The Formless Gate

The sun had just begun to touch the hills when I reached the Formless Gate. There was but one gap in the mighty trees, a yawning mouth that both beckoned and repelled. Around it, oaks the size of mountains stood sentinel, guarding the perimeter. There was no mistaking it for a normal tree line, not like the copse of birches by our farm. No. This was not a human place.

I tightened my cloak around my shoulders, trying to remember something of the courage I’d shown mother before I left. Unfortunately, like water leaking from a pail, I’d lost a good deal of my nerve during the two-day’s journey from the farm. But I knew I couldn’t turn around. To go home empty-handed was to starve.

Taking a deep breath, I marched toward the gate, my palms facing outward, empty. Everyone in the village said the trees would only harm you if you threatened them first. But with no axe or torch in my hand, what could I possibly do to them? The trunks were wider than my house, the bark thicker than my arm. It would take a lifetime for me to even scratch the surface.

As I crossed the threshold, stepping into the endless sylvan twilight, I paused, certain something would happen. But as I waited, my ears straining to hear past the crashing waves of bird song, nothing changed. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps I was welcome here.

For all the villager’s chatter about this place, only Old Tom had actually been here. It had been decades earlier, when he was probably just called Tom. But I figured only his advice was worth listening to. Everyone else’s was hearsay, or worse. What he’d said, though, wasn’t all that reassuring — if I simply walked into the woods, the forest would find me.

There was no path to guide me forward, only a sense of going deeper, of leaving the light behind. I stepped carefully on the mossy floor, eager to avoid crushing anything the trees might call their own. For a long time, I kept looking back, longing for the dappled sunlight at the edge of the woods. But after a while, even that was hidden by the trees.

Reaching a narrow stream, I stooped to take a drink before filling my canteen. Old Tom was certain that was allowed, though he’d warned me not to bring any human food into this place. “Agriculture offends them,” he’d said, as if I wasn’t coming here to ask for something for the farm. The water was like nothing I’d ever tasted. Clean and cold, I felt reinvigorated, like I’d hardly walked at all the past two days.

As I crossed over the water, though, something shifted. The bird song that had seemed so loud grew muted, distant, and the forest floor grew thick with brush and grass. It was waist high in most places, and I had no choice but to wade through it. All around me, it seemed to rustle. I swiveled my head at every sound, but they would go silent the moment I looked. Was it in my head? Or was something following me?

Ahead of me, I could see a blessed break in the underbrush, and I ran for it, bursting out into a clearing. To my right, the rustling resumed, and I braced for some creature to emerge, to punish me for some unseen trespass against the forest. Instead, a fox poked out its head. It stared at me, cocking its head. In its ears were a tangle of leaves, marking it as tree-kin. I bowed, hoping it would sense my good intentions. It blinked, slipping back into the tall grass.

I wiped my forehead, the skin clammy with nervous sweat. It felt like I’d been walking for hours. I looked at the canopy, though it was impossible to gauge the sun with how thick the forest was. Was I nearly there?

It was then that I saw it. Ahead of me, a ring of trees circled around the darkest part of the forest I’d seen yet. They looked as though they’d been carved, with strange shapes passing through the bark and pooling up the darkness. Some of the shapes could have been faces, ghoulish things leering from on high.

I swallowed hard. This, at least, was in everyone’s telling of this place. You walked into the center of the “faced trees” and spoke your piece. Afterward… Well, in Old Tom’s case, they’d apparently said “yes,” though he refused to talk about what it was he’d asked for. We all knew to wrong a tree was death. Sickness, storms, calamity — something would always follow if we broke the pact. But what did humans truly know about this place?

Coming to the edge of the circle, I tried not to lock eyes with any of those carvings. Peering into the darkness, though, I found it not so dark as I had feared. The floor was covered with strange glowing mushrooms, the caps emanating a soft purple light. In the middle was a raised clump of land, so I walked to it, standing in the center.

Just as I wondered when they might appear, the wind began to blow. It had been so absent from the rest of the forest, seen only in the canopy as the air kissed the treetops. Now, it seemed like a storm was somehow passing, the holes carved into the trees whistling in a great torrent of sound. The noise began to deepen, the ground seeming to vibrate as the howling took shape, forming words.

We, the wind groaned, passing through the tree across from me, remember.

Why, a tree asked somewhere behind me, do you forget?

Too young! another cried. They live but decades, it is why they made the pact.

You, they all howled as one, making my ears buzz. What do you seek?

“Land!” I cried, unsure if they would hear me over the howling of the wind. “We lost a crop to blight, and the elders say we’ve no more chances. But there are unused acres on the hills, if we could only try a bit more seed before the summer starts…”

I trailed off, unsure what else to say. “Don’t babble,” Old Tom had advised. “They either will or they won’t.”

But the wind…it became like laughter, chittering through the leaves.

See? a tree to my right said. They still forget.

The mushrooms began to shake beneath me, rippling in waves like a stone dropped into a pond.

Remember, child, the trees said as one. Remember why.

Before I could run, the mushrooms turned back toward me. Squirming like a bed of snakes, they crawled onto my boots, inching up my legs. I was frozen, helpless against the writhing mass. As they reached the top of my shins, there was a hole in my pants. Like the fingertip of an unseen god, one reached in, and my vision went black.

“He’s scared,” a voice somewhere in the darkness said.

“It’s too much,” said another. “I told you.”

I blinked open my eyes, finding myself in a room I’d never seen before. Made entirely of wood, it was like the inside of a tree. Around me were ten chairs. They grew as if from the wood itself. And in them, were ancient looking creatures. They were vaguely human, but as my eyes adjusted, I found their faces had no skin. They were a mass of leaves and sticks, each one shaped into a wooden face.

“Where am I?” I asked, my own voice seeming distant from my body.

“Not where, child,” one of the tree creatures said, laughing. “But who? You touched the forest and entered it. Your soul, our soul, intertwined.”

“Why?” was all I could manage.

“We want to show you,” one said over my left shoulder. Its voice was lighter, softer. It reminded me of mother. “The mushrooms are the way.”

“Rather ingenious,” one said, its face covered with a mossy beard. “You invented it. Not that humans remember such things. It’s been, what…millennia? ‘Synaptic development’ you called it then, I think. Grafting human nerve DNA onto fungi, connecting it to the root system we trees used to communicate. I think you were rather desperate then…”

“D…NA?” I spelled, uncertain what nearly any of those words meant.

“You mean you really don’t remember?” the one like mother asked.

“We honor the trees,” I said, reciting the catechism. “Is there anything else?”

“Look,” she said. “And see.”

My vision blacked again, though it was replaced by horrible visions. Fires, floods, strange metal houses washed away by waves.

“Please!” I cried, desperate for it to stop. “Please!”

Just as quickly, I was back in that strange wooden throne room, a place I never thought I’d be grateful to return to.

“What…was that?” I asked.

“The before. Generations upon generations ago for your kind. You turned to us, to see if we could do what you could not. If we could grow fast enough to right your atmosphere.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Look,” the bearded one said. He held out his palm, and leaves grew out of it. They formed a kind of pattern, like the cross-stitching mother did at night beside the fire. Instead of colored string, though, it was made of darker and lighter leaves. It showed a line, rising to a peak before it fell. A mountain, maybe?

“This was how much carbon there was in your air, from your machines. Look now, we’ve brought it back to 220 parts per million, the perfect number. One we maintain, thank you very much. And all we ask is that you honor the pact. Thirty percent wild land throughout the Earth. It was a number your kind came up with, despite your forgetting.”

Again, I didn’t know what they were saying, but I didn’t want to seem a fool. If nothing else, I just wanted to get home alive, to never come to this place again.

“So, the farm?”

“Quite out of the question, child,” the mother one said, her voice far gentler than the others. They were like a king and queen, her and the bearded one.

“Take it up with your kind. If you’ve decided to start hoarding your own resources again, not dividing them evenly…”

“But the blight.”

“Come now,” a tree behind me said, “surely there’s something we can do.”

“Show us,” another said.

“Show you what?”

“The blight.”

“I don’t know how,” I began to say, but with a wave of his hand, the bearded one dredged my own memories up into my mind. I saw the blight, the fuzzy white patches on our crops, mother crying by the hearth. Surely if your father had lived, her voice seemed to echo in the throne room, filling me with shame.

“This,” the woman tree said, “is in our power.”

“A vote?” another asked.

“Aye,” a great many of them said. But how many? Was it enough?

“So be it,” the bearded one said. With a great knocking of wood, he stomped his foot, and my vision went black again.

I woke up outside the forest, the Formless Gate looming up above me. I jolted upright, my eyes darting around the darkness. Had I fallen asleep somehow? Dreamt of the forest? The sun had set, and a great yellow moon had risen behind me, casting its pale light on the ancient bark.

What should I do? Dreams of this place were always warnings. But it hadn’t felt like dreaming. It had felt too real, too visceral. More importantly, as I wracked my brain, I couldn’t remember when I could have possibly fallen asleep. If I had been dreaming, there was no way I could enter the forest now. Who knew what could be lurking in that darkness?

I looked into the great gap between the trees, and hundreds of yellow eyes seemed to stare back. I thought to run, when a fox just like the one I’d dreamt of emerged from between the trees. It lowered its head, dropping something at my feet. A roll of paper.

I opened it, finding words scratched into it in a strange, curling hand. At the top, were three words: Cure for Blight.