Magenta Monster

The ancient fire blackened wood began to grow, it was six hundred years dead and yet now it creaked and groaned and sent forth new shoots. The shoots were not green but a rotting orange, thorns pushed their lacerating way into being. The hard packed forest floor shook as the tendrils of sick second life pushed their way through, cracking the ground and pushing loose leaf litter away.

They danced undulating cords into the icy air and began to intertwine, to weave and braid and form a spongy lattice work, a skeleton of something that had been once before. The birds stopped singing and the forest lay still shuddering in anticipation. It remembered the blood, thick and rich and how it fed the roots of the oldest trees, but the people had stopped coming, long ago the people had left the woods and hid from the grotesque power behind city walls.

All but one.

Akona of the Vísend, and now she was old, she had always been ancient but she had also been young, now she was old and brittle and bitter. She had waited and slept in the permafrost. Once she had been a queen, once she had been the forest but now she was a shade that flitted in the shadows and awaited the sacrifice. The house of rotting timber sprouted into life, it had a soft look to it as if made of sweet biscuit.

She hummed a song on the air and inverted the rainbow in the sky, locking the earth into a cold harshness. The woods had sensed a change coming, the lands had awoken her, they all needed blood to sustain, she had failed over half an age ago to provide but the world had already been changing then. This time no child would fool her and she would take what was needed straight away.

People once more trod the woods, the echos reverberated down to the roots of each and every tree. The meat was coming, and once more they could grow. Akona drifted into the dwelling and glowed, an inviting miasma spilled from the twisted cottage and beckoned to the cold and weary. A sweet spicy aroma drifted on the air. It could be mistaken for cooking to the desperate, breath too deep and the stench of decay was evident.

The hikers entered her domain, she breathed in their fresh scent and made the sky snow, hash sleeting snow, not the elegant dance of snow flakes that people seemed to like so much. This was viscous weather designed to maim. One of them slipped and skidded and shattered a leg on a jutting jagged stump. The cry peirced the woods and it rustled in delight, drinking the pain but there was no blood, the injuries were all still locked within the flesh.

There was a taste of desperation but it was not as raw or as potent as the old rites, these people did not believe they were lost. They made their way to perceived safety. The woods teeth howled and hurried the tugging and cajoling of the uninjured as they stumbled up the slope under the burden of a friend.

Wolves were not what they should have feared and they seemed to know it, the forest with the echo of a thought whisper, ‘ginger bread cottage?’ the woods felt the wariness of the group but this blood could not be allowed to escape. They needed it or they would wither to nothing but wood and humus.

Akona sniffed as they passed into her realm, she could not detect fire but something like it clung to them. She set the wooden thread to tether the door shut as soon as they were within. They were clad in strange garments, spun from the inner of the leaf, no animal touched their skin, such strange magics she did not know but it mattered not what sorcery they had found in their cities, she was old.

The creaking of the spongy wood alarmed the travellers but she conjured a stove in their minds, a pot of soup bubbles but they did not reach for it. Puzzled she increased the tantalising smell of meat. They turned their backs on the pot, and called for those who lived there. She condensed from the fug above the imaginary fire, a harmless old lady, a grandmother with leathered skin and moonlight hair.

They recoiled from her.

She was too long without blood to take their rit by the knife, a remnant from before her time, hidden in the ground where her roots had lain after the devious fire. An object of power the blood gods of the before had left her. She smiled at them and gestured to the stove.

They smiled back and shook their heads they spoke but she could not understand their soft palleted speech, she got images of them, of animals in torment. She tried not to ground her teeth in frustration, she could not use soporification.

They mimed use of some sort of speaking spells, holding flat things from ear and mouth at the side of the head, she shrugged and turned away spinning blankets corse and smelly for them. They took them with grimaces of pretend thanks. She picked up a flute of split bone and began the tune of forgetting. They lay down upon her blankets and eyes closed fitfully, like many before them they did not even know they should struggle, the blankets wrapped around them, smothering to a deeper sleep.

Akona cackled with glee but her strength was gone, she could not hold the knife to pour their blood. She evaporated, the soft wood creaked and groaned and tendrils wrapped around the shrouded bodies. They tightened until skin ruptured and the blessed blood oozed through the corse cloth and into the wood and the witch and the forest.

It was not enough but that did not matter, as the rescue party where not long in the coming.

Posted: Friday, October 17th, 2014 @ 9:49 am
Categories: Flash Fiction.
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