The Rules of this Cursed Place
1304 Words
Three days passed before I understood the first rule of the Haunted Forest.
It fed on grief.
I figured that out when I found the woman.
She was sitting against a tree maybe half a kilometer from where I had made my hollow, rocking back and forth with her arms wrapped tight around herself. She looked real. Solid. Her clothes were old-fashioned, the kind of dress you would see in paintings from two centuries ago, but her face was young and her crying was so raw and human that I walked toward her without thinking.
"Are you hurt?" I called out.
She looked up. Her face was beautiful and completely destroyed, red and swollen from what looked like days of crying. Her eyes were dark with a grief so heavy it felt like a physical thing pressing on the air between us.
"He left me," she said. "He chose her. He stood in front of everyone and said I was nothing. And then they brought me here and told me I would die." She drew a shaking breath. "I don't want to die. I don't want to be here. I just want to go home."
My chest ached. I understood every word she was saying.
I took another step toward her.
"Don't." The warning came from my left. A sharp, clear voice. Completely out of place.
I spun.
There was a boy sitting in the branches of a nearby tree. Maybe fourteen, maybe younger, with steady dark eyes and no expression at all. He was watching the woman with detached wariness.
"Don't go near her," he said again, still looking at the woman.
"She needs help."
"She's been dead for sixty years." He said it the way you would say it might rain today. Simple. Factual. "Look at her feet."
I looked.
The woman had no feet. Her legs simply ended where her ankles should have been, fading into nothing, and the ground beneath her was not disturbed at all. She was not sitting on the leaves. She was slightly above them.
I took a rapid step back.
"They look most real when you're sad," the boy said. "The sadder you are, the more solid they seem. They pull it from you somehow. Your grief makes them stronger. If you touch her, she will drain you until there's nothing left."
I stared at the ghost. She was still crying, still reaching toward me with hands that now, that I looked properly, I could see through faintly. Just barely. Just enough.
"How many of them are there?" I asked.
"Enough."
I looked at the boy. "Who are you?"
He dropped from the branch and landed without a sound. He was small and wiry, dressed in clothes that had been torn and repaired so many times they barely looked like clothes anymore. His feet, I noticed immediately, were very real. Solid and dirty and human.
"I'm Wren," he said. "I've been here two years."
Two years. I stared at him.
"You survived two years in here?"
He looked at me with those steady dark eyes. There was something exhausted in them that had no business being in a face that young.
"The forest does not kill you quickly if you learn its rules," he said. "It tries, but it is patient. It prefers to break you slowly."
I thought about the hollow I had been sleeping in. About the berries I had been eating. About the way I had been stumbling through the trees half-blind with grief for three days.
"Teach me," I said. "The rules."
He studied me for a moment. Then he nodded.
We walked away from the ghost together. She called after us as we went, her voice shifting from sad to angry to something that no longer sounded human at all, but I kept my eyes forward and did not look back.
Wren had been twelve when his pack rejected his mother and she had brought him with her into the forest because there had been nowhere else to take him. His mother had not survived the first week. He had been alone since then.
He had the rules because he had learned them the hard way, through watching and surviving and making mistakes that nearly cost him everything.
He told them to me as we walked, his voice flat and careful, like he was reciting something he had repeated to himself so many times it had stopped having meaning.
Do not follow voices. Not even ones you recognize. Especially ones you recognize.
Do not eat anything that grows in a circle.
Moving water is safer than still water, but nothing here is truly safe.
When the light shifts from gray to red, find shelter and do not come out until it shifts back. The things that hunt during the red hours are not the same as the things that hunt during the gray.
If you feel grief becoming overwhelming, physical pain is better. A small cut, a hard bite to the inside of your cheek. The physical sensation interrupts the emotional signal that the forest feeds on.
Do not look for a way out. There is no out. There is only surviving in.
"And the creatures?" I asked. "The ones with the hollow eyes?"
Wren glanced at me sideways. "Feral wolves. They were people once. Rejected mates who gave up and let the forest take them. Their wolves took over completely. But their human halves are still in there somewhere." He paused. "That's why they're so dangerous. They hate what they became. They take it out on everything around them."
I thought about the night I had arrived. The circle of those hollow eyes closing in on me. The way the mark had driven them back.
I showed Wren the mark.
He stopped walking and stared at it. His steady expression cracked just slightly.
"I have never seen a rejection mark do that," he said. "They're supposed to go black all the way through."
"I know."
"The edges are violet."
"I know."
He looked up at me. Something shifted in his young, exhausted eyes. Not hope, exactly. Something more careful than hope.
"The feral wolves won't come near you," he said slowly. "I've noticed that. Since you arrived. They moved away from that whole section of the forest. I thought I was imagining it."
"You weren't imagining it."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he kept walking.
"You should sleep near me," he said finally. "We'll find a safer hollow. Two sets of eyes are better than one, and you already know how to use the mark. That's more than most people who come in here have."
I fell into step beside him.
"What happens," I asked carefully, "to people who survive here long enough? You said there's no way out. But you're still you. You're still thinking, still human. Does that just... continue? Forever?"
Wren was quiet for a long time.
"I don't know," he said at last. "I've never met anyone who survived long enough to find out." He paused. "But I think the forest is waiting for something. With some people. It could have killed me a dozen times over. But it keeps not quite doing it. Like it's keeping me here. Like it wants something from me first."
I looked out at the twisted trees, the endless gray, the shadows shifting between trunks.
"Maybe it wants the same thing from me," I said.
Wren glanced at the mark on my collarbone.
"Maybe," he said. "Whatever it wants from you, though, I don't think it expected you to fight back."
Something in my chest settled slightly at that. Just slightly.
"Good," I said.
We walked deeper into the forest together.
For the first time since I had been thrown in here, I did not feel entirely alone
- Writer
