YAGA | ✓

EPILOGUE

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SIXTY YEARS LATER

RADYA HAD WANDERED one step too far, and the forest had swallowed her whole.

Each step she took, the veil of trees got thicker and thicker until she didn't dare breathe, for she could feel them watching.

Each step she took, the less light filtered through the foliage, until her own white fur coat brought her more light than the sun itself.

A twig broke beneath her feet, and she jumped like a prowling cat. Holding her breath, she looked down, before her stomach lurched. The forest had engulfed her, rendering all of her senses useless. Radya's feet were cumbersome and heavy, not enough energy in her body to keep her steps as silent as they should've been.

"Beware of the forest," her grandmother had always told her, milky blind eyes searching the room hungrily. Hands like claws ran over lengths of mismatched fabrics that she'd once woven herself, keeping her shrivelled body warm as she sat by the fire. Radya has never known why her Baba had dressed so, and now as branches raked down across her skin and sliced into her flesh. She wondered whether she would live long enough to find out.

Entering the forest was something that only children were foolish enough to do and great men strong enough to do.

But it was known that no harm would come to the men. Not as much as their children, anyway. But a man could still enter the forest the same way that he had a thousand times before and find that the trees shifted with every movement, their embraces opening wide at one moment then snapping shut at the next. The forest shunned the men, but it led children through ways that they had never seen.

It gave them a glimpse of heaven, let them stroke the ichor with the tips of their fragile fingers.

The first had been a peasant child, a runaway with nowhere left to run away to. The forest was his forbidden fruit, something he yearned to taste but never could, something that he could only watch from a distance. When the forest had opened its arms to him, he'd ran straight into them. The forest had opened its mouth and swallowed him whole. After that, the forest had dragged many children into its clutches, one after the other, but their families could never go far.

It was intoxicating; they wanted to get drunk to its glory every night, to go to bed murmuring its name, drink from its holy spring. They would drink to its life and weep to its death, until it rose again.

It always rose again.

The Blackwater still flowed, as it always had, but it was no longer black. Now, the water was red with the blood spilled by the children of the forest. In the belly of the beast, with nothing to see but crimson, smeared across the trees and soaked into the dirt. And the worst thing?

Everyone knew whose it was, and there was no escape.

It was the blood of their children, the children that they'd vowed to protect and had failed to do. A grim reminder that death came, too, for the innocent and not for the old and withered and sinning. Radya knew that she was going to become one of them, the last thing on their wretched tongues a lone name.

Less of a name, really, than a legend.

That legend?

Baba Yaga.

She watched the blood seep through her clothes, shuffling footsteps drag her to a house that stood on the feet of a chicken. Everything inside was stained red.

Red really was a beautiful colour.

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