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9[/url]\n[url=https://inkbunny.net/s/2856166]Chapter 10[/url]\n[url=https://inkbunny.net/s/2867081]Chapter 12[/url]\n[url=https://inkbunny.net/s/2871486]Chapter 13[/url]\n[url=https://inkbunny.net/s/2875161]Chapter 14[/url]\n[url=https://inkbunny.net/s/2878938]Chapter 15[/url]\n[url=https://inkbunny.net/s/2883393]Final Chapter[/url]\n[url=https://inkbunny.net/s/2918128]Epilogue pt. 1[/url]\n[url=https://inkbunny.net/s/2954608]Epilogue pt. 2[/url]", "description_bbcode_parsed": "Navigating the wilderness

Caution! This chapter contains: extreme violence, some of it sexual in nature

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Final Chapter
Epilogue pt. 1
Epilogue pt. 2", "writing": "He always seemed just out of reach, his glowing antlers guiding my way through trees, over rocks, amidst brush and thorn and vine. I would extend my arm to touch him and couldn't find him close enough to feel. He didn't get too far away, though, and it almost felt like he was exactly the same distance away from me at all times, maybe five or so feet ahead. If I slowed, he slowed, and if I stopped, he would stop, but I didn't want to stop. I wanted to catch him, in that inky black night, the moon behind the clouds, the breeze in the air chilly.\n\nI went to call out for him, only to find I had no voice, and, as we walked together, we would find the creek, the creek I knew well. As we traversed through it, I shivered. The water was frigid this late at night, and as we passed through to the other side, I was trembling, my body soaked up to near my chest. I didn't stop, though, I couldn't stop. He wouldn't turn around, but he would speak as we walked. His voice sounded like it was underwater, like it was being shouted at me from a friend across a pool, both of us submerged. \n\n\"Everything that happens tonight is necessary.\"\n\nWe walked for over an hour, I was sure of it. I could barely feel my feet after a while, they had gone from a raw pain to total numbness, somehow still pulling my body forward following this strange, luminescent beast through the woods. Every time I opened my mouth to ask it something, I couldn't find the words. I knew it was a dream, somehow, by how it felt. Despite the very real pain I'd experienced, everything else conveyed to me I was still asleep. The sounds, the paralysis in my throat, the ethereal fog in the world around us, I was certain I wasn't awake.\n\nIn the distance, well into the night, I saw a light, a flickering light. I could see it like a halo around the stag, who walked straight toward it. As we arrived, I saw it was a campfire, a campfire in the otherwise completely solid black abyss, the endless darkness around us. I could see no trees, no sign of life, just this campfire, flickering, casting light on the stag, who finally turned to face me. He had no eyes, nor any hole where eyes should be. His mouth would move, but the sound I heard did not come from his throat. It sounded like it was already in my ears, like it had been recorded in my head ages before and he was merely activating it.\n\n\"What I am about to say is of utmost importance. My name is Croibhriste, and--\"\n\nAn explosion echoed in my ears, in my chest, like a bomb had detonated directly next to us. Viscera burst from the right side of his body, the left side of my view, chunks of meat hitting the ground in total silence as my ears rang louder than the world around me. Croibhriste's body was thrown sideways, tumbling over itself as the limbs began to seize, his body jerking around as if he was running on his side, then on his back, his body soaking the earth with blood as his throat moaned. It all happened so suddenly, his poor legs thrashing about until it seemed as if they were breaking, bowed and bent awkwardly as he spasmed until he was on his side once more, the side that had burst open now upright, visible, pouring blood. His body ceased after less than a minute, his mouth beginning to pour a strange, orange froth. His antlers began to rapidly lose their glow.\n\nI went to run to him when my sense of sound would suddenly surge back to me, evident by how I heard the click of a shotgun pump to my right. Turning to face it, I was met with the darkness around me pulling away, revealing the world in which I occupied, a shotgun muzzle in my face, held by a man I'd never seen before. A domestic canine, German shepherd, probably 6' 2\", athletically built, beard, glasses, dressed in denim and flannel, baseball cap. My brain took in every single aspect of who he was, within a second his image was burned into my eyes. I could've probably told you the amount of hairs in his beard, it was so crystal clear to me. On the other end of the barrel, there I was, frail, cold, fully nude, almost a foot shorter.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing?\" he'd ask in an unfamiliar accent, more urban, likely from the western US. All I did was raise my hands as he brandished the barrel an inch or so closer to me, barking \"Why are you naked?\"\n\nThe shepherd gave me a onceover, and could see I was now crying, my eyes streaming with tears. I told myself just the night before that I wasn't going to cry anymore, and yet here I was, trying hard not to sob, but letting it happen as tears ran down my face. He kept the barrel pointed at me, taking a few steps back, his eyes darting to the ground before drifting back up to me.\n\n\"Sit down,\" he ordered. I followed, of course. As my watery eyes cleared, I could see that I'd wandered into a campsite of some sort. It was primitive in construction, a bare-bones tent and small campfire, an upturned log the shepherd was currently using as a seat. Taking in the surroundings as he held his gun steady at his side, he looked like he was some sort of survivalist.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I began to plead, but he interrupted.\n\n\"What're you doing out here? This is private property,\" he said. I had to lie quickly. No part of me could explain the reality of the situation.\n\n\"My...my friend and I are out here camping and...\"\n\nThink. Quickly.\n\n\"I,\" I continued, \"I took some drugs and I'm not feeling so good\".\n\nA pause, then a long inhale and exhale from the shepherd. He adjusted his glasses a bit. He looked like a teacher I would've had in high school, probably thirty years older than me, more grizzled, better suited to be out here. I could tell he was agitated with something, though. I assumed it was a naked man running into his campsite.\n\n\"Where are you staying?\" he asked me. I lied more to the best of my abilities. Somewhere farther \"that way\", I pointed in the direction from which I'd come, not wanting to confess to us staying in the hunting cabin. As my mind cleared from the ringing of the shotgun blast, I realized it was more than likely his cabin in which we were, essentially, squatting. He seemed to soften a bit, but he still had a tight grip on the barrel of the gun he had standing upright by his side. He didn't trust me. I didn't trust him either, though.\n\nConversation softened a bit over the proceeding minutes, but never became comfortable. It was indeed his cabin, but not his life that had been decaying inside of it. Apparently whoever had owned it before had passed away, and their offspring sold the land. They were younger people that needed money more than they needed wild acreage. This guy was apparently from out west, California, and had moved to the county a few years ago to \"settle down\". He was nearing retirement, lived alone, unmarried, no kids. It was something that was happening more often nowadays, folks leaving their populated urban states and moving to rural areas where it's cheaper and quieter.\n\nHe talked about his hobbies. He talked about women, and how much he wanted one. He rambled to me about his life and how hard a start he'd had as a teenager, how he didn't have good parents and how hard he'd worked to make a name for himself. He talked about how he'd rose the ranks in his job to where he was making great money, even in the California economy, and how that had made him feel rich when he moved over to Virginia. He talked to me more about women. He talked to me about firearms, and alcohol, and his passions for both and how he had an extensive whiskey collection that he was waiting to share with special people in his life.\n\nThere was an odd unwellness to him, though, something about his demeanor that had my nervous system refusing to settle. Even in the moments when he seemed to animate about certain subjects, he was on edge, visibly tense. I could sense it.. It wasn't just his distrust of me, though, no. There was something more under the surface. Every time I shifted, it seemed like his eyes would immediately dart to focus on me, like he didn't want me to move. I sat still, and he continued to talk to me. The more he did, the more he acted like he'd known me all along, which didn't settle my nerves in the slightest. All the while, the deer lay not far from me, still and likely bloating from death.\n\nHe told me that he'd gotten into shooting back out west, that it cleared his head. He said he was often worried about the future. I wholeheartedly empathized. He said that he was stressed about what his life was going to be like as he got older, and it spilled over into political opinions I nodded along with whether I agreed or not. All the while, it seems like he was still flinchy. Even if I took a moment to scratch an idle itch on my anxious body, his eyes would fixate on me, like I couldn't breathe without him worrying if I was going to run away or not.\n\nMinutes passed, and I finally looked over to the deer again, to Croibhriste, which prompted the shepherd to stop speaking, suddenly, in the middle of an otherwise longwinded ramble about his plans for the future.\n\n\"You saw me shoot that deer,\" he said.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I replied, \"happens all the time around here\".\n\n\"Not out of season,\" he replied.\n\n\"It's not like I care,\" I tried to assure him. He shifted uncomfortably on his seat, that uneasiness just crawling all over him. He acted like, any minute, something was going to happen, and I could feel my heart beating in my neck every time he moved. Something was off. I'd looked back to him, but his gaze remained fixed on Croibhriste's dead body. It was the first time I'd moved and he'd not turned to watch me. \n\n\"I've not been feeling well for a while,\" he finally said, \"I'm retiring in a few years and I don't know what I'm going to do with my life.\"\n\n\"There's nothing wrong with not knowing what to do,\" I answered.\n\n\"I moved over here to settle down and live a quieter life, but I've just felt like a stranger here for a while. I never met a woman I match with. I don't have kids. I've built myself up to something so substantial with nowhere for that legacy to go,\" he began, his grip on the shotgun barrel tightening. His eyes were still on Croibhriste.\n\n\"You've still got a lot of time, man,\" I began to speak, but he interrupted me to continue talking.\n\n\"It was pretty easy to get another job over here, but I don't fit in. My coworkers like me just fine, but no one knows me. No one wants to meet with me outside of work. I had all these plans to use this land to fish and hunt with a friend, to maybe meet a nice younger woman and have a child and take them out here, but it's never happened. I just come out here by myself now, to camp, and...\"\n\nHis muzzle remained facing Croibhriste's carcass, but I could see by the fire's reflection that his eyes finally turned to glance at me again.\n\n\"Now I've done gone and broken the law, and someone's seen me do it.\"\n\nI could feel his tension rising. My head was hurting with how hard my blood was pumping in my neck. Something was very wrong with this man, and the more I sat watching him, the more I realized I was in danger. \n\n\"I really don't care. My grandpa's done the same thing,\" I lied. Grandpa'd never shoot out of season, even if you could pretty easily get away with it.\n\n\"You're not on drugs,\" he spoke coldly, cutting through my attempted defense, \"I think you were put here on purpose. You're just another one of life's challenges being thrown at me.\"\n\n\"Listen, man...I know you're going through a lot, but I promise I don't care about the deer. I just wanna go home. I don't even know your name or who you are or anything...\" my voice was quivering.\n\n\"No one knows who I really am. No one's going to remember me,\" he said.\n\n\"Come on, that's not true,\" I tried to soothe him. His shoulders had stiffened up noticeably, his posture rigid like he'd been cast in bronze to rest forever on that old stump, his head facing off past the deer with his eyes still focused on me. I felt sick. I could feel my torso was trembling and it radiated out to my limbs. My fight-or-flight was in full force but I felt certain I couldn't run from this. I felt trapped, and I tried to quietly calm his rising stress before he interrupted me again.\n\n\"You're right,\" he said, the moment hanging in the air as I was certain he had more to say, \"you'll remember me.\"\n\nHe cocked the shotgun and raised it to his mouth. I hurriedly closed my eyes and thrust my hands to cover my ears, curling inwards, fetally guarding myself in whatever way I could.\n\nI screamed. I know I screamed because I felt it in the rasp of my throat and the way it burned to breathe in, but the sound of the blast was so loud that the ringing in my ears drowned out all the noise I was making. My eyes were screwed shut, my fingertips digging into the sides of my scalp as I further retreated into a fetal circle, my forehead pressed to my updrawn knees as I cried and prayed and cried. I prayed to a God, in that moment, I was almost certain couldn't possibly exist.\n\nThe ringing in my ears subsided after an indeterminate amount of time and let my mind suddenly realize I was still screaming, though it had largely gone hoarse and sloppily shifted to sobbing. The forest was silent between wails, and I could not handle that silence.\n\n\"Shut up, it's over,\" was the first thing to shatter the sounds of my screaming. It caused me to suck air suddenly and almost choke on my own spit, a coughing fit amidst hoarse hollers as I was abruptly hoisted up by the familiar hands attached to that familiar voice and heaved backwards like a ragdoll into the brush behind me.\n\n\"Lay there and be still,\" it said. It was King.\n\nI don't know was worse, the first sound of shotgun having known what happened, or the noises of King eating, the hideous chewing, snapping bones, voracious swallowing. Bite by bite, with the slovenly sounds of a pig in a food trough, King was eating him. The woods echoed a sickening amount of sloppy jaw slapping and snorting, grunting, breathing, as he ate the dog from his neck down to his feet, bite by bite, mouthfuls of meat crushed and swallowed, some chewed, some taken down whole. I'd stopped yelling at this point, having instead fallen to my side in the fetal position, humming as loudly as I could to try to drown out the sounds of things I was never meant to hear. I, luckily, felt like my soul left my body for a while, a dull fog in my head that seemed intent on clouding my mind out from what was happening around me.\n\nEventually, the sound of eating would quiet, and be replaced with the sound of King moaning, miserably moaning, as I tried to roll over to face him. He was on his hands and knees, one hand clutching his stomach. It was grossly distended, hanging heavy, swollen outward instead of his usual somewhat concave shape, and his mouth was open, profusely salivating like he was about to regurgitate. He'd eaten an entire man, and I could tell it was hurting him severely to have his body bloated like that.\n\nI tried to speak to him, barely getting out the first letter of his name before another \"SHUT UP\" barked from his frothy mouth as trembling limbs had him crawl like a dog a few feet forward before he fell onto his side. He laid there, labored in his breathing, for a few minutes before speaking again.\n\n\"Go to bed. We--we will both go to sleep, and we will wake in the morning and go home. Leave me to rest. Do not speak any more of this,\" he would insist. I agreed merely in my silence, unable to possibly process any sense of a response. I thought for sure, though, that I'd never sleep. I was so focused on King, laying out in the open, all the noises he was making as his distended belly ached with his hellish overindulgence, the dead stag next to him rotting in the indifference of the woods. I was sure I was going to be up all night thinking about it. I wasn't, though. The post-traumatic adrenaline wore off and I vomited, falling asleep on my side right next to my own refuse.\n\nI didn't dream, which wasn't surprising, but what was surprising was where I awoke. My eyes opened to the ceiling of the cabin. I was in our bed, tucked in. The sun was shining through the open windows. King was nowhere to be found, but I felt rested. It must have truly been just a terrible dream. My throat didn't even feel raspy from the screaming I recalled. I felt a bit tired, but otherwise fine, relieved it had all just been a nightmare, perhaps poorly digested fish. There was a gnawing in my chest, though, about the deer's name. Croibhriste. I had to write it down.\n\nI slipped out of bed, immediately going for my phone, powering it on for a moment to send myself a text of the deer's name. As complex of a name as it was, I strangely had an image of how it was spelled burned into my brain. I wrote it down, Croibhriste, and powered off the phone once more, then I stepped outside to stretch and breathe in the morning air, cool, crisp, refreshing. The yard looked as it usually did, strewn about with feral carcasses. I wondered where King was, if he was out hunting or foraging. I made my way down to the water to wash my face and relieve myself, but was distracted by something out of the ordinary in our messy yard. An old fire, still smouldering, down near the waterfront. It looked as if it had been hastily made, and as I approached it and kicked about some of the remains, I could see little pieces of plastic, the color of that hunter's tent. My chest felt suddenly very tight, and as I kicked about more I found more pieces of it. I looked around for King, suddenly calling out for him, with no response.\n\nAll I could do was wait for him, and I tried my best to do so, washing my face and going about my morning routine as normally as I could. Nothing about last night made any sense to me, how effortlessly it seemed to have faded into the past. I felt entirely too fine, physically, for it to have been real. \n\nA few hours passed, my time largely spent resting in bed, reading over that tome, before I would hear King lumbering about in the yard. I peeked out the window and saw him tossing carcasses into the grass, half-eaten, dead. \n\n\"Hello,\" I'd call out from the window, and he'd look to me from out in the field before looking away, not returning the greeting. \n\n\"Good morning to you too...\" I said, more than loud enough for him to have heard me, dogearing my page before closing the tome, tucking it away. I rose to join King in the yard, approaching him from behind as I asked him \"are you feeling alright?\"\n\nHe didn't answer, though we were only a mere foot or two away from eachother. I approached him and placed a hand on his back, asking \"are you not talking to me today or something?\"\n\n\"What you did last night was remarkably stupid, even for you,\" he finally said. My hand slid down his back, slumping off to my side near his tail as he stood, looking down at another mangled raccoon.\n\n\"I think I was sleepwalking for a lot of it. I felt like I was dreaming, for so long.\"\n\n\"Dreaming? Sleepwalking for almost an hour through the woods? You knew well what you were doing.\"\n\n\"No, I--\"\n\n\"You were seeking to run away. I suspected this would happen if we visited town again. You even made a path toward your truck, but it was clear you got lost along the way.\"\n\n\"King, no, I didn't even bring my keys or phone or anything. I was following a deer.\"\n\n\"A deer?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I began, his back turned to me, \"in my dream, I saw a beautiful deer with glowing antlers. He beckoned me to the yard and I followed him, all the way to that man's camp. I think we would've kept going, but that guy shot him. Did...\" I paused. \"Did that really happen? Did you really...\"\n\n\"Yes. Yes, it happened, and yes I did. It was a terrible night, I do not feel as though I got any rest, and my stomach has been hurting all day. I am very angry at you for putting yourself in such danger.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean to, it was so dark out, I was just following the deer, and--\"\n\n\"Oh nonsense, Nico. There's nothing some forest spirit would have to tell you, you just went out wandering and don't want to admit to me that you got lost.\"\n\n\"He told me his name, and he was about to say more to me when that man shot him! He was the deer laying dead near you last night!\" I insisted. \n\n\"There is no reason any other spirit would have to guide you around! That is my duty!\" King insisted back, turning to face me now. \n\n\"Just because we're dating doesn't mean another spirit or creature or whatever can't talk to me!\"\n\n\"Yes, it does.\" King had turned fully now, his elbows bent, hands raised in an assertive manner. I wanted so badly to stand my ground, but after what had almost happened to me the night before, and after what I'd seen him do, I backed down.\n\n\"You are my love. You've got no reason to be wandering alone in the woods with some strange talking creature, and none of them have any reasons to lure you into that, unless they are seeking to get you killed, which I am certain he intended to do.\"\n\n\"That's not true!\" I suddenly shouted. \"He was kind to me, and he didn't force me to follow him!\"\n\n\"Kindness means NOTHING, Nico! Look at where he lead you, STRAIGHT into the mouth of danger! Had you not had me, what would have happened?!\" King snapped at me, his hands suddenly grabbing mine and tugging them up into his grip, where he shook my forearms as he spoke.\n\n\"I...\"\n\n\"What if that man had been outwardly destructive instead of inwardly? Then what? If this supposed deer is even real, he lead you DIRECTLY there. You do not trust creatures blindly like that! They will hurt you!\"\n\nI grew quiet, unable to really fight what he was saying. Croibhriste had indeed lead me directly from the yard to the hunter's camp. The things he said, too, implied he'd known something was going to happen. For all I knew, he could've not actually been dead. He was clearly some sort of mystical beast, after all. Maybe that deer wasn't even his only form. He probably left the vessel and returned to the Forest's Heart, or something of that nature. King, as much as he was intimidating me, had a good point.\n\n\"I'm sorry, King...\" I admitted quietly. \"I felt like it showed strength to go out without you.\"\n\n\"Because you are naive, you are simple. You think you can simply wander through life and weasel your way out of all your problems, but you cannot. You are not intelligent enough to live as carefree as you'd like, and you have nothing for which you need to be searching. We are settling down. I am preparing for us to marry, and you are out gallavanting with another spirit in the woods, nearly getting yourself ruined or killed,\" King said, all while holding my hands rather tightly in his, gripping every few words as if to accentuate the importance of what he was saying. \n\n\"I...I'm really sorry, King. You're right. If I want you to take this seriously, I need to be doing the same,\" I admitted. No wonder he never had anything nice to say about me.\n\n\"You've betrayed my trust, but I am going to have faith that it won't happen again. I have to go out for a while, and I need you to pull some of the fungus from my stomach. I have experimenting to do, and something else, which I cannot tell you about just yet.\"\n\nI agreed to help, and we went through the motions of dredging up that strange fungus from the pit of his stomach. I felt particularly terrible doing so this time, knowing what had been in his stomach the night before. It was all gone, though, it felt. His stomach was hot and slimy as always, and he'd grown a bit more accustomed to having his insides probed by my hand. He'd learned to keep it held under his tongue, in between the muscle itself and the residual meat that held his skull connected to his neck.\n\nAfter he left, I meandered around the yard for a bit, inspecting the carcasses he'd been leaving to rot. All of them were missing at least one limb, if not more. Some of them were hollowed out, on their backs, rib cages devoid of organs. Some of them were headless. He'd mangled them all in unique, terrible ways, a tragic irony in pursuit of a presumed gift of life. At this rate, all the animals in the woods would be dead before he'd figure out if that stupid fungus could bring any of them back to life. I could tell that was his goal, but at what cost? \n\nEventually, I headed inside, to work on deciphering that book as I usually did in my spare time. Flipping pages, looking for pictures, anything to act as the start to translating. Every time I wandered over that picture of King, fanning through the pages, I couldn't help but stop and stare at it. There was something so frustrating and so enticing about how I knew secrets were written about him, potential truths and explanations about who and what he was, but I had no way of understanding it. There could've been answers to his curiosities about his fungus, or about how to reverse his curse, anything of that nature. I only had to keep trying. He never wanted me to bother with it when he was home, though, he would get temperamental about it because he felt like it was pointless. I could tell it really bothered him that there was potential truth about him right in front of his eyes, and he just couldn't access it. What a nice surprise it would be if I could surprise him with translations.\n\nStill, it made me wonder. Where had he gotten this book? Who was the man that left it behind? How had King gotten ahold of it? It made me wonder if King had anything else in his possession worth inspecting for clues. He'd never unbundled them. After we left his cave, he'd just left them tied up in a pelt. They say in the corner of our shelter before, and had continued to sit in the corner of our cabin now. Part of me felt like he'd be upset with me if I looked through them without him around, but the other part felt like I might not even see him until nightfall, if he even came home that day at all. I had hours to kill, so I decided to take the risk, thinking it better to ask for forgiveness than permission.\n\nAs I unbundled the pelt, trinkets and items would tumble out into a small pile in the floor. There were, as expected, pretty rocks, a few gemstones, jewelry, odds and ends you'd expect from a monster's hoard. I couldn't help but smile, looking at the surface of the pile, at how stereotypical it was that he collected shiny objects, like something you'd read about in a fantasy fiction book.\n\nI picked through the pile, though, setting aside the large amounts of stones and jewelry. He had old clothes, presumably picked off the forest floor or from camp sites, some of them t-shirts and some of them fancier, like coats. Some of them looked very old. He had a few bones, some of them clearly anthro. I felt a bit strange that I wasn't more horrified, dealing with anthro remains, but he'd lived in the woods for over 100 years. I was sure he'd found plenty dead bodies, and it's not like he could call the cops about them. What else can a \"lesidhe\" (as he called himself) do but collect what he finds?\n\nThere was nothing immediately of interest, unfortunately, and as I began to pile up his belongings again, I realized that one of the old coats had something in it's pocket. Flipping up the flap, I pulled from it several pieces of paper, and a small book, a personal notebook of sort. As I flipped it open, the pages were lightly stuck together like they'd not been peeled apart in ages. Had King never noticed this in the coat pocket? I carefully opened it a bit wider, and more papers fell out of it, photos as well. I scrambled to collect them, inspecting each one of them meticulously. They all had that same runic symbolism on them, written as if it was note-taking of some sort, the backs of photos also covered in notes. Whoever this man was, he took a lot of notes, and not one of them was in English. There were several photos, almost all of them photos of trees, or interesting parts of the forest. There was a photo of mushrooms, a photo of flowers, a photo of the underside of a fallen tree, all black and white. One photo, though, stood out. It was a blurry photo of King, moving between trees. I could see his face clearly, the skull face on display, his neck and waistline covered by trees but his body otherwise visible. On the cover of the photo, though, was an English symbol, and part of another one. \"M\", followed by a forward slash symbol. \"M/\", written clearly on the upper left of the photo, the only photo that had writing directly on the picture itself, the back otherwise covered in notes in the usual runic symbolism.\n\nI must've sat for well over an hour, flipping through that notebook, the photos, the loose papers, all written in rune. The \"M/\" was the only thing I could read, tragically, and I'd finally bundle up his belongings and tie them back up in the pelt. It was a conversation I didn't want to have until I had started translating, and I decided after putting away his belongings that I would go out for a walk and a bath in the creek. Winter was coming soon, and the creek was getting more difficult to bathe in, and I wondered if there was going to be a time, any day now, where we were going to have to gather water and warm it ourselves if we wanted to continue bathing. I was sure King wouldn't go for it, and he'd probably just tell me to wait until spring before washing again. \n\nKing would arrive home that night, after sunset, dragging the body of a deer by her legs as he called out for me. I had, admittedly, fallen asleep, and I wandered drowsily to the yard to greet him as he threw the deer carcass toward me, announcing \"I have made a discovery. Come, see this.\"\n\nThe deer was certainly dead, rigor mortis set in, and it's torso was gored wide open, organs still intact. As I approached it, I could see that the heart had been cut open, a clean incision in the middle of it. King would approach the carcass, sticking his fingers in his mouth and pulling out some of the fungus mash from under his tongue, his finger swiping through the open wound in the heart. It began, moments later, to beat. The organs would shift slightly, and within a minute, the rigor mortis would soften, the deer's limbs going limp as I saw it's lungs began to hyperventilate, breathing frantically. The body did not move, but King would say \"she is looking at me\" as the body remained animated. I could only watch in horror, though sedated by fatigue and post-traumatic dissociation. No reaction surfaced in my body but terror in my eyes, bewildered terror, my mind detached and yet apparently written all over my face. I could not imagine what thoughts were going through the poor girl's head, if any. She'd been dead for a while, I was certain there had been loss of brain cells. She may have had no sense of awarenes at all, her body alive purely as a machine and not as a sentient creature. There was no way of knowing. She made no struggle, and she died once more about three minutes later.\n\n\"You saw that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"I can bring things back to life,\" he was looking at me with his mouth open, his most visual sign of excitement.\n\n\"The body was alive, yea, but the brain, King...\"\n\n\"Nevermind the brain! We can discover more about the brain later! This is tremendous! All this time, the power to practically be a god was growing inside me!\"\n\nHe had indeed discovered something amazing, but I couldn't feel any sort of excitement over it if all it was going to do was reanimate a body and force it into some sort of frantic half-life half-death state for a few minutes. It just felt like torture, like the old Soviet experiments of reanimated severed dog's heads. What purpose did it serve, and how could we even discern even how aware they were? Were we pulling their very souls out of paradise? Were we damning them to some sort of purgatory state in those moments? I couldn't imagine what forces King could be reckoning with, or what hellish authority had even gifted him the ability to do so.\n\n\"King, it's amazing, but...I think you should focus more on healing what's already alive. This seems a bit...inhumane...\" I could barely stomach saying it, knowing he was going to go into a defensive frenzy, which he unsurprisingly did. I was told I didn't understand, I didn't appreciate how incredible it all was, how intelligent he was for discovering it and how ignorant I was for not wanting to help partake in helping solidify it's potential.\n\n\"I have your ring, but I wonder if it's even worth giving it to you now,\" he said.\n\n\"Why's that?\" I asked, taking a seat on the porch steps to look at the carcass of the deer, to witness it's stillness once again. Over time, I'd grown to only meet his tantrums with the fatigue of any other emotionally battered partner, a quiet buoy that could only rise and fall with the waves that crashed against it.\n\n\"I have found my calling, I have found purpose in my life after my curse, and you cannot be excited for it. You're so full of civilized morals and nonsense, that spoiled aversion to death. How can I marry you if you cannot join me in this?\"\n\n\"It's not that I won't join you, or help you, King, it's just that I'm--\"\n\n\"Scared. You're scared. I know that's what you're going to say. You're always scared!\"\n\n\"Well, yeah! It's a pretty scary thing seeing you suddenly goring animals and tossing their bodies all over the yard, and NOW you're bringing them back to life too! Am I not allowed to be scared?\"\n\n\"Yes, you're allowed to be afraid, but your apprehension shows a lack of commitment.\"\n\n\"How about you give me a little bit to adjust? It takes time to come around to this shit,\" I threw my hands up. We squabbled about it like we were arguing over who should clean up dinner, not whether or not I should be comfortable with my lover slaughtering and reanimating animals. It had just become mundane at that point. What would've sickened my to my core a year before was just a fact of life now, something I'd had to normalize for the relationship.\n\n\"How long do you need?\" he asked, like I could put a timestamp on it.\n\n\"I don't know, King. Give me a few days. It's a tough thing to witness.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he began, \"I had not yet decided when to give you your ring, but this will work well. You will tell me when you are ready to commit to this endeavor, and then we will have our marriage. It will be a beautiful wedding, and we will have a thrilling honeymoon, and soon after we will make a child. I am sure of it. I am sure, somewhere in this discovery, that there will be a way for us to procreate even through this degeneracy.\"\n\nI sat there for a minute, staring at the carcass, trying not to feel ill thinking about what I'd seen, the way it's body had breathed. I knew I need to, somehow, further normalize it, not only what King was doing but our relationship in it's entirety. It had fallen horribly off kilter again, and I needed some stability. I needed something like the photos we'd taken, like the sex we sometimes had, to make this feel normal, to not feel crazy.\n\n\"King,\" I began as he ascended the stairs, turning back to look at me.\n\n\"Yes?\" he'd ask.\n\n\"Could you indulge me a bit, tonight, before bed? Some comfort and intimacy would help a lot in adjusting to all this.\"\n\nKing stood there at the stairwell, looking down at me, while I remained looking at the open carcass of the deer, cold, thankfully stiff.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, \"yes, come inside with me, and we will have some fun.\"\n", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "He always seemed just out of reach, his glowing antlers guiding my way through trees, over rocks, amidst brush and thorn and vine. I would extend my arm to touch him and couldn't find him close enough to feel. He didn't get too far away, though, and it almost felt like he was exactly the same distance away from me at all times, maybe five or so feet ahead. If I slowed, he slowed, and if I stopped, he would stop, but I didn't want to stop. I wanted to catch him, in that inky black night, the moon behind the clouds, the breeze in the air chilly.

I went to call out for him, only to find I had no voice, and, as we walked together, we would find the creek, the creek I knew well. As we traversed through it, I shivered. The water was frigid this late at night, and as we passed through to the other side, I was trembling, my body soaked up to near my chest. I didn't stop, though, I couldn't stop. He wouldn't turn around, but he would speak as we walked. His voice sounded like it was underwater, like it was being shouted at me from a friend across a pool, both of us submerged.

"Everything that happens tonight is necessary."

We walked for over an hour, I was sure of it. I could barely feel my feet after a while, they had gone from a raw pain to total numbness, somehow still pulling my body forward following this strange, luminescent beast through the woods. Every time I opened my mouth to ask it something, I couldn't find the words. I knew it was a dream, somehow, by how it felt. Despite the very real pain I'd experienced, everything else conveyed to me I was still asleep. The sounds, the paralysis in my throat, the ethereal fog in the world around us, I was certain I wasn't awake.

In the distance, well into the night, I saw a light, a flickering light. I could see it like a halo around the stag, who walked straight toward it. As we arrived, I saw it was a campfire, a campfire in the otherwise completely solid black abyss, the endless darkness around us. I could see no trees, no sign of life, just this campfire, flickering, casting light on the stag, who finally turned to face me. He had no eyes, nor any hole where eyes should be. His mouth would move, but the sound I heard did not come from his throat. It sounded like it was already in my ears, like it had been recorded in my head ages before and he was merely activating it.

"What I am about to say is of utmost importance. My name is Croibhriste, and--"

An explosion echoed in my ears, in my chest, like a bomb had detonated directly next to us. Viscera burst from the right side of his body, the left side of my view, chunks of meat hitting the ground in total silence as my ears rang louder than the world around me. Croibhriste's body was thrown sideways, tumbling over itself as the limbs began to seize, his body jerking around as if he was running on his side, then on his back, his body soaking the earth with blood as his throat moaned. It all happened so suddenly, his poor legs thrashing about until it seemed as if they were breaking, bowed and bent awkwardly as he spasmed until he was on his side once more, the side that had burst open now upright, visible, pouring blood. His body ceased after less than a minute, his mouth beginning to pour a strange, orange froth. His antlers began to rapidly lose their glow.

I went to run to him when my sense of sound would suddenly surge back to me, evident by how I heard the click of a shotgun pump to my right. Turning to face it, I was met with the darkness around me pulling away, revealing the world in which I occupied, a shotgun muzzle in my face, held by a man I'd never seen before. A domestic canine, German shepherd, probably 6' 2", athletically built, beard, glasses, dressed in denim and flannel, baseball cap. My brain took in every single aspect of who he was, within a second his image was burned into my eyes. I could've probably told you the amount of hairs in his beard, it was so crystal clear to me. On the other end of the barrel, there I was, frail, cold, fully nude, almost a foot shorter.

"What the hell are you doing?" he'd ask in an unfamiliar accent, more urban, likely from the western US. All I did was raise my hands as he brandished the barrel an inch or so closer to me, barking "Why are you naked?"

The shepherd gave me a onceover, and could see I was now crying, my eyes streaming with tears. I told myself just the night before that I wasn't going to cry anymore, and yet here I was, trying hard not to sob, but letting it happen as tears ran down my face. He kept the barrel pointed at me, taking a few steps back, his eyes darting to the ground before drifting back up to me.

"Sit down," he ordered. I followed, of course. As my watery eyes cleared, I could see that I'd wandered into a campsite of some sort. It was primitive in construction, a bare-bones tent and small campfire, an upturned log the shepherd was currently using as a seat. Taking in the surroundings as he held his gun steady at his side, he looked like he was some sort of survivalist.

"I'm sorry," I began to plead, but he interrupted.

"What're you doing out here? This is private property," he said. I had to lie quickly. No part of me could explain the reality of the situation.

"My...my friend and I are out here camping and..."

Think. Quickly.

"I," I continued, "I took some drugs and I'm not feeling so good".

A pause, then a long inhale and exhale from the shepherd. He adjusted his glasses a bit. He looked like a teacher I would've had in high school, probably thirty years older than me, more grizzled, better suited to be out here. I could tell he was agitated with something, though. I assumed it was a naked man running into his campsite.

"Where are you staying?" he asked me. I lied more to the best of my abilities. Somewhere farther "that way", I pointed in the direction from which I'd come, not wanting to confess to us staying in the hunting cabin. As my mind cleared from the ringing of the shotgun blast, I realized it was more than likely his cabin in which we were, essentially, squatting. He seemed to soften a bit, but he still had a tight grip on the barrel of the gun he had standing upright by his side. He didn't trust me. I didn't trust him either, though.

Conversation softened a bit over the proceeding minutes, but never became comfortable. It was indeed his cabin, but not his life that had been decaying inside of it. Apparently whoever had owned it before had passed away, and their offspring sold the land. They were younger people that needed money more than they needed wild acreage. This guy was apparently from out west, California, and had moved to the county a few years ago to "settle down". He was nearing retirement, lived alone, unmarried, no kids. It was something that was happening more often nowadays, folks leaving their populated urban states and moving to rural areas where it's cheaper and quieter.

He talked about his hobbies. He talked about women, and how much he wanted one. He rambled to me about his life and how hard a start he'd had as a teenager, how he didn't have good parents and how hard he'd worked to make a name for himself. He talked about how he'd rose the ranks in his job to where he was making great money, even in the California economy, and how that had made him feel rich when he moved over to Virginia. He talked to me more about women. He talked to me about firearms, and alcohol, and his passions for both and how he had an extensive whiskey collection that he was waiting to share with special people in his life.

There was an odd unwellness to him, though, something about his demeanor that had my nervous system refusing to settle. Even in the moments when he seemed to animate about certain subjects, he was on edge, visibly tense. I could sense it.. It wasn't just his distrust of me, though, no. There was something more under the surface. Every time I shifted, it seemed like his eyes would immediately dart to focus on me, like he didn't want me to move. I sat still, and he continued to talk to me. The more he did, the more he acted like he'd known me all along, which didn't settle my nerves in the slightest. All the while, the deer lay not far from me, still and likely bloating from death.

He told me that he'd gotten into shooting back out west, that it cleared his head. He said he was often worried about the future. I wholeheartedly empathized. He said that he was stressed about what his life was going to be like as he got older, and it spilled over into political opinions I nodded along with whether I agreed or not. All the while, it seems like he was still flinchy. Even if I took a moment to scratch an idle itch on my anxious body, his eyes would fixate on me, like I couldn't breathe without him worrying if I was going to run away or not.

Minutes passed, and I finally looked over to the deer again, to Croibhriste, which prompted the shepherd to stop speaking, suddenly, in the middle of an otherwise longwinded ramble about his plans for the future.

"You saw me shoot that deer," he said.

"Yeah," I replied, "happens all the time around here".

"Not out of season," he replied.

"It's not like I care," I tried to assure him. He shifted uncomfortably on his seat, that uneasiness just crawling all over him. He acted like, any minute, something was going to happen, and I could feel my heart beating in my neck every time he moved. Something was off. I'd looked back to him, but his gaze remained fixed on Croibhriste's dead body. It was the first time I'd moved and he'd not turned to watch me.

"I've not been feeling well for a while," he finally said, "I'm retiring in a few years and I don't know what I'm going to do with my life."

"There's nothing wrong with not knowing what to do," I answered.

"I moved over here to settle down and live a quieter life, but I've just felt like a stranger here for a while. I never met a woman I match with. I don't have kids. I've built myself up to something so substantial with nowhere for that legacy to go," he began, his grip on the shotgun barrel tightening. His eyes were still on Croibhriste.

"You've still got a lot of time, man," I began to speak, but he interrupted me to continue talking.

"It was pretty easy to get another job over here, but I don't fit in. My coworkers like me just fine, but no one knows me. No one wants to meet with me outside of work. I had all these plans to use this land to fish and hunt with a friend, to maybe meet a nice younger woman and have a child and take them out here, but it's never happened. I just come out here by myself now, to camp, and..."

His muzzle remained facing Croibhriste's carcass, but I could see by the fire's reflection that his eyes finally turned to glance at me again.

"Now I've done gone and broken the law, and someone's seen me do it."

I could feel his tension rising. My head was hurting with how hard my blood was pumping in my neck. Something was very wrong with this man, and the more I sat watching him, the more I realized I was in danger.

"I really don't care. My grandpa's done the same thing," I lied. Grandpa'd never shoot out of season, even if you could pretty easily get away with it.

"You're not on drugs," he spoke coldly, cutting through my attempted defense, "I think you were put here on purpose. You're just another one of life's challenges being thrown at me."

"Listen, man...I know you're going through a lot, but I promise I don't care about the deer. I just wanna go home. I don't even know your name or who you are or anything..." my voice was quivering.

"No one knows who I really am. No one's going to remember me," he said.

"Come on, that's not true," I tried to soothe him. His shoulders had stiffened up  noticeably, his posture rigid like he'd been cast in bronze to rest forever on that old stump, his head facing off past the deer with his eyes still focused on me. I felt sick. I could feel my torso was trembling and it radiated out to my limbs. My fight-or-flight was in full force but I felt certain I couldn't run from this. I felt trapped, and I tried to quietly calm his rising stress before he interrupted me again.

"You're right," he said, the moment hanging in the air as I was certain he had more to say, "you'll remember me."

He cocked the shotgun and raised it to his mouth. I hurriedly closed my eyes and thrust my hands to cover my ears, curling inwards, fetally guarding myself in whatever way I could.

I screamed. I know I screamed because I felt it in the rasp of my throat and the way it burned to breathe in, but the sound of the blast was so loud that the ringing in my ears drowned out all the noise I was making. My eyes were screwed shut, my fingertips digging into the sides of my scalp as I further retreated into a fetal circle, my forehead pressed to my updrawn knees as I cried and prayed and cried. I prayed to a God, in that moment, I was almost certain couldn't possibly exist.

The ringing in my ears subsided after an indeterminate amount of time and let my mind suddenly realize I was still screaming, though it had largely gone hoarse and sloppily shifted to sobbing. The forest was silent between wails, and I could not handle that silence.

"Shut up, it's over," was the first thing to shatter the sounds of my screaming. It caused me to suck air suddenly and almost choke on my own spit, a coughing fit amidst hoarse hollers as I was abruptly hoisted up by the familiar hands attached to that familiar voice and heaved backwards like a ragdoll into the brush behind me.

"Lay there and be still," it said. It was King.

I don't know was worse, the first sound of shotgun having known what happened, or the noises of King eating, the hideous chewing, snapping bones, voracious swallowing. Bite by bite, with the slovenly sounds of a pig in a food trough, King was eating him. The woods echoed a sickening amount of sloppy jaw slapping and snorting, grunting, breathing, as he ate the dog from his neck down to his feet, bite by bite, mouthfuls of meat crushed and swallowed, some chewed, some taken down whole. I'd stopped yelling at this point, having instead fallen to my side in the fetal position, humming as loudly as I could to try to drown out the sounds of things I was never meant to hear. I, luckily, felt like my soul left my body for a while, a dull fog in my head that seemed intent on clouding my mind out from what was happening around me.

Eventually, the sound of eating would quiet, and be replaced with the sound of King moaning, miserably moaning, as I tried to roll over to face him. He was on his hands and knees, one hand clutching his stomach. It was grossly distended, hanging heavy, swollen outward instead of his usual somewhat concave shape, and his mouth was open, profusely salivating like he was about to regurgitate. He'd eaten an entire man, and I could tell it was hurting him severely to have his body bloated like that.

I tried to speak to him, barely getting out the first letter of his name before another "SHUT UP" barked from his frothy mouth as trembling limbs had him crawl like a dog a few feet forward before he fell onto his side. He laid there, labored in his breathing, for a few minutes before speaking again.

"Go to bed. We--we will both go to sleep, and we will wake in the morning and go home. Leave me to rest. Do not speak any more of this," he would insist. I agreed merely in my silence, unable to possibly process any sense of a response. I thought for sure, though, that I'd never sleep. I was so focused on King, laying out in the open, all the noises he was making as his distended belly ached with his hellish overindulgence, the dead stag next to him rotting in the indifference of the woods. I was sure I was going to be up all night thinking about it. I wasn't, though. The post-traumatic adrenaline wore off and I vomited, falling asleep on my side right next to my own refuse.

I didn't dream, which wasn't surprising, but what was surprising was where I awoke. My eyes opened to the ceiling of the cabin. I was in our bed, tucked in. The sun was shining through the open windows. King was nowhere to be found, but I felt rested. It must have truly been just a terrible dream. My throat didn't even feel raspy from the screaming I recalled. I felt a bit tired, but otherwise fine, relieved it had all just been a nightmare, perhaps poorly digested fish. There was a gnawing in my chest, though, about the deer's name. Croibhriste. I had to write it down.

I slipped out of bed, immediately going for my phone, powering it on for a moment to send myself a text of the deer's name. As complex of a name as it was, I strangely had an image of how it was spelled burned into my brain. I wrote it down, Croibhriste, and powered off the phone once more, then I stepped outside to stretch and breathe in the morning air, cool, crisp, refreshing. The yard looked as it usually did, strewn about with feral carcasses. I wondered where King was, if he was out hunting or foraging. I made my way down to the water to wash my face and relieve myself, but was distracted by something out of the ordinary in our messy yard. An old fire, still smouldering, down near the waterfront. It looked as if it had been hastily made, and as I approached it and kicked about some of the remains, I could see little pieces of plastic, the color of that hunter's tent. My chest felt suddenly very tight, and as I kicked about more I found more pieces of it. I looked around for King, suddenly calling out for him, with no response.

All I could do was wait for him, and I tried my best to do so, washing my face and going about my morning routine as normally as I could. Nothing about last night made any sense to me, how effortlessly it seemed to have faded into the past. I felt entirely too fine, physically, for it to have been real.

A few hours passed, my time largely spent resting in bed, reading over that tome, before I would hear King lumbering about in the yard. I peeked out the window and saw him tossing carcasses into the grass, half-eaten, dead.

"Hello," I'd call out from the window, and he'd look to me from out in the field before looking away, not returning the greeting.

"Good morning to you too..." I said, more than loud enough for him to have heard me, dogearing my page before closing the tome, tucking it away. I rose to join King in the yard, approaching him from behind as I asked him "are you feeling alright?"

He didn't answer, though we were only a mere foot or two away from eachother. I approached him and placed a hand on his back, asking "are you not talking to me today or something?"

"What you did last night was remarkably stupid, even for you," he finally said. My hand slid down his back, slumping off to my side near his tail as he stood, looking down at another mangled raccoon.

"I think I was sleepwalking for a lot of it. I felt like I was dreaming, for so long."

"Dreaming? Sleepwalking for almost an hour through the woods? You knew well what you were doing."

"No, I--"

"You were seeking to run away. I suspected this would happen if we visited town again. You even made a path toward your truck, but it was clear you got lost along the way."

"King, no, I didn't even bring my keys or phone or anything. I was following a deer."

"A deer?"

"Yeah," I began, his back turned to me, "in my dream, I saw a beautiful deer with glowing antlers. He beckoned me to the yard and I followed him, all the way to that man's camp. I think we would've kept going, but that guy shot him. Did..." I paused. "Did that really happen? Did you really..."

"Yes. Yes, it happened, and yes I did. It was a terrible night, I do not feel as though I got any rest, and my stomach has been hurting all day. I am very angry at you for putting yourself in such danger."

"I didn't mean to, it was so dark out, I was just following the deer, and--"

"Oh nonsense, Nico. There's nothing some forest spirit would have to tell you, you just went out wandering and don't want to admit to me that you got lost."

"He told me his name, and he was about to say more to me when that man shot him! He was the deer laying dead near you last night!" I insisted.

"There is no reason any other spirit would have to guide you around! That is my duty!" King insisted back, turning to face me now.

"Just because we're dating doesn't mean another spirit or creature or whatever can't talk to me!"

"Yes, it does." King had turned fully now, his elbows bent, hands raised in an assertive manner. I wanted so badly to stand my ground, but after what had almost happened to me the night before, and after what I'd seen him do, I backed down.

"You are my love. You've got no reason to be wandering alone in the woods with some strange talking creature, and none of them have any reasons to lure you into that, unless they are seeking to get you killed, which I am certain he intended to do."

"That's not true!" I suddenly shouted. "He was kind to me, and he didn't force me to follow him!"

"Kindness means NOTHING, Nico! Look at where he lead you, STRAIGHT into the mouth of danger! Had you not had me, what would have happened?!" King snapped at me, his hands suddenly grabbing mine and tugging them up into his grip, where he shook my forearms as he spoke.

"I..."

"What if that man had been outwardly destructive instead of inwardly? Then what? If this supposed deer is even real, he lead you DIRECTLY there. You do not trust creatures blindly like that! They will hurt you!"

I grew quiet, unable to really fight what he was saying. Croibhriste had indeed lead me directly from the yard to the hunter's camp. The things he said, too, implied he'd known something was going to happen. For all I knew, he could've not actually been dead. He was clearly some sort of mystical beast, after all. Maybe that deer wasn't even his only form. He probably left the vessel and returned to the Forest's Heart, or something of that nature. King, as much as he was intimidating me, had a good point.

"I'm sorry, King..." I admitted quietly. "I felt like it showed strength to go out without you."

"Because you are naive, you are simple. You think you can simply wander through life and weasel your way out of all your problems, but you cannot. You are not intelligent enough to live as carefree as you'd like, and you have nothing for which you need to be searching. We are settling down. I am preparing for us to marry, and you are out gallavanting with another spirit in the woods, nearly getting yourself ruined or killed," King said, all while holding my hands rather tightly in his, gripping every few words as if to accentuate the importance of what he was saying.

"I...I'm really sorry, King. You're right. If I want you to take this seriously, I need to be doing the same," I admitted. No wonder he never had anything nice to say about me.

"You've betrayed my trust, but I am going to have faith that it won't happen again. I have to go out for a while, and I need you to pull some of the fungus from my stomach. I have experimenting to do, and something else, which I cannot tell you about just yet."

I agreed to help, and we went through the motions of dredging up that strange fungus from the pit of his stomach. I felt particularly terrible doing so this time, knowing what had been in his stomach the night before. It was all gone, though, it felt. His stomach was hot and slimy as always, and he'd grown a bit more accustomed to having his insides probed by my hand. He'd learned to keep it held under his tongue, in between the muscle itself and the residual meat that held his skull connected to his neck.

After he left, I meandered around the yard for a bit, inspecting the carcasses he'd been leaving to rot. All of them were missing at least one limb, if not more. Some of them were hollowed out, on their backs, rib cages devoid of organs. Some of them were headless. He'd mangled them all in unique, terrible ways, a tragic irony in pursuit of a presumed gift of life. At this rate, all the animals in the woods would be dead before he'd figure out if that stupid fungus could bring any of them back to life. I could tell that was his goal, but at what cost?

Eventually, I headed inside, to work on deciphering that book as I usually did in my spare time. Flipping pages, looking for pictures, anything to act as the start to translating. Every time I wandered over that picture of King, fanning through the pages, I couldn't help but stop and stare at it. There was something so frustrating and so enticing about how I knew secrets were written about him, potential truths and explanations about who and what he was, but I had no way of understanding it. There could've been answers to his curiosities about his fungus, or about how to reverse his curse, anything of that nature. I only had to keep trying. He never wanted me to bother with it when he was home, though, he would get temperamental about it because he felt like it was pointless. I could tell it really bothered him that there was potential truth about him right in front of his eyes, and he just couldn't access it. What a nice surprise it would be if I could surprise him with translations.

Still, it made me wonder. Where had he gotten this book? Who was the man that left it behind? How had King gotten ahold of it? It made me wonder if King had anything else in his possession worth inspecting for clues. He'd never unbundled them. After we left his cave, he'd just left them tied up in a pelt. They say in the corner of our shelter before, and had continued to sit in the corner of our cabin now. Part of me felt like he'd be upset with me if I looked through them without him around, but the other part felt like I might not even see him until nightfall, if he even came home that day at all. I had hours to kill, so I decided to take the risk, thinking it better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

As I unbundled the pelt, trinkets and items would tumble out into a small pile in the floor. There were, as expected, pretty rocks, a few gemstones, jewelry, odds and ends you'd expect from a monster's hoard. I couldn't help but smile, looking at the surface of the pile, at how stereotypical it was that he collected shiny objects, like something you'd read about in a fantasy fiction book.

I picked through the pile, though, setting aside the large amounts of stones and jewelry. He had old clothes, presumably picked off the forest floor or from camp sites, some of them t-shirts and some of them fancier, like coats. Some of them looked very old. He had a few bones, some of them clearly anthro. I felt a bit strange that I wasn't more horrified, dealing with anthro remains, but he'd lived in the woods for over 100 years. I was sure he'd found plenty dead bodies, and it's not like he could call the cops about them. What else can a "lesidhe" (as he called himself) do but collect what he finds?

There was nothing immediately of interest, unfortunately, and as I began to pile up his belongings again, I realized that one of the old coats had something in it's pocket. Flipping up the flap, I pulled from it several pieces of paper, and a small book, a personal notebook of sort. As I flipped it open, the pages were lightly stuck together like they'd not been peeled apart in ages. Had King never noticed this in the coat pocket? I carefully opened it a bit wider, and more papers fell out of it, photos as well. I scrambled to collect them, inspecting each one of them meticulously. They all had that same runic symbolism on them, written as if it was note-taking of some sort, the backs of photos also covered in notes. Whoever this man was, he took a lot of notes, and not one of them was in English. There were several photos, almost all of them photos of trees, or interesting parts of the forest. There was a photo of mushrooms, a photo of flowers, a photo of the underside of a fallen tree, all black and white. One photo, though, stood out. It was a blurry photo of King, moving between trees. I could see his face clearly, the skull face on display, his neck and waistline covered by trees but his body otherwise visible. On the cover of the photo, though, was an English symbol, and part of another one. "M", followed by a forward slash symbol. "M/", written clearly on the upper left of the photo, the only photo that had writing directly on the picture itself, the back otherwise covered in notes in the usual runic symbolism.

I must've sat for well over an hour, flipping through that notebook, the photos, the loose papers, all written in rune. The "M/" was the only thing I could read, tragically, and I'd finally bundle up his belongings and tie them back up in the pelt. It was a conversation I didn't want to have until I had started translating, and I decided after putting away his belongings that I would go out for a walk and a bath in the creek. Winter was coming soon, and the creek was getting more difficult to bathe in, and I wondered if there was going to be a time, any day now, where we were going to have to gather water and warm it ourselves if we wanted to continue bathing. I was sure King wouldn't go for it, and he'd probably just tell me to wait until spring before washing again.

King would arrive home that night, after sunset, dragging the body of a deer by her legs as he called out for me. I had, admittedly, fallen asleep, and I wandered drowsily to the yard to greet him as he threw the deer carcass toward me, announcing "I have made a discovery. Come, see this."

The deer was certainly dead, rigor mortis set in, and it's torso was gored wide open, organs still intact. As I approached it, I could see that the heart had been cut open, a clean incision in the middle of it. King would approach the carcass, sticking his fingers in his mouth and pulling out some of the fungus mash from under his tongue, his finger swiping through the open wound in the heart. It began, moments later, to beat. The organs would shift slightly, and within a minute, the rigor mortis would soften, the deer's limbs going limp as I saw it's lungs began to hyperventilate, breathing frantically. The body did not move, but King would say "she is looking at me" as the body remained animated. I could only watch in horror, though sedated by fatigue and post-traumatic dissociation. No reaction surfaced in my body but terror in my eyes, bewildered terror, my mind detached and yet apparently written all over my face. I could not imagine what thoughts were going through the poor girl's head, if any. She'd been dead for a while, I was certain there had been loss of brain cells. She may have had no sense of awarenes at all, her body alive purely as a machine and not as a sentient creature. There was no way of knowing. She made no struggle, and she died once more about three minutes later.

"You saw that?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"I can bring things back to life," he was looking at me with his mouth open, his most visual sign of excitement.

"The body was alive, yea, but the brain, King..."

"Nevermind the brain! We can discover more about the brain later! This is tremendous! All this time, the power to practically be a god was growing inside me!"

He had indeed discovered something amazing, but I couldn't feel any sort of excitement over it if all it was going  to do was reanimate a body and force it into some sort of frantic half-life half-death state for a few minutes. It just felt like torture, like the old Soviet experiments of reanimated severed dog's heads. What purpose did it serve, and how could we even discern even how aware they were? Were we pulling their very souls out of paradise? Were we damning them to some sort of purgatory state in those moments? I couldn't imagine what forces King could be reckoning with, or what hellish authority had even gifted him the ability to do so.

"King, it's amazing, but...I think you should focus more on healing what's already alive. This seems a bit...inhumane..." I could barely stomach saying it, knowing he was going to go into a defensive frenzy, which he unsurprisingly did. I was told I didn't understand, I didn't appreciate how incredible it all was, how intelligent he was for discovering it and how ignorant I was for not wanting to help partake in helping solidify it's potential.

"I have your ring, but I wonder if it's even worth giving it to you now," he said.

"Why's that?" I asked, taking a seat on the porch steps to look at the carcass of the deer, to witness it's stillness once again. Over time, I'd grown to only meet his tantrums with the fatigue of any other emotionally battered partner, a quiet buoy that could only rise and fall with the waves that crashed against it.

"I have found my calling, I have found purpose in my life after my curse, and you cannot be excited for it. You're so full of civilized morals and nonsense, that spoiled aversion to death. How can I marry you if you cannot join me in this?"

"It's not that I won't join you, or help you, King, it's just that I'm--"

"Scared. You're scared. I know that's what you're going to say. You're always scared!"

"Well, yeah! It's a pretty scary thing seeing you suddenly goring animals and tossing their bodies all over the yard, and NOW you're bringing them back to life too! Am I not allowed to be scared?"

"Yes, you're allowed to be afraid, but your apprehension shows a lack of commitment."

"How about you give me a little bit to adjust? It takes time to come around to this shit," I threw my hands up. We squabbled about it like we were arguing over who should clean up dinner, not whether or not I should be comfortable with my lover slaughtering and reanimating animals. It had just become mundane at that point. What would've sickened my to my core a year before was just a fact of life now, something I'd had to normalize for the relationship.

"How long do you need?" he asked, like I could put a timestamp on it.

"I don't know, King. Give me a few days. It's a tough thing to witness."

"Fine," he began, "I had not yet decided when to give you your ring, but this will work well. You will tell me when you are ready to commit to this endeavor, and then we will have our marriage. It will be a beautiful wedding, and we will have a thrilling honeymoon, and soon after we will make a child. I am sure of it. I am sure, somewhere in this discovery, that there will be a way for us to procreate even through this degeneracy."

I sat there for a minute, staring at the carcass, trying not to feel ill thinking about what I'd seen, the way it's body had breathed. I knew I need to, somehow, further normalize it, not only what King was doing but our relationship in it's entirety. It had fallen horribly off kilter again, and I needed some stability. I needed something like the photos we'd taken, like the sex we sometimes had, to make this feel normal, to not feel crazy.

"King," I began as he ascended the stairs, turning back to look at me.

"Yes?" he'd ask.

"Could you indulge me a bit, tonight, before bed? Some comfort and intimacy would help a lot in adjusting to all this."

King stood there at the stairwell, looking down at me, while I remained looking at the open carcass of the deer, cold, thankfully stiff.

"Yes," he said, "yes, come inside with me, and we will have some fun."
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