[TALE] The Fairy Ring

It was a melancholy afternoon in autumn when I met up with my friend at the edge of our village. The sky was a sallow glow through slowly forming clouds; the trees had shed some of their leaves, but still burned with a thinning autumn fire of red and yellow. From the burning foliage at the mouth of the forest stretched skeletal branches that clawed menacingly at us. Streaks of emerald life shone through the yellow leaves that covered the ground, the last traces of summer seen in wet moss. A slight bit of mist had started forming with the approach of the evening, gathering around the trees in an ethereal haze. We passed by the talons of the forest mouth with some foreboding, feeling a tension in the air that belied the brightness of the forest.

As we set out into the forest, our boyish fancies soon overtook our trepidation and our imagination set the stage for our adventures. We were knights and pilgrims passing through dangerous lands, watching every red shadow with drawn swords. We dodged past bushes and raced up hills, monster hunters chasing our quarry. We jogged down the misty autumn road, soldiers returning to base to brief our commander on the movements of the enemy. Separated from our order, we fought back the skeletal arms of a dead tree, sworn as we were to eradicate this foulest of liches. In this manner we lived several lives, fought countless battles, and bathed in the blood and fire of the sylvan autumn.

Our games continued like this until we slipped into a strangeness that was no longer play. It happened in a life when we were two rugged highwaymen stalking the king’s taxman. We had come to a hill overlooking a bend in the road and we decided to lay an ambush for the king’s men there, hoping to make away with a hefty amount of coin. My friend hid behind a bush with drawn sword, ready to spring upon our quarry at my signal.

I overlooked the coming slaughter from my eagle’s perch – a maple tree branch from which I would rain death with my bow upon the hapless servants of the king. We waited in silence as the carriage approached. The wind was a mere whisper coming from the gray sky, a shiver among bare branches. The crows circled about us, singing their eerie laments above the blood-streaked forest. And through it all the ghostly sound of trotting horses, a tot-a-lot that echoed through our imagination.

I had my arrow nocked and ready for the first kill. With murder in my ruffian’s eye I aimed at one of the guards. As I let fly the arrow a sudden thunderclap cracked the silence, sending the crows fleeing into the gray sky. The world gave way below me in a rushing chill of panic – the branch had broken and I was hurtling towards the ground!

There was a tumbling blur of red and yellow as I rolled upon the ground, found my footing and made a mad dash up the hill. The imaginary sound of hooves, clanking armor and shouting men thundered behind me as I dodged branches and tore through bushes. I could hear my friend roar as he charged into battle behind me, but I was so caught in the thrill of flight that I forgot all about him and focused only on widening the gap between myself and my phantom pursuers. Half-naked tree branches swiped at me from every direction as the blood pounded in my ears. Far in the distance I could see a yawning black depth among the trees, and with my last bit of strength I made a final wild sprint towards it, hoping to escape into the forest shadows.

Time stopped the moment I passed the threshold into the depths. My boyish fancies were snuffed out like a candle flame, and only the smoke of evening mist was left to snake about the trees. I had entered a pine forest, the pines reaching like titan pillars into the gray infinity above and forming a great shadowy hall. The place was eerily quiet, as if every breath stopped just short of leaving the mouth.

The boundary to the pine-pillared hall was a symbol of death, for the grasses and bushes which grew in the forest dared not sprout past the knife-sharp threshold. Instead, there was only a wasteland of brown needles, broken branches, dark green mosses and white fungi. The air was thick with weirdness both oppressive and intoxicating. I stood for some time just beyond the threshold to this forgotten forest temple, feeling as if I were about to fall into the depths of a starless night sky.

I heard the sudden shouting of my friend returning from his imaginary battle. He yelled at me to come, hurry, we need to get the loot. But his boyish fancies left him as mine had left me the moment he crossed the boundary into this underworld realm. This was no longer a matter of play – we had discovered something peculiar, something we could not put into our childish words. Instead, we merely looked at each other, and let our youthful curiosity lead us into the depths.

*

We walked in silence between the naked pillars. Mist rose from the ground as if the underworld itself was breathing shades into the world, shades which clung to the trees and peered at us from the shadows. We stepped over broken branches and pine cones that lay piled like bones among the needles. We brushed the spider webs from our faces as we passed next to the grinning skulls of death cap mushrooms. The mossy ground ate the sound of our steps, and in the silence we could only hear the groaning of the trees and the cries of the crows.

We had entered into the land of the dead, and everything we saw filled us with a sense of dread.

We wandered on, crossing over the remnants of a river where the groundwater seeped to the surface. It was like a great bleeding wound, and around this wound were thick patches of moss and fern that clung to the sides like clotted blood. Not far from it, further into the mist, was the corpse of a dead tree. Snapped in half far above us, its upper half lay next to it, dead branches reaching from the ground like a great rib cage. Down the sides of this dead tree was a thick gray smear, the old dried remains of sap. All around us was desolation – the blazing autumn forest could not be seen from these depths, and the shadows crept closer around us in hues of blue and gray.

It was then that we came upon a great oval space formed from tree pillars and mist. If what we had seen so far had unnerved us, what we saw in that space truly defied our meager comprehension. In the center of the oval, seemingly coalesced from the mist like drops of water, was a ring of white mushrooms.

The sight left us both speechless. We had both seen the little painting in my friend’s house, the one where forest sprites danced in a mushroom circle during a full moon. But where that painting had been full of whimsy and enchantment, the sight we now stood before was something different entirely. There was no whimsy here. The only enchantment we felt was the breath of unholy magic. The circle stood out to us as something not of this world, like a forbidden secret, and it felt utterly sinister.

We bickered amongst each other, taking turns to urge the other on into the circle. We have to know what it is, we said, we have to see if anything happens. The tension in the air was palpable, and it set our hearts beating with fear and anticipation. What if magic is real? We had to find out! But we were both frightened, and neither of us really wanted to go further into this dark fairy tale. So we decided to turn back and leave this cursed place. I threw a last glance back at the uncanny ring, white mushrooms like ghosts in the mist.

And though I don’t know why, I turned and entered the ring.

*

Nothing had visibly changed when I crossed into the fairy ring. The colors were the same, the sounds unchanged. Yet the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I recognized the feeling of being watched. I could see that my friend felt it too, for he was suddenly terrified of being left alone outside of the circle, and he rushed to join me.

That was when it happened. What had been a land of desolation suddenly came to life as every manner of shade and fey seemed to direct their attentions at us. I could sense how the trees glared at us with moss-covered faces, how the shadows leered from a hundred places. Our meandering explorations had attracted an audience of spirits, and we had unwittingly walked right onto the stage. We were terrified of leaving the ring.

With nowhere to go, our panic began to rise. It was a hot unease that drove us to pace the circle, harried by the sharp gaze of the spectral assembly. But our nervousness soon simmered down, replaced by a growing feeling of cold dread. Among all the eyes that stared at us from the forest, one pair came from within the circle. Rising like a blasphemy from a dark patch of earth in the center of the circle was a small skeleton.

Though the animal was the size of a rabbit or hare, the pitiful state of its bones made it seem much smaller. The remains were curled up, as if the creature had sought solace in itself in the final moments of death. Much of the skeleton was lost, having either been carried away as carrion or sunk into the black mud from which the bones protruded. What remained had not been treated kindly by the elements, for try as we might, we could make no sense of what the creature was by examining its skull. But as if in defiance of its pitiful state, its two empty eye sockets stared into us with burning intent.

Everything seemed to seep into those black pits, coalescing around them like pond scum. The blue gray evening haze, the groaning trees and whispering winds, the deep forest underworld with its glaring spirits – all circled around the pits of that little skull, marching slowly and inexorably towards the eternal dark. We ourselves were caught in that maelstrom, feeling a tug towards the abyss, towards the starless night and the cavernous subterranean. All things seemed darker, stiller, colder, more sinister around us. We shivered pathetically as the whole world slipped into the Void.

*

It was my friend who suggested that perhaps we should bury the creature. He felt as I did that we were being watched, and maybe a burial was what the forest wanted from us. I agreed that we had to do something, but I suggested instead a cremation. The creature wanted to leave this place of wet, cold darkness and ascend through the purity of fire. Of that I was certain. And I knew my friend had snuck materials for setting fires out with him. He did not object. We drew straws to see who would leave the circle to gather firewood. I drew the long straw, and as my friend reluctantly left the boundaries of the fairy ring I began exhuming the bones.

The skeleton had thankfully been picked clean of most of the putrefaction, and aside from the mud it was no messy work to gather the bones onto the pyre that my friend had built. We struck the fire and lit the pile of wood, seeing the dark pushed aside by the rising flame. The fire reminded me of the autumn fire that had burned outside of this underworld realm, of the striking reds and dirty oranges that lit the maple branches.

The dark seemed to get blacker and thicker around us as we were subsumed in the orange glow of the fire, and the smoke mingled with the mist until all that existed was the glowing world of the fairy ring. The Void of the little creature now stretched infinitely beyond us as if the world had fallen into it once and for all, and we hung unto our little dying funeral pyre to save us from the ever-present feeling of death.

Suddenly, there was a strange hiss coming from the pyre, and an awful smell that struck us like a fist. We reeled backwards, but it was as much from the sudden intensification of the heat as it was from the stench. The fires seemed to lap more greedily at the sky; long tongues dancing and writhing upwards like fighting snakes; and we were taken aback by the sudden violence of the pyre. It seemed to build momentum as it stretched itself upwards, reaching higher with every new lick and accompanied by evermore ferocious roaring.

To my rising horror I saw how it began licking fiendishly at the dry branches above our heads, a motion in the fire that seemed wholly perverse. I felt the skin tighten around my face as the heat drank the moisture in my skin. As the flames kept rising, the ferocity of the fire pushed my friend and me closer to the edge of the mushroom ring. We now cowered at the edge of the Void, feeling as if the violence from the infernal pyre would jettison us into the infinite nothingness.

Above the roaring of the fire I heard my friend let out a sudden cry. I followed his trembling finger with my eyes and saw that the flames had swallowed the branches above. Like a mischievous imp the blaze jumped from branch to branch, leaving behind the seeds of a howling inferno in the making. These seeds sprouted great gusts of flame that writhed around the pine trees and garlanded every branch. The burning light of the fire grew stronger and hotter as everything around us was consumed in flame until there was neither tree nor Void but fire and fire alone. Fire, and the mushroom boundary of our island sanctuary in that roaring inferno.

Yet the fire before me could not heat the bone-chilling terror I felt at the sight of such a devouring force, such a burning incarnation of death that threatened to consume all. In a sudden surge of panic, I grabbed my pack and tore out the bottle of water I had within, unscrewed the lid and threw it into the heart of blazing giant.

A howling screech that could render sky and earth came from the conflagration, and in a burst of violence a great form came upon me. Claws forged from razor-sharp flames came at me with the ferocity of a beast of prey. A world-eater’s maw opened, its depths bellowing hellfire, and great wings unfurled as the nemesis rose and dove at me from above. Within the span of that moment, my instincts took hold of me. Led as I was by memories from deep in the blood, I cried out in fury as I swung my pack above my head like a battle axe. The full weight of school books and food connected with the head of the foe, and I pressed my attack with a brutality I did not know I possessed.

Again and again I swung at the beast. From the flames I heard the cracking of bone and the wet gurgle of blood as I brought down my cleaver upon the fiend like a mad butcher. Black blood formed of water and ash sprayed upon my violent hands and snarling face, and I cut swaths of night through the fire in my rampage. Within a few violent moments the darkness had returned, and I watched the last embers in the pyre die to the wet thumping sound of my pack hitting the ground. In the span of a breath, the night was filled with a swarm of embers that danced like fireflies before dying in the cold. Then there was only darkness, and labored breaths, and the groaning of the trees.

“Did you see that?”

I heard my friend whisper beside me in the night. I had not seen much before instinct had caught me, but I had seen the talons and the wings. I had heard the roar and gazed past the serrated teeth of the maw. I had stood before the fury and the fire as it lashed at me with its fiendish tongue. But it was not the beast nor its roars and flames that had sent me into a fit of violence like a cornered animal. No, it was the eyes I had seen in that inferno; pitch black malice that swallowed the very life from the world; a great starless Void hidden in two inky pits within a skull of devouring fire.

“Yes. I saw it.”