There is a darkness in the woods that everyone knows. It lingers over the town like fog  until sunrise burns it away. Children are warned to stay away from the trees when the sun isn’t  shining, and those who don’t heed their parents’ words quickly learn there is truth to the danger.  

It always starts small. Grasping branches and scratching thorns, roots that trip up the feet  and brambles that tear holes in clothes. A fall in the stream, scraped palms and bloody knees. But  it always gets worse. Voices on the wind that carry outside the body of trees, shadows in broad  daylight that hide just out of sight. Lost homework, surprise downpours. Falls down the  bleachers, rotten ceilings caving in, nightmares that paralyze. The darkness carries, clings, the  longer someone is within the forest’s hold, like a child with a new favorite toy. It drags whatever  it can down into its belly, holds it there as tragedy consumes—spits out the ragged remains. 

*** 

Asa is a child of nature. He belongs outside. His mother has often joked about the river  and the plain and the forest being his true father. Rowdy and energetic, he shines brightest when  the skies open up, when the sun pours down, when the moon lights the land like a midnight sun.  He is the most he can be of himself when he is outdoors.  

Some silly story about the forest doesn’t scare him. He’s been outdoors all his life. The  forest can’t do anything to him.  

It starts small. He falls out of a tree for the first time in years and sprains his wrist. He  pouts the entire way to the hospital and ends up with a brace on his wrist. He spends half an hour 

glaring at it before his parents sit him down and tell him to stay out of the forest. They’re scared  of the stories that they’d overheard in the waiting room. The stories about missing children—missing people, because teens go missing too, 20-somethings and elderly folk—and the way they’re  different if they ever return. Aged as if not a day has gone by, as if their eyes are a window to a  soul too old for their body. Quieter, solemn and melancholy in a way they never had been before,  darkness lingering about them like a mantle of shadows. There are worse stories, always, about  car crashes, animal attacks, and untimely deaths. But it’s the hollow gaze of the returned that sticks. 

Asa promises to stay out of the forest, though he’s crossing his fingers with his hand hidden between his leg  and the arm of the couch. He just needs to work on his balance and grip. He won’t be falling out  of any more trees. 

A couple of weeks later, the brace is off and he’s running free just like he’s used to. He  waits until his parents aren’t looking so closely at him, distracted by his cousins splashing around  in the pool, and runs off towards the forest. There’s a certain sort of delight that flutters between  his ribs as he delves into the depths of that mysterious forest. The trees look to be ancient, so tall  he can’t see their crowns as they stretch towards the sky, so thick even his dad and three uncles  wouldn’t be able to encircle their trunks in a hug. Their bark is gnarled, broken up into sharp spines that would surely shred his skin if he were to fall down the hill. He takes it as a challenge,  navigating between the trees and working through the brambles on an endless slope. He wants to  know what’s at the bottom of this valley he’s found. 

The farther he goes, the less the sun peers down at him. What little light shines through is  like a tear in the canopy, a splinter in the darkness. He shies away from the light, keeping to the shadows. It’s moreso a subconscious impulse than it is a decision—a pull starting in 

his sternum and yanking on his ribcage until he staggers away from the stray beams. The tugging leads Asa to a cliff face with water pouring over the edge high above him, collecting in a wide  pool. The valley has led him here, though it isn’t until he spots the gaping maw of a cave that the  realization dawns on him; he’s meant to go inside.

He’s quick in his scramble to do so, excited by the prospect of a cave adventure like he’s seen on the TV, and his surroundings are plunged into darkness. Looking back, he smiles at the sickly light filtering in through the mouth of the cave. His hand touches the wall of rock to his right, rough and wet under his fingers, careful to keep it within reach as he delves further in. The cave smells faintly of petrichor, just mud and clay and the crispness of mineral water. There is  no noise beyond the dripping of water, the heat of his own breath, the thud of his own heart. Asa feels the walls closing in on him, stone brushing against his shoulders, knocking into his knees. It grows colder and he shivers, ill-dressed for such an outing. There’s a moment he considers turning back, unable to remember why he was here in the first place. But before reason returns, the walls pull away, the floor falls out from beneath his feet, and down Asa goes tumbling on a long, rocky slope.  

Asa is still when he reaches the bottom, his chest heaving, body throbbing as he checks himself over for injuries with unsteady hands. His shirt is torn and heavy with clay, skin wet, though it could just as easily be mud or water as blood. There’s a faint stinging,  however, along his arms and his shins that makes him think he’s been cut by stones. Satisfied  that nothing seems to be broken, at least, Asa starts to push himself up onto his hands and  knees. 

His muscles lock up as a low growl jumps through the shadows at him, like gravel being pushed along by the river, or nails being dragged across the sheet metal of his house, a rip of thunder that follows a particularly close lightning strike. He hardly dares to move, but that same impulse pulls his face up and to the side.  

It feels wrong that he can see the flash of amber eyes in such complete darkness. 

Asa closes his eyes and tries to distance himself from his place in this cave, thinking of the way back home, wondering if he can climb out before what he believes to be a wolf sinks its teeth into  him. It seems to work; he hardly feels the teeth that clamp down around his side and jerk him back and forth. It’s not him screaming, he thinks, but some other foolish boy who thought himself grander than the forest.  

Light fills his eyes, and the wolf is gone, whining into the darkness with its tail tucked  between its legs. Then there are gentle hands lifting him off the ground where he has fallen. He  dreams of sad eyes and a soft face, a long-haired boy who can’t be much older than Asa is. A pair of wide antlers grows from the boy’s head as he leads his junior through an endless, shadowy wood. By the time they reach the place where the plains meet the trees, the boy has grown into a  pure white hart. There is an ancient despondency in his eyes that reminds Asa of his great grandmother.  

He wakes in a hospital bed with nothing in his memory but that dream of the boy. A name sits on the tip of the tongue, but he keeps it to himself. The hart’s name is not for anyone  else, he thinks—and knows this wholly.  

“What happened?” Asa whispers, his voice the croaking of a toad. Tears slip down his father’s cheek as he recounts his son’s disappearance—gone for days, until he suddenly showed up  in the backyard covered in dried mud and blood. They’d taken him straight to the hospital, but  there hadn’t been any wounds when he was washed clean; but kept him regardless, worried 

by the way he slept so heavily. The amnesia was expected, they said, but his parents couldn’t resist asking how he’d gotten back to the house. 

Sache saved me, Asa thinks. I met the white hart.  

“I dunno,” he says instead.  

*** 

The night Sache saved Asa, he told him what was out in the forest. Real magic, Sache  had said, and a deadly curse. He’d pressed his palm over the boy’s heart, sadness in his eyes as he told him “The moon would tear his soul free of his skin.” 

Asa had been confused at the time, but he understands now. 

There is fire dancing beneath his skin, the heat of it cracking his bones, threatening to turn him inside out. He flings his window open and hauls himself outside, biting his lip against the pain that flares up until he tastes metal against his tongue. He darts towards the forest, desperate to find refuge in the cool shade, certain that it will quench the flames. 

A wolf’s spirit, his mother had always said, that’s what he had. Too wild for his own  good.  

Sache finds him panting in the undergrowth, drool trailing from his mouth as he struggles to keep it shut. Everything feels strange, like he’s put his pants on backwards and worn his shoes on the wrong feet. Sache runs a firm hand up Asa’s maw and backs away, melting back into the hart. When he starts running, something kickstarts in Asa’s mind and he lunges to his feet, chasing Sache through the forest. The hunt continues for hours, with Sache ducking underneath 

branches, winding between massively thick trunks despite the breadth of his branching antlers,  and the wolf leaping streams and darting around trees to cut the hart off.  

The chase ends as the sky begins to lighten again. They collapse into the wildflower sea  beyond Asa’s house, once more human and panting heavily. Sache is a solid, grounding weight  atop him that anchors his soul to his bones. 

“This will be your life, now,” Sache says quietly. Asa looks at him and finds him still as  child-like as ever. His cheeks are soft with baby fat, hair falling into his eyes in a way that would warrant Asa a haircut from his mother. His eyes, though. That depth is still there, and he feels  certain that Sache is far, far older than his own great-grandmother. Maybe as old as the forest.  Maybe as old as the world. “I am sorry I could not save you before the darkness could cling. But  I will help you. It is my duty.” 

Sache urges his creation back into his house, even helps him back through his window. Asa wakes to the blaring of his alarm completely clean. The tacky feeling of sweat on his skin is unexpectedly absent. When he looks to his window, he finds it closed and locked. It’s as if nothing happened at all last night. 

There’s a quiet thrum beneath his skin that tells him otherwise.