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After a winter that seemed to last years more than months, spring was meant to have been a relief, but you’re finding it worse. The chill never let up, not really, and snow was replaced by rain with no interlude, woods turning to slush around you. One week into the season and you find yourself icy and sodden and wretched. You didn’t think you still had any strong emotions left in you, but you scrape the bottom of the barrel and come up with misery.
The Beast doesn’t seem to understand. He’s part of the woods, and he’s part of the seasons, and he sees the endless rains as a facet of life that you should adapt to as well as he does. If you’re to be a good puppet, you should be able to weather this for him. Surely winter was harsher, surely spring of all seasons will be kind to you.
It is not. You suffer and you struggle, and you assume that if you just abandon all thoughts beyond the Beast and your purpose then you will be able to soldier on between the edelwoods. When you feel hot, even on a cold day, you blame it on your cloak; when you find yourself shivering in your shelter, all through the night, you blame it on chill, even with your lantern and hood and the undeniable warmth to the air. When you need to stop and hold a tree for support because your head is swimming and you can’t quite seem to draw in enough air, you just hope you’re not holding the Beast up too badly.
You stagger on for as long as you physically can until one day your body finally surrenders. It takes a single second for the drifting, woozy feeling in your head to overwhelm you, and then you’re on the forest floor, lying amongst the sodden leaves. When you try to right yourself, your arms are too weak, your legs feeling lifeless. The lantern rolled a few feet away, blessedly not broken, but still out of your reach.
The Beast drifts around you, staring down as though you decided to play some game and not inform him. You can see the disapproval in his slow, predatory movements, and again you try to get back on your feet. All you achieve is dropping your face into the mud when your arms give out.
“Beast,” you croak up to him, “I’m sorry, I’m…” unwell, you realise, and it’s a shock to you that you’re not as eldritch as you had begun to believe. Your body is still flesh and blood and inherent, overwhelming weaknesses, and apparently you have not been giving it proper care. You’re not sure you’ve been giving it any care at all, beyond foraged food on a ‘when you remember’ basis.
The Beast regards you, and you have been getting better at reading his expressions but it’s a lot harder when your face is on the ground and he towers so perfectly imperial above you.
You wonder if he’s going to leave. You’ll stay lying in the leaves, fall apart for the soil, every little piece of you going to feed the woods. It’s not terrible, you think, but your mind is hazy and weak, dimming the parts of you that are not so eager to give in. If you die, there will be no one to tend the lantern, and that can’t happen. You sold your soul to bear that flame; it must be worth more than that.
But it isn’t your choice. The rain beats down on your face, and your hood shifted when you fell so there’s nothing to protect you. You shiver wretchedly in the dirt, and you still feel too hot, and you know this is out of your hands.
You can’t see the Beast anymore.
Something cold and bitter runs down your spine, pools in your stomach. You clench your eyes shut, and you tell yourself that you shouldn’t have expected anything more. The rain feels too hot on your face, and you can’t move but you’re shaking, shivering bitterly in the dirt. You don’t know how long it’s going to take you to die, but nausea and the inevitability of your death roll through you in hideous, jarring waves, and no matter how you tell yourself that it’s as good an end as you could expect, you do not feel okay.
You can tell when the Beast picks up the lantern because the light on the trees shifts, swinging upwards. You can watch it recede, too, swaying in his hand, dimmed by the rain. The shadows creep after him, and you lie in the mud and watch as it leaves you.
You close your eyes.
For the second time in your life, you are saved by bluebirds. Without the Beast near, you are much more approachable; abandoned by him, you are much more sympathetic. The creatures of the woods are mostly, fundamentally good, and they move you, feed you, warm you, shove enough herbal medicines down your throat to calm your fever.
You never expected to wake again, but you do, surrounded by furred and feathered bodies and worried eyes. The fact they’re out at all means the Beast is distant, and you have never felt so hideously, cripplingly alone with their masses around you.
“Hey, boy,” a bird that might have known Beatrice calls to you, “How you feeling?”
“Sick,” you murmur in response. Your body is queasy and shaky, still with aches, still with the lingering headache and disorientation your fever had brought. “Will I live?”
“Should do,” a different bird calls back. “We’ve done our best for you.”
“That devil left you,” a third chirps out, and it sounds so young and pleased, “You’re free of him now!”
Free. You swallow the word and another wave of nausea together and stand slowly, shifting the little creatures carefully. Your body hurts and your head aches, but you have walked through worse, you’re sure. “Thank you for your aid,” you tell them stiffly. “But I need to…”
They wait for you to finish. Your fists clench when you realise there’s absolutely nothing left in the world that you need to do. The unfinished sentence trails you like a loose thread as you leave without another word.
It hasn’t stopped raining. You’re still sick. But you need to find shelter on your own, because you don’t quite think you can handle company right now. Mud sticks to your shoes as you begin your shaky, solitary walk through the woods.
Days pass. Your body heals, and your head steadies, and you march in long and pointless patterns through the trees.
It’s like you’ve been lobotomized. He was your guide, the voice in your ear indistinguishable from the voice in the back of your head. A constant, static buzz that always knew where to go and what to do. The entire reason you lived was to carry his lantern, and he carried it off himself. You are now utterly pointless, robbed of your purpose, hollow, empty and dead.
It’s not that you were ever foolish enough to think he cared. You just never imagined his use for you would run out. By sheer virtue of symbiosis, you had thought that he needed you the way you’d come to need his hand on your shoulder, on your hip, curled around you and commanding. There are a few, precious bruises left on you, hard marks left by wooden fingers, and you cherish them as they fade.
You’re not like the people that populate the Unknown, you know; you’re too stiff, too cold, too disconnected. You lost something the first time you took your axe to an edelwood, and there’s no going back. Return to wherever you came from isn’t possible without help no one knows how to give.
Adrift, you wander the woods.
In summer, you hear his song. You know the season from the stifling heat and how heavy your cloak sits on your shoulders, and you don’t know how so much time passed, just that the soles of your shoes wore through while you walked. For a while, you think you forgot about the Beast completely – forgot the edelwoods and the Unknown and everything other than the trees immediately before you.
So when his voice reaches you, it hooks into you, drags you back to the world from somewhere very far away and you find yourself changing course before you’ve even made the conscious decision to, stumbling desperately in the direction of that familiar baritone.
Too many of your stray thoughts wondered how he had survived without you to fuel the fire, too much of you is still dedicated to him, and you know right to the core of you that nothing good could really come of seeing him again. You don’t care; he changed every single fibre of you to orient towards him, and you push through the trees to reach him.
The sound of an axe swinging reaches you as you get close. Your steps slow, falter, stop completely when you reach the clearing that holds him. He stands like a spectre in the midday sun, shadow so dense it seems to absorb the light around him, and every part of you strains to approach. But you hold still. The lantern sits at the feet of another boy. His hands are on your axe’s handle, and an edelwood rises up from the earth before him; he’s chopping in stuttering swings, chipping at the wood, collecting fuel for the fire.
And then the Beast turns, gleaming lights of his eyes settling on you as his singing cuts off. You sway a little, body suddenly uncertain if it’s had anything to eat or drink and should be able to support you, but you swallow hard, try your best to stand firm for him. “Beast,” you say, and your voice is long unused and little more than a rasp, but you manage.
“Wirt,” he replies, and hearing your name in his voice feels hideously intoxicating. He glides forward, and the axe strokes have stopped but you can’t wrench your eyes from him to see what the boy’s doing. His shadow settles before you, so close you need to tilt your head back to look up at him. His hand slides up your shoulder, caresses your bared throat, cups your head just a little, and you shiver at the rough feel of his fingers against your skin. “I thought you’d died.”
He left you, you try to think. He would have let you die worthlessly among the bracken and be buried in mud. One of his fingers skims over your lips, coarse and familiar, and you sag uselessly into his touch. “Animals saved me,” you manage to croak out for him. “I recovered, and I’ve just been… walking.”
You don’t say you’ve been looking for him, because you haven’t, but you think he might have heard that anyway. His hand shifts to cup the back of your neck, fingers fitting in the space of bruises that have long since faded, and he seems to be considering you. You couldn’t begin to guess how filthy and dishevelled you might look after months on your own in the woods. You couldn’t begin to guess how achingly hollow you might look after months without him.
The two of you turn to look at the other boy at the same time. He stands still, axe limp in his hand as he stares at the two of you. The marks he’s left in the tree are an irregular mess, broad and shallow, and the boy’s sweating like he’s been working for hours but without a decent depth to show for it. The flame in the lantern is dangerously low. Lower than it ever was with you.
“Wirt,” the Beast says, and your head jerks back to him immediately, “I need an edelwood felled before the day’s end.”
You respond without thought, stepping forward and taking your axe out of the boy’s hand. He resists for the briefest of moments, but relents, lets the handle slide from his grip to yours. He disappears from your notice after that, and you take up position in front of the edelwood, swing and bury the axe’s head deep into the wood. Your arms are weak, you’re out of practice, but your body remembers the form. You find your rhythm, settle back into it as though you never even stopped, and steadily work your way through the trunk.
When the tree finally groans its surrender and crashes to the forest floor, the sun has sunk to the horizon. You wipe the sweat from your brow and try to shake out the aches from your arm, and finally turn back to the clearing.
The Beast is waiting for you, watching you with luminous, unreadable eyes. The boy is gone, off to wander aimlessly through the woods. You try to sympathise, and fail. The edelwood makes a slick, dark oil, and the lantern consumes it greedily until the flame is huge and bright against the early darkness of the summer night.
When you start walking again, there’s a hand on your shoulder and one on your hip, a voice low in your ear whispering directions and a single, brief apology. You tell him you accept it, though you are not foolish enough to believe it, and you relax into the sound of his singing as you walk through the night.