Chapter Text
It is before the forest had belonged to any man that this story begins, when the world was still young and the valleys alive and the forest belonged to no man living or dead. It was in a time before recording that a fox lived and lied, because the world owed him nothing and he knew better than to ask.
And when he’d been born with smoldering embers in his hearth, in place of the fiery infernos of his brothers, the fox did not ask for a piece of the sun. He simply took it and grew lean and feral and wrong, because the sun cannot belong to just one.
When the world had been young and the rock giants had roamed free, a fox had swallowed the sun and did not know he had been cursed.
...
It’s a tricky thing, being cursed. In many ways, he remained a fox. He swam in rivers and chased birds and caught fish like the rest of them do, because that is the only way to live in a forest. But as the years drifted by and the kits grew old and the birds would sing of a life outside of the trees, the fox knew. In the only way that mattered, the fox was no longer who he’d been before. When the hunters came, built their traps, and sent their dogs on the run, the fox knew then he’d grown monstrous and strange. When the sun shone down on him and he’d been set alight, when he’d stalk those hunters and dogs to their camps and steal the warmth from beneath their skin, he knew. The fox knew that he did not belong amongst men, but he was one of them.
It’s a rather simple thing to eat so deliciously, to take a person’s soul and memory and life. He rather enjoyed it at times, especially the moments of dancing and dreaming and stories of heroism and valor. And these lives real and imagined came aplenty over the years: A disgraced nobleman hunting for a trophy, a farmer desperate to feed her family, a sailor that hadn’t set foot on land for the last 3 years.
They came to the forest desperate and did not know it was no place for a human, did not know they did not belong there. But the fox knew, as he always had. He did not spare them, because the world owed them nothing.
The fox had been hungry then and ate deliciously; he’d been hungry for humanity his whole life.
...
In time, the tales of disappeared men reached their villages of origin and spread, whispered desperate and pleading. Of the ones who made it home, it was clear they no longer belonged to the village. By midday’s sun they’d rush to the rivers desperate to be drowned or paw at the Earth until their fingertips bled. It had always been a trade, you see. Wishes cannot be granted without a bargain, unwritten and unfair as it was in that forest. The fox took their humanity, yes. But the men took his soul in return, splintered across a million lives and loves.
But the fox had left one thing, the one thing that served the interests of man and the interests of the forest. He left them their voices, because sirens always attract the most foolhardy adventurers.
Do not enter the Forest of Shadows, they told their children. A beast in the shape of a star lives there. He will not spare you.
The children who listened stayed in their villages, building walls around the forest to keep the forest in and themselves out. The children who grew up wondering left, because there was no such thing as a sun-streaked fox and there were better mysteries to solve. The children who’d grown up desperate, daydreaming, and starved of love entered the forest, because to be the demon’s slayer was a title wanted too desperately. The fox liked it this way. The ones who knew better and still sought the forest, their lives could feed him for years.
...
As sure as the cycles of the moon, a human would enter the forest. Some of them were smart, arming themselves with all of the forest’s myths memorized and tools of human invention, ready for the hunt. Some of them were naive, looking only to survive somewhere outside of the fox’s reach until they’d mustered up the courage to fight. Many lives entered the forest, because it is the nature of humans to be foolish and think themselves distinct from the ones who’d come before.
They were all the same to the fox. They were humans in a forest that belonged to the fae.
It is a cycle that continues for years, the Forest of Shadows and the beast that prowls within becoming more mythologized over the centuries. With each retelling, the image grows sharper, the rules of magic more clear. And that, my friend, is where this story really begins.
...
I had forgotten to tell you one more thing about our beloved fox, but that is because he had long forgotten it as well. He had but one gift, useless as it was in isolation. He could grant you a wish, you see, so long as another’s blood was spilled. He could rewrite the laws of the world if one’s heart was pure enough and their blood untainted, if the asker wished it so dearly. For the ones he loved, the world could be rewritten.