The Road to Lonely Wood

The soft tap of a shovel tamping loose dirt was the only sound to break the silence. Even the wind had grown still, as if in respect of these last rites. A young Lioness, her faded — and now thoroughly muddied — habits clinging to her frame, knelt to plant a small wooden cross into the heart of the shallow grave. Bowing her head with her auburn hair tied tightly at the back of her neck, she whispered a final prayer for the departed.

At last, her hands blistered and weary, the Lioness rose to her feet and briefly surveyed her work. Sixteen fresh graves stood in silent rows, their crude markers like mourners with bowed heads. She brushed mud from the skirt above her knees as best she could, then turned and trudged toward the half-burnt husk of her childhood home.

“Now,” Nayeli sighed, her fingers brushing almost reverently over the blackened head of an ax hanging beside the door, before leaning the shovel in the corner. “Where to find the rest?”

She’d spent a week here, collecting the dead from the fields and the ashen shells of homes, offering them the respect their murderers hadn’t. It was time to move on, and find where the other villagers had fled. She knew the enemy seldom took captives, but chasing survivors was likely not worth their time either. The raiders had come to stock supplies — and deny them to the kingdom. Every field, house, and hut had been torched. But there had been far too few bodies. On the one hand, that gave her some hope: most of the village had escaped.

On the other ... she knew her parents weren’t among them. Her father’s ax still hung beside the door, the wooden shaft burned down to a blackened stub. It had been both his tool-in-trade and best defense against man and beast alike. She couldn’t recall a single day he left the house without it in hand. For it to still be here meant they’d taken him by surprise — perhaps entering the village from this direction — and he’d never made it to the door.

She’d known that even before finding his remains slumped against the pantry door, his final effort to keep her mother hidden. Had he succeeded, only to leave his love to a worse fate as the flames closed in? Nayeli refused to let the question settle, much less answer it.

The Lioness prepared a simple meal of potato soup in the brick fireplace that still stood — the last she would ever eat beneath this roof. Then she sat down to eat and consider her earlier question.

“The nearest town’s three days from here, on foot,” she muttered over her soup, just to break the silence pressing in around her. That was only half true: the western road would take her to Edensville, a lightly fortified town farther from the border, in three days. The northern road reached the same destination in just under two.

But no one in their right mind took that shortcut. The northern road cut through Lonely Wood — a dangerous realm that no traveler had passed through unscarred in her lifetime. Only a brave knight, or a heavily guarded caravan, would dare it.

Or the desperate.

So why, come the light of dawn, were her feet already stirring the dust of that little-used road with the trees crowding close on either side?

The pack on her shoulders felt heavy in a way she’d grown used to on the long march from the border. The cudgel at her hip offered no comfort. She wasn’t especially brave. She knew that. And though the army called her a “battle priestess,” all it really meant was that she’d been trained to manage soldiers twice her size on the operating floor. After four years of tending the injured at the front, she was still no warrior. Certainly not a knight.

She told herself it was simply faster, even if no other villager had dared it. And she believed, however quietly, that no one remained to mourn her if the woods claimed another victim.

What she didn’t admit — not out loud, not even in prayer — was how tired she was. Tired of blood and bodies. Tired of working with the dead more than the living. Maybe, if she joined their number, it wouldn’t feel so wrong...

The forest lived up to its name. She heard exactly one bird, distant and uncertain, and the faint rustle of something in the underbrush, once. Nothing else.

She walked in a near trance, drifting between memory and prayer, stopping only briefly to sip water or nibble jerky and dried fruit. Late in the afternoon, she stopped at a fork, the path ahead split neatly into two completely opposite directions.

Nayeli blinked, weary blue eyes narrowing. There shouldn’t be a fork here. She’d never even heard of a fork in this road.

She turned in place, hoping for a signpost — anything to point the way. Forest stretched endlessly beyond the fork, swallowing both paths as they curved gently into the trees.

With a sigh of deep resignation, she closed her eyes and whispered, “Bright Lion, please guide this wayward lamb unto green pastures...”

She didn’t open her eyes. She simply turned, and kept walking.

The sun dipped low, the sky bleeding red across the treetops, as she continued through the heavy silence. She had just begun to look for a place to make camp when she saw something strange: a tower.

Not the freestanding kind the kingdom raised along its borders, but the sort that belonged to a larger estate — the kind that should’ve had servants, banners, and a name.

Sure enough, the road dead-ended at a wide, wrought-iron gate. Behind it sprawled an overgrown courtyard and a sizable manor, half-swallowed by shrubs and creeping ivy. A thick chain wrapped around the bars, and beside it hung a bronze bell, with a fraying rope still tied to its clapper.

Bewildered by the manor’s sudden appearance — and the road’s _dis_appearance — Nayeli reached out and gave the rope a tentative tug.

“Hello?” A single, clear note rang across the forest. “Is anyone—?”

“Who the fuck is ringing the dinner bell?!” The shout came from a second-story window, laced with exasperation, like this was a common prank of which he’d long grown tired.

Closer by, somewhere near the edge of the courtyard, two lighter voices cried out in panic: “Run!!”

Startled, Nayeli stepped back from the gate, and was just about to ask what she should be running from when she heard it: a deep, low growl rolling up the road behind her.

She turned, eyes wide as they landed on the wolf, and unhooked the cudgel from her belt. A second wolf slipped from the trees to her left, fur bristling in the half-light.

She bolted right, dropping her pack as she sprinted along the manor wall and into the trees.

The wolves gave chase, closing fast. One snagged the trailing hem of her habit, and she swung hard, clocking it in the side of the head.

It released her skirt only to snap its jaws around the cudgel. She didn’t try to pull it free. She couldn’t afford to fall.

Instead, she grabbed fistfuls of the stiff fabric and lifted the hem clear of her feet, showing the shape — and powerful speed — of her legs. For a brief moment, she outpaced them.

Then a third wolf burst from the brush ahead, snapping at her arm as she twisted between the trees. Another ran alongside her, just out of reach, steering her subtly — but deliberately — to the west.

Her heart pounded. They weren’t chasing her.

They were herding her.

She skidded to a halt at the edge of a clearing, breathless and desperate. Two great rocks leaned together to form a crude, natural shelter here — and beneath it lay the largest wolf she had ever seen. A thing out of fables. Even lying down, it was as tall as she was standing.

Its maw parted in something like a grin, all teeth and amused malice, just as one of its pack shoved her forward into the open.

The wolves encircled her, nipping at her tufted tail to urge her forward, snapping at her ankles whenever she tried to retreat.

Whatever end Nayeli had imagined might await her in these woods, this was not it. But as the massive beast rose — slow and deliberate, like a king receiving tribute — the cold certainty settled into her chest that this was her end.

A twig snapped behind the circle of wolves.

“Well, well, well — if it isn’t Big Boy himself,” came the same voice from the manor, this time amused and dangerously close.

He stepped between the trees, and the nearest wolves shrank back to make space with ears flat against their skulls. A Rabbit with fur the color of fresh blood emerged from the lengthening shadows. He wore threadbare silk that might’ve been fashionable a century ago, and a trailing black cape lined in scarlet that dragged behind him like a captive shadow. At full height, he barely reached Nayeli’s shoulder — not counting the ears, of course.

The Rabbit strolled into the clearing like it belonged to him. A thin smile tugged at his lips. But his voice carried a sneer as he addressed the monstrous wolf now snarling at him, hackles raised and breath steaming in the dusk. “Good effort,” he said lightly, flicking a finger toward Nayeli. “But that’s my dinner. Saw her first and everything.”

The great wolf barked once — deep and sharp as a thunderclap — and Nayeli startled, stumbling a step right into the Rabbit’s waiting arm.

He caught her without blinking, pulling her snug to his side with one hand around her hip. His smile vanished, replaced by a dark frown. “That wasn’t a question,” he said, voice low and cold. “I’m claiming her. She’s mine. If you want to take what’s mine, you’ll have to do it with teeth.”

Nayeli, pressed to his side, couldn’t imagine why the wolves didn’t simply tear him apart. They had the numbers, and her would-be rescuer was as weaponless as she was.

But he’d said it like a challenge ... one the beast wasn’t willing to meet.

Then he turned his back. Just turned. And with a firm pull, drew her around with him, making a pointedly slow walk out of the ring of teeth.

“Look all you want,” he muttered, as her wide eyes flicked over one shoulder. “But don’t pull away. And don’t run.”

He hooked his thumb into her cincture, as if to head off the temptation. “They won’t touch you while you’re in my reach,” he said, tone almost bored, “But they’re just itching for a chance to steal something from me. And I won’t chase you twice.”

Matching his slow, deliberate stride was torture. Her longer legs still screamed with the urge to run. Nayeli bit her lip, whispered a desperate prayer to the Bright Lion, and lowered her gaze to focus on each patch of dirt where she’d place her next step, right beside his.

Like rain skirting an umbrella, the smaller wolves flanked them, snapping at the hem of her habit but never quite touching. They barked and growled, trying to scare her into breaking away — but with each failed lunge, her trust in his promise grew. Step by step, her legs steadied beneath her.

“Good,” her rescuer said, noting the tremble leave her limbs. “Now — is Big Boy following us?”

Nayeli blinked, then glanced over each shoulder. “...No,” she said, relief breaking through her voice. Nothing that size moved in the trees, even among the shadows.

The Rabbit smirked. “Thought not. Pussy.”

She stared at him, uncertain which part of his bizarre behavior disturbed her most. Then she remembered he was the only reason she wasn’t being torn apart right there. So she kept her mouth shut.

“That was him, wasn’t it?” she murmured. “The wolf — the one from the fables.”

“The one who dies in nearly every tale?” he sneered. “Sure was. Still skulking around, trying to steal my scraps whenever he gets the chance. Fucker’s at least as immortal as I am, but a coward when all’s said and done.”

He ran a hand down his long ears, smoothing them back until they sprang upright again. “I was almost hopeful tonight would be the night,” he muttered. “Someday, though, we’ll have the fight that ends his story.”

Nayeli was grateful he wasn’t looking at her. She could feel her jaw hanging open. “...Immortal?”

His ears stiffened. He frowned again, grinding his teeth as if he could chew the words back into silence, and refused any more.