Short Fiction: Lone In The Forest

I'm writing a novel.

I'm done with the first draft and a round of editorial revisions, and it is in the hands of my First Reader – Diana, always Diana, forever Diana – at the moment.

I can't share anything about it at this point because I intend to try to get it published traditionally, so I will go through the whole thing: querying agents, hoping to find a good fit at a publisher, marketing myself... the whole deal.

But I am feeling very good about writing in general at the moment, so I want to share something here that I haven't before: the short story that earned me my first acceptance and fiction publication. I hope you enjoy it.

A bit of background: I signed up to do a 24-hour turnaround short fiction contest - the Midwest Writing Center's Iron Pen contest. It's a great organization and a fun contest. They give you a prompt, and then you have 24 hours to write something around it. I didn't place in 2023, when I entered, but I did have a great time and wrote a pretty good story. I liked it so much, I put it out for submission. After getting about 50 rejections on other stories, getting an acceptance from The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park for the 2023 edition of their annual Hemingway Shorts short story collection felt pretty good.

That is the only other venue in which this story has appeared, for first publication, in 2023, until now...

Lone In The Forest

The sword leans against the trunk of a tree, bigger than any tree Lone has ever seen. The weapon is simple and beautiful, made with obvious skill. It is a tool forged for work rather than ritual or ceremony.

It is dawn. Sunlight scatters through the thick canopy of other, taller trees. As Lone watches, a single bead of condensation breaks from the handguard and creeps down the blade at an angle. When it reaches the sharp rightward edge, the dew drop splits and runs faster, down to the grass.

Lone has never seen a tree this big, has never seen one as big as any of the other trees surrounding the sword. She has also never seen this many trees at once.

Lone lives in the foothills of what was once called the Klamath Mountains. In the spring, while hunting, she sometimes sees a single small scrub tree, the kind with thorned branches, fighting its way out of the arid, rocky landscape. It is often ringed with scree and clumps of fur from the lumbering hogimals that stop to scratch themselves against the bark.

On longer treks further afield from her home, ranging out towards Old Orleans or the Six Rivers Bed where occasional creek trickles provide some fresh water, she sometimes sees one tree, rarely two, within sight of each other. One or two trees. But a hundred? Ten hundred? Her life is defined by what she doesn't have enough of, by lack.

She does not know how to describe too much of something.

Lone looks long at the sword, knowing this part of the vision is important, and also that this is the part she usually cannot remember. After what feels like an age against the shifting light of the rising sun, the sword begins to glow.

This is what I always forget, thinks Lone. I must remember.

The blade, guard, hilt, and pommel now emanate a white shine, a light that begins to coalesce along the blade. Bright spots form, collude, conspire, combine into discernible shapes, into characters.

Lone has never seen writing before, but she knows that's what this is. She knows that these characters have some sort of hidden meaning, that these signs are wonders.

The sword is trying, desperately, to tell her something.

Lone is aware, within the vision, that she is seeing more this time than the times before, or at least more than she remembers. She cannot remember her mother or father, but she remembers how to hunt, how to find water, how to survive. She remembers that beyond the forest in her recurring vision is a vast sea. She remembers enough to live, but not where she came from before Klamath. Each day is the same. The only variation is this vision, which is now showing her things she hasn’t yet seen.

The characters stop shifting and, for the first time, she can interpret them, much the same way she can take meaning from animal tracks.

The characters say: DO NOT LEAVE ME

Lone opens her eyes. She is leaning against the wall of the cave where she has lived for the last two seasons. She looks towards the setting sun, across the scrubby, desolate place where she scratches and struggles to survive, and she knows, for the first time, that the sword is real.

She can feel it now, tugging on her like a hook buried deep in her chest. She is compelled and terrified. Lone gathers her meager belongings, packs her shale knife and hatchet and water skin, throws her bow over her shoulder, and starts walking.

* * * * *

After three days, Lone comes to an area she knows must be north of the Six Rivers Bed and is stunned to find a clear, running stream, too wide to cross in a single jump. Lone has never stepped into water before, has never even seen enough water in one spot to step into at all.

Now she thrills as the cool stream flows over and into her crude moccasins. She thinks better of this, takes them off, ties them to her pack, and puts her bare feet into the stream. It is late in the first warm season of this turning; the water is cool.

After a few minutes, she thinks of the sword. DO NOT LEAVE ME

She drinks from the stream and sees her face reflected by early moonlight in the pooled water cupped in her hands. She does and does not recognize herself. Her hair is long. Her face is drawn.

She moves on.

* * * * *

After another day of chasing the sun as it sets, Lone begins to see the edges of a deep and broad collection of trees. This is a forest. Lone has never seen one outside of her visions. It is huge and monolithic. If she continues to walk west, she has no choice but to enter. The forest is all there is.

Lone keeps walking.

* * * * *

Lone is not in danger, not here. She does not fear for her safety from predators or raiders. She has seen maybe – maybe – three dozen other people in her life. Three meant her harm and were harmed in turn. The hogimals, mutated and weird, are too stupid and docile to pose a threat. Rock cats, which might once have been the hogimal's natural enemy, become more scarce with each turning. Lone has only seen two in the last three seasons.

And so, the things Lone fears – hunger, thirst, heat, cold – cannot surprise her, do not stalk her. She keeps them, and fear in general, well at bay.

The forest, however, is alive and unfamiliar. It menaces Lone, unsettling her. The pull on the hook in the center of her being does not relent; the compulsion is dug in deep. Lone keeps moving, but she is baring her teeth and shivering.

* * * * *

Lone walks in the forest for two days before reaching the sword. Her ears are ringing with wild sounds she doesn't understand. Her hair is standing on end. Her eyes won't stop watering. She pauses at the edge and then moves gingerly into the circle of the sword's small clearing.

With each wary step, she expects the sword to disappear, expects this reality to dissolve around her the way it does in the old tales she'd heard from the desert travelers. She wonders if this was how it felt when the world ended, in those old stories, because nothing was real and people couldn't believe their eyes, couldn't trust what they saw.

The traveler clapped when he described how reality had come undone, how it all fell out of the world, fell apart, like the guts of an animal being disemboweled.

But the sword does not disappear. The sword and the forest are real. Here, the sounds and smells that have assailed Lone for two days are amplified and overwhelming. Lone realizes the air in the forest has weight. As she breathes, deep and fast, heart hammering, she becomes aware that the air here has a taste, something wild and alive, something other than smoke and ash and dust.

Lone is afraid and feels fully alive.

The sword begins to shine, a replay of her vision, exactly, moment by moment. The characters appear in the light along the blade. Her brain turns over, and the meaning of the symbols slides into place with a click Lone can feel in her teeth.

DO NOT LEAVE ME

A figure, not man or woman, wreathed in flame, appears beside the sword's tree. It towers over Lone. It burns. It smiles, and this is terrible. The figure has three mouths, no eyes, and skin made of living mosaic tile in a spray of vivid colors Lore has never seen. It has no hair, no sex. Lore cannot look at it without feeling faint. She looks, instead, at the sword.

You came, says the figure. Lone knows it does not move its mouths as it speaks. The flames recede into the mosaic skin, leaving behind a blinding light. The figure shines like the sun.

"Yes," says Lone.

Do you know what I am? the figure asks, tilting its impossible head.

Lone remembers another traveler's tale. "Are you a deva?"

The figure laughs. The sound seems to explode from every surface in the forest, including Lone's skin and skull.

That is one word the desert folk use. Another word for what I am is Irin. Others know my name: Araqiel. I serve the earth, and this is her forest.

Lone doesn't know many of the words Araqiel uses, but where she grasps for meaning, her brain floods with subconscious context and definitional imagery. Now she knows what folks are, what the earth is. Now Lone knows what a name is.

"Why did you call me?" asks Lone. "What would you have me do?"

Araqiel leans in, placing its wreck of a face close to Lone's.

I didn't call you. The sword did. I have been its keeper since before the great storms and fires killed most of your kind. I bore it on behalf of my mistress, Aset. It is her sword. It called you because it is ready once more to do work here, to shape the world.

Now Lone knows the words for storm, and mistress, and world.

"What can I do with a sword?"

You can do the bidding of Aset, to remake this world as a green and growing place. Your kind poisoned the greatest gifts of my mistress. It now falls to you to set things right.

Lone swallows hard and cranes her neck away from Araqiel's encroaching form. "I am no warrior. I am weak and hungry. I cannot even look at you."

Araqiel straightens, kneels, spreads its arms wide in a gesture of welcome.

Take up the golden blade of my mistress. As the sword's keeper, it will make you more than what you are.

"Do you know what I am?" asks Lone, in a whisper.

You will use the sword's power to recreate this blasted husk. You will begin by taking the sword to the sea.

Lone closes her eyes again. "I do not want this," she says.

Araqiel laughs once more.

Choice is an illusion. You will take the sword to the sea.

Lone opens her eyes. She steps forward and takes the sword's grip into her hand.

Sound, light, power, and knowledge flood into Lone's consciousness, expanding it, breaking it. She sees in vibrant detail: how it all happened, how it all ended. Now she has words for everything, awful and excruciating words, meaning piled into the sky of her mind.

She sees that her work with Aset's shining sword will run for ten hundred years; each of those years will bathe her in blood. She knows that, in the end, her kind will admire the green and growing world reformed just long enough to burn it down again.

Here, in the clearing, given the favor and powers of a god, Lone makes a choice. It is not an illusion.

She turns on Araqiel, swings the sword in an upward arc, and cuts off the grotesque head. The body collapses; three tongues loll from three mouths. Gouts of light bleed from the neck. The trees around Lone begin to grow, reaching upward and outward so fast she can hear it happening.

She can hear everything, and her fear is gone.

She knows the words now, knows that she will not rebuild the world, and why. She has seen what her kind will do when, far in the future, reality splinters again.

Lone does not take the sword to the sea or the mountains. She makes her home in the forest, which thrives wildly for hundreds of years.

Deep within, Lone builds a house from the bones of an angel.

DO NOT LEAVE ME, the sword says, over and over. And Lone does not, because now she understands.