The Butcher of the Forest

by Premee Mohamed

Really, the problem was that people believed that there was some kind of . . . door, or gate, or at any rate some visible thing that let you enter the Elmever, and it was thought that this lured children in some way, tempted them with sparkle or song to step through it. The truth was much more dangerous, Veris knew. For the world of those others was not at all through a doorway that alerted you to its presence, but was instead adjacent to the real one in a way that could not be perceived by human senses, and that was precisely why people went missing into it. At some point, you took a step, and you were simply there, and you would not see the difference between it and the true woods, and you would never take another step that led you back home.

name did not mean everything, Veris knew, but it didn’t mean nothing either; and in here it meant more than it did in the world outside.

Veris nodded; she had almost said What are guns? but in fact she had seen drawings of them a few times, and in person seen a small one, disassembled, during the war. Intricate as a clock, deadlier than any arrow, if it was to be believed. Something so dangerous it seemed like magic itself: a token like hers, but instead of being carved from wood or forged from metal, a shape pressed out of the poison some said you could make from century weed, so that a cube of it the size of her own piece of coal could kill ten thousand people or more. Imagine that: passing it from hand to hand and the hand falling away, falling to the ground, just from the touch. In such a fashion had guns been described to her. They would change the whole world, they said, once everyone had one.