Chapter Eleven
Kolfina
Theodore told me a story one day, back when he was still cleaning my music room.
He'd taken a break and tucked himself up in the reading chair, the sandwich Mr. Allard brought him abandoned on the table and his journal balanced on his knees as he scratched away at it.
I do not know if he'd seen me there, curled atop the floor and leaning against the side of the chair, but he'd spoken like he had, reading me the story he'd written as if there was no question I was there, as if there was no veil of death between us.
"Let me tell you the tale of a wolf named Seule," he began quietly, "who lived in a wood so thick, it choked the ground with roots and the sky with branches. A wood so thick, that only Seule could navigate it, as she was born in a cradle of moss and raised in the shadows of giants.
It is in those shadows that Seule had always lurked, chasing dangling vines and playing in the winding brush, yet despite her many towering siblings, despite the comfort of her mother's ground beneath her feet and her father's protection over her head, Seule found herself lonely.
Aching. For what, she did not know, but there was a longing in her chest that yearned for something more. "
Theodore has a way for storytelling. I suppose it should not surprise me, really. I once heard him tell Azizi that he writes for the same reason she paints, because there is nothing else he could ever imagine doing.
And I find myself drawn to his storytelling in the same way I am drawn to watching Azizi paint. He comes alive with it, his eyes expressive and his voice confident. It is as if he is taking you there—to the worlds he creates in his head, to the characters he births with mere ink and paper.
"'Be still, little one,' his mother's roots say with a weathered groan," Theodore continued, his voice old and creaking as he spoke. "'You are of the forest, and the forest is of you. This is where you belong. Be content, for you are safe here with me.'
'But what matters of safety here,' the young wolf asks, 'where there are no dangers to see? What matters of living if there is no life here to live?'
The trees shriek and the rivers cry at such a question, and Seule trembles beneath the weight of her mother's fear, buckles beneath her father's heavy disappointment.
'You are safe, my precious one, and that is all that matters. Here, beneath your father's canopy, none will ever harm you. Here, atop my roots and seeds, you will always live free.’"
My heart ached for that little wolf, trapped in her cage of protection. I knew all too well the pain of wandering the same gardens day in and day out. Knew how it felt to yearn for something more, yet not knowing what more there could possibly be.
Theodore turned his page, his fingers gentle on the crowded pages of his book.
I remember wondering if he could see his little wolf following the story with him.
If she lept across the page and pranced over each messily penned word.
Did he follow her story, I had thought, or is it her who followed his?
"And so Seule continued as she always did, riding the wind through her forest and wishing.
Until one night, when the trees had long since gone to bed and the moonlight began to rain across the forest floor, Seule saw something new.
" His voice dipped into a whisper, and I leaned closer, my curiosity singing beneath my skin.
"There, in a spot of moonlight, she saw a small flutter of light that danced in ways no other light danced.
Graceful, was the light, and curious was the wolf.
'You there, little starlight,' the wolf called out, careful not to wake her slumbering parents. 'Who are you to dance in the shadows of my woods?'
The light paused, twisting in a way Seule might have compared to fire and smoke, if she knew what such a thing was. 'Who are you,' the light demanded in return, ‘to say who may come and go from a place of magic such as this?'
Seule straightened her shoulders, raising her snout with a proud and mighty grin. 'I am the wolf of these woods, and I alone can run its paths. I alone can climb its trees and chase its rivers. So I ask you again. Who are you to do so?'
'I am feu follet,' the little light says. 'I go where I please.'"
Feu Follet. The will-o'-wisp. I could vaguely recall hearing stories of them as a child. Warnings meant to frighten children away from the woods; stories meant to send women running from lanterns approaching in the distance.
"The wolf did not recognize the name, of course," Theodore continued on.
"There were no others in her forest, and she had never left, so how could she?
But Seule was a curious beast by nature, and her parents were sleeping soundly in their leafy beds.
What harm could come from making a new friend, she wondered?
'You come from the world outside,' Seule said to the wisp. 'Tell me, is it dangerous out there? Is it terrible?'
'Oh terrible, yes, perhaps,' the wisp replied. 'Dangerous too, I suppose, if one is not as careful as me. I have found myself a witch, you see, and she keeps me safe when the dangers are near. Do you have a witch, little wolf?'
'I do not.'
'Then who is there to keep you safe?'
'My mother and father keep me safe,' the wolf replied, 'but there are no dangers here to threaten me.'"
Theodore gasped dramatically, his hand resting against his chest as if in shock.
"'No dangers here, you say? Oh, what a terribly boring life to live!
Why, I come across six new dangers before the sun has reached the crown of the sky.
I see so many terrible and wonderful things that I would run out of breath trying to speak them all.
Tell me, little wolf, why you live the life you do. '
'I have never known anything else, starlight. I am of the woods, and the woods are of me.'
But the wisp flickers and flares itself out, as large as the wolf's paw now with its anger.
'You are a wolf, a prowling thing that hides and hunts.
A snarling beast with sharpened teeth and piercing claws.
Yet here you wear the skin of a pup, cut down like a tree so you can no longer grow.
Come with me, wolf of the woods,' the wisp says.
'Come with me, and learn to be something more. '
'Leave my mother and father?' Seule asks, as she has never thought such a thing possible. 'Where would I go?'
'Anywhere you like, of course,' the wisp responds. 'But if you wish to, you may come with me, and my witch will take you in. She is beautiful and terrible, and she keeps little beasts like us safe.'
The wolf considered the offer. She does not wish to leave her family, her home, but her heart has always longed for something more than shadows and trees.
Her paws itched to run over more than roots and leaves.
She is safe here in her wood. She is comfortable.
But is there anything else for her to be?
'May I return home at all?' the wolf asked.
'If you'd like,' the wisp replied. 'Though I do not think you will.'
And so the wolf went, pressing her goodbyes into the carpet moss and brushing her apologies into the hanging vines as she passed. She would return, she decided. She would return and beg forgiveness, but for now, something new lingers in the distance for her, and Seule was tired of waiting.
'I am frightened,' she said as they came upon the edge of the wood, the farthest from her home she had ever been.
The wisp dances through her fur and settles against her cheek, warm and tingling and exciting.
'Good,' the little light said. 'That means that you are living.'"
Theodore did not tell me if the wolf met the witch or not. He did not say whether the wolf returned home or if she found happiness in the strange outside world she'd so desperately wanted to see.
Perhaps that was the point. The unknown.
But there is a difference between the unknown and the unknowing, I think. One is to know there is a world out there you have yet to see; the other is knowing a world and having it taken from you, leaving nothing behind but the husk of a dying forest in its wake.
I wonder sometimes if that wolf came home to find a carcass in place of her forest. I wonder if she was its heart, and her leaving gave the roots and branches nothing left to protect, and so they withered away and decayed.
I wonder if it was worth it.
The thought lingers in the back of my mind as I leave Theodore asleep in front of the fireplace after his confession. It putters around like the wolf in his story as I leave my chateau, clawing at my skin as I wander down my little mountain to the village at the bottom.
"I've met you once before, you know?" he'd said.
I don't remember the day he spoke of—when I'd appeared in his mother's sickroom and sang to her as she passed—but there is so little of my life and what came after that I recall with any degree of accuracy.
Memory is such a fragile thing beneath the weight of time, after all.
And with that fragility comes questions that I have no answers to, nor any ideas as to where to find them.
Why did I visit Theodore's mother upon her death? Did I know that she was dying? Why did I sing to her?
Why don't I remember?
I had hoped visiting the village would bring back some memories, yet as I stand here in the center square, staring off at the mismatched homes and curtained shop windows, I recognize none of it.
The streets are just wide enough to fit a carriage through, lit only by the flickering oil lamps and the waning light of the moon.
The path beneath my bare feet is cobblestoned, well worn and spackled with dirt and the lingering remains of a late-night rain.