deepintoforestwego

[deepintoforestwego]

The "Deep Sea Princess" disguised herself as a human being and tried her best just for that beam of light

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[deepintoforestwego]

Coming this fall: Tarot of the Woodland Wardens! This is my first authored tarot deck, and a project I am immensely proud of. Published by Amber Lotus & Andrews McMeel🌿 Preorder wherever you like to get your books

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Crucifix-dagger, cca 1650, Spain

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You know what I know? I know why the little fox sits so still. My one. It’s because he knows he’ll be back. And he’ll have eyes next time. He’ll have eyes next time. [x]

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Evening by Russian digital artist Andrey Surnov

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...might've discovered a new genre to lose my mind about, hold please

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Equinox

Somehow, without realizing that it was happening, Summer had grown old. Her goldenrod hair was dry and brittle as straw, and her dresses of cornsilk and Queen Anne’s lace were now tattered and shabby. These days when she went out walking no flowers bloomed behind her, and the cold seemed to cling to her bones like cobwebs. Occassionally she would see Autumn, young and proud and full of energy, flitting among the trees and splashing the leaves orange. The leaves were beautiful, Summer supposed, but it hurt her eyes to look at them.

I don’t belong here anymore, thought Summer. It was an uncomfortable thought–where else was there to go, after all–and she quickly put it out of her mind, before the fear of whatever was coming could overwhelm her.

Still. On those days in late September, when in spite of everything she put on all her finery and held her head up and went out to walk the world, she got more admiring looks than Autumn ever had.

[deepintoforestwego]

Winter Comes Back

There was someone tapping on my window. I turned down the stove and wiped my hands on my sweatpants and went over to look.

“Hi,” said Winter. She was hovering just outside the glass, which had frosted up where her finger had touched. “What are you doing in there?”

I shrugged. “Oh, you know,” I said. “Making cocoa. Got the wood stove going. Just human stuff, I guess.” I was trying to avoid looking straight at Winter’s face. She had obviously made an effort to appear human, but as usual the illusion had not held her interest for very long, and it was already starting to come apart, the layers of ice that made up her face cracking and shifting and dissolving into slush. Her eyes were empty sockets that changed shape with every jittering  movement of the ice. Winter liked human beings, but somehow even after all this time she still did not really understand them.

“Come outside,” said Winter. “Come lie in my snow. I’ve made such lovely snow for you! Do you see it?”

“I see it,” I said. The naked trees were covered in snow and there was snow floating in the nimbus of the streetlights and there was a whole lot of snow sitting on and around my car, which was going to be a pain tomorrow morning.

“Come out and make me angels,” said Winter. Parts of her body kept dissolving into clouds of snow that swirled around her and then reformed and coalesced back down into slightly different shapes. “I’ve been so lonely without any new angels to talk to.”

“I dunno,” I said. I pretended to check my watch before remembering that I wasn’t actually wearing it. “It’s kinda late, Winter. I was was just gonna have some cocoa and go to bed…”

“Please?” said Winter. “Just one angel? I’ve been waiting all year.”

I looked out into the darkness and sighed. “Okay,” I said. “Hang on, though. Let me put on some real pants first.”

“Oh yes,” said Winter happily. “That’s fine. I’ll put on pants too.” A tornado of snow whirled up off the ground and swirled momentarily into a pants-like shape around Winter’s legs, before both pants and legs suddenly collapsed back into nothingness as she noticed the icicles dangling from the porch roof and went whooshing off to examine them.

I pulled the first pair of pants I could find out of the hamper–I figured this wouldn’t take long, and I could warm up once I got back inside–and put on my jacket and gloves and my boots with the holes in the toes that I had been meaning to replace since last February. It was very cold outside, but brighter than I had thought at first, moonlight gleaming silver though the falling snow. Winter was swirling in circles around the yard, limbs disconnected from her body, hair streaming out behind her in ribbons of white. I trudged towards her, feeling kind of plain and a little awkward but mostly just very cold.

“Alright,” I said. “Just one, though.” I lay down on the ground, feeling moisture soaking through the back of my jacket. From this angle the snowflakes looked like fallen stars, shaken loose from the sky by some unseen hand and sent fluttering all the long way down towards Earth. I stretched out my arms and legs and moved them back and forth, having to push a little against the accumulation of snow to make an impression.

“Ahhh,” said Winter breathlessly, as I clambered to my feet and hopped away so as not to spoil things with my footprints. Winter moved around behind me to get a better look. She was coming apart in her excitement, features blurring, body drifting apart on the breeze. “A real angel! I’ve been waiting so long to see a real angel again…”

And she didn’t look like a person at all, anymore. She looked like ice and trees and snow coming down around streetlights and the glow of the neighbors’ windows off across the road. She looked like everything.

I stood there, snow soaking into my worn-out boots, breath steaming against the frozen air. My fingers were cold and my teeth were chattering and everything was beautiful.

“Hey, Winter?” I said. “I know I complain sometimes. But I really am glad you’re back.”

[deepintoforestwego]

Summer

I fell in love with the summer that year. Sunlight fell across green fields like a caressing hand, and the earth arched like a cat in response, blossoming into life.  It was the most beautiful season I could remember.  

“I’m in love with you,” I told Summer. We were walking down in the gorge, dipping our toes in the water. I was carrying my socks in one hand and my sneakers in the other. Summer, of course, had no shoes. She was wearing a long dress, which seemed to be woven out of wildflowers and baler twine and Queen Anne’s Lace. Where the dress should have dragged in the water it instead dissolved into sunlight, dappling the creek bed before rematerializing as Summer stepped up onto the rocks.  

“I’m in love with you,” I said again, because I thought she might not have heard, and Summer turned to look at me. Her hair was the color of cornsilk, and there was dirt on her nose.

“So?” she said. And then, perhaps seeing the look on my face, she hastily added, “I don’t mean to be rude, you understand, but you must know that a lot of people have loved me. Loads and loads of them. It just gets a bit numbing after a while.”

Summer’s eyes contained bands of color, the brown of good earth and the green of cut grass and the blue of a clear sky, more and more colors the deeper you looked. If you started from the outside and counted the bands going inwards, it didn’t take long to feel as though you would never reach the middle no matter how much you stared. Her eyes were looking at me now, and there was an expression in them that I couldn’t quite read.

“Didn’t you love any of them back?” I said.

“Of course,” said Summer, and she resumed walking along the edge of the creek, squishing her toes in the mud. I could hear the faint roar of the waterfall up ahead of us, although it was still hidden around the bend. “I loved them and I left them, as I must always do. It’s the way of things.”

“What happened to them?”

“Mostly they went to asylums,” she said. “It’s not an easy thing to be in love with me, and they pined away into madness in the long months when I was gone. The less love-struck ones got off easier, though they still took strange notions into their heads sometimes, and went dancing naked under the moon on fine nights. Some folks said they were as touched as the ones in the madhouses, but that is as may be.” She stepped daintily over a crayfish.  

“I could be different,” I said, which I knew was a lie. “Isn’t there any way I can convince you to stay?”

“I’ve been kept a time or two,” said Summer. “There was one lover, long ago, who trapped me in a glass and kept me here long past my proper time. She paid dearly for that. The world withered in the heat, fruit rotted on the vine, and all the rivers dried up to nothing.” We were closer to the waterfall now, and she raised her voice slightly. “After I escaped, none of my sisters at all visited this place for a very long time.”

“What happened then?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Summer. “That’s kind of the point.”

She had strayed back into the middle of the creek. The water was up to her knees now, and the lower part of her dress had turned to light again, light that moved in the water like cloth and startled the tiny fish that flashed around her ankles. I looked at her, and felt my heart crumbling like the shale in the canyon walls.

“Take me with you, then,” I said. “If you can’t stay then I want to go with you, to wherever the seasons go when they’re not here.”

“You don’t want that,” said Summer quietly.

“I do, though,” I said. “I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything.”

Summer looked at me for a long time. There was something like pity on her beautiful face.

“You must do what you must do,” she said at last, and without another word she turned and began walking towards the waterfall. I followed her.

There was a path that I had never seen before, leading up and around the edge of the falling water. Ahead of me, Summer’s bare feet picked their way over moisture-kissed rocks. We passed behind the waterfall, and I blinked, momentarily seeing rainbows as I tried to clear the droplets from my eyes. As my vision cleared I saw not a rock wall or even a cave, but a series of hills, rolling green and endless toward the horizon, beneath a sky dotted with milk-colored clouds.

Summer was still walking, and I hurried to catch up. I had dropped my shoes, and the grass was soft against my feet.

We followed what looked like an old cow path up the first hill, and down the second, and up the next again. Occasionally we would come to a fence, and Summer would step lightly over the stile while I clambered up behind her, wondering how she made it look so effortless.

Something was happening. I glanced up as I dismounted a fence and discovered to my surprise that the clouds had changed. They were now huge white sheets that covered the sky. When I looked up again, seconds later—surely it was only seconds later—the clouds had shifted again, becoming tattered streaks that clung to the heavens like the banners of some defeated army.

“Summer,” I said.

She looked back, briefly. Her dress was starting to come apart, flower petals and dandelion seeds drifting on the breeze.

We kept walking, and now the hills were changing too: they were no longer green, and I realized that I didn’t have a word for the color they were. The fences had begun to lean at crazy angles, and now the hills were tilting too, making impossible intersections with the sky, although my feet remained secure. The color was bleeding and leaking out of the world, forms losing their outlines, the whole universe morphing into something other. And the figure ahead of me was changing too.

“Summer,” I said again, and Summer turned towards me.

I had thought that Summer looked like a woman, but I realized then that that was only because I had been in love with it. Now we were too far out of the world for that to matter. The thing before me no longer looked even remotely human. Its skin was hard and gnarled like tree bark, peeled back here and there to reveal the new green wood beneath. But the skin, if it was skin, was pitted with holes, holes filled with churning earth, soil that writhed with insects, worms, mosquito eggs, plants that rose to sudden violent life and disappeared back into the morass. Life spasmed across its body. Swarms of bees poured from the holes, tree roots grasped like fingers, sap poured from gashes in its side like blood.

Summer stood before me, faceless, enormous, bigger than the universe, older than time.

Go home, it said. This is not a place for you. Go back.

So I did.

***

On the long walk back home, with my arms wrapped around my shoulders, I noticed that the leaves were changing. A chill wind danced down the sidewalk. Summer was over.

[deepintoforestwego]

Making the Bed

Winter keeps making the bed, with mild exasperation, putting out a new layer of fresh blankets every couple weeks. It’s time for sleep, she says, and sleep is so much better in a nicely made bed.

But the kind of sleep Winter has in mind lasts forever. So even when it is Winter’s turn to watch the house, Spring will occasionally sneak in through the back window, just to rumple up the sheets.

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Spring is the gloomiest season.

I admit, Spring has never been my favorite. My Spring sits at the top of the tallest tower in her crumbling mansion, wearing a long black dress and slowly going mad as rain beats against the windowpanes and the world outside collapses into mud. Vines and creepers push through holes in the rotten walls. Water drips down and plinks on moldy piano strings. Traveling salesmen shriek and howl as the mud pit in the front lawn sucks them under. Spring listens, feeling vaguely as though she ought to go do something. She doesn’t. It is, after all, still raining.

Your Spring is different. Your Spring runs through wet grass and bares her fierce white teeth. Your Spring has never even heard of shoes. Your Spring has drawn intricate patterns all over her face with mud and attached a whole bunch of seed packets to the bandolier slung across her chest. The salesmen in the front yard shriek and howl and your Spring hears them and does not give a single shit. It’s raining. She has work to do.

Maybe I’ll introduce your Spring to my Spring. I think it might do a lot to cheer her up.

[deepintoforestwego]

The Life Cycle of a Soul

Souls are generated in the great heat at the center of the world. Nobody knows why.

As the newborn souls exit that greatest of forges, they begin to rise, naturally following the path of least resistance. Great teeming veins of souls run like liquid silver through the hollow places of the Earth. Sometimes they emerge into the ocean, sprouting like trees of lightning in the middle of all that crushing dark, and fading back just as quickly into nothingness. Nobody knows what happens to those souls.

Souls that reach the Earth’s surface are more easily observable, since the pressure they generate is usually enough to open up great glowing fault lines, miles and miles of souls churning together at the bottom. If you you look inside you will see them, half-formed faces and bodies flickering and merging into each other, driven by some primal instinct to make themselves real. 

A great number of cities can be found crawling around on Earth’s surface at any given time, and whenever a new soul fissure opens up they will inevitably congregate around it, looking for mates. A city that is ready to breed will make sure to provide plenty of open rooms inside itself, whole buildings full of desks and beds and closets and sitting rooms, and the grateful souls will flow up into it, into the clothes and jobs and lives provided for them, their faces congealing into settled form at last, performing the many processes that drive the city’s heart. A city fully saturated with souls make for a very attractive mate, and other cities will come eagerly sniffing around, pressing their bodies so close together that very soon there is almost no distinction between them at all. All cities that participate in these orgies die in the process, but that’s all right. Their communal child will be glorious. Souls wear out with use, like everything else. After enough years performing their functions within the city’s body they begin to grow thin, clothing slipping away from shoulders that waver like light on water. Their bodies collapse, slowly but surely, back down into the primordial form of their birth, rising now again again from abandoned dinner tables, pooling around the ceiling lights, leaking out through open windows. A fully mature city will release enormous clouds of them several times a year, coils of gold pouring out from their skylines like inverted beams of sunlight. Some people say that that is exactly what they are, and that their eternal rise is a kind of migration, a long cosmic journey back to the ancestor stars who are their truest kin. And some people say that this kind of talk  anthropomorphizes souls to an unfair degree; that it is much more likely that they are merely the byproduct of some intergalactic farming initiative, the fruits of the harvest transporting themselves to the great gaping mouths that wait, ever ravenous, at the edges of creation. And some people say that they are actually some upstart god’s senior art project, or the universe’s longest and most expensive fireworks display, or that they don’t mean anything at all–that some times, these weird symbiotic relationship are just how evolution works.

That’s the thing about souls. Nobody really knows.

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Dead God

The dead god’s carcass is huge beyond measure, glittering trails of frozen blood leaking from ancient wounds where asteroids have punched holes in its flesh. Here, isolated from the terrible void of space, deep within the rotting cathedral of its monstrous rib cage, is where I have made my home. It’s fine. The schools are good. Traffic often gets snarled up on my way to work, but that’s mostly because my commute happens to pass through the dead god’s intestines. A team of flesh moles is currently chewing out a bypass. It’s something to look forward to. On fine evenings my wife and I go out walking through the crystalline forests of the dead god’s unibrow, holding hands and watching comets twinkle against the void. Sometimes there are other gods drifting around up there. This is a problem, because if a living god ever gets close enough to notice that our god is dead, the living god will probably come over and try to eat it. On those nights I kiss my wife goodbye and rush down to the command center, where my team is already springing into action at their switchboards and steam pumps. A complex system of levels and pulleys hoist our god’s lifeless fingers into one of the hand signals gods use to communicate with each other. Through the telescope I see the living god begin to back off. My team whoops. High fives are exchanged. We managed to get everything into position in less than five minutes this time, a new record. Outside in the darkness, the dead god’s cyclopean middle finger stands tall against the stars. Down the black depths of its slowly decaying body, my shift supervisor pops the champagne.

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Butterfly God

Her father was a butterfly god, and in lieu of child support he had given her mother a beautiful chrysalis that opened once each month to reveal a golden coin at its center. The coins were of an uncertain metal and no mintage known to man and it was nearly impossible to cash them at the bank, and so in a way it was almost a relief when the chrysalis stopped working a few years later. Her mother kept it on an end table, a beautiful undecaying thing in translucent greens and pinks, folded open, with a hollow at its center.

There were no pictures of her father in the house. Once as a child she had been exploring under her mother's bed and discovered a shoebox full of old papers, and on top of the papers had been a photograph of her parents together, her father standing behind her mother with his arms around her shoulders. His monarch wings seemed enormous, filling the frame with orange and black, looking almost as though they had absorbed the sunlight and now possessed their own internal radiance. His smile was warm and carefree and it was easy to see why her mother had fallen in love with him. If he had already been planning to leave when the picture was taken there was nothing to indicate it, although she spent a long time looking, there with her little flashlight in the dust under the bed.

When she went back a few days later the shoebox was gone, and she was too afraid to admit that she knew of its existence to ask about it.

The years swept by and amassed into decades and when she was twenty-seven, a cousin she knew vaguely through Facebook sent her a message saying that her father would like to meet. She drove to the address provided, nervousness churning in her gut. She had no idea what she was going to say.

The address turned out to be an open field, unmown grass and milkweed growing high around a few old stumps. Her father, the cousin had explained, was much diminished in recent years. The cult of the butterfly god had fallen badly out of fashion, and indeed had almost no human adherents left. Now she saw that the description had been literal: with only the butterflies themselves to worship him, her father had shrunk to match their size. She sat on a stump while he climbed up a twig to look at her, wings fluttering at his back, standing maybe about two inches high.

Her father spoke to her, but he was so tiny by this point that his voice was only a series of squeaks, and she could not understand him. She left him a small piece of apple and never saw him again.

[deepintoforestwego]

The Flood

The river was having flood dreams again. Maisie could tell because she’d been waking up from troubled visions of swirling green to find herself drenched as if she’d just been swimming, mud and crayfish inexplicably strewn across her bedroom floor. Maisie hated crayfish. She wondered, as she carefully tried to scoop them up with a dustpan taped to the end of a broom, how much easier life might be if she wasn’t a witch. Surely normal girls didn’t have to deal with electricity flickering from their fingertips and blowing out every light in the house during thunderstorms, or with finding themselves panting by the side of the road as the herd of horses finally left them behind, muscles burning in the extra set of legs they didn’t actually have. (They did still have to deal with periods, though. For a while Maisie had just sort of assumed that that was another one of these inexplicable witch things, like how she could feel her teeth sharpening to points every time they drove past a piece of roadkill, or how in the fall her hair always turned itself from brown to brilliant red). 

The email from Maisie’s mother informed her that the conference was going well, and that she’d sort out this flood business when she got back, and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES was Maisie to go down to the river and take care of it herself. Maisie, hopping off the bus with her bag slung over her shoulder, decided to go down to the river and take care of it herself. She was still kind of annoyed that her mother had refused to bring her along on her trip (”It’s the end of the year, mom, we’re not even doing anything in school!”), and anyway, she’d handled that rogue forest spirit and the boggart living in the pig sty just fine all by herself. It wasn’t a big deal. I’m a witch, she told herself, pulling off her battered Chuck Taylors and stopping to pet the goats (having to wear shoes all the time was, hands down, the absolute worst thing about going to school). Witches take care of things. It’s what we do. 

May had decided that it wanted to be a summer month that year, and the fields were alive with the sound of old retired farmers happily riding around on their lawnmowers. The racket faded as Maisie passed through the copse near the edge of the river, tossing her bag down in the shadow of a shattered stump. The river–more properly a creek at this point–ran clear and blue over a bed of smooth pebbles, little patches of white foaming up around the larger rocks in the center. Maisie walked up to the edge and hesitated. She raised a hand, twirled her fingers in a kind of spiral motion, and said something that sounded like the noise of mud being sucked through a storm drain. Every crayfish for half a mile around suddenly remembered a rock it urgently had to go hide under, and disappeared.

The water was cold even under the afternoon sun, and Maisie felt gooseflesh rising on her legs. She waded in up to her knees, which was almost the middle of the channel, and leaned down to clear some of the rocks from the bottom. Maisie dug her toes into the mud. She closed her eyes, willing herself to forget the sun on her skin, the distant sounds of birds and lawnmowers, all the little movements and sensations that came along with being human.

The dream of the river came up under her toenails and flowed through her veins and poured into the chambers of her heart.

roar and rushing and bursting of banks and trees spinning wild in the current and roots giving way and rushing and leaping and houses sliding backwards into the wildness and falling all to pieces and rushing and

Yeah, thought Maisie, somewhere far away, distantly aware of her toes turning blue, It’s a flood dream alright. She re-centered herself, tried to find the human part of her again, and began to push back, her own blood mixing with the river-dream, flowing back down her arteries again, sending calm and serenity into the core of the river.

and rushing and splashing and rising and covering and racing and running and flowing and

Hush now, thought Maisie. The cold was all through her now, but she resisted the urge to push too hard, to force the dream to end before it was ready. You had to be patient with rivers. You had to the coax them. It’s all right, Maisie thought, her eyes still closed. Be calm, now. It’s only a dream. Lie back down and rest.

The dream changed. 

She knew it had happened instantly, knew something was wrong. The river might grow wild from time to time, but its dreams were small, its ambitions confined to the land along its banks. This dream was something else. Something bigger. 

a great drowning had come upon the Earth. all was silent. all was still. great shapes moved in the darkness, in the watery void that was creation. somewhere far below, down in the blackness where no sun could reach, forgotten buildings crumbled and fell into nothingness.

No, thought Maisie, This isn’t right, and she tried to push harder, to set her blood against the dream, to–

Water closed over her head, and the ground beneath her feet fell away.

Maisie opened her eyes.

She was floating in absolute darkness, crushing and cold. It went on forever. The darkness was all there was.

Something huge brushed against her leg.

I can’t breathe, Maisie thought, though the idea seemed remote and far away, as though even her ability to feel panic had become waterlogged. I can’t breathe and I’m going to die.

The darkness spoke. 

Did you really think that was going to work? It said. The voice seemed to come from everywhere, as vast and deep as the ocean itself. Did you think you could challenge me? You have such little blood within you, and I have the endless tides.

“Who are you?” said Maisie, or tried to say, or perhaps only thought. She could feel her lungs collapsing. Her eyes felt like they were being squeezed from her head.

I am the deep, said the voice. It said it as though there was nothing else to be said. 

Pieces of her skull were grinding against each other. I’m dying, Maisie thought again. She tried to hold herself together, tried to assemble one last thought. She had to stop the flood. This is what witches do. 

“I saw your dream,” she said, or imagined saying, speaking to the darkness. “The world all covered and drowned. Please, you have to stop it. You have to wake up before it becomes real. We won’t survive a dream like that.”

The darkness seemed to ripple around her, humming and vibrating. Maisie realized, with the last of her strength, that it was laughing.

That wasn’t a dream, said the voice. It was a memory. You are a very insolent thing, but you are brave, and you were gentle with my child in its dreaming. That counts for something. Go back, then. Return to your world. When the dry land has lost its splendor, I will be waiting. 

Maisie’s head broke the water, and she was choking and gasping, on her hands and knees in water barely high enough to cover her face. She staggered to her feet. Her body was whole and unbroken. The lawnmowers were still droning away in the distance. The river, smooth and untroubled, flowed gently around her ankles. 

Maisie splashed back to the bank, clambered up to where she’d left her bag, and collapsed onto the grass. “What the fuck,” she said. Her clothes were heavy with water, and her lungs were pulling in miraculous gulps of air, and the sun seemed brighter than it ever had in her life.

“Is it always gonna be like this?” said Maisie. She had never been drunk, and she wondered if this was what it felt like. “Is there always gonna to have to be some huge disaster before I can do anything? Is that just how it is?”

The universe declined to respond. Maisie supposed she would have to get used to that. I’m alive, anyway, she thought. I’m alive, and the flood isn’t coming, and those are really the two things I wanted. I guess that’s okay. She just lay there for a while, as the springtime sun sank down further towards the horizon; and then she got up, and picked up her bag, and began the walk back home. 

(More Maisie)

[deepintoforestwego]

The Water of Life

“Here,” my guide says, gesturing to the wide leaves blocking the tangled jungle trail, “The place is here;” and in my haste to rush forward I nearly knock him to the ground.

The longing that gnaws at my heart like a worm was born in a Portuguese tavern some seven years ago, amid half-drunken tails of a mysterious fountain, unfocused eyes and tongues that let slip more than they’d meant, stories of a place deep in the forest where traces of Eden still bubbled up from the earth. I dreamed of nothing else thereafter, though my nights were not easy. Since I was a boy I have been plagued by moments of terrible clarity, my brain overwhelmed by the utter finality of death. The end of everything I am, confined to inescapable nothingness forever. It is an unbearable thought.

And yet, listening to the stories in that tavern, for the first time I saw a way out. A fountain, to wash away the greatest horror of the world.

My fingers tremble as they brush the leaves. It is here, at last, the answer to all my searching. My guide say something at my shoulder, but I hardly hear him. With one sudden movement I reach out and thrust the leaves aside.

The fountain of youth lies before me. Clear water bubbles up from a slab of rock, pooling and flowing down well worn tracks before disappearing under an overhang of earth. And all around the spring, kneeling, their faces pressed to the water–

“Who are they?” I whisper. My breath seems frozen in my chest.

My guide places a hand on my arm. “They come too,” he explains. His heavy accent seems almost gentle. “Before. Drink, yes? Drink and live forever.”

The things on the ground do not look up at my approach. Their knees are sunk deep into the soil. I can see moss growing on their skin, insects crawling in unkempt curtains of hair. Their faces remain level with the water, and suddenly I hear it, in the heavy stillness of that place: the sucking and lapping of a dozen slobbering mouths, pulling frantically at the contents of the spring, their owners unmoving at the edge of the water.

My guide adds, as if in afterthought: “But they have to keep drinking. You see?”

The truth of the fountain strikes me then, and I reel back, nearly falling but for the support of the tree trunk. So this is the legendary water of life! My vision distorts and blurs; the immortal gluttons on the ground seem swollen and slug-like, fat, bloated things, slurping mindlessly at their troughs until the end of time. Even the tree feels hideous under my touch, the bark warm and covered in tiny hairs, roots suckling blindingly down in the crushing dark.

My stomach heaves, and I turn away.

And yet. There it is. The void. Myself, the thing that I am, the only existence I will ever know, gone forever.

My head jerks of its own accord. I can feel my breathing becoming faster, more panicked. I shake my head again, violently, dash my knuckles against the tree until the skin hangs in ragged strips, but it is no use. Death infests my senses, a black that never ends.

There’s no escape.

I turn again, and walk towards the edge of the spring. My pack falls from my shoulders. There is a space among the supplicants, a gap in the line, as though they have been waiting for me. I step forward. The jungle whispers around me, heat pressing down like a shroud.

I kneel by the spring, and bend my head, and begin to drink.

[deepintoforestwego]

Hear y'all like rats.

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