The Vanquished Forest

Once upon a time, there was an ominous forest and a terrified kingdom. But such a time is past. The deep forest, full of witches, fairies, and monsters was no match for terror, no match for the instruments of humanity. The people triumphed, they conquered, and as humans do, they razed it to the ground. All that was left of the fearsome wood were the stumps, inadvertently marking the graves of the forest’s inhabitants.

And happily ever after could not be.

For the forest had stood for millenia. It held knowledge and sentience. With its own power and the magic from the blood of its fallen inhabitants, the vindictive forest demanded repayment from those who brought about its ruin. The people with their fleeting lives, could not understand that something so ancient left its essence in the earth and in the air.

Thus, they were in the dark when the Dreams began, bringing pain that lasted over a century, when the old conquerors had long died off and their descendants were left to pay the price.

Among the dark-eyed, sallow-faced humans in the Kingdom of Deleo, lived a tortured young woman called Wren. A sickly bird, the villagers spoke of her behind her back, expressing the contemptuous pity reserved for girls who were not pretty enough to be considered ‘tragically beautiful.’ And indeed, her eyes did seem especially sharp and beady, her cheekbones and chin just a little too pointed to appear natural. Of all the villagers, her Dreams were perhaps the most potent. So much did she fear her restless slumber that she concocted countless draughts to stay awake, risking witchcraft allegations or death.

As far as Wren knew, her Dreams were no worse than others’; these were the things that no one spoke of, since daytime was the only respite from their torment and no one wished to dwell on the horrors of the night. Yet her experiences could not have been more different than theirs. Take Madame Basset, the woodcutter’s wife. In a recent Dream, she was in her husband’s shop, admiring a fairy figurine carved in cherry wood, when the figure moved, buzzing around her head. All the tame, sculpted wood became twisted trees, ensnaring her in their roots and branches. Fairies, laughing manically, tore at her hair and carved into her face until she realized that she was now a wooden carving, unable to move. Screams were trapped in her throat as they whittled away at her. That morning, Madame Basset woke up with a heaving sigh and continued with her business as usual. The forest’s curse was especially brutal for her, and gruesome Dreams ran in her blood. To the misfortune of the Basset line, her grandfather was a lieutenant who participated in the destruction of the forest.

Wren’s latest Dream was terrifying in another sense. Transported a century before her birth, she stood at the heart of the thriving forest, with witches casting spells, not to needlessly harm, but to learn and innovate. The fairies did not seem as vicious as she had been told; they instead appeared joyful and content. Then the scene shifted to show the vanquished forest, filled with corpses of fallen knights and soldiers. They had won their war, but they paid a price, as did the forest. The gnarled trees seemed to be withering away, yet the massive trees continued fighting until they disintegrated in front of her eyes. Wren watched her kingdom expand like an overfed parasite through a haze of gray. She blinked to clear her vision, but the image remained tinted, and she realized her eyes did not deceive her. The trees she had thought gone appeared in perfect detail, rendered in a semi-transparent mist that smelled earthy. When the wind whistled, the immobile leaves nonetheless seemed to whisper in her ear.

The souls, Wren, our lost witch

They knew her, knew her name, Wren thought distantly. And they called her a witch. Though most of her willed sunlight to slip through the walls of sleep or a breeze to gently lift her eyelids, a small part of her felt that she was finally home. As if sensing her secret interest, the voices continued to murmur.

The souls are the seeds you must sow

To raise the forest of woe

The trees once again became corporeal, thrumming with power. Their branches tangled in Wren’s hair. At first she thought they would attack her, strangle her as she imagined they had done to others. But they didn’t harm her, rather, they seemed to lend her their strength. For once in her eighteen years, Wren felt full of life. She shivered, overwhelmed with the battle in her mind between fear and awe. The vision brimmed with potential. But wakefulness was tugging her out of the Dream already, and when the voices spoke again, she struggled to understand their second rhyme.

Bring their spirits …

And soon … will be complete

With those lines registering and reshaping themselves in her head, Wren awoke to her straw mattress and stone cottage. Reality was dull compared to her vivid Dream. But as she recalled the details, she forced herself to remember that it was just a Dream. She had almost fallen prey to the forest’s spell, just as she’d always been cautioned against. All inhabitants of the land abided by one simple rule: you must never give in to the forest. For most, ‘never give in’ meant that they must not allow themselves to be overwhelmed by fear or to give up hope, since succumbing to the horror slowly drained one of life. For Wren, the forest and its promises called to her like a siren song. The Dream stayed with her as she methodically made a meager breakfast and scrawled a short note for her sleeping parents and brother still trapped inside their own Dreams. Then she began the long trek into town.

Normally, Wren followed the most direct path to the market, passing familiar homes and faces, yet in her daze, she wandered. Instead of heading deeper into the kingdom, where the center of town was situated, an inner force led her in the opposite direction. Wren mulled over the message she heard, trying to recall the exact wording, the exact slippery tone of the voices. When she tried to fill in the gaps, she could only think of one rhyme that would make sense:

Bring their spirits through deceit

And soon our vengeance will be complete

The forest was wily and vindictive, as every Dream-plagued person knew. It had called a witch, but she had no way to know whether it spoke truthfully. There had always been rumors that Wren was the descendant of a witch, perhaps one of the few lucky ones who had escaped from the chaos with their lives. She wondered whether the Dream confirmed these rumors or if the forest simply hoped to inspire some sort of loyalty from her. Deceit and vengeance, though. Those must have been the words, she reasoned. She was raised on stories of the forest’s cruelty, stories of kidnapped children, changeling babies, and dreadful curses. The Dreams themselves demonstrated the forest’s penchant for causing pain.

An eerie stillness of the air jarred her from her reverie. She finally looked up from the worn cobblestones. The emptiness in front of her seemed to stretch on to the horizon, with a distant mountain range as the only sign that anything existed beyond the destruction. The beige grass looked brittle, permanently dehydrated, and there were still charred tree stumps poking out from the ground. No life, no growth existed other than some stubborn, tangled weeds. Through whatever magic remained, the forest attempted to preserve itself, refusing to let go of what it had lost.

And Wren was filled with a strange sorrow of how such a magnificent, vibrant place had been reduced to rubble. As she looked towards the center of the old forest, she heard echoes of the voices in her Dream.

The souls are the seeds you must sow

To raise the forest of woe

But the rest… Wren listened carefully and tried to decipher the words again.

Bring their spirits to face their deceit

And soon our restoration will be complete

It was not a call for blood as she had first thought. With that realization, Wren turned and sprinted back to town, her footsteps sure this time. The enduring tree stumps in the empty field, the persisting Dreams, it was as if the forest simply wished to be remembered, mourned, and healed. She slowed. For how could she forget the horror of those Dreams and the nightmarish things they all (she included) saw while they slept? Perhaps she was too easily fooled. Yet a small voice, her voice, told her that the forest was not the enemy, and it likely never was. Wren recalled Madame Basset, whose open expression always revealed a hint of shame when someone made mention of her grandfather’s brutal legacy. The tremor in their local storyteller’s voice when she recounted the battle against the forest, not out of fear but uncertainty. Even the king’s reclusiveness spoke volumes. She continued moving.

The Dreams came from the forest, of that there was no doubt. But the content of the Dreams were their own creation, borne of guilt and unease. Out of breath, Wren reached her destination: a small shop in the market that was rarely visited by the townspeople for obvious reasons, that an ancient man nonetheless kept in business.

“One sapling, please,” Wren whispered as she pushed a few coins across the table. Though the man handed it to her without a word, the muttering began as she walked back through the square, to the forest. She heard quite a few hisses of ‘witch,’ and they were right. Either by blood or by choice, she was a witch, and had found the key to breaking their self-imposed curse.

In the heart of the old forest, a century after its demise, the young woman, witch, interpreter of Dreams, planted a tree of regret and acknowledgment, of growth and healing. And happily ever after was not so far from reach.