Chapter Text
The boy who ventures into the forest wears a bright red coat.
The trees haven’t seen a match to its color since before the first snow, although spring is approaching and the world is beginning to thaw.
He holds a sword, dented and blunt, iron and gleaming. His coat may be bright but the only red on the blade is dull rust.
Tommy knows he’s not supposed to be out here. So, so many times his mother has told him. You wait until after lunch to go to the forest. The night needs time to settle back into the shadows and slip into crevices. The forest is nighttime until after lunch, and even then it’s barely daytime, only granted the lighter title with a skeptical look out the kitchen window.
By his mother’s logic, the forest is off-limits until after lunch. Lunch is the second meal of the day, right? Tommy had left the curtains open in his room last night, and the sun came in and woke him earlier than usual this morning. He’d taken the opportunity, which was how his mother came downstairs at seven to see that he was already midway through today’s chores, having gotten breakfast under his belt over an hour before.
In exchange for a second load of laundry and checking on the onion patch, his mother made him a sandwich in a bag for today’s lunch. She tucked his scarf around his neck, white and woolen, red ex’s at each end. Tommy likes to braid the tassels when he’s bored, waiting at market for his mother to finish haggling with a merchant.
Tommy, armed with his father’s old sword and a sandwich, the scarf tied and brushing against his arms as he walks, is safe.
He sits down just within the trees. This isn’t the deep forest. His mother talks about the deep forest in her lunchtime warnings. These outer oaks are fine for eating his sandwich under. The sun sends beams to the forest roof and the leaves glow green.
If he didn’t have a sandwich, maybe he’d be eating something other than a stack of cheese, sausage, and bread for lunch. They’d have leftover stew. He’d have had oatmeal for breakfast, something of which he hasn’t yet mastered the creation. But then again, if he didn’t have a sandwich, he wouldn’t be getting the chance to go into the forest this early. Early lunch, early entry, even a still-morning one.
He rips off a bite, a whole sausage round and slice of cheese coming along. Bits of bread crumble off onto his coat. Tommy brushes them away onto the mossy floor. If he moves over a few trees, maybe a squirrel will come eat them right in front of him. He scoots away a couple meters and finishes his sandwich while checking between the pile of crumbs to the treetops.
He finishes the sandwich and crumples away the cloth bag into a pocket. Tommy sheds even more crumbs when he stands up.
If his mother was there, she’d remind him that the world is not his napkin, and that at the ripe old age of ten he should know better than to eat so messily. If his mother was there, he wouldn’t get to go into the forest. And it’s bright enough as far as he can see, bright and green and ever so slightly still frosty from that morning. Maybe he’ll want his mother there later, but right now he’s happy enough to wander between the trees on his own.
The ground is a patchwork of black dirt, moss, and grasses. The dirt is the kind that gets under your nails and sticks there, the best type, in Tommy’s opinion. Not that he knows any other types of proper dirt, since he’s lived in the same small town his whole life, but it’s better than the tiny pebbles by the river, it’s better than the silt that washes up, and it’s a whole lot better than the dirt that he and his mother mix from the compost and the animal pens for the garden.
The moss is moss and the grass is grass, and Tommy’s not known for staring at the ground when there’s more interesting things to be looking at. For instance, the trees. Not one is the same as any of the others, from the twisting roots to the way they all branch off at different points. The sky is greens, laid one over the other, all glowing from the sun and rustling in the wind above the treetops.
The forest is much better at ten in the morning, Tommy decides, than in the afternoon.
The trees begin about halfway up the hill behind the town, and the forest is really forest about a three minute walk from the first tree. The world keeps sloping up inside the denser area even though forests seem like places the ground should be flat, if only because the trees do enough poking up into the air for the land to relax and not try to, too.
Even though he’s wrapped up warmly, Tommy’s glad when he reaches patches of real sunshine. The frost is almost all gone, even in the darkest dark parts of the shady bits, but all around the sunny areas the ground is warm and damp and the dirt clumps under his shoes as it should.
There’s a big boulder off to the left, between two oaks and behind a patch of ferns that Tommy quickly scrambles through. It takes a few tries to find the right way up the boulder, but when he finds it, it’s definitely worth it.
He tries to stand up straight with his feet planted on the boulder. His head brushes against leaves and thin branches. Tommy’s mother always said he was tall for his age, and from the top of this big rock, he feels like a giant. He can’t see much around him through the leaves, but it’s enough to know that he’s that close to being the height of a tree.
He slides back down the boulder and grabs his sword from where he left it on a grassy clump. Tommy isn’t sure where he meant to go today, or if he needs somewhere he’s meant to go. Maybe it’s enough to just wander in the forest daytime.
He passes through a patch of yellow flowers. They sprout out of a batch of moss, each one with two pairs of leaves along its thin green stem, and a blossom full of silky petals. Tommy grabs a handful of them and sticks them in his pocket. If they’re not mush by the time he’s home, maybe his mother would like them for the kitchen table.
And then the trees start to look different. Not like there’s still nighttime clinging to them, like his mother warned about the deep forest, but like they’re older. These trees have seen more time than the other ones. They’re bigger around, and the bark around them is darker and more dirty. The leaves above are thicker and the light is a darker green now. This place is older. It’s wiser, it knows more about the world. It’s just as safe as the younger forest and it knows how to stay safe.
There’s water nearby.
Tommy can hear it tumbling, a stream over rocks. He turns for it, and finds it beyond just a few trees.
A steady creek leads into a small pool. The water is clear but also both the deep, muddy brown of the dirt at the bottom, and the mild sky blue reflected. Tommy slides over a rock and down to the shore. There are more yellow flowers here, but he leaves them. He wants a pocket free for other things he might find.
He’s concentrating on where he’s walking, an unusual thing for him to do, but there’s only so much his mother will accept on his boots. A bit of dirt? That’s fine, all fine, but his one pair of shoes, soaked through? That one might earn Tommy even another load of laundry to scrub—though perhaps not, as they'd dry so quickly by a fire.
Eventually he reaches the other side of the pool, once the stepping stones end. His scarf came loose as he was jumping, and as he tosses it back over his shoulder he looks up at what this side of the pool might offer.
The biggest, oldest, mightiest willow tree Tommy has ever seen sits there on the shore. The trunk is grey like a thunderhead and the leaves are nearly blue. He guesses he’d need another two of himself to hold hands with to reach around. Not that it’s so large all the way, but the amount of bumps and whatnot would bend up his arms and make it harder to reach.
He doesn’t really want to go any closer to it. It’s a magnificent sight but a bit daunting, so instead he checks out the rest of the forest on this side of the water. The trees are old here too, darker and heavier. There’s another big tree, bigger than the rest, but an oak this time, not a willow. It seems a little more welcoming and Tommy makes his way over to it.
Then he stops, in the middle of the grassy space between the water and the oak. There’s something odd under the oak, pressed against and almost into the roots. Tommy shifts his stance, debating what to do and remembering the sword in his hand. He doesn’t think he’s in any danger here, but it gives him extra confidence to know he’s got the blade.
The sun is in patches around here, more than in the earlier part of the forest, sort of like it’s making up for the shadows being darker and the light being greener.
It’s not a rock, Tommy decides. It’s not a rock under the tree, but it’s not much more or less than a rock, and he’s not going to solve the question that poses by standing here.
The grass he walks through swishes against his pants, seeds sticking where he nudges them from the stalk. The yellow flowers are growing in a clump by the tree, white flowers too, and a few of the white flowers grow even on the not-rock.
Then Tommy is close enough to see what it is and his eyes are wide.
A skeleton lies beneath a gnarled root, half propped up against the oak’s trunk. White flowers grow within its ribcage. Its toes are coated in moss; one of its arms is covered at the elbow by the tree, enveloped in wood. The bones are more grey than white or yellow, unlike other bones Tommy has seen. They’re covered in crannies of black dirt, the type that’s under Tommy’s boots and fingernails right now. The bones are grey rather than yellow, and something about that is settling. These bones are old and flaking and the forest knows them.
Tommy stands up from where he’s been crouching over the skeleton and searches about. There could be something that could tell him about these old, old bones. And instead of finding that, Tommy discovers two more skeletons, both just as old as the first.
He sits back on his heels and stares at the trio under the oak.
This is a morning-time forest sort of thing. Tommy is glad he woke up for it.