by Blair Aaron
“Wait!” she said. “I know where Prince Theo is! He sent me to show all of you the way out of this mess!” Through the smoky haze she could hear commotion among the men, but she could only actually see the face of Augustus, that same skeptical expression which anticipated this turn of events.
“Quick,” Augustus said. “Get the water from the creek. I knew this prophecy was bullshit.” The other men didn't resist him, for various reasons, but mostly they did not wish to witness such a lovely girl burn to death, even if it did mean they would finally escape the living hell that was life in the Forbidden Forest.
The heat continued its progression up Elsa's waist, and she screamed in writhing horror at the pain. She could sense from the area around the smoke that the Jordan twins were throwing pails of water from the creek on the fire, in attempts to extinguish the heat, but the fire just continued to grow. Elsa looked up to the heavens, which was blocked by the vast canopy of the forest. She could faintly see the glimmer of stars between the light through the tree limbs. At this point the pain from the fire no longer registered on Elsa, because her entire body had gone numb from the shock and trauma. She could feel a single drop of rain suddenly splash on her forehead, then one into the corner of her eyes, and another on her cheek. Her heart jumped with the possibility of relief, and then in no time at all, whole sheets of rain covered the dirty bed of the forest.
“Hail, Daeva!” Kirbleitz screamed. “It's a sign!”
“A sign,” said Niklas. They ran around in the rain together, their hands shaking with the spiritual symbolism of the rain, while the twins stood the side, watching over Elsa out of concern. Once the fire died down to embers, Augustus and Humburt pulled Elsa from the pile of smoldering wood and laid her down on the damp forest earth. Augustus pulled her socks off, revealing a perfect pair of feet, untouched or blackened by the angry fire. “Look,” Niklas said. “She really is the chosen one. She can lead us out.”
“She's not the chosen one, you moron,” said Augustus. “She's just a girl, lost.”
Elsa lay with her eyes closed, exhausted but quiet because she wanted more information on what the boys were thinking. Maybe this could buy her time to figure out what to do, in order to escape the obviously delusional werewolf men. By the way they were talking, it was clear Theo had left the forest, never to return. Their claims that Theo had left cast her hunch that the Forbidden Forest was responsible for taking him from her in a new light. She also suspected--no, was near certain--that Freja was responsible for taking Theo away from her. The woman obviously wanted her to kiss Dorien for a reason. She must have needed that crystal to glow, in order to cast Elsa out, otherwise she could have just done away with Elsa from the moment they met. Elsa was a strong woman, but she was no match for a witch, just like she was no match for a werewolf. Not physically, anyway. Instead, she needed to rely on her smarts to get herself out of the situation. Elsa regretted giving into Dorien and Freja when they asked her to participate in their sick and twisted bet, and she hated herself for making the mistake of kissing Dorien. Maybe if she had refused Dorien's offer for help, she would be closer to finding Theo. She could make her mistake right, somehow, because her fallen state of mind and heart clearly gave Freja some power to get what Freja wanted--and that had to be Theo.
Her plan now was to get the boys convinced she could lead them out of the woods, far away from the influence of the evil forest, where Theo would help them become normal again. If she could keep the twins, Niklas, and above all, Doctor Kirbleitz sure that Elsa knew where Theo was and that he could heal them, she would be fine. Her goal was clear: find Theo, as he would be able to protect her. Even though Elsa knew Theo most likely was under some kind of spell and that Freja was lurking not far from him, if not right next to him, on his arm, she was sure he could fight whatever Freja had in store for Elsa, or whatever wrath the werewolves would dole out once they realize they have been lied to.
Then, there was the problem of Dorien the dragon, who most likely remained on the edge of the Forest, guarding its exit. She would get the wolves' help with that.
Such a dire situation she found herself in, Elsa. What a mess, she thought. Then she slowly opened her eyes.
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“I'm telling you, August. She can save us.”
“No she can't Niklas. You're delusional. Just like my brother was delusional. First you were willing to sacrifice her, to burn her at the stake. All because your precious preacher leader told you about a half-baked prophecy, which DOES NOT EXIST. He made it up, to keep you with him.”
“I did no such thing, young man,” Kirbleitz said.
“You did, just like you told everyone the forest would destroy Theo. You said it would draw him back here and make him a pale remnant of the person he used to be, darker and far more corrupted. But where is he? None of the things you have said would happened have come to pass. You're a fraud, Kirbleitz.”
Kirbleitz walked up to August and punched him in the mouth. “I believe in everything I have told you. I have witnessed it in the past,” Kirbleitz said.
“With who, then?” Humburt said, as his brother nursed his blood lip.
“We must not speak of these things,” Kirbleitz said, turning away from group. From Elsa's perspective, she could see the good doctor, who tried more than rest of the pack to burn her at the stake, stroke his beard in worry, unable to face his acolytes. From her perspective, Elsa could see, despite his obvious murderous impulses, that the man truly believed what he had experienced. He was no psychopathic leader hell-bent on sending the people who trust him on a path of self-destruction. Instead he wanted to help them, and it was clear his conviction that leaving the forest would result in total annihilation of their souls was true for him.
“Tell us, dear leader,” Augustus said, defiant and unwilling to back down to the man who was inarguably older, stronger, and more experienced. “Who left, besides Theo? You know, I bet you are making all this stuff up. You just want us to stay with you because you're lonely and don't have a family. You're just mad you made mistakes and you want everyone to wallow in misery forever with you.”
“Lies!” Kirbleitz said. Niklas and Humburt stood between the two men, to calm down a brewing fight, but Augustus talked over their shoulders, provoking Doctor Kirbleitz.
“Tell us then! I swear there isn't anything stopping us from leaving. We all can just walk out right now--no serpents, no possessions, no consequences, period. It's all a lie, I'm telling you!”
“Brother, calm down. You're making things worse.”
“No I won't. I'm tired of all this bullshit, Humburt. Think about how much time we have spent in this god forsaken place. We have lost everything! Don't you want to LIVE? This isn't life! It's death and regret. We can't keep going like this, brother. So tell us, Doc, buddy ol' pal. Who left and what happened to him?! TELL US! Or I'm leaving all this bullshit behind now.”
Doctor Kirbleitz looked back, ready to spill the beans. He took a soft breath, then sat down on the earth, crossing his legs like a monk preparing for dinner. “I have long feared he would come back to haunt me, and I've tried everything I can to protect you boys from what might wait for you in the deeper parts of this forest, but you won't listen, so I guess there's nothing else I can do.” Augustus rolled his eyes, but Humburt and Niklas stood wide eyed at the only father figure they likely have ever known. They approached him the way two small kids would approach a loving guardian they accidentally wounded without realizing their own strength. Their worried expressions weighed them down, with the thought that Doctor Kirbleitz would not forgive them their trespasses. They sat down slowly so as not to interrupt Kirbleitz's confession.
“Long ago,” Kirbleitz continued, “When I first entered the forest, I met a man, the only person who had been here longer than I have. His name was Zamir, and his story is the most tragic of all ours. He was the first werewolf, the Alpha among all shifters--more experienced and more powerful than Theo's lion or his brother's dragon.”
>
“Theo has a brother?” Niklas asked.
“He does, but Dorien was never meant to be part of our pack. I told you there were many creatures hidden in the recesses of this Forest. You may not know them, but I do. None of them have the strength to leave the forest, except for two. Theo and Zamir.”
Elsa's heart quickened, as she thought back to the wolf she encountered on the way to Dorien's cave, the same beautiful black wolf she saw when she first entered the forest, watching her, observing her.
“Zamir was a magnificent wolf, the most beautiful you could imagine,” Kirbleitz went on. “But he was dangerous, prone to violent outbursts and uncontrollable rages. He had no choice when he changed into a wolf like you boys can. So one day, carefully, I asked him, as we had at that point become good friends, on his better days, anyway. I asked him how he ended up in the forest and what happened when he left.”
“What did he say?” Niklas asked.
“He never told me how he got into the forest, refused to admit anything about what happened to his family. But he did tell me what happened when he tried to leave.
“When he got to the edge of the forest, he said, something would happen to prevent him from leaving, so he thought. A wall would form, or some magical creature would emerge from the darkness to take him back to the abyss of the woods. When he reached the border of the forest, he waited silently for a few moments, then stepped out. Nothing happened, he told me. Not a single thing.”
“See, it's bullshit,” Augustus said, as he leaned up against the edge of a tree trunk, several feet away from Elsa and even further from Humburt, Niklas, and Doctor Kirbleitz.
“Not so fast,” Kirbleitz said. “Initially, nothing happened. He told me he entered the town, got a job as a carpenter for a local shop. He was all ready to resume his normal life, and no one knew about his past. The.urges.to transform all but disappeared. He thought he could have a normal life once and for all.
“But after a few weeks, during his sleep, he had the most horrible nightmares--about the sun exploding, or finding a lake of fire and jumping into it to save himself. The worst dream he had involved him chasing a family through the forest, as he was so hungry to eat and could not stop himself from tearing them to shreds and eating their meaty parts. At first he thought they were just dreams in the beginning, but then the local villagers began to turn up missing, and that's when he knew--”
“No,” Humburt said.
“--that the dreams, the nightmares, were real. His life during the day--normal, quiet, calm--was the opposite of his life at night. The more good and decent of a man he tried to be, the worse he became at night, when he transformed into a wolf. He told me the forest drew him back into its clutches farther and farther into the untouched parts.”
In one dream, Kirbleitz said, Zamir was prowling around the heart of this black forest, and he could sense a sharp hatred emanating from a white cottage. The cottage had red shutters, broken windows, and a pale white color. There was a small lake in the front yard, full of black and shiny oil, with a little scarlet wind mill, which creaked sadly in the soft yet toxic wind. The whole place seemed plucked out of a sunny, beautiful place, and plopped right into the middle of these shadows. When he was sure the cottage was empty, he sniffed through all the whole place using a heightened shifter sense. Objectively there was not anything he could point toward as being the cause of his anxiousness. The place clearly had been abandoned long ago, and yet there was a demonic presence which weighed down on his chest. He compared the feeling of being near the cottage to being near a town recently destroyed by some strange, deadly electricity. The magic of place had an effect on him with ever increasing intensity the longer he stayed. But there was something he was searching for, despite the danger and irreversible damage being in the cottage was doing to him. He didn't know what it was that he was looking for, but the hunger to discover it compelled him onward, using his powerful black nose and box-like paws to search under dilapidated desk drawers, decrepit hallways, and incommodious rooms, long locked away by some feeble spirit, which had now left the place. In one room in particular, on the far side of the kitchen, the moonlight shot through a broken and dusty window, illuminating a small square box that called to Zamir. He transformed himself into human form as he approached the box and lifted the lid a tiny space, where he found a glowing rock, a concentrated form of the forest's evil waiting for him.
Elsa's ears shot up when the doctor mentioned an evil rock, and her cheeks flushed hot and red at what it meant about her own situation. Freja had the glowing rock, to indicate Elsa's own innate evil. The idea made her so angry, to think how unfair it was for Freja to trick Elsa into making a mistake and capitalizing on it. Elsa was just trying to do anything to save the person she loved. There was nothing evil about Elsa's trying to find and save Theo. She didn't know exactly what Freja needed from a rock that would glow red when someone committed an evil act, but obviously it had something to do with Theo. That was when Elsa finally realized that Freja almost certainly had something to do with Theo's disappearance. She must have been involved, along with Dorien. And that also meant the Forbidden Forest never drew Theo back from where he came. When she knew Theo, Elsa never once got any indication he struggled to stay out of the Forbidden Forest, or even in his human form. That meant this Doctor Kirbleitz must have dubious motives. Elsa was fairly certain that, as long as she could somehow get past Dorien's fiery spit, she could simply walk out of the Forbidden Forest without any consequence, and she should find a way to get out as fast as possible, in order to figure out what Freja had planned for Theo. Then Elsa remembered how much time had passed simply just traveling alongside the Forest on the way to Dorien's hidden cave. She could only imagine therefore how much time had passed since she had actually entered the Forest. Maybe Theo was married to Freja and they already had kids, or maybe even grandkids. Maybe he was gone, dead, and buried, and the closest Elsa would ever get to Theo would be his great grandchildren--all because of a mistake that was not her fault. She was tricked into kissing Dorien; she had no feelings for him. Why would the crystal glow, then?
Little Niklas sat up near Doctor Kirbleitz. “Well what happened to him, where did he go?” Niklas looked up at Dr. Kirbleitz as if he were a child listening to a story in kindergarten, only this story was no fairy tale, but a horrific warning about what might happen to anyone who dare leave the Forbidden Forest.
Doctor Kirbleitz stroked his beard, thinking about his experience with Zamir, afraid how the rest of the boys will react to the story's conclusion. “One day I woke up in camp to find that Zamir was nowhere to be found. Later that day, and for some time afterward, he came to me in my sleep--he featured in my own nightmares, transformed into a ghoulish, monstrous version of the beautiful, though volatile, wolf I knew. That's when I knew the Daevan God came and got him in the night.”
“And you never heard from him again?” Humburt asked.
“I have. He comes out of the darkest parts of the Forest occasionally at night, when you all are asleep. But I cannot approach him the way I used to, because he's not the same person.”
“Why didn't you tell us?” Niklas said, betrayed.
“Yeah, and why didn't you show us, if you want me to believe so bad about what you say?” said Augustus.
“Because he's dangerous, evil, and he will destroy you, son. I promise you.”
“I'll take him, especially if he attacks my brother.” Humburt said, getting defensive.
“No you won't, Humby. He'll tear you to shreds without even trying. He's much too powerful. This why I have kept my history as his friend from all of you, in the hopes I could convince you to follow my guidance. And this is also why I don't want you leaving the Forest, because you will suffer the same fate as Zamir. The Daevan God will come for you, if Zamir doesn't first.” Kirbleitz continued rubbing his chin, thinking about how best to deal with the rift that had occurred in the pack. Augustus, in the short time Elsa had watched him interact with the other
shifters, seemed the most skeptical and least prone to superstition than the other boys. He loved Kirbleitz, that much was obvious, otherwise he would not fought so hard to get the truth from Kirbleitz. Whether this was a good thing or not remained to be seen.
Elsa panicked when she overheard this conversation, because although the Forbidden Forest initially made her think Theo was somewhere in the vague shadows of the trees, the rest of the pack, including Doctor Kirbleitz, made it clear Theo had voluntarily left the Forest of his own accord. This must have been when Elsa met him at the tavern that day, when she so callously dismissed him as an irrelevant vagabond. But if what the doctor said was true, still, there was a possibility that the Forest drew Theo back during his sleep, into the deeper parts of the woods, where Humburt, Augustus, and Niklas never went and where Kirbleitz never allowed them to go. On the other hand, add to this the fact that Freja Stein had every motive Elsa could think of, and more, to keep Theo alive and healthy in the towns. Otherwise, she would never have taken the time to get Elsa's stone to glow red. And the question of why exactly Freja summoned so much energy to get that stone to glow in the first place, what purpose it served, lingered in Elsa's unconscious mind, continually mulling the mystery over and over again. Consciously, she could formulate many possibilities, all equally valid. But unconsciously she knew in her heart of hearts what that glowing red stone represented: the evil, the brokenness, of her own soul, the cracks through which a wicked witch burrowed and stole her Theo. Yes, there were many questions she had about her current situation, but there was one thing she was most sure of--finding Freja meant finding Theo. Elsa vowed to make right whatever wrongs she had committed against her fiancée.
“I just don't know who to believe anymore, Doc. You have always been so good to us, so protective. I don't think you would hurt us,” Humburt said. “Tell me where you heard of this prophecy you speak about. This girl fits exactly how you described her--brown hair and blue eyes, full of life and kindness. She's exactly what we expected.” Humburt looked in Elsa's direction as she remained still, pretending to be unconscious.
