing, Ogden had taken quite a few in his time there. So much so his cabin was surrounded by stumps...which were soaked too dark with wet and rot doing its best to take hold. Those behind his stolen trees—not stolen, he asked and apologized for every one he just didn't wait for an answer—bore more of the wet dark. Some were bored with soggy cavities, others starving fungus grown too thick and spread too far.
"Worse than I thought," he whispered to the rot, eyes high and sudden on the shadows for a terrible crisis of sense and remembered warnings. "But I can fix it, keep it from spreading even...if you don't...eat me."
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2087
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