Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Where long forgotten stories are revealed to those who travel through the woods

All that was lost, is revealed 

Our long bygone burdens, mere echoes of the spring

Autumn colors fall. Dancing in a swirl of golden memories. 

Winter would bring the world to its knees. All that remained after the harvest would decompose and be swallowed into the cold of the earth. Winds blew in storms, and blew out little, fragile lives. What lived, hibernated. Slept.

Spring was flowers and fruits. They poked out from the ground at first cautiously, then curiously, and then grew so boldly. The sleeping woke. Experiences grew as sprouts did. 

Spring was full of song. Songs which later echoed, only echoed. Late frosts easily killed fruit that bloomed confident that the cold was over. Youth was a fragile thing. A fragile thing.

Summer sweltered. Its reputation conflicted: lazy and laborious. Crops ripened. The cold of Winter was forgotten. It was a careful balancing act. Its heats either revealed discontent or content and spoiled the story of whether such lives would be claimed by the nostalgia of the Fall or the sleeping sighs of the hiburnal. 

Animals laid down to die. Bones were bleached by the overbearing sun. Seeds too late to grow would not grow at all. Forests of saplings failed to last. The great woods, well established, provided mercy under their canopy of leaves. Summer could not kill them. But it may try.

So much flourished in that season regardless of bias against lonely, tiny trees that would wilt in its heat. 

And then comes Autumn once more, its mists, its moonlit nights, its golden colors falling in a swirl- memories, unbidden, mere memories. The echoes of those lives yellowing, wilting, drifting to the forest floor now. Burdens fade away and stories are revealed and nary do these patterns change. 

The forests were haunted by its songs for as long as any could remember. It called in the curious. It soothed the hopeless. It lured the lost. Lullabies of the night and jolly choruses alike frightened those that hid in their homes and inns. The contents need not matter. The context made no difference. To those who were not yet called into the trees, the ever-present reminder of the horror that lived in the dark was enough to claw down the mind and erode the will. The booming voice drifting out of the night could be singing the alphabet for all that it mattered, when the voice carried on the wind functioned to remind the souls of the Unknown that these were the Beast’s woods. It could be in any one of the shadows, anywhere in its own forest.

They lived, they hid, they died by its rules. Other beings might think they had more of a claim on the souls of the dead, but for all that they might call themselves gods, they could not encroach upon what was fairly given. If they died in its hands, they were no other’s souls to guide anywhere. 

Within the nebulous place that was the Unknown, there was always the forest, there was always the Dark Lantern, and there was always the beast that prowled in the trees. 

Just as there were pastures, farms, burial grounds, star-lit clouds- plenty of places to roam, plenty of other hands to place oneself in. 

Time existed as all seasons at once, and it danced along a linear, wobbly rope that experienced them in cycles, both, neither.

How strange was it to have nothing but silence from that forest now? How badly did the equilibrium of the whole organism falter without so substantial a quarter? 

What became of a woods used to a predator, without it stalking the trees?

At the core, the nature of the forest did not change.

Its soil still swallowed those that gave in and lay down to let all the inner entanglements become outward branches. Those that submitted were overgrown. The Beast did not need to be there to benefit from the finished tree’s oil, for the tree to grow in the first place. 

The lost

The meek 

The weak

Sunk like a stone to the bottom of the river where mud rustled and covered and buried all signs it ever existed

Its fog

The deep, dark grief

Alone

Grow, tiny seed

You are lost to the trees

The Beast did not need to be there to sing to the seeds or drink away the black tears of the forgotten. 

The forest was the forest- 

The soil was the soil-

The night was the night-

And surrender was surrender.

Whether there be a cycle to maintain or break.

Many were pushed to give in when the cold made their very bones rigid and the snow was a blanket of agony. Fog was distressing or dulled memories, wishes, and wills. Darkness led the confident off track and acted as an open maw for worries to echo back infinitely within. But it was the cold that actually did the trick. The rest was necessary for keeping lost souls lost. It sealed their fate as tinder for its fire. The Beast did not kill, directly, for that spoiled the whole thing. Mere corpses did not produce edelwood. Those lost in its darkness were sometimes already dead and simply had not been claimed. They just needed to forget. They just needed to surrender. And time would do the rest for whatever body they wandered themselves silly in. 

The North Wind blew without bias. He did not care who was sent flying away. They may be oneroi, they may be ancient, fragile leaves, they could be children who had done nothing to offend him. So many others would hesitate there. So many others would draw back, and grimace, and say aren’t you too young, oh what a pity, what a shame! But not the North Wind. Ugly little monsters and adorably fearful cherubs made no difference to him. 

He would breathe and breathe and down in the trees, the snow that hurt the shuddering, freezing mortals would slow their escapes, dull their thoughts, and hurt until it did not anymore.

The Beast got most edelwood from those cold fronts. It benefited best when the wind blew ‘til souls couldn’t feel no more. 

Its own soul was snuffed even easier. All it took was a single breath. One from a mortal. Not even one that required dramatic exertion. 

It panicked, it hated, it felt agony and one blow later, it felt nothing at all.

There was a fair bit of bias from the Woodsman though. It was not a totally fair comparison. Winter killed because it was Winter. The Woodsman killed because he had many a grievance with the Beast and he was sick of those burdens. 

Differences only highlighted the pieces that were similar. 

Irony did not burn nicely at all. 

Far from any home, and on the border of every mind across the world and time alike, the Unknown lay. The forest constituted much of its boundless grounds. There was always the Unknown. There was always a dark forest. There would always be edelwood growing in the shadows. 

A soul extinguished had no more will, to choose differently. Blown away into total darkness, it could only be swallowed by the soil beneath it. It was only a matter of time. There was no light to follow. No voice to chase. No hands to lay a claim otherwise and so it sank. 

Chapter Text

This much was true: the Beast predated many of the features in the Unknown, and the Dark Lantern predated it by at least a second. It crept or sped through the shadows of the forest. It was the forest, was the shadows. 

Wayward souls slipped into the fog. 

Fires required fuel.

The thick black tears of edelwood fed the master of the woods. The forest deserved to be served by its trees. 

Mortals feared the thing that prowled and so it learned to stand instead. Mankind ran from or hunted beasts with antlers and shining eyes and innate danger, but learned to respect the Beast. 

This, too, was fact: not all wayward souls ended up claimed by the Beast. The Unknown was more vast than its forest. There were other graves, other ethereal doors heavenward, other hands to lay one’s fate in, yes indeed. 

With appearances seen how a mortal thought they should be perceived, but underlying duties and patterns the same no matter what soul came by their grasp. 

If the skies would always accept the dreams of the wishful, if Autumn would always celebrate its harvest, were they not immortal? Immortal, no matter the external? Immortal and not imaginary? 

Here was another truth, perhaps already known, ‘though it had not spread that far yet: the Beast’s soul resided in the Dark Lantern, the Dark Lantern was the burden of a Woodsman, and the Woodsman extinguished its flame in one breath. The Fire was gone. It might be praised, and it wouldn’t matter. It would make no difference in the fact that the flame did not exist anymore. 

The Unknown was eternal. Death’s presence was immortal so long as creatures lived to die. A mortal had slain an immortal and so it was apparent the lord of the forest was not a constant, an immortal, after all.

That should have been made obvious by the existence of its soul in any form. It burned, so it could burn out. It lived, so it could die. 

But it was prevented for so long.

It acted as the guide, then devourer, for the dying. 

One could mistake it for a permanent fixture in the Unknown. 

It ensured the lantern was fed always because it knew, in truth, that it could disappear and it was a hypocrite on such matters. Sorrow and fear were not going to be easily forgotten by accepting it was dead. 

Some of these things were lies and some were half-truths and all could be considered stories. But what was more real than a story? 

What was more immortal?

Not the Beast, as it turned out.

Darkness was eternal. So the stalker of the night would be thought to live forever.

Life was not so relevant for creatures like them.

Existence ...darkness was eternal, and existence was not when one was erased out of the clouded annals of history. The soul was an ephemeral thing. Quick. Fragile. Temporary. The Dark Lantern’s burning flame either existed, or it did not. Such fact was binary. Mutually exclusive. 

So existence could be called more relevant than life, and the Beast’s flame had been swallowed into true darkness. 

(It was not ready. It was not ready to face its own fragility and did not close its eyes to the black very gracefully.)

Mortals that died in the forest went into the soil and ‘lived’, anew, in a state none could really argue counted. Edelwood was not like all other plants in nature. Still, the dirt swallowed what fell and then held up and fed new growth in an endless cycle of give and take. 

The Beast was shouting for attention, still protesting, unprepared, when it was introduced to true darkness. 

The forest lost its hallmark.

The Dark Lantern was just a lantern. Empty, noiseless, innocuous. 

Edelwood grew with or without the twisted heart of the woods there to feed off their oil.

The vessel of the Beast was rarely seen. So rarely, in fact, that the entity itself could forget what it technically looked like and identify instead as the cloaked shadow it had full power over. 

It was a being of two parts, split. The Dark Lantern held the soul. A vessel of ancient, constantly refreshed edelwood acted as its body. 

Unlike the souls which made those trees, the vessel had no sensitivity. It was the darkness, not the many mouths of those it had been fueled by before. 

The soil can still be felt. It can not be moved. It fed roots so the tree could grow and grow, but otherwise was an unshakeable object caging it in place.

Sap leaks out in a sensation unlike anything a shadow could compare with. It could only stretch imagination wondering if the feelings were equivalent to some that flesh creatures experienced. It drains, the feeling; it drains from a well already pushed past the straining point, demands a supply from a vendor with nothing to give. It burns as well. The actual process. That is a pain more easily given a frame of reference to, though. It is the production again and again of the sap and then loss of it that drains so strangely. 

Every single sense and not-sense is strange in the most unwelcome way. 

It cannot be shaken off. It cannot be explained. It is not understood. 

There is also pain.

As a tree grows taller, it swells. It strains. It cracks down the bark when it can no longer contain the width and reveals the meat beneath. Its surface splits as slowly as a season changes.

There is no detecting how many seasons pass by because for all the faces in an edelwood, it has no eyes to see with. Time is undetectable. It must be passing. The tree grows, and its flesh splits and splits time over, so it must be. 

The sap leaks and drains away a memory or a thought or- or- something important but intangible, every time.

For the most part, it is just darkness and nothing. Not the type of darkness that could be worn and thrived through. A quiet so absolutely silent it practically buzzes. A lack of actual input of any type, and easily no output of thought if it did not claw to keep that function. If it didn't, then it wouldn't really hurt at all. It wouldn't be capable of telling. 

It wouldn't be. 

This is unwelcome. It fights to live when it is far too late, and like any soul in that position, all it serves to do is make it aware that it exists in a nightmarish state it should really be unconscious for.

Irony really is an unwelcome thing.

It wants to scream. It is covered in mouths stretched out to do so, and yet it can make no sound. It has no organs, no magic, to do this. Wood is wood.

No nerves. No skin. It should experience no pain. The mouths all scream soundlessly. 

This was not the Beast.

It was not not the Beast.

Moss takes up growth along the wood, and fungi latches onto it when moist and rotting. Neither stays for long. They seep up black oil instead of any of the nutrients of a tree, detach, and drop dead (not that it can watch, not that it gets to see if they are corrupted into dark imperfections on the forest floor). Whether or not they crawl out of the dirt where these failed lives fall, or come along the ground slowly but surely from anywhere at all, turtles do occasionally walk up and over roots and trunk and branches. They are the only type of creature that can stand exposure to the sap. Though it was generous to call them creatures. 

It can grab none and crush them, rip their soft bits out, squeeze out black ooze wastefully to steal its shadows, or try to force it into the lantern. They migrate on, uninterrupted. 

It is overgrown in its own roots, refusing to stay in the soil. Vines from the forest crawl into the crevices supplied by stretched wood and hollows. Better than bird nests? Better than life dancing about without consequences, within its cavities? Maybe. 

Holes widen like wounds. Its textures go from fresh to old under the weather. 

It is given nothing to see. The hollow eyes of edelwood trees do not burn with dark flame here. Not when winding vines and slinking roots have crawled through those openings.  

But if it could just get a glimpse- 

Winds took its leaves too often for any to really shroud the sky. Stars looked down at it.

This, it keeps thinking, when it is able to think, is important. Somehow, it is important. 

Burning would not be so bad so long as every piece was destroyed and leftover roots wouldn’t just make it grow again. 

Rotting was too unlikely. Took too much time.

An axe was not a force of nature. The roots needed to be dug up too. But it was thorough. A blade to rip it into a multitude of strips all to scream at the air surrounding every side. Or maybe they would escape the unnatural air and experience instead compression, while a mill ground them into paste. 

If the oil was left to seep into the ground again unused, it would only feed the soil. And grow, grow, it would grow again. 

What it wants is to live. 

That was very unlikely to occur by pure chance and coincidence. 

It was only slightly more likely to occur intentionally, because that required another force to choose to dig up rather than destroy. 

It needed to make a deal.

Oh, that’d be a first. The Beast was not a fixture of the Unknown that functioned based on deals, and rule-abiding exchanges. It merely let souls think that. 

It understood the concept of debts, of course. They did not particularly apply to it, but this did not mean that it didn't fully fathom why and how they might to others. Talking down mortals is served well by this knowledge. It can lead them to believe they are bargaining, or could convince them they owed someone- rarely itself, but it could pry and find the weak point, the memory of another the lost soul might think they disappointed- and its way was the only way to repay that person. 

So yes. The Beast quite understood the concept of debts.

Technically, it was stiffed from a deal orchestrated by one who dealt in wishes and dreams. With the interference of that boy’s brother, the deal he'd wished for was moot, insoluble. Ruined. What did that say of the deal broker? The dream dealer? It spoke very poorly on her, in its opinion.

Or at least its opinion when it needed her to share it.

So long as its memory only flicked around in the hollows of edelwood, it couldn’t call anything or anyone, and begin the process of explaining this to any creature let alone an uncomfortably powerful entity. 

Limbs reached up, up, without muscle or intention, reached up and failed to fill the sky. A vast expanse remained in between those arms and the night sky. It knew, it KNEW-

what 

needed 

Starlight.

One wish

Adelaide was an adequate servant. She was also dead. Gone to the night wind despite her loyalty to its master.

Pity.

The sister hag did not serve the night. And the oh-so- hungry spirit Whispers kept occupied would rather eat the meat off of bones then allow the soil to claim those bodies. 

The forest itself was it and it, the woods’ stalker, the forest. Yet in this way, one could not answer the other's call. It would be as effective as negotiating with a limb or organ.  

Those trees already burned could provide nothing now. 

Wayward souls passed through without it capable of sensing a single one. They too were unreliable. 

Spirits inclined to the dark were as likely to feast upon its corpse than to aid what was now too weak to hardly lord over them. 

The dark itself devoured it as it devoured the dark, an ouroboros of the predictable and steady, and the imperfections leaked by the Unknown itself. 

Winter’s wind was chained away. He blew, regardless, when his time came ‘round. All this did was strip leaves off and coat wood in snow. (Leaves, given no chance to fill the sky, to hide the view of the stars. Pulled from its branches again and again.) In all other seasons, he was tugged away into the Queen of the Clouds domain more often than the Beast’s. 

Allies in territories separate from the forest meant very little. They could not come. You will not define the terms of this agreement. It must be one sworn to its service, not merely willing to consider the stalker of the dark an ally. 

Adelaide would have been preferable. She could not have made it through the breeze into the trees. 

It could almost begin to think this was a cruel trap. 

The type to make the will spoil. To offer hope and then wait for the simple creature to realize it was going in circles, and was no closer to escape. 

A deal which was rigged. 

That was not her style. 

It was a deer with its ankle crushed in steel teeth. It could circle and circle but never walk from where such a heavy weight had it pinned. If something was near enough, it may hear the pitiful cries of a doomed fawn; if something heard, the pathetic creature might be released. If if if. It relied very much on if. 

You will not define the terms of this agreement.

The cage did not have to be blatant for the powers at play to fulfill what they claimed they would, and still nearly ensure it would not live. 

When life finally- finally? It knew not how long it’d been but it felt like eternities- came across the twisted edelwood, vague awareness detected them like tiny little fuzzy points of pressure against consciousness. It heard not through shadows. Their weight upon the soil was only faintly noticeable. 

If they lifted lanterns to better see the tree for what it was, it couldn’t tell. No spot was more warm, when temperature didn’t exist.

It imagined at least one of the weights did so. There was a resonance of shock. That wouldn’t come if wandering souls simply thought they were surrounded by the same old normal trees as all their steps took them through.

“Wh-” 

Too faint. If given enough decades, the trunk of the tree could be twisted to grow in that direction. By then, there’d be no one at the spot that it needed to be nearer, to hear, to pretend it stood a chance at hearing anything.

“-o eed– -for-”

Buried words. Muffled in every layer of substance to exist. No voice to make out, by that reasoning. 

It knew- it thought. One presence. Grief and remorse and hate and helpless, hapless rage, and stupid naivety, and terrible loneliness, so much more overfamiliar with the monster in the darkness than his own kindred souls- rage here- surrender there- easy to fool, easy to use, quick to emotion- Yet subdued emotions at the end, very quiet, no more threats, and it could not do anything with that so it fumbled and compensated loudly for his whispers and could see what he was going to do before he even opened the lantern door.

“Is -h- -ri-”

If he were anything like he was in that unprecedented final state, the man would turn and walk away. 

He couldn't-!

Shadows went unregistered.

Listen to me, Woodsman! Listen to me. That time, he chose not to. This time, he couldn't hear it to start with, before deciding to not listen.

That led to a mute frenzy of the same pointless efforts to be heard. Listen to me! Listen to me! Listen to me! Do not walk. 

He'd been so predictably horrified to see the early stages of an edelwood, to learn what it was he was grinding up for the Beast for years. It bet he probably never touched edelwood again. As if that made him more moral, somehow, when the deed was done and a tree was a tree already. His mission to not cut any down didn't reverse time and revive the soul that turned into a seed. 

Softly now. Merely advising, an ancient wisdom to one less experienced in years. Not enforcing, not overbearing, see? Listen to me. Do not walk. No shadow hands were settled a breath away from the man’s shoulders. No soft tones met his ears.

“-sh- -d- w- – -h–? Ca– - t- u- —v-”

“-ould- –O- –ur- –ve- r-”

Argument? Perhaps. Hard to tell. Too buried, too faint. There was tension and unease in the two weights on the forest ground, on roots, the dirt above roots.

“-u-n?”

The lantern wasn't here. Things still were not right with the world. 

“-...-e-. Th– -n- –a—”

Something shifted. 

More purpose in stances. In footsteps. Nonliving weights were set down. 

Steel bit into its fibrous flesh. Splits ripped apart, open, like time made a trunk do at crawling speeds- but immediate, instead. Fast and painful.

Awareness stayed in branches cut off and those remaining. Split awareness. Splitting into more. 

One hollow in the trunk a turtle spent time laying within was ripped open completely. Reaching limbs hit the ground even further away from the starlight. 

Sap bled from cuts. 

Draining, more rapid than was natural. Things were a screech of the incomprehensible.

It finally saw when the tearing of the axe pulled one of the many obstructions out from oil-black hollows shaped like eyes. The night was bare of most clouds. The sun was gracefully absent. With just a sliver of the sky to witness, there were still over dozens of stars. 

Thud- Yank.

Thud - Yank.

Dozens of stars for the dying to see. 

One would have been enough.

Sleep.

Moreso than sleep.

The teetering state between being and not-being. The encompassing fog and drifting gray haze ferrying the dying, but not yet dead. 

This was where the Unknown lay to begin with. But the Unknown itself was an organism of layers, organs, fixtures, and this one- when peeled off- focused on dreams of the fading, right on the brink, but wills intact and heart airy enough to fly. 

It most certainly did not qualify in the latter respects. It was too old. Not a naïve child. Not one with so little experience, still, that it could unthether like that.

Will, it had plenty of.

And it was creative- it had to be, to play so many into its hands.

This was not territory it ever should've entered. If the North Wind could, damned if his better couldn't, though.

To be claimed in her hands meant going through a warm, bright gateway. Darkness puddled right outside instead. 

She did not split the clouds to drop it from her skies. It won. It won the moment it got an audience instead of being flung out on principle.

It was piggybacking off the wish of a child it took full advantage of. What of it?

His wish was left unfulfilled. The agency and autonomy behind it were nullified when it was all so gruesomely and disrespectfully interfered with. Regardless of if his choice would have led him directly into the maws of death, it was his wish, was it not? His singular request when given the chance for one? 

Under her shadowed, unhappy attention, it had the terrible feeling she was doing this as much for pity as for duty unfulfilled.

It was a somewhat flimsy argument on its part. It did not have to believe it. It could know the child was very naïve to think a deal meant a deal he could win anything from, and still make it sound like she owed it of all creatures. 

She did not look very persuaded even though it knew it was very good at persuading beings of lies and half-truths.

Or perhaps mortals and lesser powers easily cowed into serving its darkness may have given it a misleading sense of success, when confronted instead with a shepherd of death alike to itself. 

It was less of a peer and more of a skewered worm flailing about right now.

Time moved, nonlinear, like it could remember what had yet to come.

One wish

"One wish. You may have one wish."

Even with her usual words, so over-generously handed out, required of a creature of desideration, children's dreams, sugar schemes, her face did not hide its displeasure. They both existed as lights in the darkness, but what very different lights indeed. Her committees cried for what it took. The sky yearned but could not touch what surrendered instead to the soil. She would vastly prefer that forest fade, surely, and with it its evils and comforts alike. Snow skin, bone white, cherry blood, all shaded in the darkness she wished it would disappear forever in. Yet for all that her face betrayed her true feelings, she played out her role like any doll on its strings. If the forest was despair, and the fields neutrality, and the skies an attempt to be any light dream the ground couldn't provide, then she could not be partial and act the part of the dirt she saw it to be. For all that she looked down upon it in dismay and disgust, she provided a mercy she didn't want to give. Fitting this saccharine nightmare. It loathed this place. Its knowledge and existence was too heavy to be sat in the skies, while it could be literally whatever an innocent little mind dreamed it to be.

"You have never given your victims extra time while you dally. Do not make me wait for you."

But it was obvious, what it wanted. At the basest core of a desire: to exist. It needed- clauses. The Dark Lantern, lit. The Forest. The shadows. Its voice, of course. Time reversed so that all returned to normal would be very nice but that was beyond the power of this broker.

Loyal service - Natural position - Hands capable of claiming wayward souls

Allalllalllofit-

The dark under her eyes was disdainful. Light ate and ate away at shadows until there was nowhere else for a speck of them to be.

She did not care to hear clauses of any kind.

You will not define the terms of this agreement.

No deal with you is an exchange. You take, hunger. You are known for your lies and so there will be no room for those embellishments or misleading promises.

It was not used to feeling like it was disconnected from its forest, falling, without a single stabilizing connection to a spot of dirt. Or cold, trickling down a back that should be darkness, untouchable and unaffected. 

Or suffocating, drowning, while sight went out- while it once again was unwillingly presented with true darkness- while black burned white bright and screeched within metal walls.

Chapter Text

“-e awake-?”

“Bew– - safe. –ay cautious.”

'Safe'.

It knew the voices. It was very much unsafe around one of them. 

Lurch. Live. Sooner than later, so it could kill before it was killed. 

“-why we –sai— – Well-”

“-arefu- He stirs-”

The soul lit the lantern first. It was burning in there for a good moment before it started to condense outside its protective walls. Shining, no doubt, in that way, that luminance, that only the Dark Lantern could provide compared to wicks and candles. Though far from vast, the shadow was enough. That pulled aside enough for a pair of the same unique lights to shine out. 

The lantern. They found the lantern, almost immediately. For that moment, no amount of mortals mattered. Only its soul and its eyes and their shared reflection.

There was, the Beast found next, very little space to spread out. Two culprits were obvious. There were walls and a ceiling boxing it into a tiny, but all-too-solid place. And there this box was lit up by far too many lights. A burning fireplace, a handheld candle, weak lanterns on the walls, its own soul.

It was unideal. It could not even let the shadows extend to its proper branches shape and size. There wasn’t room. There was not enough power on its part. 

Someone lit the lantern. ‘Someone’. No, it could see who. One of the few servants around that would know how to. To give the dead lantern edelwood oil would not be enough. It needed to be filled with every essence of the soul again. The echo had to be uprooted completely until the forest held not a single bit anymore. And all of that essence must go into the only casing it could exist within, instead of just dissipating to the sky. 

With Adelaide gone, and hardly easy to move out of her lair anyway, it made sense that the Woodsman was the next best option. The Beast could have been amused at the idea of dreams clouding his mind, using him as a means to complete a debt. 

This was no empty old mill. It was too cared for. Too solid, rather than falling apart in enough places to let the night seep in, or having so few occupants that the one there didn’t bother lighting up the whole place and allowed shadows in nearly every corner. 

He’d gone home. 

After killing it, he’d gone home. 

And there the girl was, healthy and hale, the living proof that he had fallen for a lie. The Woodsman feared a familiar home being filled with unfamiliar emptiness. It was almost surprised he’d overcome that enough to go back and discover the ruse. But for as predictable and simple as the Woodsman was, he could catch it unaware. Having the guts to risk darkness by blowing out the light came to mind. 

Maybe it could have gotten under his skin faster if it didn’t discard him so…officially, a moment earlier, enough to get him off guard and then snatch the lantern back. Making a show of demanding the boy come closer and take on the ‘role’ of ‘lantern bearer’ when the current fool to believe that was a position lay in the snow at their feet left little room for interpretation. The Beast discarded the Woodsman, the Woodsman discarded the Beast, all in the manner of minutes. 

That meant it was its turn again (if the Beast was the type of entity to limit itself to turns or rules). It did not even want to make these souls into fuel. They were rancid enough. It would prefer to cut ties, blow out the flame, simply and quickly and viciously. 

There was so much damn light in this lair. The mortals constrained themselves to spaces this cramped and claustrophobic? It could not judge, since its soul was held in a lantern with even less room. Still. Mortals could choose where they lived, how they lived. They were not born as fixtures of their world, or this world. This might as well be underground in a rabbit’s den. That, at least, provided more deference to the soil that could collapse upon and crush them all if it decided to. The forest surrounded this home. It was an expanse. To the darkness, this was magnificent freedom. Its vessel existed with the most vast of territories, unlike its soul. To mortals, it was a maze, a fog, and despair made manifest as they found themselves hopelessly lost inside. 

There was a door behind where the Beast was collecting shadows to appear a visible entity to mortal souls. It already generated enough of a vessel to make slipping out along the floor under its crack difficult. 

It did not loom properly in an artificial box full of too much light. So it did not even bother to act as if it were a lanky humanoid standing up on two legs. It stayed where it was and let the shadows it could pull swell around it. 

This part of it did not need to worry about getting hurt. The lantern did. The lantern being held by one who knew how it held the Beast’s existence precariously inside. 

So really, the axe at the Woodsman’s leg was pointless and the smaller hatchet in one of his daughter’s hands even less likely to be effective. 

Making a rush for the lantern could be blocked by either, bundled up to extra sizes in those clothes and serving as a barrier to light (and darkness). It stopped staring into its precious, burning soul and glared at the Woodsman in silent expectation. He never failed to talk too much to it before, as if it was listening and considering his protests or pleas. 

“Beast.” There it was. Predictable indeed. What it did not have a comfortably solid expectation for was its own safety in his hands. He blew it out once. He could extinguish it again without anguish. Darkness flicked about, but did not enact visions of damaging him in bitter anger. “Stay where you are.”

“It’s too soon to try moving,” the younger soul said with impressive neutrality. The slim axe rather ruined its genuineness. “Besides,” she tilted her chin up and betrayed that she was shaking, intimidated, in this effort to intimidate, “We will not hesitate to kill even a wounded creature, if they try to kill first, and you are no innocent animal.”

Such emotions. Even in this weakened state, it could tell she was simmering in turmoil. She was equally likely to run, as she had in their very short meeting previously, as she was to begin crying, as she was to settle down into a cautious but curious approach, on and on. While it was curiosity that drew her into the forest before, losing her father for so many years only gave her multiple new pains that could be used to lure her into the fog now. 

Did she hate it, not on her father’s account, but her own- selfishly focused on what she lost, what she missed out on, what she had to act like a healer, a caretaker, for with her own damaged mess of a caretaker? It went against the idealistic innocent the Woodsman painted her as. The Beast rather supported this turn. 

Hate away, child. Grow bitter and inflammable as an adult. Fall into the same traits that made her father so easy to play before. It wasn’t like she was an oblivious youth fragile and ideal for a tree anyway, by now. 

“There is a reason you find yourself here but don’t assume we are unaware of your vile tricks.”

Flattery was always welcome. 

It did as told because it didn’t have a clear reason to risk movement when it needed more awareness of its surroundings and situation. It didn’t bother looking at the escaped mortal either, since it would not be looking away from the Woodsman first. It monitored his every move or lack thereof. It stared, and stared at the Dark Lantern where it was half-hidden by the side of his coat. 

There was an awkward silence. 

The Beast suspected its old pawn was expecting its voice by now, peeling down his will and encouraging the impudent rage that just hurt him more than whatever he tried to turn it on. 

In truth, it could not take credit for this amusement being intentional. It hadn’t sung for the same reason it had not moved: it was petrified so long as its mind could not think louder than the chorus of the lantern, the lantern frantically repeating and overlaying itself. 

The Woodsman cleared his throat with a subdued cough. 

Its soul lay only feet away. It did not exist at all just moments ago. It was consumed by the need to have it in its own grasp, deep in its own forest, and not contained in some artificial, dirty nonsense. 

“Can you hear us?” he asked or wondered aloud, it did not care which. 

It didn’t plan to directly answer. But it would indirectly, by speaking now instead of allowing the panic in its mind to continue keeping it petrified and vulnerable.

It ought to choose its first words carefully. Words, after all, had always been its greatest weapon. 

There was far too much light in this place. And far too solid of walls boxing it in. Its forest needed trees to grow tall and hide the very sky with their leaves, because it was all the better to make wayward souls feel the encompassing sense that they were lost. And it prevented the more idealistic of them from getting to drift up into the clouds where she could claim them instead of it.

This did not cause creeping feelings of misdirection and hopelessness. It was just claustrophobic. It was the tightest encroaching trap it ever remembered fitting in aside from its lantern.

Its lantern.

It was here. 

Surrounded in light that kept it from simply reaching it with a little expanse of shadows. Its eyes were on it even as it didn't embarrass itself attempting to snatch it back. 

“Have you held this since you murdered me?”  

That was too raspy. Its voice was strong as the oldest oaks. Not…It did not rasp anything out. It did not even speak through a throat and mouth of meat-flesh. 

The reactions made it decide to keep this behavior pocketed for the future. Perhaps playing weak could aid it at times. It was stirring up discomfort and anger and guilt, and it could work with any of those. 

Mimicry was among its most useful talents. Surely the Woodsman should know better than to think it was an animal that could scratch at the floor and barely speak for lack of water and other mortal necessities. So if even he retreated and grimaced, those with far less experience around the Beast would be completely oblivious that it might be a telegraphed weakness. 

Unfortunately, its mind was scattered, and soul ill-fitting in its case and vessel alike, and it could not appreciate this being a happy accident it might use to predict human behavior in the future. 

The Woodsman shifted back, in this room that caged them all with very little space for him to retreat anyway. He held its lantern. Its soul danced and wailed within, all strangely, unpleasantly faint in the oversaturation of indoor firelight. The girl also shifted, though she took an actual step whereas her father played-pretend that he could stand his ground.

(Bold, from it, when the last full memories it had were of trying and failing to make him stop standing. Looming and shadowing and shouting, even, with so few effects that it could have been the smaller one and it would have made no difference.

It did not need to think about those short moments right now.)

She held a pointless candle- was it not bright enough in here?- higher. Like it was a weapon, hah!

It noticed over the years that the Woodsman could be terribly expressive. It was as if the fool didn't realize how much he gave away with his face and the frantic vocals he might make. If he was less easy to read, the Beast wouldn't have been able to play him so delightfully well for so long. 

The man’s daughter appeared to have the same flaw. Her face made a journey through many emotions before settling on something less than ideal. The grimace a moment ago was better. The fear was better. The displaced pity of a dumb human that thought they were looking at a limping, stupid animal below them- better. 

“Murder?” she repeated. It noted that her voice was not the same as their brief encounter. Poor child. Left to age and grow alone in an empty house with no idea where her father vanished. He really ought to feel the weight of being a terrible father, every night that he tried to find peace. 

The girl who was not quite a girl, but hardly old by any means (still plenty young enough to make a good edelwood tree; the older souls when they gave up were too brittle, grew only a little and then stopped like that), frowned. “That is a strong word for what happened.”

Oh? 

Was she there?

Did she witness the Beast’s demise?

Or was she overconfidently spouting whatever her elders told her was the truth, like any child did? 

The Woodsman moved his free hand to her arm and barely touched it. Was he afraid to show his dependence or affection, after he was able to be fooled and did not bother coming to check the house to see if she was there? After he uprooted their lives and left her like that solely on the word of the Beast, who infamously lied? There were songs telling strangers not to trust a word it said. 

It watched, entirely still and poised, for any and every tiny sign that it might extrapolate an emotional reason behind. It knew the Woodsman very well, but its encounter with the girl herself was rather quick before. It felt her soul yearn, curious, for the unknown, for the strangeness of the dark woods she was not to wander- it was how it was able to call her out there. That was not enough to confidently predict what her body language actually meant, let alone know how to play her best. 

How it had starved for sight. For these chances to discover more and more about mortals and their wealth of little motions, big emotions, contradictions and incoherent thought processes.

Its tension led it to miss what he murmured to her. That was fine. It was unlikely to be important. The Beast already knew the lantern-bearer well. 

“I have not,” the Woodsman turned his gaze back and answered it. “I hardly needed the gruesome thing.”

It was beautiful, actually. For as long as it existed, the Dark Lantern failed to rust, discolor, lose its qualities. Any other metal and glass would have done so long ago.

“Then-”

“North of here,” he interrupted.

It did not seethe. But that was because it was making no sound at all, and not because it didn't feel like it. 

“You know where we are.” Did it? It could predict. He seemed rather uninterested in letting it guess or not. “So you know the town that's north along the road.”

It knew where the old mill the Woodsman took up living in was. It also knew where his actual house was, though it ensured he never went searching for edelwood anywhere near that area. It twisted the woods around him to keep him from drawing close. He might accidentally realize, otherwise, that his daughter was in what he mourned and feared to be an empty home. 

While further south than the mill, the few stable roads in question going north out of its forest, its hands-

He'd handed it over to them? To foolishly loud and active dead mortals? To Enoch? 

It did not have ‘skin’ that would ‘crawl’ and thus could never fully imagine a confident representative of what humans meant by that expression. But this might have been the closest instance it came to understanding it. There were a thousand termites running quickly inside its hollows. There was ice rolling down its interior walls, dreadfully, unnaturally cold for all the quickness, feather-touch. 

It thought of the Dark Lantern in those other hands, being left on some dirty floor, or used like any other lantern, for their dances and rituals and celebrations of death that went contrary to how it convinced its claims to surrender and cease pretending they would go back to active lives- with just some dirty flame inside it that would not let its shine extend out as brightly as its soul, would not compliment its unique metal curvatures, that was just..just…wick and cinders! defiling what should've been housing its soul-!

Rust, discolor, sooty glass, peeling metal, til it was nothing more than a lantern created in bulk and forgotten about.

And with those ! The harvest-lovers. The memory-obsessed. Those that stayed in Autumn and kept a mental fortitude that never led them to their proper exhaustion. Submit. Submit. Submit. They could not even think to. They mimicked life, on and on. Instead of accepting they were dying and would never get their lives back, never survive whatever it was that sent them to the Unknown, they chose to stay, die, be dead, in the form of useless dancing skeletons. At least the edelwood served a point. 

That point was for the Beast’s benefit. It did not have any philosophical or moral feelings about the methods of Enoch but it did very much like being alive and having its lantern fed, and so it would present whatever argument it needed to make them sound in the wrong. 

Oh, it crawled. If it had stayed dead forever, then the Dark Lantern would just collect dust or hold weak little fires, and never again light its forest. Ribbons and husks and bones would open and close it to put their tiny wicks and flames inside, even though it should never have been opened once. What defilement. 

Somehow, it was worse than if the Woodsman had just kept it after and then used it likewise as a menial lantern in his house. It would've been an understandable trophy that way. The dead of Pottsfield and their master did not have anything to do with the Beast and never then had a single reason to hold onto its precious, horribly-cold lantern.

It could have gone on forever being treated like something mundane instead of the ancient, important phylactery it was. And the undead would know what they were doing by dirtying it that way. 

It did not think it experienced the emotion of disgust ever as strongly as it did now. It was far more unpleasant when it was real and not a faint echo following convincing mimicry. 

“You do not have to stay, Anna,” the Woodsman spoke, repulsively-soft, (familiar, like it might be when urging a tiny seed to grow into a tree). “We’ve finished here. He cannot hurt us.”

Yes, Anna, run along to bed now. Let the elders speak. Let two old friends talk, like they had many times before… about edelwood, about children’s souls, about doing ‘terrible’ things for the sake of her own soul. Did she know what her father was willing to do in her name? Better yet, did she distrust the idea of letting them talk because she feared her father might easily be tricked, swayed, played again by the one who commanded him before? 

The lack of fear on his part was new. And very distasteful. 

It benefitted often from wayward souls that lost their horror, because that meant their exhaustion was leading them to find its promises soothing, and they saw the light at the end of a suffocating tunnel in the form of its hands- in surrender. Sorrow and fear are easily forgotten, after all. And the naïve ones that didn’t realize to fear it to start with, like young Gregory, would follow it like a friend in youthful, fragile, blind trust until the cold made them collapse. 

The older souls needed a healthy amount of anxiety. Those it was using to serve its lantern most definitely had to fear it, no matter how companionably it would slide into their miserable vision. All the better if they feared it at its friendliest. 

The Woodsman knew how to actually damage it now. He wouldn’t be running off into the dark with a swinging axe again. 

The Beast wondered if it could make him fear once more, and could not think of a reason why he would after he saw it die so pathetically unable to fight back with more than words. 

Well, then. It wanted nothing more to do with this mortal. It would just take its lantern back now, thank you. He brought it here and that was the last helpful thing he could, or would, do for it. The Queen of the Clouds picked an ironic servant to fulfill her part of the deal, and the mortal pawn probably didn’t even realize he was being exchanged around by powers above him. Perhaps he wouldn’t even mind, so long as he wasn’t limited to thinking its way was the only way. 

Anna looked at it with the fear her father unfortunately lacked; she also happened to be looking down at it, with shadows below her eyes, and it thought of the skies and teetering on the edge of pain and existence. 

She took the axe and candle with her. It didn’t desire having its lantern's door opened and light turned upon it so any physical blade could hack it into tinder, so at least half of that possible equation was gone now. As for the wailing fire itself…

The Beast rose like it was a bipedal, standing loosely. It made its eyes stay on the Woodsman’s face instead of sliding down and past his many coats to stare at the Dark Lantern. Just as it could extrapolate on mortal expressions, it could give away desperation or telegraph a movement a second too-early before making it, allowing its opponent to counter. 

It did not think it had given away the angry revulsion his recent revelation caused. 

It did not tip its hand like that. It did not. Not until, not since, the boy met its threat with threat, and see where its moment of exposed raw honesty got it.

The Beast could tell the dark branches were slightly longer without the girl’s candle around. It was still not enough to look like its normal self, but undoubtedly the closer it got matching that appearance, the more the mortal it harmed plenty would remember to fear its proximity.

Any moment now would be nice.

No, this was fine. It was often served well by acting amiable with him. It called to him, it would say they needed to talk as if they needed to instead of it claiming his beaten down soul and whatever information it was after from his mind. It allowed for the illusion of allies meeting at the table, however distasteful they may be, or however much one of them may hold more power than the other. It was not so uneven as an immortal force of death and nature compared to one little mortal. 

It made him more pliable in time. It made him more rash, and then he did stupid things like running after it with an axe while his light source was left behind by a budding tree made just for him. 

It separated him more and more from humanity, and he failed to interact at all normally with other mortal souls he ran across. His desperation to help them came across as crazed and dangerous; his anger and frustration towards the Beast, as constant as the cage of grief around him, came out unintentionally at these completely unrelated innocent targets. He was not a fun man to be around. No one willingly chose to stay any longer than they had to, and those were the ones that didn’t scream and flee before he could get a word in otherwise, because they saw the light of the Dark Lantern and drew conclusions.

Well, then, let them commence. He called this meeting together, so it would let him start. 

“Beast.” The Woodsman said, again, like he always had. “I preferred the forest without your infernal singing keeping everyone awake all hours.”

It bet he did. Half of the time it decided to serenade the night with the jolly woodsman song it named after him (the opposite of what he was, but it was rather jolly with him doing the work to keep it alive) during his work, it was intentionally to bother him. He thought a child was meeting the (presumed) fate of his daughter when its voice carried through the fog, and its motivating melody to keep chopping had a side effect of scaring any mortals away who might otherwise remind its servant of human connection. Keeping him isolated was important. It meant he never even considered going back to his home, except in revulsion and grief, and that meant he didn’t discover his entire sob story was a farce. 

Speaking of farces, though…

The Beast reached out, ever-willing to be reasonable and make deals. The Woodsman did not want to notice it ever again, and it wanted the same in reverse, and so it was only gracious to point out the obvious solution to both of their unhappiness.

Yes. Reach out. Mutually beneficial. There is only my way- but I am willing to make a deal. Its voice betrayed none of the anger it had for its rebellious servant. “The role of lantern-bearer is a sham. You know this now.” 

The darkness adjusted like a cloak draping and slipping down when its arm extended. It lacked its threat. Even though it was night outside the cabin, there were not enough natural shadows in this place to wrap about itself and grow to loom however the situation best demanded it. Something told it that dying to a single breath of air while in the midst of frenetic breakdown left this mortal far too immune to fright or trust depending on whether it put on nightmares or charm. 

As shadows, it was only as powerful, as intimidating, as the child in bed seeing monsters in nebulous shapes and scraggly tree branches allowed it to be. 

Though it was far more than imagination. Its songs lured souls. Its light was a tiny hope to pursue for the meek, the weak, like moths to a lamp. 

Its forest must always be shrouded in shadows and draining colds. So too must it be shrouded in fear and mystery. Never- never - should that scatter and leave naked roots behind for any to see. 

It may have been far more uncomfortable around this one foolish Woodsman than the mortal pawn was around it, now. 

Bare, bare, bare, burning for the fire, blowing ashes in the cold north winds ne'er to recollect again. WRONG! It was WRONG!

So the man hardly retreated from one black branch of an arm. What did it matter? Its fingers unfurled regardless in their demand.

“You had no will once you saw the truth of the edelwood trees. How you had it in you to grind one more, I wonder? After the show put on? No matter.” Fingers crooked, curled, open and inviting. “How fortunate for your peace of mind that you have no need to fulfill the duties of work you know to be fraud now. Give me my lantern. Return to what unfulfilling life you carved out here with a girl willing to leave you for the Unknown once.”

Digging claws into a wound it predicted was hardly healed and then twisting them in there was as pragmatic as it was a little indulgent. 

The best scenario was for pawn and lord to part ways. It very much required the latter to have possession of the very thing holding its soul. It would feed it from now on, until a better opportunity arose, and even that would depend on if it would ever be comfortable risking a lantern-bearer again.

The more that the mortal was reminded of how very much he did not want anything to do with the lantern he had slaved so dutifully to protect for years, the better it could snatch it off his weakened, mournful, guilty frame.

Yet the Woodsman was unmoved. If anything, he grew defensive, though his tone was careful to hide it. His frame shifted to hide what could never be put from its mind.

“The lantern stays here.” 

Oh. Does it now?

How very bold.

“I think not.” The arrangement worked fine in the past, but that was when the Woodsman was nothing but frantic to keep the flame lit. His belief that it was his daughter’s soul within drove him to constant, reliable cutting, harvesting, grinding, feeding, feeding- a caretaker most convenient. The best kind: the type of pawn that never even considered he was playing into its hands. It could feed the lantern…or it could focus on luring wayward souls into the forest while something else did that work.

That situation had changed. The Woodsman saw the trees for what (who) they were. Even desperation to keep his daughter would not have properly fueled his efforts from that point on. They would stall. They would crumple. And he would be a most wonderfully broken sort of mortal, worn completely. His enemy- his benefactor- would show him the light that waited in the dark. Dying with such…awareness would, in turn, provide the forest with a different caliber of tree. But surrender was surrender. 

It just so happened to nicely line up with a different desperate soul that wasn’t already worn out from years of slaving for the Dark Lantern, and so losing one old man did not cost it greatly. The older boy was capable of being a lantern-bearer. Funny. That should have clued the Woodsman in. If the Beast wanted its lantern back from him, specifically, so badly after he ‘won’ it in a fight, then it would hardly go offering the precious item to anyone else.

In hindsight, it very badly wished it hadn’t attempted that route of manipulation. A few seasons of taking care of its own soul itself, until some new, preferably adult and stubborn and set in one path of mind, human came along, would actually have been the least costly of its potential losses. It itched at the idea of any hands but its own on the Dark Lantern. Allowing the mortals to hold it instead of enveloping them all in darkness and striking before they could think to open its door was foolish. It had no reason to believe it would be foolish at the time. The entire incident was unprecedented. 

It could not allow this to be a precedent now. 

The Woodsman knew. His daughter must, too. 

They were isolated in the Unknown. Easy prey. But if they ran across others in the time that the Beast was nothing but soot scraped across the bottom of a phylactery and mixed into soil, then the story may have already spread. 

Oh, the gods would mock this turn of events. It detested them for what they did not understand. It detested that it had so fragile a lifeline, while they could call it a creature as if it were not a god in its own right. 

“Think whatever you wish, Beast,” the mortal said with all of his usual distaste for his master. “It will not change what is to come. The lantern stays. You do not. I shan't let you take it into the forest to terrorize the lost forevermore, to make your trees and fuel your cruel flame, and you will be less incentivized to destroy lives if you cannot even draw the oil out of their misery. Unless you do it to spite-” The man’s glare went more steely. “And then you will find yourself starved to death. The oil burned tonight was your own and not an innocent.” 

It would see to it that he rot forever. The shadows spasmed. Its fingers twitched. 

Easier to keep rage back than to consider the rest of what he said. Any soul could surrender to the forest. Any woodsman could go and cut them down, cut them all down. Any tree could be chopped into tinder. Any of those could be ground into oil. It did not want to think about being put through any of those steps.

“This is unacceptable,” it said in time without nearly as much power as it would like its voice to contain. It should have sounded unpassable. 

“It is not up for debate.”

The Woodsman’s eyes narrowed.

“I know well how to manage it. Give me no reason to blow it out now, and you can assume I will continue to keep its door shut.” 

This was unacceptable- but there was no space offered to bargain.

No room given to make a deal. 

It wished for life, and there was a broad scale for what could, vaguely, count. 

Its fingers twitched again, as if it could rip away the chains on the North Wind and let him terrorize the idiots in the clouds from all the way down here. 

“Go, Beast, or linger. But you will not touch this lantern. This is my home,” its traitorous servant claimed, “There is only this offer. There is only my way.”

He was audacious for turning its words against it. And he was likely smug about getting the chance to.

It could not overpower either human while on their ground, surrounded in light, owing its life, and having the Dark Lantern held hostage. As much as it would rather throw the man to the floor as it had done in the snow so cheerfully, it did not have the advantage of darkness. Brittle echoes of pain deterred it from risking this state of existence. That was its lantern and it could not even make a grab for it without looking like a desperate stupid drunkard. The embarrassment would have an audience, too.

The Beast growled without its usual mimicry of cultured power. What good were words and songs and secrecy when its bald limits were already exposed to these would-be seedlings? They thought themselves so clever, it imagined. They felt very good about the power they held over something unfathomably more powerful than they. They also would not be giving it any more than what bare minimum the wish compelled them to and it would scrabble and trip like the fool if it tried to force the issue. 

That was not theirs. That was its soul. 

That was not theirs to hold and hoard and keep so smugly out of reach. 

The growl only rattled the girl in her room, while its pawn gave no ground. This also made it appear the only fool present.

With nothing else to do, it stalked out.

Chapter Text

Not a single thing was right after that point. Perhaps it left the house too soon. It did not even learn very many particulars about its revival, like why it occurred in there to start with and not in a simple clearing closer to P- the place the lantern had to be retrieved from. 

Lacking knowledge and memories was a wonderful way to stir confusion and the dread which led to resignation. It disliked closure, when mortals achieved it, because it was a wall around their will that took them out of its hands. Any lost and wandering soul would start out with something missing- after all, no mortal knew why, how, or where they entered the Unknown- that it could prod. 

Things it might ask them about, and see doubts flail about to provide answers, only to exasperate the problem when they realized they could not. Things it may ensure the forest turn them around towards the pitfalls and paths that would bother them and their missing closure best. Whispers in the night lasted only as long as it took for them to be ready to hear its lullabies instead.

It was the first and only time the Beast was inside a territory other than its own. The walls and ceiling were uncannily, unnaturally solid. It was not as if it had been invited to stay longer and pick anyone’s weak brain, which it would have rejected anyway. 

If not for the fact the Dark Lantern stayed inside that house, the Beast would never think about it again. Certainly, it would not wonder. Waste time with doubts and curiosities until they were allowed to form a draw towards its location of returned fire. 

It cursed the Woodsman and his daughter for not giving it its own lantern, and also not being safe targets so long as they held it hostage. If its existence stemmed out of a deal that did not allow their deaths anyway, then the Beast would be fine just having its soul and never sensing either of their souls again- especially the insolent pawn. 

If it just had the lantern, then, when things still were not right, it would have to know it had nothing to do with that house or its arrogant occupants. 

Answers that opened more gaping questions may have been worse but it could not compare until one occurred. 

The forest was far more welcome than a tight box excessively lit up by mortals that knew to fear some parts of the dark. 

It was not home, yet. It was not itself. 

Something frayed daily and it would not name if it was intelligence or sanity or even spirit, will. 

It was unlike anything experienced and the Beast hated it. 

Better to hate, than to think too hard and feel the unease set in.

The fog of life chewed away at its peace- and it did not see the fog of life. It existed above that, and it posed no risk at all to the master of eternal darkness who could not be made cold, made bleed, made confused.

This arrangement was unsatisfactory. It was better than the alternative and yet the benefactor did not feel very benefited. 

It stalked its own woods without the comfortable power it ought to have. 

Singing would have felt like a sham for now. The songs may cut off abruptly at any point. It would, technically, not be alive to feel embarrassed, in that case. The idea rankled it anyway. When it sang, its voice carried. A multitude of dull, uninspired mortals would hear the moment its mastery over these trees snapped apart. 

All because it did not have any control over the status of its soul. 

It was a shameful image. They'd celebrate, it imagined. 

So, for now, no songs. No lantern. No unquestioned reputation. 

When shadows ceased being feared, they were not quite so effective. It found only some of the darkness it was used to having. 

The Unknown still attracted lost souls. It could hardly feed the fire when someone was holding any access to it hostage, out of range. The Beast could only wonder about tinder wandering uselessly, perhaps finding their way to some other place to lay- Pottsfield’s signs led plenty onto its paths, and those laying in the cold were just as likely to see the skies and dream rather than giving into despair. And those claimed by the soil? It could hardly do anything with the trees. 

It could do nothing, in fact, except wander restlessly and wait at any given moment to feel the dreadful death of its flame. 

Restless.

Restless.

RESTLESS.

The Woodsman did not let the fire burn out but there was at any given moment the possibility he would, and it was not even close enough to watch the death be telegraphed ahead.

It slid to the cabin at times- shrouded unnoticed in the night- and scratched down frosted windows, but this only reiterated its own internal impotence. It did not receive the chance to pounce either inhabitant when they were outside. It seemed both were frustratingly cautious. 

Besides, should it attack the girl, her father might blow the lantern out before it could torment him in words, or explain she was a hostage in the event that she was not dead. And leverage would work better than attacking him directly if he was going to actually keep his grip on its lantern, instead of foolishly leaving it on the forest floor and attempting to harm darkness in the dark. 

On more occasions, it did nothing with that pocket of the Unknown. Let them live. Let them rot. And when they were dead, it would take back its soul safely.

Unless, of course, it did not notice when they died and, without either’s attention, the lantern simply went out before it knew it was free to retrieve it. 

It was terrible. However similar to branches scratching at a window as its fingers may be, the claws scraping inside it actually left marks. It hated, it hated, it hated- the helplessness, the restlessness, the not-knowing all around. 

The unknown, hah.

It detested the unknown factor of its fate. 

The only other times it actually approached that damnable house was a moment of weakness when it dropped edelwood branches at the door of the back shed. The hint was not particularly subtle. And it couldn't even tell if the Woodsman used them, or if mortal morals led him to toss the perfectly good tinder away on principle. 

And then came Winter.

And all the complaints it had before were buried in snow it did not control.

The Beast was both the Fire and the Shadow cast. The latter was an absence of light. Of particles and waves. Not flesh and nerves and any single kind of sensation. 

Edelwood rarely fell to weather and time. They were turned to oil before that could really approach. Edelwood was more permanent than other trees, in a sense, and despite their outward appearances being so bare and damaged, they could stand for- perhaps- eternity. They could burn, but rain and snow and wind did little aside from some cosmetic changes. 

(It- almost- recalled otherwise- From the same curious corner of the mind that thought of blue and gold and being looked at like a worm. Words from a voice, but no voice to be remembered at all. 

It lived. Then it was extinguished. Then it lived again. There was much between these last two steps. Hazy. Unreal. Gone, entirely, until it shone a light of awareness on it. Even then, what was seen was like a wound and the natural thing to do was pull away, not rip in and look deeper.)

Edelwood. Yes, edelwood. 

It found small ones occasionally that it had not been present to see take root. Souls found themselves lost in the Unknown no matter what. The forest did not like to give anything up. 

The Beast could not seem to find a single living soul though. Never had it been so hard to just detect where one accidentally made its way into the woods. And it did not sing to erase the step of finding any, skipping straight to them coming to it. 

There should have been at least a handful for the Autumn! 

Nothing. 

Quiet.

It stalked on its own, oddly disconnected to its forest. Fraying slowly but ever so surely.

It was damp. Darkness could not be damp any more than it could be dry, or any other texture. 

It noticed the crawling next. No matter how it shifted forms or how fast it sped through the night, it would find its peace interrupted by the conviction that termites were moving in crowds in its vessel. 

Rain and snow left water trapped in pits and crevices, and the faces of the souls it fed off of made for many of those in its hidden form. But not a single drop should’ve made it past the shadows to start with.

Pooling cold weakened wood. Termite tracks were one thing. Having the elements ruining its vessel’s integrity was more pressing because it affected larger areas at once. 

Ice made things brittle and oxymoronically dry. Weathered wood split more often than healthy bark. It broke more often. 

Nothing had, yet, because nothing could, because its vessel was not fully edelwood and it was shrouded in the night so that it could only ever be affected if lit up under the light of its own soul. 

The cold drove it to the ground. 

It hurt like a tree, not like a shadow. It shuddered like an animal and not the type of being it was. 

Winter never harmed it before. But it was never so weak, at any point in the past.

Things were very wrong. 

Its body was weak and growing worse with every storm, and it had no body. The fault must lay with the lantern, somehow. But even in times when it ran low on oil, it didn't experience this. There was a gnawing ache. Its soul itself felt weakened. It would think more often about edelwood, doing little but picturing finding some. Perhaps the issue was the Woodsman allowing the flame to burn out slowly, but starving the lantern alone could not explain all of this. 

This was too reminiscent to dying animals. Winter caused many of those.

Between snows, when it was upright once more, it wandered and hunted and came across no lost souls. 

The frustration was beginning to amount very high. 

It was a hunger. It was a hunter. It stalked the night. It lured the lost into danger. It was a guide, leading the dying to their death. It was a very old and very dangerous entity.

It found not a single mortal.

Once, in an age some might consider long ago, it roamed on long limbs. Its branches extended into an even greater crown. Wayward souls did not like that. One fool oblivious to the head injury killing him even shot it with a rifle outright. 

(He’d decided it was a deer, it saw from his memories after. As an adult, he was less given to accepting the unknown and the limitless, and more rigidly stubborn in a way it found could be called either delusional or stupid. He saw that it was much too large, it did not have a deer’s antlers, its head was rounded like his own, it was draped in pitch-black foliage- none of that mattered to a human that could not bear monsters be real. Discrepancies must have just been mistakes filled in by his eyes and exhaustion. A deer or elk or generally real woodland prey creature of this size would make for a rack that awed visitors to his lodge. Really, he would’ve been disappointed if the bullets made any difference. The branches would just melt into shadow and, if they did not, then they would be wood dotted in holes that weren’t to his decor’s fancy.

It did not bother with adults as often as children. The Woodsman was one of the few recent exceptions and it knew it was hardly guiding him to the soil to make for a very good tree. He fed the lantern far, far more than he would be able to provide it.)

Two legs both disturbed mortals more, and also kept them from running away as often. They would listen. They would most certainly not pretend it was venison. 

The reality was it did not have limbs of those sort anyway. Oh, but it could make darkness expressive. It could extend hands. It could tilt a head. It could cause all manner of assumptions in a mortal’s perception of its ‘body’ by simply changing the size and shape of its eyes. 

Surely it was not scaring souls away, without first noticing them. They wouldn't have better perceptions in the forest than itself. 

It was presenting itself as it had for a long time- a perfected picture best suited to make mortals dread and tempt them not to run away alike. 

Another storm came and it spent that one almost screeching while bent over and contorted in frozen, shuddering shapes at the base of an unhelpful pine.

After that one, it almost sang, the fear that its voice would be cut off in abrupt unseen death be damned. Almost. 

The water wasn't clogging up so many of the pockets in the wood now. That was because their wailing faces cracked from eyes to mouths and more and opened up so wide that most excess liquid would spill out of the gaping hollow. It imagined one of these holes might manage to stretch all the way around the vessel’s circumference and then bisect it. What then? If any of the crevices got too close to doing that, it would be stick-thin in some areas lengthways and that sounded like something incapable of walking at all. First it would be grounded, then bisected, and the snow would cover the waterlogged and rotten remains.

Winter was, in fact, its favorite season (though its metric for experiencing favorites was nothing like other creatures). It was practically just as much a part of it as the forest was. It could call on Winter and then do twice as good with luring souls as it would any other season of the year. 

If the Beast was to say it liked any at all, it would answer Winter, obviously. 

It currently hated Winter. 

It couldn't end soon enough.

Winter took that as a challenge.

Yes, time meant little in the Unknown, and less may have passed than it felt, but from its perspective, years of wind bringing wet, cold snow in taunted it. 

Was the damned mortal doing nothing with its lantern?

There was, one day, no more left to safely fray, and all the remaining threads slid apart further like its hag’s stretched or snapped webs. They might exist, but hardly kept the function of the whole. 

The wind blew in new snow with a fury. Mortals gave up over far less. 

Rather than being caught unaware and then trapped at the roots of a useless tree, the Beast took action. The moon and stars hid behind thick clouds. The forest was shrouded in nightfall and it could traverse as fast as any light might. Or did until ice weighed it down and brought it into a floor of snow. 

Its soul might not be extinguished, but it thought it was on the brink of something nearly as detrimental, and far less known. It was the boy all over again, mocking. If only vessel and consciousness were swallowed by the soil, would they just decompose and grow and cycle, unstopped, since the soul technically still burned unchanged? 

What were the terms of the arrangement? That it die in practice and go back to that fate as a tree it could not control, so long as the lantern was lit again? 

What clauses for a wish to exist did she create to do as asked by the letter while doing so with as much misery in practice as was possible?

It would have been easiest to bunker down where at least a tree trunk blocked some of the wind, and then submit to the rest of the elements. 

Easier than needing a pawn and not just conveniently benefiting from one, let alone being left with a very unreliable option that did not need to get to see it pained in any way when he already knew one too many of its weaknesses.

Ease, unfortunately, was for the lost and forgotten, not their guiding light. 

The forest spat its master out in the human-crafted clearing. Wet- Freezing- Rigid- Risky joints- Bodily integrity at an all time low- The Beast had a variety of obstacles to fight before it could even reach the low front porch. 

The home’s windows showed its inhabitants used a stupid amount of lights even when they weren’t trying to keep it at a disadvantage. Despite this sign that the mortals were awake, they made no noise. None that could pass the walls and overpower the sound of the wind outside. 

This was technically not its territory. The settlement was high above the soil, in a spitting defiance to the ancient forest dirt, and so the most it could do- in terms of exerting its power- was tempt the unfulfilled or curious from the treeline to come to it . It could not enter the inn of the dolls or go over the fences of Pottsfield either and those were much more established sovereignties. 

The lights within came from simple flames. Those exuded warmth. That was something everything outside was sorely lacking. 

The lantern was right inside. 

Right inside, past a door it couldn't force open and wasn't in a state to slip through as shadows, and that was why it was here.

It dragged long marks down the lower part of the door, but it was an exercise in aggravated futility. It felt more like wood than darkness, and that wood had locked in place in a twisted curl that wouldn't rise tall. 

There weren't lanterns outside, despite a hook or two where one could get hung. They'd be too tall for it to get at either. It might have tried just to set any still dry wood here on fire and thaw itself. 

A single damp blanket was covering the flimsy porch chair as a weak protection from the elements. The Beast determined it was much more important than a chair. It dragged its way over and then dragged the wet thing back. It let more cold seep into its very essence. The woodpiles of the yard had tarps but it didn't feel like it could move to them, out into the full force of the wind and snow.

The Dark Lantern held a fire.

All of its fire.

The vessel, the shadows, the Beast, produced no warmth of its own, or else very, very little. Less than trees, for all living things did create some, however invisible to other creatures frames of reference. So this shelter did not start to trap heat. It was not back to normal before the night ended, fixed by its own means with only the aid of a mortal crafted cloth. 

The snow that blew on it still leaked into the fabric and made the thing more soaked. Cold was a draining thing to the body and will. The lantern was right there and it wasn't permitted to enter. You will not define the terms of this agreement. It might just go mad from this deterioration and pain and die by all but the official definition, and still her debt was clean because it wished to exist and its soul would exist. 

The Beast prepared to yell at the Woodsman to show himself, but found no voice. No power. No power at all. 

It did not think about how this would look. It tried not to think about either mortal closing the door on it once they realized who was huddled there, and what few options it would have if they did. Few. None.

It needed its lantern. It needed its forest and its night and its Winters back.

It existed as it wished to. But it needed its life returned, because that, it seemed, had not been included in the wish.

Chapter Text

In its defense, the blizzard was still going come morning. Obviously, it was trapped, committed, in its poor decision to go after its lantern.

The lights within were only necessary in daytime when the sun went hidden behind a storm. It felt its shadows retreat under them the further inside it was dragged. But it was not so excessive as before and so where the shade might need to retreat on one side, it could extend on the opposite. Lights, however much a double sided blade, were useful to darkness.

It didn’t enter on its own dignified volition, like it left through this door with. It just rolled in, collapsed over the threshold when the door was opened and the surprised exclamations that followed didn’t turn into a demand that it respect it had no place within this territory. Really, if it didn’t, then its lantern didn’t, and so the Woodsman already made things vague and messy.

It was not supposed to be on the ground. Despite the closer proximity to the Dark Lantern, which it felt was burning low but not dangerously so, it…was still locked up pseudo-physically. 

No. Why?

Hand. Limb. Let it slip along the floor in the shadows and take the lantern. 

Movement failed. It was nearly senseless. 

It was stinging painfully. 

That brought awareness back. It was a new agony. It saw the fireplace and first thought it was burning, but wet tinder did not light up, and it actually was feet away from those flames despite a first impression. Their heat countered ice painfully, rather than feeling warm the way Summer sunlight might or a burning tree could. 

Forget reaching the lantern. It was too far away. It should reach those flames instead and make this process faster. Tricky business, timing it all, but it would rather burn than feel wet. Burning, at least, was something it was meant to register, since its soul was a fire it had to keep fed. The damp, the dry, the ice and water, it came with no nerves to register any of those. It knew darkness, and it knew fire. 

(It knew true darkness, that state where it could not exist, and its desperation to come back from there led it to accept a return that was wrong.)

It did not manage to reach the flames. 

It only made it this far over the floor because it was dragged. 

Startled exclamations lowered to more conspiratorial and quiet volumes, but voices surrounded it. All but its own. The Dark Lantern trapped the sound of wailing behind its glass and metal. 

Pressure tried to move its foliage and discovered that darkness was intangible. That was no true cloak of cloth, to be moved by human hands. 

The Beast, in turn, discovered that despite the intangibility of shadows, it could tell that hand of meat emanated a good deal of warmth. 

“I did not think the Beast could get cold.”

“He can't be trusted. This may well be a lie.”

Ever the suspicious one, its Woodsman. It was pleased formerly by how adamant he would be about fearing and mistrusting everything within the Unknown. It had the tendency of making other mortals nervous around him and his rantings. 

It also wished all of this pathetic petrification was an act on its part. If only. There was no shame in whatever show, however embarrassing, was put on for the sake of a good, effective manipulation. 

“Should I guard the lantern?”

The girl. Her father already rubbed off his less favorable traits on her: like the obsessive certainty the Beast would just snatch the lantern the second a human hand was not on it. It would try, but it wasn’t as if doing so was as easy as they acted or else it would have retrieved it while the Woodsman threw a fit over a single doomed child.

So- “...no. I think it may be needed out here. But-”

…it expected that as much as the girl did. 

“Father?”

“It is nothing.”

And he accused it of lying freely.

Those spots of pressure continued to try and fail to do anything noteworthy. The stinging of contesting temperatures, at least, did not feel as extreme now that it wasn’t a surprise. 

It made for the fire. Nothing but its head moved. The branches forced it to be face down and all its efforts just led it to bleed shadows off into the cracks of wood panels of the floor. It did not appreciate losing even more strength.

The Woodsman’s voice came from a different position. Louder, too. 

“Anna- do you hear that?”

It was- and this was an ironic thought, it knew- too dark. Especially with a fire so close. It should not be stuck with its own eyes’ light reflecting on a floor it was face down upon. 

Something lowered and amounted to a wider area of attempted weight and heat, one of which, at least, it did register in this state. 

It really should not be considering the faintly oozing warmth of biologically living mortals a positive. 

The presence settled and then spoke while still laying- leaning?- too low to the ground. 

“...oh. I can.”

Hear. 

It could also hear them. And the crackle of the fire. The wind beating the walls. 

The Beast could say it was hearing more than it was seeing, or saying, or moving. It tried, again, to slide at least one thin shadow towards the fireplace. The wood that darkness shrouded cramped, branches broken to lock others in place. Its voice did enter the scene but it was for a hiss and nothing very…characteristic (despite its name). Its reputation was for the power of its words and songs. This noise didn't exude great confidence in its power. 

The girl's presence jolted up. She didn't stay deterred for long. Numbly nonexistent pressures tried to shove without purchase. Her hands only found frustrating resistance after sinking into the visible layer of the intangible. 

It realized she was trying to roll it over and that was laughable. Did this child think she had the strength? She wouldn't have gotten far in before discovering the obstacle to angling its lengthy branches provided. A neck could only twist so much.

“There's nothing to see.” To guess she was frustrated had been correct. She could no more mask her feelings about a task than her dreadful, vindictive, useful father. “I can make out no injuries. But I can make out no features at all.” 

Surely injuries would not be the ailment. That was limiting thinking. It was a creature of the very Unknown itself; it was the forest and the dark and the fire; it was the stalker of the night and the harbinger of Winter. Its soul was a visible thing in this realm of existence, kept inside an ancient lantern. 

Think bigger. 

Perhaps a tall order. It did not attain the service of the Woodsman because of his brains. 

(It did not know what was wrong with it either, but that said nothing.)

The Woodsman’s voice came from lower to the floor as well now, but further down, away from the fireplace.

“Water is moving.”

“But we just can't see it. See anything.” She almost sounded frustrated about that. Perhaps medical curiosity overtook rationality and made her forget this was no stranger to her of whom neutral acquaintances were drolly shared. 

“I think-... ” the Woodsman did it again. Drift off, dance away little leaves, down the stream. Oh what a use all might be completely oblivious to. No, it did not buy that his thoughts drifted in truth. 

They were guarded. 

Keeping secrets.

The shared space within this house was not perfect. Discord could be stirred up from what they showed in just the few moments it was around to observe either together. 

The Beast did not think it stormed to the door to demand aid for the purposes of driving the mortals into conflict that then would send both souls, in time, into the forest full of dark thoughts and lost direction. It just was effortless to notice these flickers of discontent from souls, and determine the best routes to play them into abject misery. Creatures could argue that they had no control over their day to day breathing. Well, this was like breathing to the Beast. It was in its position, forest-keeper and lantern-carer, for a long, long time.

None of it was important. None of their little bleeds, their bruised weak points, and all the ways to take advantage of those specifically, mattered right now. 

“Father?”

“I will bring the lantern in here. It's the only way to truly see him.” Oh? 

True. 

Though it would argue its most true ‘appearance’ was the fire within the lantern itself.

This aside, it did not permit any eyes to use the light of its soul to bare the vessel. It did not allow anything to see it like that. 

The Beast made to rise and crowd the room in darkness. The Beast, it hated to admit, failed. But it did succeed in giving itself new pain to be surreally affected by. The back side of its trunk was hurting very badly from the attempt to arch. 

“Careful-!”

After suspicious alarm from its movement wore off, the Woodsman returned to saying those things it did not give him permission to share.

“There is a…Under its light, he's visible.”

“I can retrieve it,” the girl offered. “Should I guard it while you try to find the source of the sound?”

Absolutely not- No- Maybe yes- If it worked-

They could die after, immediately after, so word would never spread.

If they died after and this weakness came again, what was it going to do? Go inform some new soul about the properties of its lantern and order they use it to find an impossibly physical issue? Go to the likes of Enoch to have the harvest treat the lantern like a toy once again?

Pain rattled down from limb to roots. The floorboards groaned, or it did. These considerations and frantic thoughts meant nothing when it was immobile, and the Woodsman would achieve his plan before the Beast would find the power to undermine that strategy. 

“No-”

Oh wonderful! The Woodsman agreed with it on something! One mortal was bad enough. Let not a second expose what was meant to never be illuminated. 

“You should feed the goats, and begin breakfast for yourself. The chores of the day cannot wait entirely.”

Both presences faded. That fuzzy weight, that odd heat, the flickers of souls so nearby which could feed the lantern- faded out completely and left only void behind. The voices didn't. They came from higher up. It pieced these clues together to tell they'd stood and gone off to conspire together. 

“If you could bring towels and blankets first, perhaps a bucket, a small axe-?”

“Yes, father. But are you sure one of us should not have a hand on the lantern? The barn can wait a few hours.”

“No, no,” the Woodsman was doing that quiet muttering it knew him to rant or grieve with, sometimes. As if he was private with his thoughts and not just as easy to hear that way than when he yelled. “It will be fine. You should not have to see this. It will stay with you too long…”

Did he find himself sleepless? Were his dreams haunted by the unwarranted, unprecedented glance he took of its ancient vessel?

Good.

But also it would rather wipe the sight from his memory entirely. And this desire was stronger than a vengeful delight over nightmares.

It really would prefer the world wait for its input. Its branches kept its head trapped in the same awkward position. It heard the creaks and moans of edelwood and souls, felt the ice filling those mouths and eye cavities.

Saw and felt mostly just a void, though. Hearing alone wasn't enough to make it present.

The Beast didn't manage to stop the Woodsman from bringing its lantern just out of range.

Some towel managed to ‘lay’ on its darkness, at least more believably than hands could. The towel did not question how it was doing so and it had no eyes to get all curious about just how it stopped sinking into a shadow despite reaching no solid opposition. 

While it slipped about in a mental fog that it did not care to find the irony of, it missed whenever it was actually thrown (or gently laid for all it knew) over its cloaked legs. It just became aware that it was there during one of the periods of thought where it wasn't too self-collapsed to notice anything. 

That…kept some very minimal amount of gained heat from its present by the fire to stay instead of being lost to the air. Compared to its head, the root area of the vessel was not nearly as thawed out. Maybe the towel was meant to help with that. Or maybe it was there so the Woodsman wouldn't have to see more faces in the bark than he must. 

Unlike that vague change in surroundings, it was very aware of its lantern coming closer. Much closer. It yearned, both ways. Give it. Give me my lantern.

Not like that. Don't give the lantern light.

It was set down with some heaving and exasperation on the part of the mortal, who could be heard moving things around to re-settle the lantern in place. 

The shadows should have surged forth and at the least departed, if not demanded the Woodsman know, remember, no amount of lights lit could actually keep the darkness from simply muting and overpowering them. 

Click.

Its soul was a wavering thing in there. The Beast did not lift its head to see it dance and wail with the voices it stole. It knew what its soul would look like. It also knew its soul should not be exposed to the air and have its dance recoil from the opened doorway meant to protect it. 

No matter how wavering compared to its former state, ill fed but not starved, there could be nothing brighter than the light of its soul to the vessel. That white radiance came out in a beam from the open lantern door and wherever the beam was aimed by the mere mortal, the darkness could not exist. 

Against its back, lightless foliage continued to ruffle and shadows blurred the line between haze, liquid, and solid. Under the towel, darkness subsumed into itself repeatedly, restless. And one hand, flopped out somewhere over the floor, stayed a vague, shifting hand- concept of ever inconsistent sizes and soft inky edges. Yet just down the limb attached was matter with none of those same characteristics at all. It did not shift, it was not softly blurred, it could not settle and resettle into what size was best comfortable for a given moment. It was not looking, but it knew that it would see a skinny, knobbly thing dotted in pockets betraying the amount of hollow within the limb, and faces overlaid upon each other in such quantity many stopped being all that notable. 

Edelwood bore the sap-leaking misery of souls miserable enough to give themselves up to the forest. The only major difference with the vessel was that it did not leak oil of its own. 

And, unlike edelwood, it should not be seen. 

But to move only earned the creaks of ruined wood and new waves of cold, icy and painful acting, impossibly, like the wind was within its hollows blowing at full force - something slow and wet rolling, the previously unnoticeable pooling disturbed by movement, and it made wood into mush in a sensation that was revolting, terrifying if it was thought of, so merely revolting it was - cluttered piles of tiny shriveled dead leaves, husks of termite molts, the shells of those as well shaken loose and pouring out into larger caverns where each feather-light landing could have been a knife sunk and carved right into the wood - rot -

It remembered, unfortunately, why it was here. 

The mind took its detours into the haze of shadows and fuzzy light, awash with pain while simultaneously being above pain. It noticed the contact of a textured, bumpy fabric and then lost the tether to attention before it could really swallow the concept. For the best, that. Being seen under the light of its own soul was enough of an atrocity. That same wood it took complete care to keep hidden being touched with some dirty rag- no, it would be bad enough even if it was the most valuable silk in all of history. 

Nothing got t-

Nothi-

No-

The vessel had only the surface wood of a tree with thin bark after having lost those flaky strips. It did not take long to rid that exterior of whatever water somehow, impossibly, got past the dark swirls of the Beast. Dry did not mean warm but it put a stop to the constant soaking cold getting to sink its way deeper and deeper into the layers of wood. 

If the intention was just to do that, then he would need to move the lantern’s beam and scare the shadows behind it over to its front. 

Existence went back to a sinking-drifting experience. It refused to drown. 

The lantern was not moved.

It felt lighter. That made it easier to twist consciousness into a breeze, rather than being something so small and fragile that the dark beneath it might be able to swallow it again. Lighter still. It should not have density. Shadows were the absence of light and just as weightless. 

It felt lighter, it learned, because there were arms pulling gunky, unnatural debris out of its trunk. 

The Beast’s thoughts completely stopped for the first time since it had been extinguished, between time as flame and then as wood and back. 

Then it was pressing its face against floorboards so that it could get at least its head off the ground and gore the mortal with its branches. 

Its shrouded heartwood form was meant to be weightless, but not hollow. It was meant be intangible. It should practically not exist if the bared light of the Dark Lantern was not chasing the shroud away from it. Hollow required tangibility, to be an absent, empty space in. 

It was aware of wrists just past sharp edges, a mouth worn too wide until it lost boundaries with drooping eyes and more than one other face made of fissures in wood. Those grooves should only lead into dips of an inch or two. Not into cavities resembling the tree hollows of very old, exposed fixtures in its forest. 

Just as it imagined feeling before, the integrity of its very vessel was failing despite the status of its soul in the Dark Lantern. If these slits were to grow too cavernous, it would be like a bipedal creature trying to continue walking with a blatant cavity down its trunk and disembowelment removing stability. 

Stalking on four legs would only be slightly better. How long would it take for the pockets in the limbs to become hollows too? For the wood to be eaten away too much in the middle and what served as a back to crack into itself? 

It was shadow. Wreathed in the night. Master of eternal darkness. If only it was intangible and limitless in how its power could expand through the trees. It wasn’t as if having the vessel grounded it in the physical realm; blowing out its soul and plunging shadows into darkness it could not be distinguished from quickly destroyed it regardless of what form that soul could reveal. 

What was done? Rags. Unliving invasion, not that a family of chirping birds would have been any better inside it. Removed, and replaced, because what started dry grew soaked and pointless. Ice scrubbed or scratched away by rough glove texture. Even through that thick fabric, the heat put out by warmblooded creatures was even more startling inside than on top of shadows. The cold was agonizing; now warmth was agonizing. It did not matter if it was better after passing, or that it was removing sources of hurt. 

Even if it failed to get its head off the ground, it finally was able to get its voice to rumble out. 

“Stop.” Close the lantern. Back away. Die and let the memories of seeing its exposed vessel disappear before any others saw. Most pressingly, if none of that, then cease being wrists deep in its version of viscera. 

It must have surprised the Woodsman. He jerked slightly, and it meant sleeves caught and tugged the edges of the hollow being excavated. Its mind screamed, shadows roiling and bleeding faster into the cracks of the floor. 

No noise audibly left. Perhaps, if some did, then its order would have been heeded.

Motion returned. Something, seeking something, tangled and melting and scraping through fixtures it could feel but had never seen. 

“Settle, Beast,” the Woodsman said. The tone was- unmoved. Or it could be called steady? One made it rage, one threw it a hardly reassuring hope to grab at. “There are easier ways to kill you, we both know that.”

Yes. Yes, it realized this was no attempt to butcher it. But that hadn’t been its point. It meant him to stop what was happening in the immediate moment. 

The elaboration came out as a strained snarl. The Woodsman held still, but since it was not communicating what it meant, he intended this to be a pause, not a cessation. 

Then he was back to looking and dislodging its guts. 

The Dark Lantern let him. The Dark Lantern shone on the floor that it couldn’t see, illuminating handfuls of dried-out molts, ice growths, the black shell of a turtle which crawled and lodged its way between two internal knots and slowly strained the wood on either side in a manner that widened the gaps outside, placed on the towel-covered ground. Its soul twisted in a frenzy while it could not. 

This wasn’t-! But it was existing. It wished to exist, blindly. 

You will not define the terms of this agreement

All it wanted was the same base need for survival any creature formed first around. Reaching desperately to escape one pained state did not make it grateful to be placed in another instead of having its life returned. 

It waited while axes bit and branches tugged away so that it would not miss the moment it could see the stars. It could wait this out too.

It rode through one alien sense to another alteration that it wondered if it would feel forever, or if, when surrounded in shadows again, the dark would eat and reshape the hidden form back to what it had always made its shape before.

The Woodsman took hold of a shoulder exposed by the lantern and was successful in tilting it. If it were shadows, he could not hope to do such a thing. 

Any remaining water flowed out at the new angle. It might have been akin to vomiting. Or maybe disembowelment proper. The idea let alone comparison to the type of creatures it preyed upon did not require further thought. 

In a consequence of the handling, wood split and creaked. The Beast found its voice again. “Stop!”

There were easier ways to kill it, Woodsman! 

It heard pieces of curses through a haze promising to be much better than paying attention to any of this. The cracks were unintentional. That meant little coming from the man that blew its lantern out while it protested. 

Haze.

Haze.

Hands on separate edges of a hollow, pulling. 

Haze.

It dreamed of murdering the Queen of the Clouds and letting her know everything it thought about her disgusted pity. Unfortunately, it used up its dream for one existence. 

The Dark Lantern shone on this whole mess. On ruined towels, for the debris that the Woodsman did not have the foresight to put into the bucket. Whatever it appeared to be when removed, it all was nothing but corruption. Terrible, repugnant corruption. Errors in the Unknown that it did not invite to spawn in its body.

Haze.

Straps and new, unwelcome textures, bending and tiny metal biting and suffocating eternally opened mouths. Something sticky, sap-like, spread about- thicker, actually, than any sap, stickier than black oil. 

And oil - not nearly enough of it- fed the lantern between these uncanny moments. The fire very much appreciated the fuel, but it did not transfer to the Beast and make it whole again. 

Even the Woodsman seemed surprised this did not serve as a solution. 

Haze.

No more haze.

The Beast was more aligned to the passing of time, gradually. It noticed moments drag on. It determined it by the exerted breathing of its former pawn, his occasional unhappy mutterings, and the sound the flames within the fireplace made. 

The mortal still hadn’t closed the door of the Dark Lantern. He was too busy prioritizing trying to rid his possessions of the corrupted ooze he’d idiotically placed upon them. It should reach for the lantern now. 

Arms capable of the speed and subtlety of shadows already failed it earlier. The twigs it was stuck with so long as that radiance shone on them weren’t even at the right angle to successfully try. 

The Woodsman should move the lantern. That wouldn’t help it retrieve what was its own. It would be counterintuitive to that goal. But it would take this spotlight off a private thing the Beast really would have preferred never get seen. There was very little pain now. Little aching, even. Without that to muddle its consciousness, it could remember that there was another mortal soul nearby who could walk in and see it like this. The girl. The girl. It found the hypothetical inescapable. 

There was…It was not at risk of its structural integrity collapsing. The hollows. They’d-? The remnants of those souls that blurred together in gaps unrecognizable as multiple faces- they did not feel restored, and it did not feel gaping cavities in their place either.

The cold was not keeping its every joint petrified. The fire continued to make it strangely warm, but better that than the freezing clasp of its own Winter. 

Maybe it would stay by those flames all day and fight off whichever human tried to drag it back outside where there was only snow. 

Human. Human. Woodsman. It drifted as irregularly as a leaf on separate winds. It needed to claw itself to the present.

It tried to feel out what he’d done, and the hands pulled its own away by the wrists. 

“Stop,” the Woodsman had the audacity to demand.

He returned to his unseen shuffling. And it reached again to its trunk.

Gloves snatched both wrists and kept them together once more. “Must I find a way to bind these, if you cannot control yourself?”

Now he had the audacity to nearly sound amused. The threat wasn’t hollow, though. It even understood the reasoning; but it desired to sink claws in where human hands had gone and map out every change made more. It had little to do with reason and sense. 

It should have been able to slip away easily, but it had no darkness to hide in. Its hands, its arms, were bared by the Dark Lantern. The only parts not were the wrists that the mortal was holding. 

Like this, it was so limited. It was the vessel of the forest, made out of that forest and the souls which fed it. Stiff and ugly and physical. The Beast did not think of itself as this thing. It so rarely even saw itself stripped of the night down to the bone. 

It bothered with one tug and no more once that did not budge the Woodsman’s grip. He began to release anyway, although his hands’ retreat paused and it felt the fabric of a glove push its way along the underside of a finger to straighten out its curl. 

“...You have the faces even here, Beast,” its traitorous pawn murmured. 

He knew what they were. Disgust should have had him drop the arms the moment he so much as grazed one tiny divot and noticed it was a miniscule mouth. The small grooves of the glove’s fabric caught in an almost equally tiny eye mark. 

It was holding very, very still. If that was his goal, he’d need no ropes after all. 

There was a sigh, and the warmer hands slowly moved wooden limbs back to the floor. They stayed for a moment over the wrists there. Warm. Everything was so warm despite the coverings that heat had to fight its way through. 

“Don’t ruin the splints,” the Woodsman said, far more like that sigh and less of whatever revolted fascination or foolish, misplaced mourning was there a moment before. “Or snow will just make its way in again. And I do not particularly wish to repeat this.”

Wish? He was one to talk. Here he was, in his warm, not-empty home, with his quite-alive daughter, and all his fond memories of wiping the Beast out of existence with a mere breath. It was quite the boost to pride, no doubt. Other than how he’d wasted years of his and his daughter’s lives, what did he have to waste a wish on? 

It was not thinking so clouded and its itching unease was not so completely unbearable that it had to gouge its own wooden surface. Fine. 

There was far more it would like to say, but it would lay here so long as he shut the door on its lantern. 

The Woodsman took that away from this spot on the floor before he took away the rest of his mess. Tsk, tsk. So little trust. Did it look in any shape to be snatching it while he was only a few feet away?

The Beast was a liar by trade. It would mimic this amount of weakness and then grab its lantern back, if it thought that strategy would work. The Woodsman was too paranoid to make it likely to succeed. This- how he moved the lantern out of range first before anything else- was just evidence. 

What a pity, that. 

The change was immediate without the light.

The dark enveloped it. It became the dark. Yet inside its intangible presence, there was a dull pressure from the swallowed vessel. Whatever the Woodsman did at the end there, all of those clumsy, uncomfortable physical reminders were still present even under the shadows. And without the lantern, it could not reach that part of itself, separate and lost somewhere in the maw of darkness, to poke and remove any of it. 

The uneasy itch rose in importance. Then the fire was stoked up from the fading state it had slowly fallen into, and heat was a consuming, confusing ache- anti-ache- of its own. 

A much better blanket than the soaked one outside replaced the earlier towel, this one covering all but its head, branches, and the inconsistently shifting shadows of forearms bent and laying in the same place they were set down. 

“Try not to catch on fire,” the Woodsman said overhead. 

How foolish. While wood may be tinder, vulnerable to a flame, all one might do to darkness was scoot it back out of the range of its light. 

It was in no shape to point out anything to a dense mortal. Or to listen to anything else he said. Noise, noise, permission to lay there, yes yes yes. It would do as it pleased. Right now, nothing could be considered pleasant through the sheer exhaustion and stress of the- well, the entire Winter, and the Fall before that, and all the time since it got its life back wrong. Thus, not attempting to do anything was the next best thing to comfort.

It was swallowed by a much duller aching than a day before, and lost the rest of what was said between the man and the girl. It only realized night had come and they were both gone to bed when its senses took on a colder sting once more and it lifted its face off the ground to find that its eyes were the only illumination present. The fireplace was coal and ash.

Chapter Text

It didn’t bother moving all morning and the restless souls still kept glancing its way as if it was being an active disruption. That was on them. It wasn’t doing anything. This was a constructed house. What was it going to do, try to make them edelwood that had no dirt to get a single root into? 

And here it was acting like a shadow that eyes could just pass over, barely registering and quickly forgetting the needless visual detail. 

The Woodsman was being all protective over the Dark Lantern. There was clearly no point in trying to retrieve it right now. All this spot of darkness was doing was molding into the available nooks and crannies next to the fire. 

(The Woodsman, a bit unfortunately now, was paranoid, and since learning the truth about the Dark Lantern, he looked at it as if every little thing it did was a lie playing a part of a grander conspiracy.)

Oh, well. Most mortals didn't welcome the night for long. They were so inclined to fear the dark, to their own detriment. Truly ironic that those like Adelaide- not that she was a mortal soul of human origin- who did welcome night over day were also vulnerable to something like the twilight’s fresh air.

In and out they flitted like nervous animals. Even in the icy flurry, there were little mortal duties to attend to. 

Their livestock needed food but so did they and that required them to pass through the long main room with the fire. Again, it wasn't like the shadows were being intrusive. This alarm was all tedious. If not an offering to the forest, there was no point. 

The Woodsman came near only to start a fire in the early morning hours and then he retreated to some separate room. Houses were very sharp and overbuilt; the walls blocked more than was needed and the doorways were instead small, like an inversion of the forest where the space between solid trees was larger than the trunks themselves. Judging by the heat and smells that came from his direction, it was another fireplace. Mortal creatures ate with their mouths rather than fueling their souls. 

It couldn't say it liked the scents. They were distinctly organic, or too metallic, or charred, and so smelled nothing like edelwood oil. 

He gave it a long, long look at one point as he stood with the lantern by the main door, but the Woodsman ended up going out there without saying whatever thoughts he wanted to. 

The Beast could guess. It was a load of sentimental complaints and gripes. It was a list of rules, half of which were redundant. It was a threat directed its way not because it broke an instruction, but simply because its nature was as it was. Any of these might be what stopped on the mortal’s lips and made it no further.

They both returned to eat a second meal with the same insistence on getting across this room so quickly they didn't notice it, ignoring the way this required it to be on their minds to start with. 

The Woodsman came closer again to stoke the fire and add new logs. They exchanged no words. 

Outside, the storm blew about just as badly as it had when the Beast was exposed to its winds. From behind too-flat, perfect block walls, the girl’s voice carried complaints about ‘biting cold’ and ‘nipping’ whatnots. They were all very human complaints. Creatures weak to the wet and cold knew to dislike it- else they not survive. Still, any of that flippantly unhappy attitude aimed towards the elements at large cut off to silence the second she was within the first room’s walls. 

They let the Beast in.

They let it stay the night.

So they should stop acting like it could snatch their souls away at any breath. It was getting annoying.

It found itself wrapped up in these thoughts, even as it had, by now, discarded the wrappings of the blanket. The cold within was missing. The shadows cast by the fire still remained preferable to the snow outside. 

It did not expect the girl to bother approaching it, so when she hesitantly did, it counted itself surprised.

“You had bugs crawling inside your head?” she asked. 

It no longer thought this would be a useful interaction. 

“Wait-” Anna startled when it rose. “I only-. It’s just, I’ve thought about how that would feel before. I always pictured spiders though. Did they all get removed?”

It debated shifting the shadows over its eyes to squint down at her. But, in the name of all this neighborly generosity going around, it did not show her its scorn. 

“They were,” it said with a tilt of its head. “I am indebted to your father.”

That got her to puff up a bit. Oh, she likely didn't notice herself. And she was too busy considering all the positives as well as boosts to pride this could mean to remember that the Beast didn't care one whit about debts. The less in danger she felt around it, the more likely she wouldn't just scamper away like a wood mouse. 

Considering her choice in conversation, it did debate if that was better. 

It was, somewhat unfortunately. If this duo was gradually guided into not being on guard around it, then it would become far easier to one day snatch the Dark Lantern from their then-unsuspecting hands. And if the Beast was going to be just as susceptible to the weather as any creature, then it would do well to have a den to hide away from the cold in. 

Let her tell her father all about how he had beat the Beast. Let her prop up the image that he helped it twice, now, and it owed him good behavior for the charity. (Hah. As if he had not murdered it in the first place.)

The winds were not so bad now. Under Anna’s scrutiny, though, it returned to the unobtrusive spot it previously occupied.

Both she and her foolish father then continued to act like it was very much so obtrusive by existing there.

Snow drifted in occasional puffs. The temperature of the air was still sharply freezing no matter if the winds and flurry calmed down.

It thought it had most certainly recovered by now. Even whatever things the mortal stuck to its damaged vessel were no longer prodding at its senses, uncomfortably present. It felt that the darkness had consumed them after all. 

The Beast was never this disconnected from its forest before. Yes, it surrounded the property, but unnaturally constructed walls surrounded it in here. It could barely even see the trees from the windows humans built. 

Time was not so important for a being like itself, and did not tend to pass in notable, linear days as mortals obsessively noted it to do around them constantly. 

The fact that it was watching some act on their rules from clocks to move from the indoors to outdoors to specific, individual rooms inside for the whole night, and then repeat, was throwing the Beast off a little. Here it was, thinking in days itself. How many passed, based on the nights, which it could remember because the mortals sleeping locked away throughout that time always led to the fire burning out and making it cold. How many were left before the snow left altogether. 

It was considering these things when interrupted one morning, very early (by the mortal souls’ standards), by the sound of a door unlocking outside the range of time previous patterns established. 

The Woodsman’s daughter poked her way out of what it determined to be her personal room and, upon seeing the coast was clear, approached again. She was up before her father. There was the vaguest, smallest sense that she was doing something wrong. Frowned upon, inappropriate. Rebellious. It did not matter which. The general results of a variety of those feelings were the same: and that result was discontent that it could use to call a soul into the woods from. 

Just as effectively as curiosity- and here that came too. The girl was different than her younger self, which it had easily lured into the forest despite being raised on warnings from her father. Far less creative in that curiosity, that unsatisfied pit of wonder each child held for the unknown. She was more willing now to (attempt to) strike it with an axe (as if shadows needed to worry about attacks like that), like her father. Less likely to run. Running led to her survival, but that wasn't how she viewed it: running led to her father vanishing, for years, and years, and years. She had more sturdy beliefs constructed around her than before, but they were not yet so stubborn as the Woodsman’s in his age. No. She had a thread of instability throughout all of that identity. There was a chance that she could be poked and proceed to unravel, emotional, irrational assaults on the world around her in order to collapse so much that things would be trapped under the ruins. Trapped with her. 

The problem was how deep her roots went into this spot. She may be more susceptible to unhappiness now than as a more whimsical, naïve child, but that child was willing to wander, while she was ready to lash out and catch what she wanted in her teeth before it could leave her range. 

Confidence came with cracks. She probably didn't even know they were there. A wall of stones could be built higher, but in trade it would be more likely to wobble and collapse.

Far less fragile, but less sound at the same time. 

She went for the fireplace as, it hypothesized, an excuse for being out here so close at all. There were only a few pieces left out on the mantle for her to start one with. The Woodsman carried in new loads every day. Like the lantern, even basic fires required so much feeding. 

There were plenty of potential makeshift weapons at the fireplace. Pokers, a hatchet, oh it was not dense to how the wet human eyes would flicker to the like while pretending to be crouched before their handiwork. 

Anna took far too long to talk and the Beast was not going to be patient when it didn’t benefit it very much. By the time it heard the Woodsman stirring upstairs, it ruffled its pitch foliage over itself and went for the door. The sun had risen enough to see how the snow fell without fervor. 

“Are you leaving?” the Woodsman’s daughter asked. Ah, see, it was . But that was all it took to get her tongue working again. 

Not that it needed much from her. The chances that she would retrieve its lantern for it in direct opposition to her father’s wishes were very low. 

Shadows drifted as they pleased, despite a lack of wind. It turned its head back to see her and watched the tension increase throughout her body. Of course. It was the Beast of the Unknown, after all. Nothing could be truly comfortable in its presence except for souls so close to death that they were too tired to care about a nightmarish creature in front of them admiring their edelwood growths. Why not? its own appearance asked in return.

She barely hesitated. “Why did you come here?” 

Sometimes, the best approach was a truth so broad that all manner of incorrect stories could be dreamed out of it. 

“I was cold,” it said simply. 

Perhaps where it had gone wrong in that terrible moment it was entirely unprepared to improvise through, with the boy, and the lantern placed in the Woodsman’s hands, and everything it ever knew shaking, had been amping up its demanding persona. The hope at the time was that the Woodsman, so used to following like a good little pawn but misbehaving that night, would have such a trained response kick back in if its demands were a little louder. Granted, ‘hope’ was giving it all too much credit as a thorough thought process. It scrambled, it fumbled. Without the panic of encroaching extinction, the Beast could think of alternative hypotheticals all it pleased. The Woodsman’s autonomy outweighed his ability to be directed. The boy placed the thought in his mind that his daughter was not the soul within the lantern at all, and the Beast lost its leverage without time to think up a new lie. 

Instead of continuing with rhetoric that had lost its impact, it could have made a display of vulnerability. It knew now that the Woodsman and his daughter alike fell for that. It was unfortunate that its display days ago was not, in fact, an act, but the information was valuable despite the high costs paid retrieving it. 

And it could no more reverse time than anyone, so this could not be taken and applied in the past in order to avoid everything terrible which followed. 

The girl’s mouth opened wordlessly. Feet made the ceiling creak, a reminder of the time limit. 

“It is still cold,” was what she said. 

Its eyes were round, unblinking lamps that did not change at all in the face of her grand sentiments and wise observations. 

Yes. So it was. 

Now, to leave this corner of the Unknown before the other mortal made it downstairs and it had to witness the same tedious avoidant flitting around. 

Chapter Text

The cold air could be felt as a sensation. It was an unwanted discovery. Predictable, though. Nothing had really changed in its situation. The cause for its new weaknesses went undetected and unbothered. It could have guessed as much from how it distinguished the different feelings sensed from the warmth of the fire when it roared compared to cooled ashes. 

It observed the snow from under the porch where there was more natural shade. Its branches caught on that roofing occasionally, to its annoyance, but it kept itself short enough to mostly avoid the problem. It could be smaller still and ensure there was no such issue, but it rather refused. It was meant to be taller than any soul that came face to face with the lord of the forest. 

Take the girl waltzing out of the warmth to stand on the cold deck, for instance. She was only a little shorter than her father, who might have been taller before he fell into a life of constant weary anger (and also would've  had less time carrying the weight of heavy log cuts on his back). That only worsened a stoop age would cause without this extra help. 

It would hardly be more diminutive than she when in her presence. And the more tethered to its vessel that the Beast was, the more limited to that vessel’s exact shape it found its shadows. Its newfound weaknesses made that anchor all too present. 

When it glanced her way, the uppermost branch on its right caught on the overhang and it held back its annoyance at how it ruined the fluidity of its movements. 

Her father probably would have made a comment. The Beast almost wished that it had met the two in reverse order and had her as a lantern bearer instead. The thought was there and gone. She wouldn’t have cut and carried as much edelwood at a time and there was no saying she would be as easy to convince that the soul in the lantern was important to her. And she could have shown as many hostilities if worn down by the task as long as he was, for all that it could say. 

She was very bundled up. Much like the Woodsman would be before. It found he shed layers if he was inside his own territory. If it was warmblooded, it would too. Despite the extra puffy coats (ah- and the weapon, sorry, ‘tool’, attached to a belt), the cold wasted no time in making her face’s skin a bright, painful pink. None of those fabrics covered it. This seemed like a design error. 

“Father says if you’re going to still be here, you might as well pull your weight too,” Anna said. She remembered to be tense only after the declaration. “Erm. Those were his words, not mine.”

Yes, that was consistent. He would make it insulting that way. She would make the same sentiment sound bizarrely familiar. 

It did not accept the demand that it do work for its killer, but it did slip down the porch to follow her around the yard. This was just because it was bored. It might as well see what chores were so important to do daily that it made the mortals open the main door to the cold air multiple times a day. All it had gleaned from their very stilted words were that there were goats, and the firewood got cut up as well as stacked outside somehow instead of inside where nothing was wet. 

It noted the girl was strange around the well but it didn't stop her from dragging buckets into the barn and house.

“It's small for a barn,” she told it, because she was under the impression it cared and it never hurt to let youth think it was a good listening ear. It killed time effectively while waiting for something like the cold to kill the speakers. 

The Beast did not go into settled areas. It would need to be invited into some, and others were so bare of trees that the light of the sky was oppressively constant upon every square foot of land. That made it needlessly difficult for the stalker of the forest to get its shadows off the ground. 

It saw nothing of villages up close. It despised certain ones- a difference of professional opinion could be too bitter and such was the case between it and others who stole perfectly good souls away from edelwood. The forest was untamed. So it did not matter, what little fixtures might dot the Unknown. They were not always there. The Dark Lantern shone where weak lanterns on their light posts did now. The Beast remembered what came first before mortal influence let artificial dens construct. 

The apparently-small barn was indeed a diminutive, unimpressive thing. Its sole advantages were that it had a roof and walls that kept the wind and snow out, and that it was slightly warmer inside. There were too many rafters and poles for its branches to catch in. It stank. That would be the goats, apparently. Those and the fowl that were kept in their cramped shelter from the cold. 

It didn't know why the Unknown bothered to make animals. They could at least be improved upon, and not have waste. Some firewood stacked along a wall to keep dry.

The Beast maneuvered its branches back out through the tiny side door (the large ones bolted and untouched because they would let greater amounts of cold air in should they be opened) to see what the Woodsman was doing to pull his weight. It heard him out there so it knew he wasn't hiding with its lantern in his grip somewhere in the house. 

It found a very uncreative answer. He was chopping wood. With a tarp pulled back, he retrieved pieces that he could place on a stump and then strike with his usual brutality, somehow not cutting the stump up in the process. How expert. It was in his name, though. And after a good deal of years in its service cutting and processing edelwood, he'd better make it look easy. 

There was the rest of the firewood. Barely kept from being too wet to have a use. No wonder some pieces had to wait so long on the mantle before the Woodsman tried to use them. 

Well, it saw him work plenty and with better wood. It wouldn't be volunteering to help with that. Or with whatever his daughter was up to, most likely, but it was more willing to consider the latter. It might ‘help’ and then she would praise, give it a good word, to the individual keeping its lantern away from it. (It was with him over in the snow. Disappointing.) Debts meant nothing to it, but it would not mind making other souls feel they owed it. 

It slipped into the darkest corner of the barn and ignored the way the chickens and mice skittered away. 

The Woodsman’s daughter was sitting on a stool. It thought it recalled her talking about feeding, cleaning stalls, breaking icy water up, and more, and yet here she was, doing absolutely none of that.

Anna was petting a goat’s head where it was demandingly pressed to her lap. She was not accomplishing any chores. 

It took her much longer than the chickens to even realize it was there. It was then treated to a tour through every single creature; she focused on their names more than the qualities they were going to be butchered for at some point. It found her, in that moment, more like a child it might lure into the forest than the young adult she was. Once the barrier of distaste, perceived superiority, and fear was crossed, it seemed she would not stop talking. The manner in which she did so was…curious. It half suspected she forgot she had an audience capable of comprehending words, and half suspected she thought there was at least one other person present capable of that outside of the Beast. 

In its long lifetime, words were its weapon of choice. It knew to adapt how it spoke according to audience and its intentions with that listener. Its songs were the voice of the forest. With this resume to provide it its caliber of judgment, it thought she was not very good at speaking. 

“And here is- OH -” The girl broke off and stared, half in wonder and half in horror at a bird that was comfortably nestled into displaced hay and branches in a rafter. The inside of the shed was warmer than the yard by far. It had heating from a little woodstove near the center of the floor which required a chimney to go up through the tallest part of the roof in a bit of an awkward design all around. 

The metal pipe wasn't what caught her interest. It peered at the messy nest to see what had her looking so worried. 

It was a mockingbird and it could be anywhere else in the Unknown rather than where Winter was currently taking its turn. It had wings for a reason. 

Heated or not, the barn wasn't a pleasant temperature. Just livable for the warm blooded animals inside. 

Why a mockingbird chose to be out this far into the forest in this weather, it didn't care. They didn't make for fuel. It had little interest in what could not feed its lantern.

The Woodsman’s daughter tried to straighten up to a fuller height in between it and the rafter. 

“Don’t hurt Mr. Twerps,” she demanded. Or pleaded or threatened, or what did it matter? They were all the same from mortals. 

Still, this was not like being asked to let a wayward soul on the brink of losing its will free to go to Pottsfield to get buried and undug. It hardly needed to be treated with the same levels of passion and severity. 

The Beast looked at her and shadows shuttered its shining eyes. “Child, do I have a reason to?”

That sunk in a second later. She reacted accordingly, ready to move them all along. And in between, it saw far more awareness from her than it had judged, scattering, strategic, too late now that it noticed. She actually did think the Beast of the Unknown had a reason to be invested in one individual bird. That hadn't been the reaction of someone assuming it would just eat any creature it saw- which it did not and had never done, but let the tales spin out of control as they pleased, so long as it meant those that found themselves lost in the forest were predisposed to fear and would be quickly chipped away. 

The Beast moved around her to see the silent mockingbird. Animals that didn't contain human souls didn't often fear it the way mortals did. They weren't able to understand all the stories and tall tales. So their fear came from a simpler place. In that case, the bird should've tried flying away out of reach and out of the barn. It held still but ceased the little singing it did when first making its presence known to the girl. 

The reaction of those that heard songs and myths making the Beast as horrifying as imagination could allow them to paint it. 

“Ah.” It allowed itself to say. “He is not a normal bird.” 

It detected she moved elsewhere in her barn and approached now with an axe. The Beast leveled her with a stare most unimpressed. 

“His soul isn’t free,” it said, “and I do not enjoy disputes.”

Though skeptical, she did let the weapon hang more loosely from just one hand. 

“Your Mr. Twerps is safe…from me.”

She ignored the implication that her bird friend’s soul could be claimed by the hands of another that her standards might call- what was that word she'd used for it again? Vile? Yes. Dramatic judgments based in dramatic mortal values. The Unknown was a very complex organism, and mortals were not.

The girl looked back at the silent mockingbird.

“His name is Zacky actually. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember because I spent too long thinking of him as-” Her words grew too mumbled to make out. After a pause where her soul restlessly stirred, she shook the gloom away.

Anna lifted out a hand, trading it for a single finger that the mockingbird cocked its head to and fro rapidly to investigate. Despite the way this looked, she was not pecked for her efforts. “Hi Zacky,” she said to the bird directly. 

The Beast was not one to have its looming presence ignored in favor of a bird no matter if it was a mortal once. 

It stalked the border where the woods grew thick and its forest called to any with a wavering will. The sun was diminished by clouds and cast the afternoon into an early twilight. It could command the forest grow even darker, but it could not extend its power into this side of the clearing. 

The ground beneath it was wet. This should not matter.

The Beast stared into a tempting gray. A silent gray. Lacking in boisterous song, and this, also, should not be.

False twilight morphed into true evening. 

The snow was falling hard again. It felt very against the idea of going deeper into its own woods. Pain no longer present acted as though it were currently real, through memory. 

It retreated to the porch, displeased with itself. When the girl passed through the room to go to the other side of the house and jumped upon noticing it beyond the window, she opened the door for it. Nonsensical. It ached badly. Whatever was done so recently, by the elements and then by the Woodsman’s hands, it could not be shaken off in a manner of hours. And new snow would repeat the problem.

It slipped past the offered door. It felt like a surrender. This was not to the forest, and did not involve directly feeding its soul, so it bristled and protested against such a term.

Chapter Text

The Woodsman slept upstairs and his daughter below. More than once, they’d almost stumbled into each other going the wrong way. The Beast wondered if their room claims were recently switched. It would be just like the man to keep the Dark Lantern even further away from the Beast despite how unobtrusive of a visitor it was. 

Mortal spirits slept more soundly within their own dens. It was not sure if this was out of a sense of safety or because of extra comforts. Souls lost in the forest grew more and more uncomfortable trying to sleep. Some would have edelwood grow around them while unconscious because of just how poor the cumulative stays on the forest floor made their will feel.

Souls relaxed in their own territory didn’t feel anything like what it was used to. There was no scrambling to make the ground a little more comfortable or the grass into blankets, and little to none of that ever-present fear of the dark. 

It was cold. Having a physical blanket on its lap did very little to help, since it generated heat at insignificantly slow, small levels. The Beast waited for the morning when one of the mortals would fix that. Because this was still better than the ice outside if it left, and it didn’t want to wait scratching on the porch to be let in if it regretted leaving. 

As far as it knew, most mortal souls didn’t sense each other, let alone more powerful spirits. It could nearly be tricked into thinking otherwise when Anna re-entered this space hours before the sun would be up. 

She crossed the floor to run the pump in the kitchen and paused, pale, on her walk back when her sleepy mind noticed it wasn’t completely dark in here. Freezing like that was a common enough reaction to creatures seeing its eyes at night. 

Anna blinked a few times and her soul re-settled. Her pulse slowed back to a pace it didn’t hear. 

She came a little closer. When she folded her legs to the floor, they disappeared under the gown and quilt she had around her shoulders. Blankets bundled around the living in a far less displaced way. Maybe if they made a trade, the quilt would take a while to cool off from her warmth. 

“You can keep the fire going if it is cold at night,” the girl said.

It was quiet enough to not carry up to the level above, though not a whisper. 

The Beast didn’t reply quickly enough for her, apparently. 

“Do you not know how to? Wait.” She set her hands on the quilt wrinkles where her knees approximately were. “Do you know how to start one? Because if you are freezing and it's gone entirely, you're allowed to start a safe one.”

How very thoughtful of them to give their enemy a little more room to do anything aside from sit. All the while, they held its soul hostage and constantly guarded by the same creature who extinguished it once before. This was like giving a hound a slightly larger kennel or throwing bones inside the bars, and the Beast almost found itself dismissing the ‘allowances’ on bitter principle. 

It mirrored the way she sat and reached- nonthreatening- into the space between them.

“These shadows hide a tree,” it said. “Putting my hands in embers does not sound conducive to my wellbeing.”

The Woodsman must not have told her about what it looked like under the unfiltered light of its soul, or else she wouldn’t look surprised to hear this. That was a point in his favor. There was no prize for accumulating any but it was interesting to note anyway.

She looked as if she wanted to ask a dozen questions. Youth and its curiosity. It never served to be a drawback for the Beast. 

“But are you cold?” she chose to ask. “You’re out here all night, and I-...”

She didn’t impart whatever that was. For a moment, all she did was frown, before she shuffled on hidden legs until she was at the brick mantle. 

“There are always gloves, but I think- you could manage. Here, watch, and do as I say.”

That was a very bold way to talk to it. Not all powers in the Unknown would humor her bossing them around, but consider the Beast in the right mood to play along. It often did. Granted, it often had a reason to stall for time while naïve souls tried to ‘beat’ it, and this instance lacked an end goal of edelwood. 

In continued quiet, she showed it the pokers and how her own occasional nerves around fire’s heat led her to balance wood on the thin metal and use it to put the piece into the right spot, what three-piece build was easiest, and how if it stirred up the embers with a tool or stick, and shoved all manner of old papers and needles into and around the triangle stack of wood, the embers may light the kindling and those may burn long enough for one of the logs to start as well. 

“It is easiest if you just keep putting wood on the coals before they cool off,” she whispered, very close, while they were joined in leaning down to stare into the current smoking attempt. The entire position was foolishness, and yet it still played along like it was just another fellow mortal body to conspiratorially stare at a failed fire and hope the other mortal didn’t awaken to find the source of smoke clogging up the air. The only difference from image to reality was that they were far from touching sides (mostly impossible, for anything to touch darkness), and it had very prominent branches crowning its head that she had to avoid accidentally hitting her own with. 

It could see her point. With this ‘permission’, it would rather act like pokers were tongs that could put spare wood on the still burning remains of a close-to-dying fire than try to light one by hand. No matter how much, the Beast considered while watching her try to alter the flue to save the room from smoke, it should not know how to have a hand in anything inside mortal constructions. Those inside homes were walled off, until their soul wavered just enough to come outside and cross into its trees. It had a hand in the fates of wayward souls, while not being meant to exist in their business if they were not lost. 

The only fire it fed was the Dark Lantern’s flame, and it burned by oil. It did not need to be restarted on a bed of ashes, because it would be dead if the fire reached that point. 

The wind outside began to howl. It felt the ghost of crawling aching itching pains carving it open from the inside. Ice. Elements. Water. 

Its attention went back to the fireplace here, away from the shadows of its purpose and power.

Anna cleaned out the latest mess and now started on a fire without trying to include its involvement. The tiny kindling flickered with very little heat. Light and shadows reflected off her face while she stared in a rigid seriousness, like she was seeing something it couldn’t, and didn’t need to. 

She did not start to talk until after the lower left log began to burn instead of just blackening from the kindlings fire against it. 

“Were you ever lonely?” she asked.

It gave her its attention. “No.”

“Even though you have always been alone in the woods?” 

It was her question- the one she withheld but wondered since its weakened self was dragged over these floorboards. Hate and fear for the Beast before kept the mortal soul from ruminating on it too often. But now? After this intrusion lasted on and on? 

Rumination let edelwood roots grow up to tangle around feet and ankles and trip their owners while the mortals, chewing the same old thoughts over and over again, failed to even notice they were there at all. 

This was not just curiosity or else she would actually be stealing glances its way. In fact, the Beast almost felt like an insulted stand-in. It might as well be that bird right now. No great difference would be made in her approach.

Curiosity on its own part did have it tease out more from her, first offering elaborations to later trade back answers from. 

“No one is alone in the forest,” it said. “It is filled with a chorus. Those whose voices are cut off after being cut down are food for the lantern. No mortal soul would know what it is like to have others join.”

She didn’t run at the reminder of its feeding patterns. But she could hardly truly understand what it talked about, in fairness. Neither could her father. He just would be less content to hear any of this because his mind would jump to the first (and last) very fresh edelwood he ever saw, and the horror that followed when the weight of his actions with the trees sunk in. One cannot trade the souls of children as if they are tokens- oh, he did not like to learn that he’d been doing exactly that for years! And he hadn’t, either. Because it was not this girl’s soul that he traded the other children in for, it was the Beast’s own. Even his realizations about his lie of a life were lies! This was what it meant. Mortals could never understand some things in full. They couldn’t begin to hope to know. 

And she did not, in fact, come close to starting. Her mind was elsewhere and passed over the forest completely. She’d been thinking about herself from the start.

“I was lonely.” The information was volunteered up as abruptly and freely as its elaboration. Its recipient cared just about as much in both instances. But the Beast did pay attention. It may be important. “Mother left me books, but I cannot recommend romance novels for those already crushed in solitude.”

She hid a smile under the draping mass of hair that fell before her face.

“I shouldn’t recommend them regardless, because they are horrid. And horribly entertaining.”

Hm. The value level of this did not seem especially high. It understood nothing of what she was talking about now. 

It had never once held a book.

She turned and made a claim very easily, that it might have found laughable if it didn’t intend to keep the Woodsman sleeping. “If you were addicted to them, you wouldn't have time to kill people.”

“Mortals kill themselves,” it countered. “You just contest the method of the forest.”

“Do you always pretend to not be awful?” she accused, pulling a face.

Oh, forget the Woodsman.

It tossed its head back and laughed.

“The Unknown knows not to trust a thing I say and forget they do right after!” Darkness coiled along the ceiling, curled up around its height and its height curved over her. It let its hand stand out from the rest of the pitch when it came to rest humbly where a human’s chest would approximately be. “I am named the Beast, and I am known for lies. I would say that is all rather self explanatory.” Sliding back to a less oppressive corner between couch and wall and mantle, it gave a shrug. “It's not my fault so many ignore the obvious.”

It wasn’t as if it had named itself. Or as if humans named it. The Unknown merely knew what it was and all of those who found themselves lost or at home amidst the Unknown learned as they started to drift in. The Dark Lantern and the Beast. Not quite a god, not welcome as a psychopomp since its forest consumed souls and repurposed them into oil rather than booting them along to some lovely little afterlife, most assuredly not a mortal but protecting a soul just as ultimately fragile…It fit, did it not? Monsters and nightmares were too broad. It was an ageless animal which learned to sing and stand but knowing how to lie to creatures did not change how its core was survival, ritual, need. Only a beast would take its monstrous self and give it a voice to trick and haunt, soothe and quell, the souls it planned to eat. 

The Unknown knew. It remembered not a day when it itself did not know.

Someone was having a nightmare in the level built above this space. Out in the forest, that would be enough for vines to wrap around the mortal. Its laughter would be familiar to him; and it proved more convenient that hearing it cause dreams to take a sour turn as opposed to waking him from his sleep completely. 

It was still considering him, head ever so slightly tilted to the ceiling, when Anna pressed the topic again. 

“If you aren't lonely, why are you here?” 

It forgot the roof and faced her fully.

“Your father made me unnaturally susceptible to the cold,” it reminded the girl. “He is not making it right. So I am here to get my lantern.”

A lantern up past the stairs. Stairs it did not think its branches could hope to be angled and fit their way through. And it had not been invited to that level. It functioned as another personal territory rather like the girl’s room down here. The Beast stalked the woods, not the branches high in the trees. It was hardly known for its presence in the air untethered from the soil. There was no surprise the Woodsman would keep the lantern up there. 

“You haven't managed yet.”

“Would you rather I try with more force?” it threatened. She was good at schooling her expressions, it was true, but she had no control over her blood flow. Her face paled and betrayed her efforts, as any human’s would.

It didn’t want to be forced out into its own Winter. The Beast gave her the chance to calm first, by looking away, displaying its disinterest in a fight. 

“The fire survives,” it said. And it did, even it was burning more pathetically than most. “Go back to your sleep.”

She did rise. The quilt didn’t fall long enough to cover her ankles. 

“You’ll help it if it starts to go out?” It almost sounded like she wanted a promise from it, of all thin- “If you get cold?”

It could manage that basic of a mortal task, yes. Even if it did not like the feel of anything in its hands that was not its lantern handle. The discomfort was nearly surpassed by boredom and so it would almost rather the fire start failing so it had something to do. Beneath both of those sentiments was the thick displeasure that it was feeling anything so dependent instead of mastering its own straightforward existence. The Beast was as straightforward as its moniker, from the moment the Unknown put such a name upon it. This restless shadow could not survive if it went outside and was forced to be a relic of lost history in the wrong environment within this side of the door, and if it did not know how to be patient, it might have set the house ablaze and thrown the livestock into the wilds just to relieve the tension of its own self imprisonment. 

She didn’t fall asleep very quickly behind her door. It felt her soul restless but aware, unlike the restless yet unconscious mortal above. It heard metal, tiny, tiny metal noises hidden away in there with her. Intentional. Timed. They rang more stilted than a bell free to move in the air would be. But those hollow, muted metal notes made a song. And that made it envision setting the place ablaze even more vividly, with a hapless impotence it wasn’t able to sort out fully.