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The woods sprawl before him, treacherous canopies casting shadows across Khalid’s slight frame. A gust echoes through the blackwoods, snarling, and it should be a cue to turn tail, go home, be safe. Khalid’s not sure he has a choice. Heavy mist closes in at his back, vines twisting behind him. The torchfire flickers in winter’s afternoon glare, its malevolent light furious and knowing.
Khalid swallows the bile in his throat. He hears Their footsteps when his breathing slows, when he calms the panicked racing of his heart. Each stomp screams Khalid’s doom; louder, louder. The wind-whispered rumors howl, the woods don’t take to outsiders. This might be his sole escape.
The lashing vines might protect him. Nature has a way of knowing — perhaps the trees sense who Khalid is, and they mean to encircle rather than ensnare. The twisting creepers are a barrier between him and his pursuers and Khalid shakily steps closer. Could this be an invitation rather than a trap?
The woods are perilous, but they call his name. Khalid breathes deep as he darts inside, knowing there may be no turning back.
---
Be wary of roses, his mother whispered, stroking Khalid’s hair as she laid him to bed. He’d been so young, sugar-sweet and wide-eyed innocent, vainly hoping there were still trustworthy creatures in this world. Roses may be beautiful, but they thirst for blood. Get close and they’ll prick you to death.
She hadn’t spoken of a rose’s magnificence, its allure, how mauve blooms sprawl across their bushes, smiling radiantly. Their dewdrops sparkle in the setting sun, expecting Khalid to touch, to bloom back. His mother’s warning rings clear in its admonition, but Khalid leans in— a closer look wouldn’t hurt this once.
Vines lash from the bushes to choke Khalid in their embrace. He shrieks, but the thorny vines grapple his waist and mouth, threatening stillness, demanding silence. His free hand darts to the dagger at his waist; a haughty cackle pierces the air.
“We don’t take kindly to strangers.”
The boy stepping through the bushes wears a plum-petal coat, bright and radiant as his hair. He moves daintily and fey-like as he raises a spear to Khalid’s neck; he dances back, nimble, when Khalid slices his knife through the vines. The strange boy lunges forward again, but Khalid's feet are as quick as his wit, and he dashes away before the boy’s javelin strikes.
Khalid’s heart pounds in his chest as he runs, runs, his torch’s flame dimmer with every pace. But he knows the truth: his pursuers lurk outside the forest. He can run from its horrors, but he can’t hide.
---
Khalid knows Demonic Beasts lurk in the woods. They’re ghastly creatures of stitched sinew and bone, red eyes dripping blood tears and terror, ghoulish and mad and so, so haunted. His mother spoke of them in low tones and hushed voices, warning they tear little boys like him from limb to limb.
The trees rattle a screeching howl, and Khalid shudders under his branch-and-leaf shelter.
A soft voice travels the wind, words punctuated by choked sobs. It’s not fair, the leaves sing, it’s not fair, it’s not fair—
Khalid cranes his neck, but doesn’t budge from his spot. A battered spirit throws back her head and shrieks, her face as pale as her long, white hair. Her tattered dress matches her matted tresses, and Khalid briefly considers grabbing his torch to meet her.
His gaze flickers to its dying light.
“Stay put,” he mutters, even as the banshee screeches again, moaning about years of stolen life, of lack of companionship, of lack of time. This isn't the Demonic Beast he heard of, but he cannot afford to bare his heart. Not until he has fire.
Khalid pulls a thin blanket over himself; it itches like fresh straw. He yearns for his bed’s luxury and comforts from the outside world, but there’s no turning back from those who’d see him dead. The pounding in his chest won’t drown out the banshee’s screams.
---
“C’mon! Let’s see the world!”
The voice pierces the sunrise: forthright, friendly, deceptively brash. Khalid presses his back to a tree . Two pairs of rumbling footsteps: one heavy, one light; the latter taps like leaves falling on marsh water. Their owner jitters nervously.
“We can’t leave, Raphael. Not while your parents are here.”
Khalid cranes his neck to peek, mind racing, reminding him to stay quiet till morning. The hulking cyclops smiles, his lone eye twinkling with amusement as he lumbers on, followed by a smaller dryad with moss-colored hair and leaves for wings. The dryad stumbles.
“I told you yesterday. Who’ll take care of their graves?”
“Dunno, Ignatz,” Raphael shrugs. “The vines, the sun, the sky. They came from the earth, y’know? To the earth they return.”
Khalid’s breath clouds in the morning chill. Even he gets lonely. Part of him wants to interject, to interact, to connect, but he recalls whispers of the night, that he can’t trust anyone till he sees the sun. So Khalid freezes while Ignatz and Raphael bicker. He’s trembling, still, when the clouds part to reveal daylight. Morning smiles upon the forest, greeting it with disquieting beams.
Ignatz meets light with a piercing shriek.
Gravel crawls up his feet and through his skin, his fey-like features freezing under a layer of stone. Khalid whips around to see a trapped Raphael, his jolly smile encased in light-infused rock, there till sunset.
“They turn to stone each morning,” Khalid whispers. They won't leave the forest, not until Ignatz stops hesitating. Perhaps silence was a mistake, but did he have a choice? Khalid packs his belongings up and quietly slips away.
---
Demonic Beasts are terrifying, even in daytime.
He encounters one while braving thorns and beetles to pluck berries from a bush. The beast grunts loudly behind him, and Khalid turns; its eyes burn as red as the juice staining Khalid’s hands. He doesn’t scream.
Daylight casts shadows across its face, illuminating its bloody features. The creature is horned and monstrous, spit slathering its maw. Khalid steels himself and meets its gaze. Stare it down, and it won’t hurt you. Look it in the eye.
Khalid clenches his fist so tightly he fears his bones might break, bursting the berries in his grip. Don’t move, his mother warned. It’ll find a weakness, and it’ll attack. So he keeps staring, focusing on the ridges in its scales, trying to ignore its breath on his face. It glares back, then winces.
Huh?
Khalid’s lips part in shock. He spots recognition in its beady red eyes. “You trying to say something—” he begins, but the beast interrupts with an anguished howl. The ground quakes beneath Khalid as the Demonic Beast flees, its footsteps thundering through the dirt as it scampers away.
Khalid runs, too. He can’t risk being found, even if his torch’s flame wisps away in the wind.
---
“I’m sure glad you didn’t eat those berries!”
The centaur’s laugh is warm, as fiery as her orange hair. She thumps Khalid’s back so hard he might retch his heart out, but her words are kind. Almost enough to inspire trust. The centaur — Leonie — grabs his palm, examining the juice stains sprawling like blood.
“More than two and you’d have keeled over.” She snorts. “Maybe it’s good the Demonic Beast found you. Grab these instead.”
Leonie plucks a plump fruit from a bush and eats it, its yellow juice staining her teeth. Khalid’s stomach cries desperately, and he cautiously chews on one too. The fruit is sour, pungent, and barely edible. It burns as he swallows, and Khalid hears the forest mock him with every bite: these woods bear no gifts. It might nourish him now, but at some point it will take again and again, till there’s nothing left. Is this truly a better alternative to being maimed outside? Leonie beams.
“You’ve been out here alone for a while, haven’t you?”
Alone.
She speaks of solitude, but Khalid’s not alone. He thinks of the golem and dryad, frozen in sunstone. The banshee who screamed her anguished cry. And to the Demonic Beast who halted him in his tracks, as if it had something to say—
“It was trying to stop me,” he murmurs, too soft. Or was it? Has the loneliness gotten to him? Is it a foolish assumption, or is he so desperate he’s humanizing a monster?
A chill surges through him, his terror more grim and biting than the cold. Rustling noises haunt the looming trees, and Khalid’s certain it's not from the winter.
---
Rose vines envelop a figure strung in the trees, circling it in a corrupt cocoon. Khalid gapes at the canopy, squinting through gaps between tendrils to glimpse brown skin, a flash of limbs, a scrap of beige fabric. Terror grips him in a tense, tight coil. Khalid bites back the instinct to flee.
Running landed him in this situation, after all. He didn’t have a choice, but there’s no escaping the forest’s call. He yells at the boy.
“Hey, kid. You need help up there?”
Khalid’s torch no longer burns, but the sun still mocks him. Hours remain till sunset. Leonie the centaur took Khalid’s shaking hands in hers; the least he can do is help. He leans his torch against the tree and grabs a low branch, hoisting himself up and steadying his foot on bark. Khalid ascends branch by branch, pulling himself closer when a large, thorny, vine lashes down, hurtling Khalid to the ground. A youthful, bitter voice calls out.
“Go away.”
Khalid grits his teeth, ignoring the scrape on his face and the dirt on his elbows. “I’m here to help,” he mutters, racing towards the tree and gripping a branch, ready. “Hang on tight—”
His descent was painless compared to the force of two larger vines slamming into his face and stomach, their thorns threatening as they thump into him. From the ground, Khalid glances at the vine-imprisoned figure. Their eyes meet. The prisoner’s look like his.
The young boy glares.
“Can’t you see? I’m happier here. Go away. ”
---
“You look like you need fire. I’ll give you some, but join me for some tea first? It’s sooo boring here.”
The fairy’s voice is dainty as her features, her laugh lively as the tinkling of bells. Her smile is magnetic, her gait gregarious, and she breathes flame into Khalid’s torch with a kiss and a wink. She wraps an arm around Khalid, and he has a feeling he’s walking into a trap — so when asked for a name he responds “Claude.” The name feels false and foreign on his tongue, the long L and muddled vowel overcast like dark clouds across an afternoon sky. She giggles, believing Khalid’s lead-coated lie, and introduces herself as ‘Hilda’ back.
Hilda leads him down a path peppered with periwinkle petals and pink flowers that match her hair. They step into a mushroom-covered clearing, and she sits on a speckled sprout. She claps her hands. A porcelain tea set appears on the tree stump between them, sporting a selection of delicate teacakes and honey-glazed pastries with fresh, juicy fruit. Hilda pours Khalid a cup of tea, and he’s parched enough to lift it to his lips.
The stench of roses hits in full force. Khalid sets down the teacup without a sip, trying to look clueless before resuming conversation.
He wishes he didn’t enjoy this, but it’s the most fun he’s had since arriving in the woods. Hilda doesn’t seem to notice Khalid hasn’t touched his food. She laughs at some joke he made, and he truly wants to trust her, but the scent of rose lingers. It’s no surprise when Hilda’s smile twists into a snarl, and she asks the question—
“We don’t see strangers like you often in the Leicester Woods. Where are you really from?”
Khalid’s rose-scented teacup overflows with black sludge.
He recognizes the thorny vines lunging from behind Hilda; they’re the same vines trapping the other boy. The woods will mess with you, his mother chastises, and Khalid suddenly realizes why the boy was so content as a prisoner, so content in the tendrils’ wicked clutches. Don’t let them in your head.
The porcelain teacup crashes on the ground as Khalid grabs his torch and runs .
---
It’s exhausting, this constant fleeing. His limbs have been drained of life, and there’s a pit of acid where his stomach should be. It feels like hours before Hilda’s rose-covered vines are out of earshot, and he lets himself slump against a tree, his breath misting into clouds as he catches it in his palms.
The sun's last rays shine over the horizon, his torch’s flame barely a flicker. Time's running out. Khalid shivers, cupping his hand over the fire to protect it, freezing in the frostbite until he hears the crunch of leaves under harsh footsteps, and feels the ground tremble beneath him. This will not be the end.
Mustering every ounce of fire he can, he turns to meet the Demonic Beast's gaze.
“Hey, uh. About the berries,” he says, finding the strength to sound flippant. “You tried to stop me, didn’t you—”
It growls a low rumble, more soothing than scary. Khalid smiles.
“I never got to thank you. Do you have a name?”
The Beast parts its jaw, spitting syllables in a resonating, gentle dirge.
“Ma—ri—ann—Go—away—”
A bluebird flutters onto Marianne’s shoulder, and the juxtaposition is almost cute. Khalid smiles, and offers a hand. His lips twist into a familiar lie.
We are who we pretend to be.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Claude.”
The sun plunges from the skyline. The last flicker of torchlight dissolves into mist.
Black smoke envelops Claude in darkness, and thorny vines ensnare his ankles and wrists. He smells his face burn. Searing pain courses through him as muscle and sinew melt; his heart continues to thud, quick and furious like a wardrum. Claude howls as two bones protrude from his skull, piercing his forehead in sudden, angry gasps.
When the smoke clears, a small stag tumbles to the ground, stumbling on shaky, newborn legs. Marianne gapes, and Claude blinks up through glassy eyes. Part of the forest, at last.