What Grows in Dark Places
1220 Words
Two months into the Haunted Forest, I killed my first shadow spirit.
I did not mean to. I was not even sure what I did. One moment it had Wren pinned against a tree, its translucent hands sunk into his chest while he made a sound I never wanted to hear again, a choked empty sound like someone being hollowed out from the inside. The next moment, something in me simply broke open.
The mark on my collarbone exploded with violet light so bright it turned the gray forest momentarily white.
The spirit shrieked with a frequency that hurt my teeth. Then it came apart.
Not like something dying. Like something being unmade. Thread by thread. Like watching smoke dissolve in the wind, except what was dissolving had been screaming.
Then silence.
I stood there with my hand pressed to my collarbone and my whole body shaking, and Wren slid down the tree trunk to the ground and sat there gasping for air.
We did not speak for a long time.
Finally, Wren said, "You didn't shift."
"No."
"You didn't touch it."
"No."
He looked at the mark. Then he looked at me. "How much control do you have over that?"
"None," I said honestly.
He nodded slowly. "Okay. We are going to figure this out."
That became the project.
Wren was methodical in a way that must have been there before the forest got hold of him. He had survived two years on careful observation, and now he turned that same careful observation on me, on the mark, on what triggered it and what did not.
We tried anger first. That did nothing except make my hands shake.
We tried fear, which lit the mark faintly but not enough to be useful.
What worked was something harder to name. Something that sat between grief and fury and absolute refusal. The feeling of being told you are nothing and deciding, with every cell in your body, that the person who said it was wrong.
I had a lot of practice accessing that feeling.
By the end of the first month of training, I could make the mark glow on command. By the end of the second, I could control the intensity. By the start of the third month, I had killed eleven shadow spirits, protected our hollow from a pack of feral wolves three times, and learned to use the light as both shield and weapon.
My wolf came back slowly.
That was the part I had not expected. When Kieran's rejection had hit me, I had felt my wolf go silent inside me, like a candle being snuffed. I had assumed she was gone. Destroyed. Another thing taken from me.
But in the third month, she returned.
Not all at once. First, just a presence, a warmth at the back of my mind. Then a voice, not words exactly, more like a feeling shaped like words. Then, one night when the light had gone red and something terrible was moving through the trees outside our hollow, she rose up inside me with the force of a tide coming in.
I did not shift. Not fully. My hands changed, fingers lengthened, nails becoming something sharper and darker than claws. My eyes changed. I could feel them doing it, the warmth of the violet glow spreading from my irises.
Wren, watching from the corner of the hollow, said absolutely nothing.
The thing outside the hollow made one sound and then the sounds of its moving faded rapidly into the distance.
We sat in silence for a moment.
"Your eyes," Wren said carefully.
"I know."
"They were like that. Like when you use the mark. But you weren't touching it."
"I know."
"Your hands are doing something."
"I know." I looked down at them. Slowly, deliberately, I breathed out, and they returned to normal. The warmth in my eyes faded.
Wren exhaled. "Okay," he said again. He had a habit of saying okay when things were very much not okay. "I think whatever the forest is doing to you, it's making you something the rejection mark was supposed to stop."
"What do you mean?"
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "The forest breaks people. Everyone who comes in here. It strips away everything until there's nothing left but the most basic thing you are. Most people, what's most basic in them is pain. So they become pain. That's what the ghosts are. That's what the feral wolves are. Just pain, given shape."
He paused.
"But you," he said. "You were supposed to break. And instead you became something else."
I looked at the mark on my collarbone.
"What did I become?" I asked.
He met my eyes.
"I'm not sure yet," he said. "But I don't think you're entirely a wolf anymore."
I thought about that for a long time.
In the fourth month, the Shadow Queen appeared in my dreams for the first time.
I was standing at the edge of a black lake I had never seen before, and she was standing on the water's surface, her feet not quite breaking it. She was beautiful the way a wildfire is beautiful, all consuming and terrifying and bright.
She had once been human. I knew that the way you know things in dreams. She had been rejected too, a long time ago, and the forest had taken everything from her and replaced it with darkness and power and hunger.
She looked at me with eyes that had no color left in them, just black from edge to edge.
"Little wolf," she said. "You are becoming something interesting."
"I am not becoming anything for you," I said.
She smiled. In the dream her smile was beautiful and wrong.
"Not yet," she said. "But the forest is patient. And you are going to need so much more power before this is finished. I know where you can find it. I know what you are." She tilted her head. "Do you?"
I woke up in the hollow with the mark blazing on my collarbone, so bright it illuminated the whole space.
Wren was already awake. He had started sleeping lightly, waking at the slightest change.
He looked at the mark. He looked at my face.
"Her?" he asked.
I nodded.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "What did she want?"
"The same thing she always wants." I pressed my hand over the mark until the light dimmed. "Everything."
Outside the hollow, the forest breathed.
I did not go back to sleep.
Instead I sat with my back against the tree and thought about power and what it was made of. About what I was becoming. About whether there was a difference between using darkness and becoming it.
I thought about my father's face, worn by a monster.
I thought about Kieran's face when he had looked at me and found me unworthy.
I thought about Wren asleep in the corner, twelve years old and more competent and steady than most adults I had known.
I did not have answers. But I had something that was beginning to feel, for the first time, like direction.
Whatever I was becoming, I decided, I would become it on my own terms.
Not the Shadow Queen's. Not the forest's. Not the rejection mark's.
Mine.
- Writer
