The Butcher of the Forest

by Premee Mohamed

They were innocent of their father’s evil. The old women of the village would say they were tainted with it, but there was no taint in blood alone, truly.

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.

A 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.

Did she have the careless transparency of a child, or was she a monster in the making?

She tasted her own blood in her throat and thought of death, hers and theirs; she thought of the village torched and smoldering under a night sky of ethereal beauty, and the bones of her family, and the bones of their house, giving off a small oily light.

And Veris, who had been an only child, and far distant from her cousins, felt something like envy: for this wordless love, when it would have been so easy for them to destroy one another in a moment of weakness as children often did.

If you did not believe in magic, a day here would teach you to believe, like it or no. You were surrounded by it, and must guard yourself against it, this thing you did not believe in.

No, it was better to not know; everything she had learned here she regretted learning. She felt it burrow into her mind and under her ribs like a worm, all this knowledge. Poisoned, venomous. Squirming. Not dead.