think I am in love with the forest because it is not the sea.
When I go to sleep, I must listen the sea as it breaks upon the rocks outside my bedroom window. I dream of it, each night, as the white stallion and I stroll down the long black stretch of sand. I awake to the crash-and-lull of the same waves day after day after day.
Perhaps its the monotony of my life that breaks me; the morning breakfast; the classes; the quiet of Terrastella; my visit with the monks when they tell me, so quietly, that I must continue my meditations or else risk something terrible.
And today—it is not often, but today—these things accumulate into the unbearable. I do not intend to leave. But when I begin to fly, I do not stop until I cannot hear the sea.
And then, I keep going.
I go until the fields give way to sporadic trees; and then those trees become a forest.
The Viride.
I look it up in books, again and again. I admire it from afar in the gilded pages of Novus: A History, or a chronicle of the Eira fables. I study it, obsessively, on the map in the citadel war-room that stretches the entire floor. I remember, of course, the actuality; how it night it becomes a frightful place and as a boy I might’ve died there, if not for—
If not for fate, or destiny, or a girl named Isolt.
I visit a different forest, today. When I land amid a small clearing—one nearly obscured by towering, formidable trees—the birds are alight with life and the grass underfoot is vivacious. It crushes beneath my hooves, and the air is perfumed by the distinctive odor.
The winter hunger is gone, replaced by late spring’s warmth and blooms. I walk through the clearing, into the trees, and soon find myself devoured by the depth of the forest. I know I should remember my fear, how quickly I became lost… but I no longer feel so helpless, so haphazard. My wings are strong, now, and where I walk I illuminate the darkness with my own ethereal glow.
After a while, I stop; and I stop because carved into the wooden face of an ancient oak, the branches gnarled out around me, is a deity I do not at first recognize. I close my eyes. The energy of everything, the threads that weave this place together, is nearly overwhelming.
I am praying, when she finds me.
The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves.
i I met a unicorn once who smelled like the sea. She had asked if I wanted to see the waves with her, had offered to show me how death looked lying like flotsam at the bottom of it. But the sea is no place for a unicorn.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have said yes, yes, yes, and followed her into it instead.
I
solt is thinking of the sea, as she stands in her spring forest and listens to the hush, hush, hush of leaves all around her. In it she can hear the echo of the ocean (of the waves she has only ever glimpsed beneath her as she crossed the bridge to that terrible, wonderful island in the sea.) She curls her tail around a young birch tree, watching the paper bark begin to curl and darken. The point of her tail taps against its trunk like she is knocking on the tree’s soul, leaning close to whisper are you awake? into the knot of one of it’s eyes.
That eye only stares back at her, unblinking. Unseeing.
But when she carves a line into the tree’s side and watches sap rush to fill the wound, and a starling startles from its crown and lifts high, high, higher into the sky —
the scattering of leaves that rain around her reminds her of the weeping sea.
She waits until the tree crumbles around the death-spot she bloomed in its trunk, until the quiet forest is filled with the keening sound of a falling cousin. She waits until the leaves are crying down like tears all around her and the earth shakes as it catches the weight of it. And then she steps quietly over the still-trembling branches of its carcass.
Somewhere in the distance is the weeping sea — her father has told her of the way the forest grows up to its very edge, the way some trees have braved the brine and reach farther and farther out into the bay. Today she will see it.
The forest falls silent around her, and Isolt imagines the trees are turning their backs to her as she passes. Another day she might have cut lines into them all, she might have turned the drops of rot in her veins to a river of it flooding the copse of birch trees, choking their roots, severing their arms from their bodies. She might have punished them for being foolish enough to think themselves safe from her.
But today she only presses her teeth into the eye of one young-tree and whispers to it, some day. Some day she would be back for them.
But today she lets them live.
Behind her, before her, in the green-dappled light beyond her shadow, the forest rejoices. And it is in the rejoicing, singing forest that she finds him again.
She watches him from the shadows for some time. He is taller than when she last saw him: his shoulders are broader, his wings are muscled from flight. He does not cower in the darkness like he had before. He stands before the carved face of an oak, his own eyes closed — but it is the lines of his face that make her pause.
Isolt has never learned to pray. She is not sure she knows what a prayer is (rarely do people pray to her, to death, to the unicorn in the woods.) So she comes closer, and closer, and curls her tail around that great-oak. As the first spot of rot blooms across it’s bark, she wonders if he can hear it in his prayers.
“You are a long way from home,” she tells him. But she knows she has found the sea.
eneas feels her before he sees her. He feels her as a star might rest at the precipice of an event horizon, at the mouth of a black hole. He feels her as one feels the absence of warmth when a cloud passes over the midday sun. He feels her as an inevitability, as an energy that consumes; a negativity that pulls, that creates a gravity so deep escape becomes impossible. She defies the laws he knows and is instantly familiar for the darkness that settles upon him.
She wonders if he can hear the small death, if it makes a sound. The decaying of cells. The entropy of her presence, inescapable and inevitable. Aeneas does not open his eyes because yes, he feels it, he feels it as one feels a thread braid beneath their fingers. It changes shape. It becomes something else.
You are a long way from home.
It occurs to him he does not know what he is praying for. To forget, perhaps. To find himself. To grow into this forest as this face has grown into the oak. Whatever it had been, her words interrupt it; they steal him from his reverie and into the moment at hand. It is better that way, he thinks, and his energy undulates; he had not been at peace before. He is not at peace now.
Aeneas opens his eyes and he smiles. He is older; he is not afraid, as he had once been, and there is a strange reconciliation in finding her here again. The wolves were howling before; but they do not howl now.
“I love this forest,” he says simply, because there is no other answer. He might say home has not felt like home since his father disappeared. He might say he does not know if he ought to have one foot in the Susurro and another in the Mors. He does not feel torn in two, here.
Aeneas feels strong, now. He had not been before, when he first met her. He had been afraid and too young. But with the sunlight straining through the boughs, his energy reaches out and the rot becomes black quartz jutting from the wood. The unseeing eyes of the face watch them, and for a moment he wonders what it might say, if it could speak.
The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves.
I can feel the tree trembling beneath me as it dies. I can feel its sap turning to sludge, to tar, to blood as black as mine. I can feel it collapsing.
Is this what he prayed to? This tree-god that dies at the touch of a true-god?
If so, he chose the wrong god.
I
t is better, she thinks, that he came to her again in the daylight. In a forest that is singing and rejoicing, with branches that bow beneath their green crowns instead of reaching out like claws to him.
If he were smart, he would not linger. The days were growing longer but the nights — oh, the nights were still cold. Isolt knows. She wanders these ancient halls beneath every moon with her sister, with their risen things, with the wolf-packs running free in her veins. He might be stronger now, taller — but he was still small compared to the forest. He was still a mortal before the gods.
He was still prey to be consumed (one day, one day, she whispers to the wild thing rising in her throat. But not today.)
She is not sure why she commands it all to sink back down into the depths of her. She thinks maybe it is the spring, the way the forest resumes its singing the moment she moves on from it that makes her think her hunger can wait. Maybe it is because of the way her father had walked beside her in this very forest, naming every root, every blossom, every tree-god (there had been so many — Isolt had only ever known them as tree and flower before, never by oak or beech or bluebell or larkspur or—)
Maybe it is because of the way he had glowed gold then red then gold again that night. The way it had felt like her own soul was shining a light in the forest.
Whatever it is, she steps towards him now with less hunger than she had before. And she begs her smile to be softer, to be satisfied with the one death she has caused. She begs it to be enough, if only for now, if only so long as this boy-who-loves-the-forest is here.
“Why?” there is no cruelty in her voice today. Only curiosity, only an echo of her hunger, only the wondering a god might feel towards its saints.
