A Wild and Terrible Thing

So trembling, and covered in blood, we learnt to walk again. The trees spat us out, raw and blinking, as if doubting our ability to pull ourselves upright.

Our muscles were unfamiliar with this new, heavier gravity. Every step awkward, stuttering, shivering beneath the tight pull of skin.

We pulled air into our lungs and gasped at its clarity, something we fought so long to forget the meaning of. The river nearby, relentless as memory, sang its silver song. At its edge we hesitated, but the current called to us and the undertow promised absolution.

On the far bank, the world was changed—a little brighter, a little hungrier as if set on devouring us. The trees did not know us, opened a path for us to follow, carved from old desires and older fears.

We glimpsed ourselves amidst reflected starlight. Our faces half-shadow, eyes rimmed with red, mouths set in lines we barely recognised. Behind us, a smear of light — will-o’-the-wisps, the memory of others who had taken these steps and never returned. The woods had taught us only one honest thing: curiosity always trumps survival.

Soon the world stopped pretending to be ordinary. The path melted into a spiral of colour, a helix of impossible weather and clouds that pulsed like living things. Each step forward unmade the old world.

We walked for what felt like centuries, until bones and flesh agreed again on how to exist together. The world scrolled past in fragments: bone-white birch, meadows humming with insects, torchlight burning in distant windows.

We met others along the way. An old man, waist-deep in a pond, who asked for the hour and wept when we told him. A boy who claimed to be my brother, but I remember being alone as a child. Some of them walked with us, for a while. Most vanished when we looked away.

Sometimes the road doubled back until we found our own footprints waiting in the mud. Sometimes voices sang from just out of sight about hunger. About creatures that always counted those leaving, but never those returning. We walked faster then, barely noticing when the trees grew eyes and wind called our names in the lilt of a lost parent.

One night, when the stars hung so low we thought we could pluck them, we came to a circle of mushrooms in a clearing. The warning bells were deafening, stories from a time long gone. Never step inside. Never eat the fruit. Never give your real name.

But the rings were too perfect, too inviting, and we were so tired of being afraid.

We laughed, and stepped inside.

The world fell away like wet paper.

Twilight held everything. The world snapped back into focus, but wrong: brighter, closer, as if painted over itself. I touched the bark of a nearby tree—

And for a moment I was alone.

For one sharp moment, I felt the world narrow around me, as if some old bargain had turned its face my way. Then the tree dismissed me, and we were many again.

The light shifted: less gold, more violet. The sky grew larger and closer. The air hummed with a frequency we felt in our teeth. Sunlight dripped rather than shone, pooling in the dips of the landscape. The trees wore their shadows like cloaks, and the rivers ran uphill, singing a song that made our bones itch.

We tried to turn back, but every step in reverse lengthened the distance to the place we still called home, though none of us could have said what waited there anymore.

Rules asserted themselves, slowly. First, we forgot how to count the days. We began to carve time into our flesh, watching the blood drip up into the clouds. Until we forgot why we wanted to. When we tried to tally the hours, the figures slid off our tongues and vanished into the air.

After that, memory thinned. The woods left us only what pleased them: the crack of a deer’s leg in the underbrush, the taste of green apples, the smell of wet stone after rain. Names frayed first. Then faces. Then the shape of our own hands.

We wandered. Sometimes the world wrapped itself around us, compressing into a corridor of thorns or an avenue of arching midnight. Sometimes it opened so wide it seemed we might fall upward into it. We woke on the lips of canyons, on the crest of waves, in fields where every blade of grass whispered a secret too dangerous to keep. There was a mountain that beat like a heart, and a cave beneath it where lost things went to sleep.

We learnt caution because carelessness was punished beautifully. Never eat what is offered, but never refuse a gift. Answer every question with a question. Never lie, even if the truth tastes foul. Smile at every stranger, especially those who look like friends. If you must bleed, do it into the river.

If you must cry, do so into your hands, lest the tears grow mouths and start whispering back.

Once, under a swollen moon, the creatures found us. Their faces were lit from within, lovely with hunger. The music they carried caught in our bones before our feet began to move. We danced until our shoes split and our toes bled, and still the rhythm held us upright. When at last the music stopped, the creatures bowed. So did we. No one spoke of what had been promised. Debt does not need to be named to survive.

The creatures kept sweet things, and beautiful things. We meant not to become either.

Hunger became a companion. The fruit shone like treasure, but tasted of memory and regret. We learned to bite only the rind, to spit out every seed. We drank from the river at dusk, and only with our left hand. Small rituals, learned by instinct or inherited from the bones of the place.

We walked, we watched. We stopped waiting for madness to arrive. The place had no use for madness; it preferred adaptation.

One morning, we woke to find the world had shifted again. The sky was greener, the sun sharp as a blade, and the air was thick with warning. We felt, rather than saw, that something was coming. We stood very still, and listened.

The thing that came out of the woods was not a monster, at least not in the way that mattered. It was the shape of a woman, her skin the colour of birch, her eyes blind and knowing. She smiled, the kind of smile you give to a child before you tell them the truth.

She beckoned. We followed, because that’s what you do when the world gives you a path. She led us to a hill overlooking everything we had walked through, everything we had survived. She pointed, and we saw the mushroom circle below, our own footsteps circling it. We saw the trees leaning in. We saw the river, thick with memory, looping back on itself.

“Is this what you wanted?” she asked.

We tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. We realised, then, that we had forgotten our names. It didn’t matter. Names were for the old world. The old world felt less like memory than something we had once been told.

We thought of the version of us that had not stepped forward, the ones still standing at the edge of the circle, still capable of fear. We did not know which one of us had been kinder.

She nodded, as if she could hear the thought. “You may call it home. It may not answer.”

We stood on the hill, uncertain, and looked at the world below. All the dangers, all the wonders, the things that could kill us and the things that could make us live forever. A wild and terrible beauty, the kind of thing that parents warn their children against, but secretly hope they will find.

We remembered the warnings, the stories told around campfires, the rules whispered by cautious lips. But those rules belonged to a world we no longer remembered clearly enough to trust.

So we stepped forward, off the edge of the hill. We fell, and the wind carried us, and the blood from our feet trailed behind us like a comet’s tail. We landed in the circle and the world blinked.

We looked into the light, the darkness between the stars. The trees spat us out, raw and blinking, as if doubting our ability to pull ourselves upright. So trembling, and covered in blood, we learnt to walk again.