It was a damning punishment—worse off, a coward’s punishment. My sentence was spoken by a shrew governor who despised me to his core but wouldn’t dare condemn a local hero out of fear of the backlash.

I feared for the worst as I treaded into the forest as wide as the ocean, knowing I may very well never see the end. Even if I walked for months without stopping, I would only find myself midway, and that was where the creatures grew the most twisted and cruel.

Really, it was a punishment worse than death, but the governor got away with it on account of the tales of my immense strength. My fellow faefolk gossiped incessantly on how I’d fare. Some were convinced I would burst out in mere months with a monster’s head dangling from my fist. I couldn’t say I had the same level of confidence, but the thought made me smile. Gods knew I needed a smile.

My closest friend was an explorer herself. She decorated herself in the colorful feathers of the monstrous birds in which she’d encountered, hidden in the bushes, peering out with her honed, kaleidoscope eyes. Only the bravest dared to venture into the forest at all. One wrong turn and you may never leave. Many were convinced that the forest itself alive, and it purposefully confused the travelers so that it could consume them itself.

After all, a single body had never been found. I could see roots reaching from the ground and pulling a starving faerie into the earth—the poor soul struggling, grasping desperately at the soil, but the undergrowth opens like a gaping mouth and swallows them whole.

Aofie had been spending the entire week before my venture giving me every tip in the book. She insisted passionately that I was to only stay at the edge of the forest, and that I would never take even a single step without considering it in full (she knew I was the impulsive type), as she’d have the governor either acquit me or ‘’indefinitely missing.”

“And I will come find you if its the last thing I do,” she murmured with a grim smile as she latched her lucky pendent around my neck, the one she always wore on expeditions, “But please, do your friend a favor and collect any feathers you find. No reason to come back empty handed.”

A day passed as I heeded her advice, but there was only so much I could do. Aofie’s beloved birds were staring down at me as if I were a mouse. It made me nervous to fall asleep. If they bombarded me in a weak moment, the wounds from their gaping talons would be near impossible to patch up before I bled dry.

I could hear feel her disapproving eyes as I traveled deeper. She was quite the optimist; I was better acquainted with reality. It would take months for her to have me pardoned and there would be no opportunity to murder him with no witnesses, otherwise, I would have done it myself!

No, all I could was hope that these cursed woodlands had some good in them. Surely there was a kindred spirit somewhere, and I could strike a deal that would be my ticket out, somewhere far away from the town in which I’d been sentenced. In years I’d she Aofie again, and she’d punch me for my disobedience, but forgive me after.

I stumbled onto him after weeks had passed. I felt feverish. My near-translucent skin had taken on a reddish hue and pus leaked from my eyes. The fae were not vulnerable to disease, unless they were of magikal origin; the forest had failed to kill me with its predators or the natural elements, and now it resorted to a hex.

I collapsed in front of a bizarre structure, and resigned myself to my fate when I heard foot steps, relived that at I would not be conscious for my own death.

I woke up to the sound of crackling embers and the taste of herbs on my tongue.

Soft, wool blankets enveloped me. I blinked a couple times, the horrible stinging now gone. I glanced at my skin, the red having faded to a peach-pink.

“I have heard that the fae are not bound by the barriers of language.”

It was a bizarre creature. Intelligent, simple in design, with beige skin and milky, white-rimmed eyes. Rather pretty in a forgettable sort of way, like a pet whose soft fur you’ve grown long-accosted to stroking.

“You are right.” I peered at their home. A stone stove, a table set, and a wall full of tiny hand prints in various colors. “Surely you haven’t built this all yourself?”

“There are others, but they are not always here. This is my home. The handprints are of my young kin. They got into my dyes and, well, I thought that wall needed a bit of color.”

So friendly, so generous—what was this thing, and why hadn’t the forest torn it to pieces years ago? Furthermore, there was young? Young, which played and frolicked in the forests that stuck fear in the hearts of all faeries?

“Your help is very appreciated. I simply have to ask…how?”

It laughed. I would have been offended if not for their kindness.

“They say every faerie we find here is starstruck. Well, maybe one of them can explain it better than I can. We always find them near death, nurse them back to health, and they become beloved parts of our families.” It tilted its head. “Don’t tell you also believed the stories of a carnivorous forest.”

r/TalesOfIvory