Ascentan Tale, collected from Priest Jen, Earth 19

There is a child in the forest. And that just isn't normal, but then again, neither is the forest. While I make my bed in the evening before work, I look out the window of my room toward the strange small forest. I see the child wandering among the trees and a joy shimmers within me. As the sun rises, work ends, and I pick up the sticks and leaves that have littered my lawn, but my gaze rests on the forest. I always watch that mottled green and blue for a glimpse of strangeness.

I asked my wife about the child, but she did not answer me. She works all the time now. And when she rests, she sleeps like a child. I do not wake her from sleep because my wife is the Waker, and I am not. From the beasts of night I guard these lands. I make my rounds. Not many enemies approach through the outer ring of dense and rocky foothills, but some visitors attempt to approach from the heavens like hawks swooping from the darkness. Still other assailants try to ambush me from the ground, like worms burrowing through dirt and gravel—visitors from other worlds. I find it hard to tell up from down, or at least which is which, but I protect the forest nonetheless.

It is a green thing, wreathed in darkness. Hardly more than a grove and yet its inhabitants are so small as to make the moss a world in its own right. I know its inhabitants, its dwellers, hungry and wild. But I do not know the child, whom I first noticed on a Friday many years ago. The child lopes between the trees, phantom and eerie.

I rub my eyes. It is too early for children. I call it a child not because of its youth, but because of its mystery. A child is unknown, imminent. A child has barely happened. It has not revealed its nature, not yet. All can guess, but none can be sure. All strangers then are, in that sense, children; manna, bread, mystery, unknown.

My wife, the Waker, tells me that a long time ago, before I accepted the guardianship of these outer lands, I went into the forest. Like I said before, that happened many years ago. Although my memory forgets, I suspect that I left a part of myself in the forest when I entered it all those years ago.

“You, my dear, have taken some of the forest with you,” my wife insists. It is so hard to be married to her sometimes. At a distance we seem a perfect match, silver and gold, an obvious correspondence. And yet with every year she remembers everything—she, like gold, never rusts or tarnishes. I exist in the same category as her, but only on a technicality. She does not forget the scale of a butterfly’s wing for a thousand eons, but I, on the other hand, can hardly remember the last month.

I married a god. Perhaps I am one too, a god, but I have forgotten. Each day I sleep, at night I stroll the yard around the forest, clearing it of brush and bramble. I do not approach the forest. It is not my place. I guard the dark plains, the darkness without, not the darkness within.

A traveler approaches in the night. His eyes are bright and smiling. He enjoys the approach towards the warmth of my summer lands. It is cold and dark where he comes from. It is cold and dark here too, but not compared to the alien space whence he comes.

“Lucas, my man,” he says to me. “Is that you?” His voice is affable, low, and familiar, but I do not recall him or the name Lucas. I have had so many names, I cannot keep track anymore.

“Aye,” I say with false confidence. It is the hospitable thing to say. Besides, the traveler might know me, perhaps my name is Lucas, which I know means bright one.

“Temoc,” the traveler says. “My name is Temoc. We met a long time ago when I last passed through these lands. You guarded this forest then and now, I see.”

I do not remember. “Sorry. My memory is not as it once was,” I say, nodding slowly. “But yes, I guard these lands from the beasts that seek to waylay the forest dwellers.” I speak professionally, for I am the host and he is my guest.

The traveler smiles knowingly.

“It is the nature of darkness, my friend. Whence we came, so we shall return.”

“Aye. But you also dwell in darkness; do you not also forget?”

“I forget,” Temoc said. “Although I am a nomad, I am not without habit—indeed I have been here before—so yes, I forget.”

“I see,” I say. But I do not understand. This Temoc, traveler, speaks like a mad man. But he sees my confusion and turns back on his own words to explain.

“You are here,” he says. “You make your rounds?”

“I guard the forest, yes.” I grow older with every passing minute.

“You bring the light with you, no?”

“Indeed I light the way, when the fog and mist permit.”

“Your light has shown me the darkness of this forest, Lucas. So I return, because I remember. But because I return, I shall also forget. You guard the forest, Lucas, my man, but evil dwells there.”

My heart sinks.

“Yes, Temoc. There is evil among the trees,” I confess.

“The forest dwellers cry out,” Temoc says. “I will go to your wife, the Waker, and she will know whether the outcry against the Children of the forest is true.”

“What then?”

“If what the dwellers say is true, the Waker will entrust me with the Flame.”

“The forest will burn,” I say. “The burning will vanquish the evil walking among the trees.” I say those things, hoping that Temoc would refute me, but the traveler does not speak again that night. I stay up, watching over Temoc while he sleep-walks through my lands. I know this plane and the forest at its heart well enough. I know the outcry against the Child—the suffering of the helpless is great and true.

In the morning the traveler departs. I wait for his return, pacing the boundary of my lands, restless day and night. I shine into the darkness all around, keeping the beasts of shadow at bay. But it is all for nothing if I cannot think of a way to keep the forest from burning. It must not burn, for I must guard the forest. And yet the forest must burn for the same reason which bids a surgeon cut away cancerous flesh. Amputate the gangrene limb. It must burn to protect all the other forests of the world.

Temoc is the doombringer, the messenger of justice, but my wife is Judge over all these silent hills. The traveler, Temoc, will surely talk to my wife and return with fire and flame. The forest will burn.

I think of the child and my soul shakes with anger and confusion. I pace the darkness, waiting for Temoc’s return. I cannot let the child perish in the flames. And yet all that day and the next I cannot find any solution.

I see the traveler approaching a long way off and walk to meet him.

“Temoc!” I call out, but he does not answer. He shines bright with purpose and I see that he intends to enter the forest grove with the fire given to him by my wife. “Temoc!” I call out again. He looks up then, his walking revere disturbed by my voice.

“I do not know you,” he says, his voice thin and clear, bright and beautiful. “That name holds no power over me. My name is Comet now, for my path returns whence I came.”

“Comet!” I say, my voice catching in my throat. I walk the borderline between him and the forest. “There is a child in this forest. It must not burn.”

“Stand clear, oh bright one. The forest harbors a darkness which calls for fire’s judgement.”

“But the darkness is just a child.”

“So I shall vanquish the child.”

“It is a child,” I repeat.

“And it is evil,” the traveler says. “I must bring it to ashes. We must return whence we came, forget the evil gained along the way.”

“How can a child be evil?”

“Even a child knows its right hand from its left,” says Comet.

“And yet,” I plead, walking closer. “A child may know and see the difference between his hands while still not knowing which is which.”

Comet turns then and speaks the dreaded truth.

“You cannot stop me, just as you cannot stop yourself lighting these dark plains, warding away its beasts—o’ Guardian of these plains, guardian of this forest—so you cannot stop me. I carry this fire and I cannot even stop myself for I am a nomad, I am a traveler. I am a comet and my course is set—the Waker has sent me.”

“Then give me the fire,” I say. “As you pass I will take it from you.”

The traveler considers this.

“You have forest within you,” he concedes. “It would quench the thirst of the Waker’s flame, which I carry.”

“I will burn.”

“But my path is set. The forest shall still fall before the sweeping of my body’s edge.”

“The crushed forest regrows in time. The children shall hide in their cleft rocks, unburned. They will reemerge in time.”

“And you?” The comet asks me.

“My flesh will burn.”

“You will become bone and nothing else.”

“So be it,” I say. Better to die than to abandon a child of the forest.

Comet comes close, clutching crescent coals. I approach carrying the vibrant color of night’s brightness.

“Your flesh will not grow back, Moon,”

“I know this thing.” I can only think of my child—tormenting the other forest dwellers with its mischief and creative cruelties, imitation solutions to nonproblems—I can only think of the child roaming the forest planet, bringing light and darkness wherever it goes, insatiable and godlike.

It is my child, I realize. I traveled to the forest years ago before becoming Guardian of the summer plains. The child has bones of my body, fire of my wife, and body of the forest. But what is this? How can I now remember all these things? The traveler’s nearing voice draws me from my contemplation.

“What will you give me in exchange for this spark of death?” the comet asks. “You must give me something.”

“Of course,” I say. “Where are my manners?” I reach up and pluck out my great diamond eye and give it to the traveler, who replaces my eye with the Waker’s spark, the flame from my wife, gentle and bright in the crater eye socket. I look, (through my dislocated eye) back at my pale body, blind and burning. From the crook of Comet’s arm I watch my glowing round body, burning, receding away in the night—revealing the pale silver skeleton moon behind the dwindling vale of forest.

I felt the pain as intense but distant. Then the cold numbs all sense but sight—of the dark forest, as my diamond eye, clutched in the Comet’s congregation of rocks and ice, approaches, carried by the traveler. I see our path of destruction laid out before us, the beasts fleeing before our landing, our great and terrible momentum.

I see two of the children of the forest planet, stride away through the mossy hills, miniature and persistent. One of them turns to see the place where we arrive, the place where we strike the trees with our approach. I watch as that watching child turns into a pillar of salt and fire. It reminds me that not every burned land regrows, not all who remember forget, some leave and never return. Some children must wake up before the morning comes lest the night, guardless and beastly, destroy them. For dust they are, and to dust they will return.