Viktor woke slowly the next morning, the exertions of the previous night's hunt making his movements heavy and sore. His eyes fluttered open, long silver lashes touching his cheek once, twice, before he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and regained consciousness fully. Sitting up, several furs fell off his naked form on to the hard wooden floor, slithering across the ground as though still alive.
These first few moments of waking were always when Viktor felt his isolation the most. Every day he awoke alone, before mending his weapons, washing his clothes, and planning the next night's hunt. And every day he had to endure the wary eyes of the villagers, which sometimes flared into open malice.
Viktor's thick, soft silver hair curled around his sleep-warmed limbs, and he stared at the sleek coils with dislike. Every other person in the village, and every person that the people in the village could remember back to their farthest ancestors, had had dark hair and dark eyes. It was one of the few common features in a village in which skin colour ranged from palest white to deepest brown, the one constant that identified them as a member of the tribe. When Viktor had been born, twenty five years ago, with his silver hair and his icy blue eyes, the townspeople had called him the spawn of a demon, and had accused his mother of witchcraft, and of lying with the devil.
His father had left, unable to bear the shame, disappearing over the horizon without a backward glance. His mother had lived, and had loved him with her whole being until he was fifteen years old. Then she had died of a wasting sickness, being drawn away from life slowly until she was gone, and Viktor was alone.
He had taught himself to hunt from an early age, as his mother relied on him for food, and had proved extremely gifted. When the other hunters came back with a lone rabbit, Viktor always returned with a deer, or a brace of fat, slow witted pheasants decked out in bright feathers. The other hunters, jealous of his prowess, had taken this as further evidence of his unnatural providence, and had shunned him more virulently, even though what Viktor and his mother didn't eat was always given to the town store.
Viktor had never stopped trying to be accepted, never stopped feeling the ache of rejection whenever the villagers spat at him in the street, or warded off the evil eye in his presence. His mother's presence had been a balm to his young soul, before he was old enough to understand why he was not the same as the other children.
"You're special, Vitya," his mother would hum as she brushed his long hair every night, "You are destined for great things. One day, your destiny will find you."
He had smiled, because he wanted it to be true, and he had cried, because he knew that it wasn't. And then she was gone, and there were no more comforting words, no one to hold him as he cried, no one to wipe the blood from his face after he was beaten (yet again) by the other boys.
The day his mother died, Viktor had sheathed his heart in ice. As time went by, he grew strong, taller than anyone else, and learned to revel in his aloneness, and to utilise the villager's fear of him.
One day, one of the worst offenders, a man named Olik, spat in Viktor's face as he walked past him, jeering "Now your slut of a mother is gone, no one will defend you eh? Devil's-spawn!"
Viktor had glared at the man, wiping the saliva off his cheek, and had hissed some indistinct and vitriolic words under his breath without breaking eye contact. Olik, fearing what the witch-child might do to him, had fled.
For the next week, Viktor had followed Olik whenever he went to The Forest to hunt. Silently Viktor crept through the perpetual shadows, scaring away rabbits and deer before Olik could approach them; every day, he would return empty handed and fearful, wondering whether this was as a result of his mocking of the witch-child, and whether he would ever hunt again.
At the end of a week, Viktor desisted, allowing the man to hunt undisturbed. Olik had told the other villagers of the 'curse', and, fearful for their families, they had mutually agreed that it was safest to leave Viktor alone from that point onwards.
So the beatings had stopped, and Viktor had been left utterly, completely alone. In many ways it was an improvement, but as time wore on, he began to feel his isolation as a corrosive hole in his heart, growing more virulent with time. He even considered leaving the village to their fate, and looking beyond the horizon for a new home as his father had; but the only memories of his mother resided here, in his small house, and without his skill with a bow the villagers would probably starve come the winter. Viktor couldn't find it in his heart to wish that on them (however much they might deserve it, he thought).
Viktor stood, stretched, and threw on some of his few garments, moss green leggings and a dark blue tunic, before braiding his hair and draping a thick fur about his shoulders. Looking around the room, his eyes taking in the spartan furnishings, Viktor caught sight of the hunting clothes he had discarded the night before, stiff with blood and grime. He carried them out to the back of the house, and began to methodically scrape the worst of the dirt off them, rinsing them in the clear pool every few minutes.
When he finished, Viktor hung them over the fire that burned in one corner of the room to dry, and sat down at the small table to plan his next expedition.
It was coming up to the coldest part of the year, what the villagers called the Dead Moon. For one month every winter, the cold descended like a hammer blow; no animal seemed to venture anywhere near the village, trees froze solid, their sap expanding to split them in two as though struck by an axe, and if it weren't for Viktor the village might have starved.
Viktor planned to spend the next week hunting nightly, stocking the village with as much meat as he could catch, in order to stave off the hunger that the Dead Moon brought with it. Last night had been incredibly lucky, he knew; he had expected to find a few rabbits at most, and instead had found a huge stag practically waiting for him, which would provide for a large family for a week.
Now that the Dead Moon was drawing closer, Viktor had decided to put into action the plan that he had been pondering for some months, never sure whether the risk was equal to the reward. The villagers never ventured deep into The Forest, which seemed hostile to them, and Viktor was the only one to make it to the Cut and back unscathed, seemingly always in the right place at the right time. Tonight, however, Viktor was planning to venture deeper into the heart of The Forest than he ever had before, past the Cut and into the deep woods beyond. He had been watching the deer herds tracks for some time, and he had noticed that any time the deer fled from an inept hunter, or occasionally from Viktor himself, they always headed in one direction; north, towards where the woods grew thick and the ground grew treacherous for humans.
Tonight, Viktor had decided to follow them. If he could find where the deer slept, he could return each night, and by the time the cold arrived in force he would have stored enough to keep the entire village full for the entire duration of the Dead Moon. He reached for some rough paper he had pressed himself out of willow tree pulp, and for a slender stick that had only partially burned in the fire.
Viktor began to sketch, drawing from the infallible map in his head the direction he would take that evening, marking reference points and paths, in order to guide him if he should get lost in the dark woods.
When he had finished, Viktor rolled up the map and stored it in his hunting belt. Then he cleaned his knives and bow twice, oiled a new bow string, and sat down to fletch some more arrows just in case. The mindless and familiar activities calmed the sense of unease that lay like a thick fog in the back of Viktor's mind (there must be a reason no human has ever survived the deep woods, his unconscious thoughts murmured).
Finished with all his preparations, Viktor ate bread and cold meat, drank from the mountain stream, and lay back down to sleep until dusk, his mind still humming with tension like a taut bow string. Eventually, the exhaustion he still felt from the previous night's activities settled heavily into his bones, and he slept.
oooooooooooo
When Viktor emerged from his house at dusk, he was again dressed in the plaited leather hunting clothes, his bow slung across his back and his braided hair swinging hypnotically, like a pendulum, in the frigid breeze. He made his way to the edge of The Forest, and taking a deep breath, plunged into the shadow of the trees, where his retreating form was quickly lost from sight.
After an hour of silent stalking through the steadily darkening forest, Viktor came to the Cut. This was where, he knew, he would have to decide whether to press on with his plan, or to give up and try and find something nearer the edge of The Forest, and safety.
Lifting his chin defiantly, Viktor thought of the children who had not yet learned to fear him from their parents, and their pinched faces when the Dead Moon hit and they didn't have enough food stored.
With this image swimming before him in the darkness, Viktor paced back a few feet, and then ran forwards, his lithe muscles bunching beneath him as he leapt across the narrow gorge (trying very hard not to look at the ground that yawned in a chasm beneath him). His flight lasted a few seconds, and then was over, as he hit the ground on the other side and rolled, his finely oiled bow collecting a coating of dust.
As Viktor stood, warily glancing about him in the unfamiliar territory, it seemed to him that the air on this side of the Cut was richer, deeper, more complete in its darkness. He felt horribly out of place, an invader into a land which was not his, and which could expel him with brief and violent finality in an instant. There was very little noise, the darkness seeming like a vacuum which swallowed sound before it could go more than a few feet.
Viktor looked around him, orienting himself by his internal compass. As he looked at the dark earth covered with the detritus of trees, he saw what he had been hoping for. Hoof-prints! he thought excitedly, pacing forward and tracing them with his experienced hands. He though that the prints could be no more than an hour old, and judging by the way the ground was churned and distorted, a whole herd of deer had passed this way.
Excitement thudding in his veins, Viktor felt the last of his unreasoning fear leave him, and he began to follow the prints deeper into The Forest.
Behind him, and unheard, there followed the soft tread of broad, padded feet, and quiet, panting breaths.
After another three hours of flitting silently from tree to tree, Viktor came to the edge of a small clearing, and saw at once that this was what he had been searching for. About twenty six deer stood or lay in the clearing, and from where he stood hidden behind a tree, Viktor could see one particularly impressive young stag that lay twenty feet from him, with its eyes closed.
Silently, Viktor drew an arrow from the quiver on his back, and silently he fitted it to the string. Breathing in slowly through his nose, his lifted the arrow, and sighted along his outstretched arm. It would be an easy shot, and the stag would die painlessly, sleeping as it was.
Before Viktor could loose the arrow, the quiet darkness behind him was rent by a violent snarl. The deer woke up instantly, and were gone in a moment, with only the sound of their thundering hooves remaining, before it too disappeared into the underbrush.
Viktor spun on the ball of his foot, and came face to face with an image which haunted the nightmares of every hunter in The Forest.
Before him, emerging from between two of the darkened trees, paced an old, grizzled grey wolf, teeth bared in a vicious and now silent snarl. One of its eyes was missing, a mass of scar tissue filling the empty socket, and saliva hung in ropes from its teeth; it was lean, and obviously starving. And here I am, thought Viktor, his heart sinking, prey that walked right into its territory.His pulse thundered in his ears, fear pooling like acid in his stomach, the realisation that this might be his last hunt sinking slowly into his bones. The wolf looked half mad with hunger, and Viktor knew that this would be a fight to the death, for both of them.
Viktor still held his bow, the arrow nocked and ready. He lifted the bow, sighted along his arm, and loosed; but at the exact moment he let go, the wolf let forth an ear splitting howl, the wood around Viktor reverberating with the force of it. The arrow flew off course, and before Viktor had had time to do more than incoherently shout in terror, the wolf had cleared the space between them with one bound.
Viktor felt the white hot pain of teeth at his neck, and then his head struck the iron hard bole of an ancient tree, and he knew no more.
ooooooooooooo
Yuuri was lying on the topmost branch of the First Tree, his back balanced against the lichen covered trunk, and his legs stretched out along the branch itself. He was thinking.
It had been a long time since Yuuri had had to think of much more than the rhythms of the forest, or the celestial dance of the heavens above him as the stars and planets whirled their way through the night sky. He did not often find something puzzling; as he had sprung from the heart of the forest, the forest itself held no secrets from him. The last time he could remember that he had felt such a dizzying array of emotions was the time he had seen the ancient hunters breaking and burning, slashing their way through the wood in search of ever more food.
Yuuri closed his eyes against the sight of the rose pink sky and sighed, the sound lost in the still air high above the forest canopy. Humans, he thought, are more trouble than they ought to be, given that they live for no more than a few breaths.
In the distance, Yuuri heard a wolf howling, singing of its loneliness and terror and hunger. He frowned; though he did not, as a rule, interfere in the patterns of life and death, predator and prey in his forest, this animal sounded half-mad with pain and hunger.
Resolving to go and look for it when it got dark, and help it if it could be helped, Yuuri opened his eyes again, and stared up at the endless expanse of the sky above him. The stars, more numerous than he could ever count, were spread out across the heavens like a careless scattering of sand, each of the millions of pinpricks of light seeming to Yuuri like an old friend. It was a cloudless night, a full moon; Yuuri could feel the cold, the real cold, approaching through the darkening air. It would be another half moon, he thought, before it arrived, and then even the humans wouldn't venture abroad in the forest, their fragile bodies too vulnerable to the freezing air.
And with this thought, Yuuri's thoughts resumed the well-worn track they had run on since he had left the edge of the forest that morning, when the hunter with the silver hair had shut his door against the dawn. Who was he? Why is he so different from other humans, who come and go like leaves on a tree?
Yuuri pictured the man's naked body as he had seen it last night, cold and beautiful under the dark sky, reflecting the faint starlight and intensifying it in his glowing skin. He remembered the heavy fall of his hair, sticking to the muscles in his back, and something in his stomach heated at the thought, a flash fire briefly burning across his skin.
He remembered the pearlescent moonglow of the hunter's spirit, spread throughout his body so gently, so unlike the harshly burning spirits of the other humans, and that was the most puzzling thing of all.
Yuuri had thought of nothing else since he had seen him, seeing only the white shape of his body behind his closed lids when he tried to rest, hearing only the soft sighing of his footsteps as he tried to listen to the usual sounds of the forest at dusk. It had been so long since anything new had happened, so long since anything had really changed in the ancient forest, that Yuuri couldn't tear his mind away from this new mystery.
The desperate howl of the wolf split the air again, and, sighing, Yuuri stood up lithely, balancing on the branch as easily as though he stood on solid ground.
He leapt down, from branch to branch, sometimes falling twenty feet before landing lightly on his feet on the next wide bough, until he reached the deep tangled carpet of roots at the base of the clearing.
Pausing only to inspect how the family of foxes that lived directly underneath the tree were faring (very well, they said, considering the Big Cold was on its way), Yuuri set out to find the lonely wolf. He leapt from tree trunk to tree trunk, coming down to the forest floor only occasionally to inspect a print or sniff the air. The wolf had been silent for two hours or so before Yuuri caught its scent, near the Cut. When he finally found it, he froze, his limbs locking into place in shock, assessing the scent tapestry that appeared to his mind as broad swathes of colour in the dark night air.
Across the Cut, where no human had ever trodden, there stood the scent of the hunter from last night, as clearly as though he had been standing there moments before. His scent was bright, excited, light blue, and tinged with a small amount of electric yellow fear (no doubt due to the fact he was in unfamiliar territory, thought Yuuri). Painted across his scent, coloured a diseased green with madness and hunger, ran the wolf's scent, crossing the hunter's at the point he had landed. And then, as the hunter's scent disappeared in a broad blue stripe between the trees, the wolf's scent changed, dripping with the dark, burnt blood-red of bloodlust, and began to mingle with the hunter's as it followed him.
Yuuri's heart began to race, and he didn't know why. He had never even spoken to this hunter, but there was fear pooling in his heart and electrifying his pulse. The single thought that beat in his brain as his feet began to move, leaping up into the treetops and hurling his body as fast as he could through the dark forest parallel to the scent trail, was not him. Not him. Please, not him.
As Yuuri followed the trail, the wolf's scent never leaving the tracks of the hunter for more than a few feet, he saw the scent getting brighter, stronger, and knew that he was close. When he saw the spots of drool drying on the ground over the wolf's bloody trail, he knew that he was minutes, if not seconds away now.
But before he could break the cover of the trees, (near the clearing that some of the deer slept in, he remembered) he heard a guttural snarl, a few seconds of silence, then the twang of a bowstring heralded a vicious, maddeningly loud howl.
As Yuuri broke through the trees, he was in time to see the wolf leap at the hunter, its teeth bared, and sink them into his should and neck.
Yuuri did not hesitate. Focussing on the flickering light that he saw in the wolf's starved body, he inhaled, and then blew hard, with his body as well as his mind, dissipating the light of the wolf's spirit onto the night air, where it quickly faded away.
Yuuri leapt forwards, landing lightly next to the hunter, and pulled the now dead wolf away from him. He lowered the hunter to the floor, cradling him gently in his arms, and pulled the edge of the leather tunic away from the wound.
Yuuri breathed in sharply when he saw the damage. There was a lot of blood, the wolf's teeth having torn the large muscles in the hunter's shoulder, but miraculously none of the arteries in his neck had been severed. The hunter's silver hair was stained bright red, sticking in the wood, and Yuuri pulled it back to bare the ruined flesh. The soft glow of the hunter's spirit was still present, still whole, though it had begun to flicker slightly, as though in a slight breeze.
Yuuri had done this before, when animals had been injured and he had wanted to save them. However, he had never tried it with a human.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the forest, and allowed his mind to see only the light of each life as it appeared around him. He saw his own intensely blazing pale green spirit, filling his skin like a caged sun. He saw the now rapidly-flickering spirit of the hunter, as it flowed with the blood pooling underneath his body. He breathed in slowly through his nose, and when he exhaled, Yuuri pushed an infinitesimally small fraction of the light from his hand into the hunter, watching as the pale green assimilated and became the same opalescent shade as the hunter's. The flickering slowed drastically, and Yuuri opened his eyes, knowing that the hunter would now survive at least a few more hours.
He pulled the man on to his shoulders, taking care to keep his wound untouched, and began to run swiftly through the forest, the weight meaning no more to him than a bird on the branch of a tree.
As he ran, he thought. Yuuri had never been able to tell what the strange things he could do with the light of life (which every creature, not matter how tiny, had within it) were. He had always been able to save those animals which needed saving (such as the mother bear with two new cubs, which had been caught in a cruel spiked iron trap near the edge of the forest; Yuuri had healed her, and now her descendants lived on near the mountains), but he had never used the power to kill before. He was not disgusted at what he had done; the wolf had been very old and in pain, but more importantly, he had clearly been rejected from his pack, which to a wolf meant madness and death.
He had never used this power on a human before. He thought it didn't work as well as it ought to have done; maybe it was because the humans were not part of the forest, and therefore were not part of him.
Within an hour, Yuuri had reached the clearing and the First Tree. He clambered swiftly and deftly over the branches, finally reaching his destination; the wide, open circular space from which he himself had sprung so many years ago, still open and pale, the heartwood of the tree.
Yuuri place the hunter down on the soft bed of moss that grew across the floor of the heartwood, and efficiently removed the shredded leather from his damaged torso. As he did so, in a distant part of his brain, Yuuri wondered what on earth he was doing; this was a human, one of the creatures that broke and tore the forest and Yuuri surely ought to let him die. But even as he thought this, he continued working over the wound, cleaning it with herbs that he drew from the pockets in his silver furs, and occasionally jumping down to the roots of the tree to pick a few leaves from the plants there.
Having done all he could for the moment, Yuuri covered the hunter in a soft pelt, leaving only his face exposed. He stepped away, his hands covered in blood and his mind racing.
What was he going to do now? The hunter would probably survive; his ministrations had seen to that. His spirit no longer flickered, having returned to the steady all pervasive glow it had been the night before, if a little weaker. But Yuuri couldn't find it in himself to carry the man to the edge of the wood and leave him there to be found; if the man didn't freeze to death, he might be attacked again, the wolves seeing him as an easy target.
Yuuri studied the unconscious man's face. His eyes, now that they were shut, showed pale eyelids patterned with fine blue veins. His forehead was wide and pale, unmarked; his lips were slightly open as he breathed slowly though his mouth, the sound a soft, regular rhythm in counterpoint to Yuuri's own racing heartbeat. The corners of his eyes were prematurely lined, their deeply carved edges seeming to speak of tragedy and loss; his chin, slightly pointed, jutted out at an angle which showed that this tragedy had not defeated him.
Yuuri thought that the hunter may be the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. He sat down next to the man as he slept, and took the long braid of hair between his fingers, removing the tie and deftly unbraiding it, feeling the soft coils fall through his fingers, matted here and there by blood.
Yuuri felt something in his heart clench at the sight of the silver overlaid with scarlet, this tangible evidence of how close the man had come to an agonising death. He spread the man's hair over the pillow of moss that he lay on, the silver against the deep living green, and moved across to the other side of the room, sitting cross legged and leaning against the wall.
Yuuri took one last look at the man's sleeping face, and heard his regular heartbeat echoing around the small wooden chamber, a reassuring evidence of life.
Closing his eyes, Yuuri drifted into his thoughts; he had never been able to sleep, but this lucid wandering through his memories was as close as he could come to it.
The man's heartbeat sounded in his ears as he dreamed.