Jack tore through the woods at a pace he'd never before known he could run. His head was pounding, his mouth was open in wheezing gasp, his heart hurt more than he had ever imagined possible. The image itself was ingrained, scorched into his eyes: the sight of Lily in the arms of another man. Not only in the arms of another man, no, but kissing him wholeheartedly, with a passion she had never shown to Jack.
Suddenly, he could run no further. With a cry, he fell to his knees, bowed his head, and dug his fingers into the dirt beneath him as deep as they would go. How could she? How could she? After what I—after everything... Slowly, his head fell forward until it rested on the cool earth. I don't want to live. Not in this world. Not where my Lily... Great, howling, wracking sobs suddenly tore through him. She was all I ever wanted. Ever since the first time I saw her, she was all I wanted...
He hid behind a tree, knowing that letting these strange people passing by see him would be a bad idea. It was something that Mother Fox had told him: "My strange little son," she'd said, "If you see others who look like you, hide. They'll want to take you away from here to be one of them."
"But I don't want to!" he protested. "I don't want them to take me away! The forest is my home."
Mother Fox licked his forehead. "Then, my boy, hide if you see them. I will always be here for you."
So he hid, even though the sound of their language fascinated him, as did the bright colors they wore. The people traipsing through the forest today were especially prettily attired. It didn't matter, though, he reminded himself sternly. The forest was his home, Mother Fox was his mother, and all the creatures of the woods were his brothers and sisters. These people, even if they looked like him, were nothing to him.
With that in mind, he was content to hide in the shadow of the gnarled tree, crouched in stillness to avoid notice.
The strangers were almost past him and he was about to race off home and tell Mother Fox what he had seen, but then he heard the strangest sound. A silvery, joyful noise, it echoed in the air around him and effectively froze him in place with wonder. The noise faded all too fast, but now determined to find out what had caused it and to hear it again, he brushed his hair out of his eyes and followed the happy people, always keeping just out of sight.
Finally, the group halted in a clearing and spread out blankets to sit on. Morsels that made his small stomach grumble were removed from pretty cases and set upon the blankets. As he mentally ordered his stomach to be quiet, it growled again, to his embarrassment.
He sat down facing away from the merry group, hoping that his stomach would get the point and be quiet before he was found out. After a few minutes, it seemed to subside, and he cautiously turned around again...
...only to find himself staring into a pair of big brown eyes, the likes of which he'd never seen before. Instinctively, he knew that this creature was the source of the joyous sound he'd heard before. Her hair was the same shade as his, but, as he noticed when he dazedly reached out to touch it and she shied away, hers was shiny and clean. His mouth fell open at the sheer beauty of her.
She smiled and spoke, but he didn't understand the words; he didn't care about the words. Hearing her voice was enough. When she noticed how he was staring at her uncomprehendingly, she paused for a moment and bit her lip.
Finally, with pantomime, she got the message across that she wouldn't alert the others to his presence. He clutched her dainty hand between his rough ones gratefully, barely noticing how she gently withdrew her hand with a slight grimace of pain.
He would have been happy to sit
there with her, behind the fluttering leaves, until his hair fell out, but a
member of her group, an older male, called out loudly, and her head swung
around and she answered. Figuring that
the strange syllables he'd just heard from the man's mouth were her name, since
they'd gotten her attention, he decided to try and say it himself.
"Li...lee?" he said awkwardly through a mouth that
felt as though it were lined in cotton.
She beamed at him and bobbed her head up and down. "Lily," she repeated, pointing at herself. Then she pointed at him and raised her eyebrows questioningly.
"Lily," he said happily.
She laughed and shook her head. "Lily," she said again, patting her chest. Then, with only the slightest hesitation, she reached out and touched his chest and looked at him.
He shrugged.
Lily's lips pursed in a pout and she spoke again, this time musingly, almost to herself. After a moment of contemplation, her eyes lit up and she pointed at him and said, "Jack."
"J—Jack?"
She nodded. Her mouth opened and the silvery sound again poured forth. Though he wouldn't learn the word for it until much later, it was laughter. "Jack," she repeated once more, and pulled a flower from her long hair.
Lily held out the flower, and he took it, hesitantly. With a last smile at him, she rose to her feet and ran back to the clearing to join the others. He sat alone, in a daze, holding the flower she had given him as though it were the most precious thing he had ever seen in his life. He knew that she'd given him a name, something he'd never had before, but that didn't matter to him. The only word that mattered to him was her name.
When the revelers packed up and left the forest, that was the one truth he remembered, and the one truth he took home to a worried Mother Fox: that this strange girl who made the beautiful noise was the one thing in his world that really mattered.
Another sob tore through him. For the last ten years, Lily had been his life. She had been the voice in his ears and the smile in his eyes. Now that was all over. She didn't want him anymore. For her sake, he'd become a hero. He'd saved the unicorns, her life, and the world itself, and she'd just smiled and moved along to another man, to one who lived in her world.
A soft sigh rippled in his ears. "I did try to tell you, Jack..."
He didn't look up. "Go away, Oona. I—I—I want to be al—alone."
Oona's hand reached down to rest softly on his tousled head. "What are you going to do, my dearest?"
"Nothing," Jack said thickly. "Lie here and die."
"No!" the fairy exclaimed. "Don't give up hope! You could...come with me. We could be happy somewhere far away, you and me."
"She is my life, Oona. I can't be happy without her."
Though he did not see it, he could feel the fairy shudder. "You humans. You believe that there is only one for you, and if you lose them, you want to shrivel away and die."
Jack sniffled. "I love her."
"You will drive yourself mad."
"Probably."
A slender hand reached down and drew his chin up from the ground to look at her. Her blue eyes looked down at him tenderly. "If you had seen me first, Jack, you would love me."
"No," he said dully. "I am fated to love her."
"You are like a loyal wolfhound," the fairy said. "The first face that offers you kindness, the first hand that gives you warmth, you will follow her till the day you die, no matter how many times she kicks you to the ground."
"Isn't that what you're doing?" Jack asked with rare insight. "I don't love you, Oona. I love her. But you won't give up."
"She's moved on, Jack," Oona replied, ignoring his implications. "You were her childhood sweetheart, and now she wants to be a woman. Leave her and learn to be a man."
Jack opened his mouth to reply, but before the words emerged, a sudden cold wind blew through the forest, chilling them both to the bone. As they looked at each other in sudden alarm, a roaring noise built up in their ears, making their teeth chatter and their eyes water. Though neither could identify the noise immediately, they both realized what it was when they recognized the voice making it.
It was a scream, filled with more pain than either of them had ever heard. It stripped their souls bare, swung from their hair, filled their stomachs, left them on the ground gasping, eyes streaming tears, blinded and deafened.
When the scream subsided, they were both so disoriented, and their ears so filled with the echoes that it took them a few minutes to realize what was different.
The forest was quiet. Utterly quiet. No birds sang, no breeze rustled the leaves.
As Jack and Oona finally blinked the tears from their eyes and looked up, their faces were an equal study in horror.
All around them was death.
The trees were dead, stripped bare of leaves. The bushes were mere skeletons. The very living earth under their feet seemed to have turned to dust.
"What happened...?" Jack breathed, feeling as though his insides had been torn out. "What's—"
Oona's eyes were more frightened than Jack had ever seen them. When she finally spoke, it was a single word laden with dread. "Gump."
"Gump?" Jack asked, hoping he'd heard wrong. "What—what about Gump?"
"Something's happened to him," she replied, the panic in her voice growing. "Something—I don't know what—I need to go to him!"
"What should I...?"
"I don't know," she said shrilly, already distracted. "I'll come back if I can. Jack—Gump's in trouble. I have to go!"
His nod was barely perceptible, but it was enough. Faster than he'd seen before, she transformed, and raced off through the now-still land.
*******************************************************
Lily lay limp on the ground, feeling too weak to move. She didn't know what had happened; one moment, she'd been leaning against a tree, crying and trying to figure out what she should do, where she should go, who she should go to...and the next moment, the world had seemed to explode around her.
She'd been sent flying to the ground with a sharp cry as the inhuman sound vibrated through her body, ripping more tears from her burning eyes.
It was now quiet again, but she'd peeked through tear-spiked lashes when she could see once more, and viewing the desolation that now ravaged the forest around her, she closed her eyes again, hoping against hope that she was dreaming, that this whole day had been just one bad dream.
"It's not a dream," a deep voice whispered in her ears. "It's all real, My Lady."
Her voice was little more than a tired croak. "So it's you. I thought that you'd been rather quiet lately."
Darkness's laugh echoed in her ears. "Ah, lady, you are a delight."
"Whatever you've done, undo it."
"So stern, Lady? And so accusing, when in fact, I did not destroy the forest around you."
"Who else would have?"
"Now, now. You are quite clever enough to figure it out on your own."
"If you undo this, I'll... I'll give myself to you," she whispered.
The demon rumbled, sounding enormously self-satisfied. "You are despairing, Lady, and rightly so. However, I do not see why I should do anything for you when I will take you anyway, will you or no."
"Wouldn't you rather have a willing lady?" Lily asked, feeling as though her heart was dying inside her. "One who...who won't fight you?"
"If you did not fight me, Princess, I would not want you. I need no boring milksops who come when I call. You have hot blood in your veins," he hissed, sending shivers down her spine, despite herself.
"Just take me, damn you, and be done!" she cried despairingly. "Stop playing with me as though I were a morsel of food!"
She could almost hear him leering. "Whatever you have done, you have done of your own free will. You slept with that guard, escaped from the castle, hid from your devoted boy, and then betrayed him in front of his face. I did none of that. All it does is make me more determined to have you, you minx."
Though Lily didn't want to admit it, he was right. She wanted to scream that she hadn't meant to hurt anyone, that she had had the best intentions, but she had still done these things.
Painfully, she dragged herself to her feet, wanting to delay looking around her, but knowing that she could delay it no longer. I have to continue. I still have to try, at least. I need to go on...and I need to do it alone. I let myself get lazy because I had Connor, but I can do this. She stared at the mountains that were now no more than an hour's walk around. I have to do this. For Jack, and for Connor. And for... Lily shivered, standing alone in the dead forest. ...for...Gump.
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A/N: I know that this is a short chapter, so please forgive me for that. School's been keeping me really busy, and I don't even know where I found the energy to write this much today... Hopefully back soon!
~signpost