#thoughts???

The old woman grunted, tightening the shawl around her neck. The protective beads around it twinkling in the moonlight peering through the fronds, Gunn trudging through the damp grass that was the last normal stretch of greenery before the Forest’s dark. The last normal path she knew on the western front, kept at bay by the swamps the Thing was always late to swallow as it advanced — the Forest not liking water, Gunn had found, hesitating and only swallowing it once it had surrounded it by all sides and never before. Gods knew why, when it eagerly devoured blood and bones and anything intelligent life had ever touched — storing them within, preserving them under thick layers of moss and vines like a hungry collector of ancient things. The villages and the cities of old long lost among its fronds — and the secrets within, the valuable knowledge an entrepreneurial woman could find if she knew where to walk.

Gunn softened her breath, making herself quieter than a mouse.

It wasn’t too hard, in truth, to make one’s steps silent on the grass. It wasn’t too hard to make herself invisible either — not when one was wearing the right shawl, each one if her beads tidied up in a protective knot, and when the old gnarled staff she had inherited from her mother shielded her from prying eyes with soft light. Gunn careful where she placed her feet, careful not to touch any of the wandering vines lazily patting the ground for prey to snatch — the trees growing thicker and gnarled the deeper in she walked, the half-digested stone foundations of villages swallowed long before beginning to show like exposed teeth beneath the moss. And with them, pale and bloated, were the first bodies: hacked pieces, the bones and the half-preserved flesh submerged by the greenery that digested them, covered in lichen and vines or absorbed by the trunks themselves.

It was hunting ground, the Forest, after all. To be braved only for the most serious of needs, despite its power.

Mother, mother, I found a man.

Gunn ducked down in between the bushes on the side of the path, pushing through a space invisible to all those who hadn’t walked it before and knew how not to be caught. Remembering her daughter’s voice, the joy of her life.

Oh yes, darling mine? She had sneered, when she should have screamed. Was he handsome, had a palace in the dark?

For the Forest was darkness and hunger and dead bodies lying in wait to hunt, but it was also mirrors and enchantments and stunning beauty in its outer layers. It was fresh greenery before the fronds grew too thick, flowers and berries and chirping game only begging to be caught. The wind whispering through the fronds to all who’d come near enough — the soft singing of a maiden, a crying child or a tall broody man on top of a horse with a crown and a sword looking out from afar. Lies, glamours them all — lures to make prey cross over the boundaries of Gunn’s runes, into the jaws of the Forest’s creatures.

Thyra, her daughter, had only scoffed.

I am not an idiot. She’d flicked her hair, descending from a mare that cost more than they’d make in a year. He was human alright, made of flesh and blood.

And Gunn, grunting and unsmiling as she often was, had only been able to welcome her daughter home. Her child, returned pregnant from a year of wandering south.

She should have known that, human or not, the mare and the richness her daughter had brought home would only spell disaster for them all.

The first time Gunn had seen the ruins, the first outer layer of what must have once been a sprawling extent of villages around some devoured lakes, she’d been little more than a child. A teen with older sisters who could have inherited the staff, had she not found herself so apt at deciphering the Forest’s secrets. If she hadn’t been so damn curious and brave, travelling beyond the first layer of the Forest into its dark — hunting the secrets held among its deads, the villages and towns that had been devoured whole. The homes and shrines frozen in stone even though they must have once been made of wood — covered in moss and vines, runic carvings foreign and yet so similar to those her people still used now. The half-collapsed buildings sprawling concentrically around a groove, dipping low after a tall descent, its entrance covered in thistles and ruby-red berries shining among the thorns.

Gunn knew how to slip through that entrance too, the light of her staff hiding her as she crouched and made herself small. The old woman careful, so careful, not to let a single thorn scratch her lest she bled on the ground and forgot who she was.

The spring on the other side was beautiful in its destitution, the stones of what must have once been an archway now lying in large uneven chunks on the ground. Spacious and bright — silver light shining from the water that streamed from an opening high in the rocks of the valley’s incline. It fell in rivulets among the leaves and moss, twinkling and breaking in uneven streams leading to a small bed of stones in the centre of the groove. The Forest only peeking from high above, hidden by a cover of intertwined ivy and thorns that covered the spring like a dome. And mirroring it all at the bottom of the stream, in a broken fountain bed made of a circle of stones white as bones, were carvings so old Gunn wasn’t sure she could decipher them at all.

‘SILVER IS THE WAY OF LIGHT’

The old woman let herself fall to her knees, taking out a bone knife from under her sleeve. The light of the stream caught over the metal of the circlet holding the knitted shawl over her eyes, covering her silver braided hair.

“Spring, spring, I come with an offering.”

In her head, lifting the knife to her palm, she held firm the memory of the birth.

Blood, the smell of copper pungent on the tongue. Screams, her daughter’s voice high and hoarse, pushing over the furs until the early light of dawn. The smell of sweat and fear and of the roaring fire in their cabin mixing with that of iron and musk — the child all wrong, taking all of Gunn’s coaxing to convince him to turn right to come out. To detangle the cord from the neck of a baby she wanted alive, the thing seeming to twist like a snake—

And then, when she’d finally taken him into her arms, when she’d finally touched him fully after the fight for his life—

A vision, a bright sun rising cold over a barren land. A silver sea of sand, a desert extending everywhere the eyes ran. Death, death everywhere under her feet, the fine grains coarse in between her toes and sharp where furious wind slashed them against her skin. An infinite sky rolling with storm, growing dark and tangled over an ocean crashing over the sand. Power, still sizzling under her tongue.

Gunn lifted her hand over the water, letting the blood heavily fall from her palm into the fountain.

“Spring, spring,” Gunn repeated, barely a whisper, “I come with a question to thee.”

There was a beat, the shortest of things, before a ripple ran through the water. A second, coiling over the air and filling her mouth with the sizzle of rust — and then a third, her vision vibrating at the edges of the groove where the inclines of the valley met the dome of thorns and stones.

The first spirit appeared sideways there, flickering silver with eyes sunk with hunger.

Gunn kept still, perfectly still, making sure not to move an inch. The old woman, the shaman, knowing better than to look directly at the creature as it advanced. A second fizzling in the periphery of her vision, then a third — the spirits growing in numbers as she kept her eyes trained on the spring, the water twirling silver and pink with her offering. The ghosts coming closer, immaterial limbs overlapping the more they grew — reaching down to drink, greedy, one by one.

Gunn waited for enough of them to have their fill before speaking her ask out loud.

“What is the fate of my grandson?”

There was another ripple, more subtle this time. A shudder, as if a gust of wind had run through the mass of spirits kneeling and clamouring around the spring. Their movements stilling, a hush running through them as they slowly, so slowly, stopped drinking.

Gunn could hear her blood slowly drip out of her hand, the beating of her heart drowning the sound of the water.

“No,” whispered the spirits, a single faint voice drowned in the hundreds of mouths. “No, wise one.”

And then they spoke, a thousand voices overlapping like a choir. A screeching sound, tearing through the groove with physical force — coming out of the ghostly mass with the sound of many voices, hurled and pressing against Gunn’s bones.

“Kill him!”

A single scream, rising in volume. The spirits lifting their heads at once, seeing her now.

“Kill him. Kill him. KILL HIM!”

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