Scream It Until You're Coughing Up Blood - An Early Medieval Punk Fairy Tale

6. We Will Do Great Things

You rub your head, the green bracelet brushing gently against your skin. It takes you a moment to find a name to the feeling in your gut which for once isn't revulsion. Ah. It's curiosity. Anticipation like you haven't felt in weeks, months, maybe ever. Wherever she's gone to, you want to follow.

Everything aligns to make the day good on you. The morning sun shines through the canopies, light and warm, but they also give enough shade to keep the summer's scorch away. You pack your things and run a hand through your messy haircut. You don't remember why the woods ever scared you, at all. When you put on your wraps, you smile under them.

Her feet – no, her hooves – left clear impression in the underbrush, and they are not difficult at all to follow. Although her trail snakes through dense thickets of fresh growth, over high ridges and down steep gorges, it never once fails to lead you safely and quickly. The woods are gentle on you as follow with your eyes down to the ground, always on the lookout for her next mark. Branches brush against you, but their touch is a soft caress. Roots seem to move out of the way of your feet when they would trip you and raise to give a hard platform where mud bars the way. Among the trees, you spot the beasts of the wild, watching you. But in the eyes of the foxes and wolves and stags and boars that meet you, you see no fear and no hostility. You pass between them either unseen, or thoroughly accepted. Even sustenance is amply provided to you. You drink from brooks too rapid for you to see a reflection of something ill in them, and eat from tall brushes heavy with blood-red fruit which taste sweet like honey and are still heartier than any meal known to people of the Saintly faith.

And yet, it is not that comfort that awes you the most about the chase after a woodland temptress. It takes you a while to notice, but somewhere during your sun-soaked road, you realize that there's been a voice in your head that kept screaming poison and curses into your ear ever since-

-you pause, both in your walk and in your thoughts. The trees around you wind so to support you when you lean against them and try to remember if there was ever a time when there was no voice following your every step and action. Maybe you were free of it back then, back home, when there were others around you drowning its screams with their voice and presence. But it was there, in the undergrowth of your memory, in the dark places of lightest days. That voice, that part of you, had always been your surest companion. And now it is gone, like a pain you don't even realize you had to live with until it abates. The thought occurs to you as a parliament of birds gathers on the branches above to sing peace to you that maybe it hasn't left you entirely, maybe it remains buried and sealed somewhere deep inside, muffled and muzzled. If that's the case, then you are not going to go poking through the underside of your skull, looking for its den.

You are not stupid. It's not some miracle, it's not an act of the Saints. They are not heaping their gifts on you. The creature put a spell on you. You crouch down, sinking deeper into your thoughts, and the forest offers you a place to sit and consider. You pull yourself up a flat, moss-greened rock it presented to you, crouch on it, then lift your wrist to your eyes. The bracelet is there, vivid green. Careful not to break it, you touch it and flinch. The leaves are prickly – it feels like there are some unseen barbs that grow on their underside. You imagine how much it would have to hurt to rip it away and shudder.

Yet, you pluck at it again, the jolt going down your arm and into your chest. When you close your eyes you imagine long roots growing from the thorns, weaving around your muscle and bone, then beneath your ribs into that secret place of your body where everything vile in you dwells, and you imagine them tying it up, binding it and sealing in a thick net that it will never allow it to come back. Then you lay back on the stone and allow the sun to come and shine on you some more. You catch a short nap, for once alone from that rancid side of you.

When you wake up, the bliss is still with you and so is a growing sense of need to keep it there. If that creature knows how to keep you with it, you must never leave her side, because your life feels good, good and easy and most of all, simple. There is something hollow to this quiet inside of your mind, but maybe it how it should be, without the tension, without the pain, without the filth and the fury. Maybe this is why others- no, you don't want to think about them. You don't want to think about the world that is behind you and that's no longer yours. There is a road ahead of you that will take you to where a girl that you suspect to be a Malefactor weaves peace into bracelets and snaps them on the unsuspecting. If this is temptation, you are falling all the way for it, no stops and no brakes.

There is a sense of elation when you realize that you can think thoughts like that and not have them be knives that stab into your mind, that you can think them and not want to tear your own flesh from your bones to rip away everything that's wrong and throw it into the offal-pit where it belongs. Now, those thoughts come and go, like waves. No barbs, no edges, nothing. Just the silken surface of a mind like a sea-smoothed stone.

When you finally slide down the rock and return to following the trail, the sun is well on its way towards the horizon. But the summer days are long and you are not afraid of the dark. The woods are gentle on you as long as you march after her; besides, soon you do not even have to follow the hoof-marks. Enormous stones rise from the underbrush, and her path winds from one to another.

At first you think them to be just ordinary rocks, but each one you pass by stands taller than the previous, until they appear like white obelisks, tangled in vines, mottled with moss. Then they start to appear in pairs, triples and more. Sometimes they stand in neat rows bent at an angle or curled, and sometimes they are in scattered clumps so grown into the fabric of the forest that you would never notice them if not for the trail leading you through the weave of stalk and root from one to another. Slowly, you start to suspect that there must be something more to them and so when you pass by a row of five, arranged like upright fingers, from a thumb to a pinkie, your curiosity takes the better of you and with the butt of your spear you poke at the underbrush near the base. With less surprise than you would have expected out of you, you find the shared base they are built on. The shared base they grow from.

The first full hand appears in view not long after, buried to the middle of the palm, but unmistakable. When you approach its base, you have to look up to see the tips of the fingers; the smallest one of them is easily your height. The light of early evening paints the rock in beautiful roses and yellows.

The forest you walk through is no longer just trees. Palms and fingers of white stone break the soil one after another, some closed into fists, other spread and open as if trying to grasp at something. They rise up in hundreds while old vines spread between their fingers like cat's cradles. Like canopies of tall trees, the vines then grow from hand to hand, forming a complex, living moss. And then there are some hands that rip themselves free of the soil so high that you can see the rock wrists and arms frozen in their paused ascent towards the sky. Trees, both meek birch and alder, as well as mighty ash and oak hide in their shadow. The tribe that lies buried beneath the woods, no matter how long dead, still clings to some hope that one day, it will rip itself free from the soil's shroud.

But until that day comes, in this forest of hands, other creatures dwell, and among them, the Malefactor you were following. If not for the rhythmic clapping of her hooves on the side of a bent, stone finger, you would not have noticed her. The hand she took for her home rests half-curled on its side, forming a done of sorts. The fingers are spread, and from the one you assume to be the index-finger, a long curtain of junk, refuse, garbage and bone braided with twine that hangs. She hides behind it, beneath the roof of the palm, and only her legs are visible.

There is a stink coming from the inside, intense enough that you stop short of passing past the curtain and instead wait for her to take notice of you. But she doesn't seem to realize you are there, sitting absent-mindedly on her rock bench, looking somewhere at the network of vines spreading from the knuckles of her home to wide-spread fingers of the hand thrusting up in front of her. Or maybe looking past them and into the blue, empty sky. You don't know, but whatever it is, you don't want to disturb her. Instead, you sit on the dry ground, wave away the stench, and take a good look around yourself.

What you first took for a ramshackle collection of garbage reveals itself to be something else as you examine it closely. Woven into string, you see old nails and yellowed-out knuckle-bones, age-hardened wood but also glinting pieces of gold and silver – halves of a ring, bent bracelets, pieces of a clasp. They are all mangled beyond use, and strike you as very old. What you can make out of their craftsmanship is unlike the wealth of your people.

Yet, the familiar is not entirely absent from this strange forest. Not far from her curtain, thrust into a patch of dry soil, there is a pine log, paint flaking off one of its sides. Still, the figure depicted remains recognizable. Someone's unsteady had has painted it with a figure of a woman carrying in one hand a candle and in the other a knife. Saint Etheria, you recall her name, who listens to the prayers of thieves and jugglers. A few bones, scraps of rotten meat clinging to them at places, just out from the ground in front of it. Offerings, you assume.

As the Malefactor fails to address you, or even appear to notice your arrival, you grow restless and pace around her home. There is more garbage strewn behind it, soggy wood and fabric that comes apart in your hands when you try to grab it. Bones too, some of them you think to be human, as well as pieces of broken instruments: a body of a harp, a few strings still attached to it, a pierced drum. Junk, all and all, equally mixed with old remains. Above it, there looms a shape of a small cart, shattered into a pile of logs and splinters, but still recognizable. An ox that drove it once is near, or at least its skull, affixed to a pole.

Even with the bracelet keeping the worry away, you find this graveyard of sorts oddly disquieting and so return to the front, to the Malefactor, only to find her gone. But you don't have to wait long for her return. Before you can throw yourself into a pointless search, she sneaks in front of you, as soundless as in the morning. In her bloodied hands, she carries a pair of pheasants. She smiles to you and then bows her head, taking a bite out of one of the birds, feathers and all.

The fact that you feel no revulsion surprises you, although maybe it should. Still, when she offers you one of her catches, you do not follow her example and eat it raw, all the way to the bones. Instead, you start looking for a way to prepare it. But even though it is something you know how to do, there is no tub here, no fireplace, no well, nothing. You stumble around for some time, then deciding that you are not all that hungry anyway, you decide to leave the bird for tomorrow. You should have plenty of time.

The Malefactor doesn't invite you in, and for that you are thankful. Instead, taking use of the warmth, you find a bed of moss, spread your cloak on it and lay yourself to sleep. No dreams bother you, and the lingering blessing makes it so that when you wake up, you feel rested, like you haven't felt in weeks.

The pheasant, however, is already gone by that time, and a few scattered feathers around the Malefactor, still dumbly sitting on her bench, indicate that she took back her gift, likely assuming you were making no use of it anyway. However, you don't mind, not much. It gives you an opportunity to instead wander about this strange forest, in search of more of those fruits that sustained you yesterday.

They grow plentifully, although never near the bases of the monolithic hands. Within an hour or two, you have gorged yourself and gathered enough for the rest of the day. Not long after you also find a brook to drink from, and wash yourself. There is something deeply pleasurable to the simple act of scrubbing yourself clean as the summer's warmth makes sure to keep the chill away. As such, you stay at the bank, far longer than you had any need to, then wander down the creek for an hour or two. The forest of hands spreads far and the farther in you go, the higher they grow. A thought occurs to you that maybe if you go long enough, far enough, you will find the stone giants uncovered, come face to face with their collected, still visages. But that would be a great trek, and you do not feel ready, not yet.

There are many animals here, but they all keep their distance. In a way, it is different to being stalked or feared; you see many beasts, wolves and bears and many-fanged creatures you do not know how to name and how to describe stare at you from their dens and abodes in the trees and in the hands. They allow you to pass in peace and seldom follow. Only the birds seem to take some interest in you, and a few blackbirds keep you in remote company as you investigate the creek and the forest.

That there are other Malefactors living in the woods seems beyond obvious to you. You find traces of them – footprints too large to belong to a man, or sacrifices spread before rock-carved altars to Saints you do not recognize, or sometimes echoes of haunting melodies played on syrinx and drums – but never see them directly. At best, they are a blur, a motion or a shadow in the corner of your eye, fleeing from you and leaving alone in the shadow or arching hands. Idly, you wonder if, given enough time, they will come to see you as one of their own, whoever and whatever they are.

The woods, after all, are so welcoming that they might as well be a new home for you. When you return in the evening to the creature who brought you here you find her gnawing on a split carcass of small doe. She doesn't eat much and what is left, she throws back into the darkness behind her curtain of refuse. At least now you know where the stench comes from. But that's fine. From your treks, you managed to gather some wood and some kindling, and work on putting on a fire. She watches you from her ledge, either curious or bemused, and when you fail, she sneaks closer to crouch over you like an owl or an ill spirit. In the dark, her eyes shine gold and carefree, but you never feel threatened.

The next day is no different than the previous one, and the one after is the one where you finally manage to start a bonfire. In the licking flames, you roast some of the her prey and eat it alone as she watches, always distant. In the morning, she sticks her hands in the ashes and smears them on the surface of the hand that is her home, painting strange patterns. When the space in her reach runs off, she swirls the same lines onto her flesh, where they remain until evening. This time, she sits close to the fire and rips the roasted meat from your hands, before spitting it out angrily. From that point on, she refuses to share anything you have cooked.

There are a few more days before you forget to keep track of time and lose it, although the loss itself does not register until many days later. It's the same pattern, day bleeding into night bleeding into day. Explore the empty woods and be respected by the beasts. Tread in the wake of strangeness but never see more than a glimpse of it. Share some carrion with your host who never seems any interested in you, but also never fails to make use of the ashes you provide her.

There is a simplicity to all of that, a mindless quiet that in time makes you understand that she is not feral, but merely of this land and realm, and such petty human trappings, speech and the dramaturgy of life are as alien to her as the taste of cooked meat or the notion of language. It should terrify you, but it doesn't. The bracelet remains fast on your wrist and you don't touch it, fearful that it might damage it and weaken the spell.

To that simplicity there is also a certain hope that if you stay here long enough, it will erase all the memory of pain and its echoes that you still hear sometimes just before you wake will fade. That you will forget not only how it felt, but also that you have ever felt it at all, and maybe that you will become like your host, find yourself a den filled with rotting flesh and live there, empty, wild and without fear or concern.

But that hope is undershot by something not even the bracelet can suppress, and that is restlessness. The days are like water, flowing on without pause, and yet a measure of boredom slips its way into them. The forest is too kind on you and provides you too easily, and soon, you realize that you have time, more time than you ever thought a man or a woman could have at their disposal, and that time is also like water, running between your fingers, becoming lost without a hope of recovery. Without worry that it will one day run out – in truth, ever since she put the bracelet on you, you have not experienced a worry more pronounced than a grain of concern – you start to set out ever farther into the forest of hands, to find something that would occupy your mind and stave off this peculiar sense of boredom.

You find much.

There are more shrines like the one to Saint Etheria. You count at least a dozen, each depicting some other holy woman, and not two alike. Some of them are freshly painted, too, and you even manage to find one, lodged between a pair of stones so loosely that a stiffer gust of wind would surely knock it over, that is still wet. Sometimes, you stop and pray at them, and when you do, a feeling you can't quite describe overtakes you. Like elation, but incomplete. Yet, with each shrine you visit, it strengthens, and you feel closer, although unsure to what.

As you seek more of them, you start to notice a wolf that follows you, a lean, mean-eyed creature. However unpleasant he appears, you still get a sense that he has an interest in you that is not malign. When you chase after him on one cloudy day, he runs away and before long, you realize you are being led away. You break off the pursuit and return to your bonfire. When you sleep, you dream of warriors and bloodshed.

Sometimes, you follow your host onto her hunts, into a dark grove that spreads where the hands reach low. There are shadows there and whispers, and you never see her get the kill, but each day you spend with her where the sun fails to penetrate twisting canopies, you learn to listen to the heartbeat of that grove better and better. There is a heart that beats somewhere within it, and it reaches out. For her, or maybe for you.

Although you have a lot of time, you can't follow each of those leads, not to the end. And so, you come to the decision that you will devote your time to…

[ ] …praying at the shrines so that you can face the Laughing Painter.
[ ] …chasing the wolf so that you can see the battles waged in the Forest of Hands.
[ ] …hunting along with your host, until you find a way to the Beating Heart of the Woods.