At first the forest didn’t seem that intimidating. Some evergreen conifers; some dry leafless tall trees with bare branches and equally bony shrubbery. But as you moved deeper within the rank darkness, the trunks seem to increase density, and the shadows would grow tall and thick. I ran behind these shadows as fast as my legs would take me. Quite the sprint. I do not recommend running immediately after waking up from the dead. Wait at least a few days, and never run immediately after lunch.

The moonlight mixed with the shadows cast some grim hallucinations in my eyes. And only one of them I recognized as having wings. I slowed down, and so did she.

“Finora!” I cried.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Thank god, I found you. Are we on the right path?”

“Yes,” she answered, monosyllabic as ever.

“Where is your cold worded, cold hearted, misguiding elder sister?”

“Scouting”

“Scouting? I can barely see anything here.”

“She smells”

“Ah, yes. Her powers are very much akin to her personality—”

“Nora!” a cold whisper broke the silence of the forest and our light muffled footsteps. To my surprise, it even carried over my own voice.

“I could hear both of you from a mile away!” she said, her eyes very much crimson. “If you talk any louder, even the Cawadhlain would hear you. Crow, I need you to focus more on stealth than on your complaints. Why do you keep complaining? There’s no one else to listen to you. It will do you no good. Understand?”

“That’s harsh,” I said. “Complaints are all that I have going for me.”

“Ugh.” Even the spotted moonlight couldn’t hide her annoyance. “Nora, they will get to the Big Old Oak in about ten more minutes. I will lie in wait, just in case. Go.”

Finora’s great leathery bat wings propped up and she hopped out of the line of the thick trees and was soon lost in the canopy. She was swift and precise in her movement: someone with skill and craft in the trait of agility.

I too wanted to head behind her, but I was stopped by Fangira with a strong grip of my forearm.

“You come with me,” she said. “And if you make any more noise, I will kill you.”

“I still have some questions,” I said.

“We shall run and talk. Keep up!” Fangira said, and broke into a run. I followed, hurrying as fast as these boots took me.

Okay, I know you have questions, but let’s take it easy a bit and talk about these nice boots! Extremely comfortable! They seemed to hug the shape of my foot and ankle, and somehow squeeze and stimulate the area around the Achilles’ tendon! I felt not the hard knobs of the roots on the ground, or even the rocks, the boots gripped them all. But that was not their only speciality. How do I explain this – they glided over the terrain. As if they were made of springs!

Of course, I still didn’t have any nice woollen socks, and hated my life, my existence, and my luck at the same time. No one should wear boots this good without socks.

We broke out of the dense tree line and found the moonlight bright on the frosted carpet of snow. The denseness of the trees had ended. Standing there, no one would ever say that the trees were that thick from where we came running. Somehow, half the trees remained hidden. Mysterious.

Fangira stood there in the middle of the path and kept sniffing the air; vapours were rising and falling from her nose and her mouth, scattering the moonlight.

“So, what is the Bloody Knight?” I’m sure you’re curious as well.

“You wanted to ask that now?” she seemed incredulous.

“If you haven’t noticed, Miss Fangira, the name demands a bit more attention.”

“It’s a monster that roams the paths of this forest,” she said. “Or did you not understand what this forest does? It’s a monster in the true sense – it is without any intelligence, only malice exists in its heart. The will and desire to kill and destroy. That’s what it does. If you find it, run. It’s the only choice you will have, and you must choose quickly.”

“And, how does it look?”

“Why do you think people call it the Bloody Knight?”

She had a point.

“One more thing, why do the eyes of your sister and yourself change their colour?”

“Ah, so you noticed?” she said with a surprise. “Not bad, not bad. When we channel magic, our eyes can become red.”

“Crimson.”

“What?”

“Your eyes become crimson.”

She stared at me, her eyebrows scrunched, having to deal with the bombs of truth that I had dropped upon her. Carpet bomb dropped all over her brain!

“Okay,” she nodded her head, in what I still think is utter defeat. “Crimson. Why does it matter?”

“Because, my dear Miss Fangira, that’s the right colour.”

“Okay, I get it. Crimson. Red. How does it matter? They’re almost the same colour.”

“The key-word there is almost.”

She shook her head. “You know what, I’m done arguing about w-what— with your nonsense.”

“I don’t think I said any thing that had no sense in it.”

“Okay, crimson. Can you now concentrate on this problem at hand?”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was how I won the famous Battle of the Winterburne Forest against the Forest Queen, User of Sharp Words and Sharper Claws, Fangira. She scored a point against me, and I scored two points against her, without reply. Checkmate.

There was another battle, but we’ll get to that later.

This was the more important one.

 

The smell, or whatever it was, came back to Miss Fangira. She turned her head to what I thought was South and said, “That way”

Revelling in my victory, I remained quiet. The moon had moved more than 40% up in the sky. I looked up to see it peeking across many a coniferous canopy to illuminate this path.

“I don’t think there is any necessity for us to undertake this mission,” I said. “They would have never found their way to the Manor.”

“Some paths,” said Fangira, her voice a cold whisper of the wind, “are closer than you think they are. Paths that lay in the dark will shift; they would have found their way to us just after midnight. Then, I would have had to kill them.”

“Are you sure? We’ve been jogging and running for close to an hour!”

“Half-an-hour. You think that makes them many hours from the Manor? Wrong. It would take us only five minutes to get back from here.”

Then, she stopped and raised her hand as a signal, motioning me towards the line of the forest to my right. This time, within only a few minutes of negotiating through tangled knots of roots and branches, we found ourselves hiding in the darkness behind a young larch tree only a few meters tall.

I was about to say something, but she put her finger on my lips and shook her head. Even though the snow kept the forest muffled in silence, I could hear the clink of metal arrive unseen. Unmistakable sounds of a company of men marching through the parted wood line. Their boots thumped the earth, the metal of their armour clanked, and their lantern’s light soon found its way around the curve of the path to fall on the branches of the trees in front of us.

That was another thing I noticed. All paths seem to curve. Always. The trees grew in an uncanny line like an avenue within a maze. Always with a curve.

There were about thirty of them. Some had storm lamps held aloft on sticks, and most carried lamps with a heavy convex lens in the middle which gave beams of light that fell every which way. You could tell that these were men who were gathering their courage as they walked. With every step into the eerie forest the courage leaked out from beneath their soles.

I should have told this to you before, reader. But I guess I am so far gone from being human that only at the sight of other human faces did I realize what was wrong with this forest.

There was no sound. No chirp of insect. No hoot of an owl out hunting in the full moon. It was always the deathly silence of snow.

Yes. There is no life in a forest wrapped over with the white cloak of death.

I had to adjust the position of my seating. I put my arm around over Miss Fangira to go very near her ear, cupping my hands to ensure not even the smallest vibration would leak through.

“What’s going to happen? Are they the ones?” I asked.

She flicked her fingers on mine and nodded her head and pointed to the right. The platoon of soldiers was heading to a large clearing with a rock, beside a giant Oak tree. Big, knobbly, tangled boughs reaching some eighty feet into the air. Sure, the birches and the pines were taller, but none stood near its fearsome canopy. From my vantage, I could see some of the dark, leafless, spindly branches against the moonlight.

“Marvellous!” I spoke.

The platoon stopped after a few seconds, abruptly. They pulled their lamps out and began pointing the beams all around them. I saw them miss us a few times. I looked at Fangira, her face right beside mine in our little hideout, into whose eyes the moonlight had found its way around the young larch tree hiding us. She kept staring at me, with a face masked in vacuous anger. And a very cold, hard stare.

In hindsight, I should remember to remain quiet.

Also, in hindsight her face was really uncomfortably close to mine.

“It’s okay,” she said. “We are about to begin.”

The wind started rushing through the path. The darkness became stiff, and the sides of the trees, especially the large Oak, started glowing crimson! Crimson light sprang out of the roots in the soil and lit the snow as if on fire! And the poor old platoon was caught between the two crimson edges of woods.

And on the rock stood a figure, eyes crimson and wings red. Her platinum hair shone in the blue reflection of the moon. Beams from the lantern fell on her and showed a hand that was held in front of her like a claw. Her figure seemed wrecked in pain with her wings squirming behind her, growing wider and wider till she tilted them up towards the sky.

“Heed!” she cried. Lanterns fell down, and most soldiers collapsed on their knees. Their eyes too were aglow with the same crimson light.

“Heed my words well, ye who come!” she exclaimed. “You are lost. No path leads onwards. You are lost. The way home is behind you. Leave now. You are lost. Escape the forest. Know fear in my voice, know pain. Know the only way out is back!”

There were screams I heard. Oh, what screams! Pain and suffering; the worst fears a man could dream. They were all feeling it.

“Go back,” the girl said. “You are lost. Go back.”

For a moment, there was stillness. The crimson light of the snow became just an afterglow. Not a single man moved.

“They are all asleep,” Fangira said. “It’s over.”

Finora kneeled over the large stone; her wings without the red glow stirred only the slightest air. She was panting – I could see the mist form in front of her.

Then, a single streak of light erupted from in between the sleeping soldiers. It was like a firework, and it went up and up and up, and burst in a large flash of white light above us.

“Bloody hell,” said Fangira. “It’s not over.”