Flash Fiction: Something is Wrong in the Forest

Randall the Huntsman glared at the forest from the doorway of his cabin. The trees seemed thicker today, more crowded, less welcoming. It was midday but the shadows were too dark, almost malevolent, and it was silent – no birdsong, no breeze, no life.

The forest was his home. He had grown up beneath its boughs only a few miles north. When his father died Randall had roamed south, found himself a good spot and built his home. He had been here for years, communing with the cycle of life, living from the forest, just as his father had taught him.

Today, something was different. Something was wrong.

He walked to the middle of the circular clearing. Grassy paths ran between his gardens from here to the four compass points. To the west, his cabin; east, the Sunstone; north, his well and shrine to the Water Mother; south, a bare patch of earth and the Gravestone.

Life was a circle, every part of it to be honoured.

He sat in the centre, cross-legged, facing east. Beneath him he could feel the circular Heartstone buried there. He closed his eyes and let his feelings drift down the four paths; he felt the familiar circle about him, and beyond it... a darkness where there should have been chaos, an overwhelming emptiness where there should have been life and death and nature.

He tentatively explored the absence with his spirit, touching against it and feeling its hunger, feeling its pull. He dared not drift beyond his circle for fear that the darkness would swallow him up.

He opened his eyes. In the forest beyond his Sunstone a figure sat, also cross-legged, watching him. To his right he saw a similar, dark, indistinct figure just past the Gravestone, within the tree line. He couldn’t see past the well to his left or through his cabin behind him, but he assumed there were two more there as well.

As he waited, the figure in front of him remained unmoving, silent. Randall felt the Heartstone beat once, twice, beneath him as two hours passed without event. His back grew warm as the sun drifted lazily across the sky behind him.

He stood up and walked back into his cabin. He took his father’s short bow, that had been his grandfather’s and his great grandfather’s before that, and older. It seemed to be made from a twisted knot of gnarled roots and the huntsman’s muscles strained as he strung it. He picked up an arrow of burnt wood that he had prepared that morning, as he had every morning since his father had died.

He walked back out to the centre of his clearing and sat down again. The figures were nearer, within the circle now, between him and his Sunstone, his Water Mother shrine, his Gravestone and – he looked behind himself – now his cabin as well. The darkness had encroached with them, somehow, and it was not the darkness of night, which will give way to daylight in its turn; this was the darkness at the end of things, which has no dawn.

Randall regarded the shadowed figure in front of him. The figure spoke, and its voice came from all around him as if all four spoke with the same rasping hollowness.

“What god do you worship, little man, that it keeps us at bay where everything else has succumbed?”

There was still time, and so Randall replied, “I worship no god. I honour the cycle that is endless.”

The voice crackled with what may have been a laugh. “The wars of man, magic and gods have broken your cycle. We are the end.”

“I know who you are. You are the avatars of entropy. You seek to consume everything until you are everything and everything is you. Even you avatars will be consumed in the end.”

“Of course. It is in our nature, we do not fear the final death.”

“But now is not your time.”

“The gods are dead, the heroes have unleashed forces from which the world cannot be reborn. You are not even a hero, you are but an ordinary man. Who are you to resist us?”

“I am the axle about which the world turns. North, South, East, West. Darkness and light. Life and death. Past and future.”

Randall raised his bow and notched the arrow. The figure before him did not flinch. Then Randall pointed the bow skywards and drew. He released the arrow straight upwards, impossibly so. At the apex of its flight it twisted and plummeted straight down towards the huntsman’s upturned face.

He looked back at the avatar in front of him and smiled. “We have prepared for this day. The end is part of the cycle, and after the end, a new beginning.”

As Randall felt the beat of the Heartstone beneath him, the arrow struck his head and passed straight through, piercing the stone and going deeper still. The burnt shaft, stained with blood and stone and sunlight, remembered its path through the air and through the earth, and through Randall.

Randall became a pivot at the centre of all things, at the centre of the cycle. He reached out to the Sunstone, to the Starstone beneath his cabin, to the Water Mother and Father Death. He took hold of the world and he twisted. Slowly, it began to move.

He felt the avatars clawing their way towards him but as the great cycle began again, they were forced back. Their jaws snapped in frustration as they prowled about the edges of existence. Their day would come, inevitably, but in good time.

Randall’s thoughts returned to his body. He ached, everywhere. He scuffed his feet as he shuffled back to his cabin. He heard a soft whimpering, a quiet murmuring, from inside. On his bed lay a baby, clutching at his blankets, staring at him.

The cycle was safe, the cycle continued. His son had been delivered.