Work Text:
I
In the beginning was the forest. It covered the world, or so it seemed. From Offa’s Dyke to the great river it stretched, green and growing, full of beasts and birds and other creatures, full of light and dark and life and death. The settlements of people were few and far between, huddled in clearings, turned away from the forest, fearful of the darkness beneath the boughs. The people were fools. They did not understand that without darkness, light is meaningless, that there is no day without night, no life without death. The forest preserved the balance of the world.
II
The people feared the forest, and they sought to destroy it. They hacked the trees down with axes and burnt them on great bonfires; they set traps for the forest creatures or hunted them with bows and arrows and spears. Where for centuries there had been forest, settlements expanded in the cleared land; buildings first of wood from the forest trees but later of stone, alien and unnatural in this wooded land. Walls and fences kept the wild creatures from the pastureland where tame beasts now grazed. The forest dwindled, shrinking back from the settlements, unable to resist the assault.
III
The Queen was created as the forest’s champion. Her bones were oak and ash; sap, not blood, ran in her veins. She was both a part of the forest and its ruler, one with it and separate. She could take the form of any creature; she could appear as a deer, leading hunters deep into the trees and bewildering them with twisting paths so they never found their way home, or a fleet falcon spying out the latest assault. She could even take on human form and move among the people unnoticed, taking revenge on those who harmed the forest.
IV
The people in the settlements began to tell tales of the strange power that ruled the forest. Accidents befell those who ventured into the forest to cut wood, and anyone who strayed too far returned half-mad, if at all. They whispered that the forest was cursed, but they did not stop their assault. If anything, fear made them more determined to push back the forest’s shady boundaries; where they had once lived in uneasy coexistence they now waged war on the forest. Where there had been trees, fields and pastures stretched to the horizon, and the Queen’s realm shrank away.
V
Alone in her golden grove, deep in the heart of her forest, the Queen felt the death of each one of her trees and the loss of the creatures who made their home among them. She knew that she could not hold her ground alone; the people were winning, slowly but steadily destroying the forest. She needed an ally, but the forest’s dreaming could not create another champion such as her; reduced in size, it no longer had the power. All alone, she mourned the impending death of the forest, her grief increasing as each new day brought further destruction.
VI
From time to time infants were abandoned in the forest, their mothers too poor or too ashamed to raise them. The Queen was patrolling the marshy fringes where the forest met the great river when a feeble cry alerted her to one of these waifs, half-dead among the reeds. She took the child up, planning to raise him to assist her in the defence of the forest; she endowed him with her power of shape-shifting and he grew to adulthood deep in the forest, never setting eyes on another human, knowing nothing but his adopted mother and her forest realm.
VII
In the cleared lands which had once been forest, the people thrived. Their settlements grew and grew; hamlets became villages, villages became towns. Ever more land was needed to feed the people; fields for crops, pastures for livestock. The farmers grew rich and fat in their stone farmhouses. Margaret was the daughter of one such farmer who worked tirelessly to build his livelihood, until his farm stretched away from the farmhouse to the horizon on all sides. The forest was only a distant shadow, the Queen a memory from children’s tales. This was the modern world, the world of men.
VIII
The Queen whispered to her son how the people made war on the forest, how his duty was to stop them in any way he could. When he grew older she taught him the tricks she had learnt over the years, the ways she had fought against the destroyers. His favourite game was to take the form of a white deer, leaping through the forest, leading the hunters on until they became hopelessly lost in the depths of the trees, never to return home; but leaping too high one day he stumbled, and lay unable to rise among the trees.
IX
It was there that Margaret came upon him, and his human heart betrayed his upbringing; almost unaware of what he was doing he fell in love with her, and vowed to always stay by her side. The Queen was heartbroken by the loss of her adopted son, her companion and ally, and furious at his desertion to the enemy. Her grief and rage lay over the forest like a black pall, and she sought high and low for a way to destroy the woman, believing in her folly that the removal of her rival would restore her son to her.
X
The forest had long been the haunt of vagabonds and outlaws, who made their homes among the trees and shunned the society of other people. The Queen tolerated their presence so long as they left the trees unharmed, and it was one of these she chose to help her; despite misgivings over allying herself with a human, she bribed the man to steal Margaret away, condemning the girl to a terrible fate at the villain’s hands. She had not foreseen how her son’s human heart would lead him to follow his lover even into death, leaving her alone once again.
XI
Alone again, and by her own folly, the Queen’s spirit failed her. Rarely now did she walk among the settlements, sowing chaos and punishing the destroyers, or lay traps for those who ventured too far into the forest. The leaves of her golden grove withered and, as if the people knew that the forest’s defences were weak, their assaults worsened. As years went by the forest shrank away, until all that remained were isolated groves and copses among the farms and villages, and the world of humans covered the land where the Queen’s realm once stretched so proud and wild.
XII
Few people remember how once the forest covered all the land; the Queen is all but forgotten. The balance of the world has been lost; light and life are taken for granted now, not celebrated as they should be. Still the spirit of the forest survives, weakened but awaiting its chance. Watch any patch of abandoned ground, and see how the trees return, saplings thrusting up through the earth, roots pulling brick and stone apart. The forest is waiting. One day the people will be gone, and the trees will cover the earth, in the end as in the beginning.