The White Wooded Watcher

The liver-spotted elders always ached on about the white woods in my younger years. With jaded indifference and the composure of unbreaking stone they discussed matters that defy their diction. Things beyond the parish, beyond the silver rocks and out where the firs collected snowy blankets so thick their reeds would never grow. An icy ring around our small patch in the wild where a lonely ghost roams, tracking and slaying those who stumbled too far from our parish- fearful things all of us in the congregation already knew through lessons of blood and sin. Do not leave the lands, for they are the last. Do not enter the White Wood, for you will be hunted. It was foolish to observe these teachings as anything less than irrefutable fact, in retrospect, but I suppose the eyes that grow from the back of our heads sometimes have sharper vision.

I flew out into them one night under cover of darkness, sporting a quiver pregnant with broadheads, and a seed of liberty festering in my mind. I mused that there must be something beyond the White Woods, something beyond our pocket of safety and through that corona of winter that resembled the stories that great housemother once told us of the old world. Something worth finding, I figured. Something worth breaking the laws put down by crazed, aged men who could no longer do so much as string their own bows. By the time I passed the silver stones and stole into the headwoods, the others in the congregation stopped pursuing me. My defiance, it seems, would punish itself in time.

Day's sunshine corroded into crackling winterlike skies the further out I traveled, and before my eyes could strain to see the edge of the White Wood itself they had already lost reference with the parish. Not even of the tower of smoke that billowed from plagued funeral fires could be seen. I was gone. For all I cared, they could rot with their ghost stories and polio alike. Two weeks chasing the edge of the known world by foot, and I bled at the heels and frothed at the mouth. Some fever had taken me, and my shooting arm shook violently, making hunting hare impossible. I was starving to death and loosing arrows to the trees far faster than I would have liked.

When I finally bordered into the White Woods themselves the horror of their barren stretch was lost to my emaciated, sick body. The White was stripped of any live thing that moved, and the further into it's uphill stretch I crawled up, the more I saw the accent killing even the pines. Trees bleached and naked, like rows of decapitated skeletons, did not watch me die slowly for my curiosity. But someone did. I began seeing him as I got closer to the crest of the white woods after what felt like months of walking like a corpse. He did not move, but did not quite stay in the same place- manifesting at distances away completely frozen, only to be swallowed into the night as my visual lock on him was broken by another frozen tree. A ashen skinned character, wrapped very lightly in underclothing not unlike a loincloth or mere sheet, he bore a white, horned, faceless mask of non-expression. Were it not for the line of bright red rope tied taught around his gaunt and bony waist, he would have never stood apart from the corpse. He stalked and observed, unmoving and silent like death himself.

In a fit one night I grew tired of my slow progress, my ill, my hunger, the cold, and the watcher, and it all came out from my throat as a canine holler and a rogue arrow fired towards him in fury and paranoia. He moved visibly for the first time to swivel behind a tree out of the way of the haphazard shot and retort with an expertly thrown pilum, which stuck fast in my shoulder too far off from my heart to do more than infuriate me. The cold did not as much as permit me to bleed, and I numbly snapped off the smallspear's haft from my cloak, allowing the head to stay wedged into my muscle for reasons I can not longer begin to explain. Things made less sense the closer I got to the now clearly visible edge of the white wood's cliff, which tilted up at such an angle to betray what it was. I wheeled around once or twice as the hike became a climb to look down into what I now understand to be the massive crater where the congrigation beleives the last of the world exists. While I struggled upwards, my altercations with the watcher escalated, and in some way gave me twisted strength to fight back against an active oppressor. I stuck him at least once, damn near the gut with a broad head, and he (unbleeding) fell away into the darkness for a whole day, affording me time to climb the slope unburdened. There were very nearly no trees, and those left warped even further into shapes trees do not make naturally but cannot be carved into. They were black, burnt. Beyond the cliff edge mere yards away thundered things like distant storms, crushing against what my melting brain said was freedom outside.

I was done with the White Wood. Whatever it was was unwholesome, changing me like it did the semblance of man-ghost that was whatever the damned watcher was. I think it made him like this- grey and unhurt, strong and dead all at once. He struck out again from somewhere in the fading woods and sunk another pilum deep into my lower back, to little effect. I had been here for months now, just walking. I was like him now. Still climbing, I shifted about and turned over so my back would press against the cliff face, tearing loose the pilum and sending it cascading past the watcher as he desperately scrambled at me from below, a saber clenched in his teeth beneath his faceless mask. This was unlike the monster I had feared on my way in. He was scared now, wounded like a bear defending the border of their territory so that their cubs might sleep in peace. His composure was gone. It was time to take his quarry without show or honor. So we climbed, desperate for purchase enough to allow us to hurl projectiles at each other. But the edge was so close, I could hear the storms beyond thunder louder than anything I had heard before, and with each pound gusts of hot fresh air blew over the lip of the cliff and blew over us. He couldn't have been outside much more than arms reach, and then I could hear him panting and desperately swearing in some tongue I could not understand for it's age or fury. I scrambled and pushed myself over the edge, drawing swiftly a single shot and peering back over the lip of the crater at the Watcher, who's mask fumed hot breath. As he closed within a foot of me I pressed the point of my arrow against his face, and he stopped, sighed in fatalism, and without pulling himself up, slowly raised his hand up to the handle of his blade, slide it out from his mouth and cast it into the chasm below. He spoke slowly, in a voice that did not belong to something living, but was unequivocally human and mortal in tone. It sounded remorseful, and to my surprise, it was in my tongue.

"I am sorry girl. I could not stop you."

I shot him through the eye and he tumbled back through the cliff, mask torn from his face and thrown at my feet in slow motion.

Behind me the sound roared again and hot wind crushed against me. I turned slowly to reap my victory of freedom, but what I saw was not the old world the housemother spoke of. There was sand, sand forever, stretching beyond a leveled horizon, and burnt in places by crackling purple lines of lightning that burst forth from the sky of pitch black clouds. They roiled unnaturally for moment, as if something beyond measure stirred within them, and in due time a trunk of something unlike size I had ever understood burst forth through the clouds and struck the ground miles away, throwing up dirt and bursting into an explosion that rocked even the foundation of the ground I was standing on from my insignificant vantage point. It was a foot, humanshaped and wrought of bedrock and eyes, nearly as tall as the crater that my whole existence was contained within was deep. It would have crashed mountains with it's gait, and it was not alone. Further even in the distance were more limbs. Arms and hands, legs, teeth and things I don't have words for, plummeting from beyond the clouds and doing things upon the earth in the distance in a repeated cacophony, then raising back into the sky drenched in splatters of red that my turning stomach said was blood. They were not confined to a cardinal direction or pattern. They stepped and bit and struck without reason. I knelt and dropped sick into the sand, being unable to excise much more than spit and fear, and must've stayed for hours before I unclicked from the horror of what lied beyond my little hovel of reality, turned back over to the watcher's mask and slid it over my face. When I peered through it's perfectly circular eyeports and saw down into the crater his motivations began to leak into my head like a poisonous logic. I saw my own limbs, grey and stony, unboodied, cold, and I understood. I must return to the white woods. Somebody has to watch. I can't let anyone leave.