Chapter 1 : The Forest

"Poison can be an elixir. This theory had taken deep root in my mind: everything can become its very opposite under certain circumstances."

(Ambient sound)

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Places mentioned:

Mertie:

Ivan's hometown, a rural village

Spring:

The capital city of Tyrannoson

Dowin River Valley:

Mertie falls within the scope of this valley

Tyrannoson:

One of the three kingdoms on the Central Continent, ruled by the Valrino family

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Creatures (that can speak and have names) mentioned:

Unknown:

Yisreal

The Mellons:

Ivan: the narrator
Moine: Ivan's grandfather

The Carpels:

Charlie: the oldest boy
Karl: the second son
Lucas: the youngest

Creatures in the forest:

Philemon

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1

The Forest

Soon, I would meet Yisreal—by "soon," I mean after my father’s burial.

Two days after a pigeon delivered the message from Spring, his body came to Mertie. The escorts handed me a letter from the King. They set down the coffin and waited aside.

I decided to open the coffin. A blast of odor of spice and balm came out and every bystander backed off. The coffin was insulated within a larger coffin filled with melted ice. The bluish-purple color of the skin penetrated the thick embalming; his gums must have bled and his eyes had no whites. Supervised by the royal guards, with the help of villagers, I buried him and set off for Spring.

At night, we stopped by a creek to camp. It was a full moon that night, making the valley appear twice as bright. The guards were sitting around the fire, roasting bread and rabbits, drinking, and dozing. Some told me a plague had spread in the capital city. I went down to the creek alone.

Maester Mellon became my title, as stated in the Letter of Appointment. It would take four days and three nights to travel from Mertie to Spring non-stop, yet I was told to wait for the royal guards in the initial message. Plague. What more could I do? I hadn’t learned enough from my father.

He taught me all the knowledge in his books, took me to gather herbs, and to hunt for animals that were good for medicine. Snakes and deer are the best. The young deer’s velvety antlers, the deer blood, and the musk deer’s gland. Snakes’ venom, galls, skins, and grease—everything from a snake is good for medicine; the more poisonous, the more precious. We also hunted bears and tigers—by “we,” I mean the Valrinos, the royal family. They hunted once a year, killed the beasts, skinned them, extracted the teeth, took away everything they could use, and then sent it to my father, who had good use of bear galls and tiger bones. As for herbs, likewise, the more poisonous, the better.

One poison can counteract another, he had said.

Poison can be an elixir. This theory had taken deep root in my mind: everything can become its very opposite under certain circumstances. My father never allowed audiences during his treatments. Our family’s healing practices were inherited and thus had to remain confidential—even to me, which made no sense. He’d asked me to fetch things for him that was nowhere to be found during his treatment.

You don’t want me to be a good physician, I had complained to him.

Yes, I do. I want you to be a physician, nothing more than a physician.

That’s not fair. Grandpa taught you everything before he was gone.

Grandpa is not me. You are not me.

Is this all about mother?

No.

I washed my face and drank from the creek, and suddenly, a deer appeared across the creek. He was a rare white deer, with his fur and horns gleaming in the moonlight. He turned around and paced towards the woods. I crossed the creek, following him. The white deer plunged into the earthy-smelling darkness like lightning cutting across the sky. I waded into the woods with intense yellings behind me. Two of the guards who ran after me across the creek stopped in front of the forest.

* * *

I should have stopped there too. Everyone on this continent, especially we folks of Dowin River Valley, knew that it was a forbidden land. No one entered ever came back—so I entered.

When I was nearly ten years old, three other kids (the Carpel brothers) and I planned to sneak into the woods. We assured each other that we’d go home before sunset. Charlie, the oldest boy, found a rope and tied us together at the waists. He led the way, and we followed. I was at the tail of the group. The march slowed down as soon as we lost sight of the path we had come from.

The plan to go home by sunset was impractical since we couldn’t see the sun at all. The sun was obscured by gigantic, towering trees, and our feet were remembered by the loose, moist soil. Charlie marked the first sign on the bark, and the bark bled. Horrified, he fell backward, and so did the three of us behind him. The back of my head bumped onto another tree. The trunk sounded hollow. I stood up and knocked on it again, then tried another trunk—all were hollow. The youngest kid, Lucas, screamed that the mark on the tree had disappeared. Karl told his little brother to calm down; these were just some unusual species. I turned around when I heard a crunchy noise. The bare soil we had just stepped on was suddenly carpeted with golden leaves, yet the leaves kept falling from the trees behind us, as if our arrival had sped up the time in the woods. I asked them to turn back and look, but none of them saw anything.

“Can’t you see the leaves are falling from the trees? And the ground! It’s covered with fallen leaves!”

Charlie and Karl said that my whole family were weirdos. They laughed with effort—half because I was talking nonsense, half because the nonsense was disturbing.

While the rope around my waist pulled me forward, I kept turning back to check if the chill on my nape was an illusion, or that the season had truly changed. Leaves kept falling, and soon the branches became bare, and the route of retreat cleared up—I could see the glistening creek we had waded across in front of the forest’s border. I pulled the rope, forcing my companions to turn and look.

“You’re losing your mind, Ivan,” Karl said. “We see no creek, only trees.”

“Maybe we should leave since Ivan saw the way back.” Lucas’s voice was shivering.

“You believe that,” Charlie said.

“Please,” I begged. “I have a really bad feeling.”

“You always pussy out. Let’s go. You can go back if you want.”

“And we won’t tell you what happens.” Charlie walked side by side with Karl.

Lucas hesitated and decided to follow his elder brothers.

I stood there watching the Carpel brothers go deeper. With each tree they passed, leaves fell, branches grew bald, and turned pale—pale as dead men’s skin. The trunks, too, turned pale, with purple veins spreading all over the bald trees. I turned around and ran towards the creek, with the leaves squeaking under my feet as if they were in pain. I could hear another string of footsteps behind, at first from afar, moving like paces of the wind, and before I had time to look back, it had caught me. I fell, and the leaves, heavy as bones, crawled all over me and buried me. I couldn’t breathe or struggle. As they were pressing my face into the soil, they suddenly ebbed away.

I looked up and saw my father standing right in front of me. He pulled me up from the dirt and carried me on his shoulders.

I went into a coma after that. When I woke up, the Carpel brothers had been missing for two days. On the third day, Lucas returned in delirium, speaking in a strange, beastly tongue. People marveled that Lucas was the first one to return from the forest.

I was trying to argue that I was the first one, but my father shut me up. He gave the Carpels a rope and warned them never to untie him from the supporting pole of the house.

That night, the orchard owner’s wife was killed. The next morning, all the villagers went to see the body. There were two deep, sharp holes in her neck, her skin was pale like plaster, and her eyes were wide open in panic. My father visited the Carpel family again. Lucas was dozing, sitting on the ground with his back against the pole in the kitchen, his arms behind him and bound together by the rope. My father stressed to Lucas’s parents that they mustn’t loosen the ropes. The Carpels, of course, felt offended by his insinuation, and he decided not to offer them any further advice just yet.

After that, my father went to check on him every day, making sure that Lucas still had the ropes around his wrists, until he had to return to Spring. On the eve of his departure, my parents visited the Carpels together and came back looking careworn.

They won’t do that, my mother said. Will you do that to Ivan? Did you?

My father gave her a gloomy glance and looked away.

That evening as soon as my father left, Lucas ran out, broke into a farm, and killed two lambs. The dog didn’t bark, so when Lucas broke into the house, the family was still asleep. The little girl died first, followed by the couple. It was only after Lucas ran away that their dog hopped out of the fence and started barking around. Soon, all the dogs joined in, waking up the entire village. Lucas was soon besieged by torches, sticks, hoes, spades, and lancets. He had deformed, blood dripping from his eyes and flesh sinking into his facial bones, veins creeping over his face, wrinkles around his hissing mouth. He bared his fangs, flung himself to the crowd, and bit a farmer’s arm.

Staggering backward, they tried to stab him in the chest and burn him with their torches, but Lucas was small, as sleek as an otter, and nearly impossible to catch. Fear and hesitation led to two more injuries.

My mother had been watching the crowd from the roof while I peered through the window. She wasn’t like any other farmer or craftsman’s wife. She was stoic, quiet, troubled by things unknown to me. Lucas pushed his way through the crowd and ran toward our house.

“Ivan, burn the fences!”

My mother yelled from the rooftop. I rushed out with a torch and set fire to our wooden fences, which had been greased.

Lucas slowed down when the fences around our house were on fire, but he didn’t stop. I stood aghast at his face, not because of his fangs or bleeding eyes, but because he stared at me over the flames with an uncanny smile—a smile of an old man on a head the size of a five-year-old’s, sallow and bony, covered with purple veins, pale like the tree bark in the forbidden woods. His emaciation aggravated that look of evil. He knew me. Despite his deformity, his eyes conveyed that he knew me, and a chill ran down my spine.

I thought the fire would scare him away, but he easily jumped over the fence, which was at an adult’s shoulder height. I threw the torch at him, ran back into the house, and latched the door. He dodged away, heading toward the door. Just as he came under the roof, my mother jumped down and landed at his back. The moment he turned around, his head fell off his shoulders, yet his body remained upright. Screaming surrounded our fences. Not a drop of blood splattered out of Lucas's broken neck.

“Give me a torch!” my mother yelled at the crowd holding the sickle, but they didn’t move.

“Give me a fuckin’ torch!”

Someone threw a torch over the burning fences. She dashed to pick it up and borrowed more fire from the burning fences. Lucas's head started bouncing on the ground, higher and higher, as if trying to land back on his shoulders. Obviously, that wasn’t something my mother had prepared for. She was petrified, as were the others, dropping their farm tools and torches and fleeing helter-skelter.

Just as the crowd scattered, a giant black bird twice the size of an eagle swooped down from nowhere, lifted Lucas’s head by his hair, and flew away. It was only then that the body fell to the ground.

I rushed out of the house, trying to see the black bird that had vanished into the night. Grandpa. It must be him. I had seen the bird twice when Grandpa was still here. The bird came both times right before the virgin snow, and when the snow came, it departed again.

Lucas’s parents also died, in the same manner as the orchard owner’s wife—dry, with no blood left in their veins. Six other villagers were bitten deeply in the throat, drained of blood. All were dead except for the widow. My father’s letter, sent by a hawk, arrived the next day, telling my mother to convince them to burn all the bodies.

They wouldn’t listen to her, a probable witch who had chopped down the boy’s head and summoned the black bird. That night, my mother went to see the bitten widow with a pot of chicken stew. She dragged the widow’s body to the graveyard in the middle of the night, then dug up all six bodies from their graves and burned the seven bodies together. Before dawn, she told me she was going to the market, but she never came back.

My mother’s leaving was different from my grandpa’s—I knew that from my father’s devastation, a pure devastation with no element of surprise, what he had dreaded had finally come to pass. Four years before she left, I had witnessed Grandpa disappear into the dark. The next day, there was a tombstone in the graveyard with his name, Moine Mellon, written on it.

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Now, seven years had passed since Grandpa’s black bird took away Lucas’s head. I was again absorbed into the forbidden forest.

Maybe this time, Grandpa would show up for me.

It was very dim at first, and it took me a while before my eyes could adapt to the darkness. The deeper I went, the stranger I felt, as everything seemed to be mildly off.

I couldn't see the treetops; all around me were trunks. The air was grayish-green at first, and the full moon I had seen outside the forest was lost. Gradually, my surroundings brightened with a milky hue of light, like mist permeating the woods. Wildflowers—mostly orange—carpeted the grass. There was the sound of rushing water, crickets, and, between the trees, fireflies glimmered.

The white deer reappeared by the creek in front of me. His white, sleek fur was so bright it almost seemed to glow. I approached him, and he stopped drinking, starting to walk slowly as if leading me somewhere. We passed a sparkling waterfall that seemed to pour stars onto the earth. A few beautiful creatures gathered by its pond: a white rabbit, a black panther, a brown bear, three lion cubs, and a hedgehog. They raised their heads to watch me with non-hostile, almost communicative eyes.

Just then, a shadow darted at my tour guide. The deer tried to shake it off its back, but within seconds, the shadow had pressed it down to the ground. All the animals by the waterfall scattered as the deer’s blood squirted from his neck.

I hid behind a trunk and got a clear look at the shadow: it was roughly human-shaped, with much longer hind legs, squatting down with front limbs on the deer as it sucked his blood. Suddenly, two red, flickering eyes spotted me through the long hair—or fur—that covered its face. I fled. But then, another creature of its kind popped up and hopped onto my shoulders. It scratched me and choked my neck with its knobby, slimy, cold fingers. I fell to the ground and immediately flipped myself over, trying to hold its jaw before it bit on my neck. Its eyes were two bleeding holes, and its fangs were sharp and filthy. I successfully held its head but feared that it might turn to bite my hands. We contended for a while, and I felt doomed. The creature was so bony and lightweight, yet mighty like a tiger. I had killed a lone wolf by luck, but a tiger? Not a chance.

Suddenly, an arrow pierced through its neck right in the middle, with the arrowhead almost touching my nose. The nasty creature fell off me. There was no blood oozing from its neck.

I struggled to lift my upper body with my elbows when a gleaming figure flashed across. For a moment, it made me feel as if I had been dreaming all this time. I gaped at this full-sized human figure jumping down from a fragile tree branch like a squirrel, a rope rustling out of his hands. The figure moved swiftly up and down and finished tying up the two creatures.

The creature that tried to kill me lay on the ground, while the other—the deer-murderer—started moaning in a hideous pain that was hard to sympathize with. It squirmed, but the rope tightened around it even more.

Wait, that rope—

“How dare you hunt a white deer!”

The speaker, the gleaming figure, had long, pale golden hair, light-colored eyes (I couldn’t tell the color without sunlight), and pointed ears.

Is he…

“Philemon, leave it to us.”

Two other dexterous figures landed gracefully beside the first one whom they called Philemon. It struck me just now that their language was nothing I knew or ever heard of, yet strangely, I understood every word they said.

“What about this one?” A knife was pressed against my neck from behind with a feminine voice over my head, and the three, as if just noticing me, turned around.

“Kill him,” one of those two males said. “The lord has ordered us to kill every intruder, especially Man.”