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Nyxie didn’t entirely know why she had returned to the forest.
The decision wasn’t one she had decided by herself, not fully. It was on a whim that she had decided to take a walk outside, random chance that she took the forward path at the crossroads instead of the right toward the village, pure accident that she stumbled forward, lost in thought, until she found herself standing between the tall, rotting pines of the old forest.
It was the call of the void that compelled you, she would later suggest to herself, once she was back in the safety of her own home, or the subconscious still trying to find closure. They were loose excuses, really— in the moment, as she picked past bulbous roots and strangling vines, she didn’t feel anything pulling her along, or whispering in her mind, or wanting her to move her feet another step forward. She could almost picture herself apart from the body, watching from above like the birds that did not sit in the branches as a hand brushed away rotting bark on a tree and the ends of a pair of crutches were smudged with damp soil, disturbing a singular earthworm underneath.
The quiet didn’t help, either. Not the squelch of mud under her boots nor the body’s laboured breathing could distract from the stifling silence permeating the air. The wind, present earlier in the day when she had first set out, had slowed to a stand-still, the remaining leaves in the dark boughs above unmoving. Thankfully, the trees seemed to be thinning, the space between them widening, and Nyxie faintly wondered if she had made a loop around, before coming face to face with the clearing.
Nyxie jolted as she was pulled back to herself. Her eye widened as she realised what she was looking at, and she took a step back. Her crutches caught on something as she overcompensated, almost making her fall to the root-covered floor, barely even realising what she was doing because—
—arms unable to lift her slight figure off the ground even though there was practically no weight to carry and the grass seeming to pull her back in in in and rotting vines slipping off her fingers and living vines wrapped around her thin legs being better support than the bones themselves the realisation as she stared at her reflection in a puddle that she was a living corpse—
Because nothing had changed.
Even as she built up the courage to step forth, the grass— brown, dead— collected around her hungrily, though not with much force, as if willing her to fall back and return to the ground from whence she came. As she took another step forward, two, three, four, she saw the indent in the soil where she had woken up the first time. The puddle where she had seen herself for the first time still pooled, glistening, on the ground. Nyxie crept around the edge of the clearing (still as circular as ever, seeming to push back the admittedly sparse vegetation just outside) and firmly avoided stepping into the time capsule-like space.
One of the first things she remembered was, somewhat paradoxically, not remembering anything. Even now that she had somewhat filled in the gaps and softened the edges where many still remained in her mind with her ever-beloved context, she did not recall anything before waking up in this cursed clearing.
Maybe it was better this way; that she didn’t know what it was like to have her body completely attached, to feel warm blood rushing through her veins, to not eternally feel the breaks in her mind where her memories had dissolved into oblivion. Maybe it was fine that her emaciated legs could not stand alone, that the only thing keeping her awake was the magic pulsing through the ground. Maybe she could live like a puppet on strings; as much as she could live, in any real sense of the word.
Maybe it wasn’t okay that the thought made her want to sob through tear ducts that she did not have.
(It was on her way home that Nyxie saw a child, barely five, playing in the dirt with a broken doll, holding it by its string arms and making it dance.)
(If the first thing she did once she was out of hearing distance was to start laughing hysterically at the irony of it all, that was just for her to know.)