Chapter 1 #2
Despite my hatred of their kind, I couldn’t deny I’d wondered why they didn’t make a real stand against the Hollows, why they hid behind their walls.
If they were able to fight the monstrous beasts the Necromancer had risen to plague our lands, then why not do so? Why leave us all to suffer their wrath?
Just ten days’ travel from here to the east of our town lay the border with the Fae.
I’d never seen the wall which marked the division between our lands myself but I’d seen sketches, heard tales.
And they all matched. The Fae lands were closed to humans.
Just as the forest was closed too – unless it claimed you for its own.
My stomach knotted as I considered that, the nearness of those damned trees making me uneasy as they always did.
When I’d been a child, the forest had been a full week’s travel north of here.
Our town had seemed safe from its grasp.
But every year, its boundary spread, the trees inching outward, stealing land from the three realms. So far as I knew, no one had ever been able to slow the forest’s advance, let alone stop it.
And so every living creature in Rathian was losing the battle to save themselves from its clutches, just as we were losing places to run to.
We were surrounded. The Taking Trees to the north, the Hollows and their Necromancer king to the west, the Fae and their wall to the east and nothing but the open ocean and a promise of oblivion to the south.
“There,” Mother announced, turning me so that I could appreciate her handiwork in the mirror on my dressing table.
My brown hair was braided in a style I could never replicate alone, the strands knotted and intricate, drawn together while still framing my heart-shaped face.
I studied the warmth of my skin, the dusting of freckles which coated my cheekbones and touched my nose.
As always, my eyes stood out the most, their sapphire colour flashing to a deep violet in the light.
Rissa used to say they changed with my moods, sometimes as bright as a summer’s day when I laughed, others as dark as an oncoming storm when I frowned.
I wasn’t certain that was true, but I had always appreciated their otherworldly allure.
It was the one thing about myself which seemed to agree with my heart – they didn’t fit.
Didn’t belong. Perhaps my eyes were the one thing about me which betrayed my intentions because they spoke of something outside of this place, they spoke of something… other.
I stood, smiling at my mother and hoping she couldn’t read what I was planning in the tempest of my expression. I felt as though my long-held secret was suddenly becoming so obvious, like perhaps she’d suddenly see it there in my face, plain as day, and realise what I planned to do.
“Ferris…” she said slowly, rising too and taking my hand in her own. “I wanted to-”
“The day is wasting,” Father called jovially from downstairs.
He had always been a jolly kind of man, the type to gather friends as easily as plucking weeds, the kind to have compliments scattered in his wake.
But I could see through his smiles. For eight long years, they’d failed to touch his eyes.
No matter the fact that we didn’t speak of it, no matter how hard we all worked to pretend.
“Mother?” I urged, squeezing her fingers as she made to withdraw them.
She squeezed mine in return, then smiled. “I only wanted to say…be happy. If Axel Bradey isn’t what it will take to make your heart shine, then you don’t have to accept him. You don’t have to do anything which would demand something you can’t offer.”
“I know,” I told her, my secret burning through the pit of my stomach.
It would break her. Father too. I knew it with a certainty that had stopped me from sleeping properly for weeks. It was the one thing which made me doubt what I had to do, the one thing which made me question this choice.
But it really wasn’t a choice at all. Even on that night, eight years ago, I’d known it would come to this. I’d been a girl then, only fourteen, yet overnight, the innocence of childhood had been ripped from me.
I’d have done it then if it had been possible. I wished with all my heart that I could have tried – I’d even attempted it before. But this was my only true chance to keep the oath I’d made to Rissa back then and I couldn’t turn from it. Even though I understood how high the price of it would be.
“I love you,” I said, my voice cracking on the last word, and Mother blinked at me as if she understood the finality of that declaration.
But then the evidence of my betrayal cleared from her eyes and she breathed a laugh, drawing me close in her arms and kissing the top of my head the way she’d done ever since I was a babe in her arms.
“I love you more,” she told me, squeezing me tightly and making me hate myself for what I had to do.
We parted on an awkward laugh at our emotional moment, and I waited as she headed from the room, stooping to grab my pack once I was confident she wasn’t watching. The weight of it felt like evidence, the bulk too.
I grabbed my grey cloak and swung it around my shoulders, concealing the bag and tugging my hood up for good measure. The day was bright but a chill still clung to the air, so I wouldn’t be alone in dressing for the harsher edges of the weather.
Father made a show of fussing over our lateness and bustling us out the door.
His hair had greyed in the last few years, his eyes and brow lined more heavily too, like his body was tired of the weight he fought to carry, the burdens he bore painting themselves onto his flesh in defiance of the smiles he tried to hide them behind.
He offered an arm each to Mother and me, and I took it, enjoying the warmth of his body beside mine, the rough wool of his brown coat a familiar, steadying point for my slick palms.
Our village was large – practically a city now by the old standards, if my parents were to be believed. But the flint houses and thatched roofs looked as tired as the people who dwelled within them.
Wooden doors were branded with scars, symbols to ward off evil scratched or burned into them, sometimes painted in blood. So far as I knew, nothing truly helped. But without our superstitions, I supposed we would all have succumbed to hopelessness long ago.
I glanced over my shoulder as I thought on that, the cobbled street empty behind me, a dozen houses just like our own gazing after us.
A shiver ran down my spine as if I were being watched.
I slipped my fingers into the pocket of my cloak and turned over the wooden relic there three times before releasing my hold on Father and crouching to scrawl an X into the dirt with my fingers.
Superstition or not, I took no chances in this lawless world.
My parents paused so I could catch up to them, the three of us moving towards the northern edge of the town where the music rang out loudly and the excited chatter of the crowd could be heard too.
It wasn’t often the people raised their voices in jubilation like this, and I wasn’t certain if my spirits were lifted by the sound or if it only stoked my nerves.
This had to work.
The forest wouldn’t give us another fifty years.
In that time, it would consume everything.
Our town alone likely had less than a handful of months left.
We’d all been preparing our possessions for weeks, packing up our lives in preparation to relocate south.
Many of the people living here had already fled the forest before, some had done so five or six times, others had simply passed right through our village and kept going to the southern border where most of our population now resided in the towns along the shore, awaiting the inevitable at the end of the world.
No.
I stopped that thought in its tracks.
Not inevitable. If I believed that, then I would have run too. I wouldn’t be here, grasping onto my secrets like they were sand in my fist, the grains spilling away like the seconds they marked, my truth so close to revealing itself.
We stepped into the square where the town hall stood proudly, and I couldn’t stifle the breath which sawed into my lungs in a sharp gasp.
The forest had moved again. I’d been here only two nights prior. Beyond this square there had been four rows of houses, a tailor, a blacksmith’s forge, a stable…
“When?” I breathed, my eyes on the colossal trees which loomed like glowering statues just a handful of steps away from us.
Their trunks were thicker than carriages, so tall they appeared to brush the clouds with their spindly branches.
The space between them was thick with bracken and brambles, thorns knotting together to create a wall which I knew to be impenetrable.
No one could enter that forest at any time other than during the Hunt. Not by their own choice anyway. And legend had it that any taken in the night fell prey to the most monstrous of beasts within its wild walls.
My thumb rolled over the faded scar on my forefinger, the most prominent of those left to me by the same thorns which now tangled together so close to our home.
The music didn’t change in pitch but there was something about it which sounded less jovial and more hurried now that I was closer to it. Like those who were playing wanted an end to this celebration so that they might run from it.
The smiles on the faces around us were tight at their edges, whispers passing between the crowd which all carried the same message.
“We’ll be on the road by nightfall,” Father said gruffly, and I knew he was speaking for the entire town.
It was madness to linger once the forest crept this close. I’d watched countless others make the pilgrimage away from their homes throughout my lifetime and had always known our time would come too. But it had never seemed so real as it did now.