Forest
of 
rot

They said in the forest, even the trees bled. That if you scraped away moss and ferns, you’d find fingernails in the trunks, and when it rained—as it usually did—the knots steamed out real breath.  

        To the north and south, the Cascades marched on. Dumb, unthinking rocks covered in trees like fur. No ghosts, no magic, no jawbones dug deep into bark. Not like here. Something split the flesh of these woods, and it festered. 

        Two towns out, they blamed bears for the screams. A few people tossed the word cult around hoping a human concept could absorb inhuman malice. Like they would be so lucky.   

        This story bloomed in roadside diners in the next town. It fell from nervous teenagers’ lips with a chuckle and a dare—to go, to see for yourself. Let the forest swallow you, let it nibble through your skin and lick the tendons off your bones. The magic of the forest made these promises to most who neared it—that it would take all who came for it, that it would devour them piecemeal. The dissonance rang through that valley and pushed the locals away, away, away. Nobody took up the dare. Nobody went near the forest.  

        Except for the ones it called.  

        The forest spoke in blood, and blood responded. It salivated power, and the hungry came. From the farthest seas and the most inhospitable mountains, from beneath every rock where predators dragged their prey, the way flies found flesh to lay their eggs, they came. For centuries, they had come. Hapless fools caught in a song and necromancers seeking power.  The hurricane of death magic that had grown up with the forest before living memory called them in. It nourished them. Whispered justifications to those in its bounds, reasons why the dead should walk, and it showed them how to make that happen if they didn’t already know.  

        How fortunate you are to live here, the forest would say. But only the strong survive. You must bless your mantle with blood.   

        To gain power was to take it. To take it was to kill. The magic would drive anyone insane, given enough time, but those who felt the call strong enough to make it to the forest were already half there. They wanted the madness. They made it their home.  

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Thirteen years ago, the forest called a couple in. It whispered to them of death and blood, and the couple rejoiced. They slit the throats of animals and used the forest’s magic to reanimate them, set them to work. When people who lived in the forest tried to take, the couple gave them new purpose in death. They drained the intruders’ magic just like those intruders were going to drains theirs. They watered their gardens with bile and bonemeal.  

        The young daughter they’d brought with them—who wasn’t called, who’d only felt the away, away, away when they’d stepped into the forest and every moment after—begged them to stop. She tried to appeal to the version of her parents she’d known the last six years, before the forest called them, warped them, took them. Those parents were gone. There was no outside, no before. Only here, and now, and what they had to do, and what the next collection of skull plates would bring. Every maggot was a butterfly to them.   

        So she watched. And listened, when she had to, when they forced her to. She absorbed their lessons. And she grew into the most unusual kind of flower in her new home: non-carnivorous.  

        Her name was Marigold. To the people she loved, it was Mags.  

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It went like this: 

        Mags started her days with a run through the trees, checking the wards she’d placed in rings rippling out from the cabin. Her breath mingled with the early mist as she cut her finger and smeared blood over a fading mark painted on a trunk. She thought of Mom and Dad doing the same thing years ago, before another necromancer killed and drained them. Wondered if she was doing it right, if tonight an undead monstrosity on spindly limbs would sneak through and murder her in her sleep. She wondered this every day.  

        In the three years since her parents died, Mags had learned predictability was her best defense in the forest. She ran the same paths, worked flesh from bone with the same knife, and traced the same melancholic ideas so deep into her brain, they shaped her dreams. Protect her clearing. Protect her cabin. Protect her little brother. Kill anything and everything that did not align with those missions.  

        The forest whispered to her day and night, begging her to take it further, to hunt rather than defend. She wanted to listen desperately.  

        But her memories reached beyond the forest. She had been a young child, once, showered in affection. She’d watched TV shows in smelly motel rooms while her family traveled across country. Fuzzy puppets giving lessons like be brave, be honest, be kind. Somewhere out there, the world worked that way, she thought. In town, people didn’t kill each other. Didn’t even think about it, as far as she could tell. She clung to that. She listened to those puppets in her head all day, because it was the only way she knew to block out the forest.  

        Under the canopy, she built up a sweat. Her scalp itched. She thought of her old braids and mourned their loss, but she couldn’t maintain long hair out here, not without her mom’s help.  

        She killed two squirrels and stuffed their corpses in a messenger bag stiff from blood and dirt. An undead raccoon she’d reanimated to keep watch gobbled the smaller squirrel so fast, she had to yank her fingers back to keep from being bit.  

        She glared into its cloudy eyes. Rotten flesh draped from its bones, consuming more magic than she got in return. A good necromancer could maintain a creature for a decade or more by feeding it flesh and power. This raccoon was barely three and already fading. And it had outlasted everything else she’d roused by far.  

        She pushed more of herself into it, dropping to her knees from the effort, and the beads of sweat on her forehead coalesced into a downpour. The raccoon skittered away once she finished. “Greedy jerk,” she muttered. The last trace of its magic faded into the trees, barely an ember in the darkness when she so desperately needed an inferno.  

        The wind left stinging welts on her cheeks by the time she made it back to the cabin. The wood held together on misplaced hope and rusted nails alone. She allowed herself this: two breaths out front. Be brave, be honest, be kind. A few moments with closed eyes, listening to nothing.  

        Some days shrieks split the air, signaling a conflict somewhere else. She spent those days shut inside, huddling with Shiloh and telling him it was a game, though he was too old for that now. Twelve, stubborn, and stronger than her by half. After so many hours, his fingers fused to her arm, and hers fused to the knife.  

        Today, though, it was silent.  

        For two breaths, she missed her parents. Missed the people they were before the forest called them, and missed the feeling they had given her—that everything would be okay, and that she didn’t have to be the one who made that happen.  

        She opened the door.  

        Shiloh sat on the bed. She breathed a sigh of relief, just as she did every time she saw him again after leaving.  The jeans and flannel she’d nicked from a thrift store a year ago rode up his forearms and legs, no match for his pre-teen growth spurt. He looked pristine, or as pristine as a boy growing up in the forest could be. Very few scars, and Mags wanted to keep it that way. When he put on the one clean outfit she kept stashed in a box for trips to town, he looked like any other Black kid in rural Washington—a little lanky, with close-cropped hair and a geeky smile, eyes so bright when he stepped into the sun, they shone like polished jasper.    

        Mags was a rough cut in comparison. The left half of her face drooped, craggy where it had been torn to shreds. It gave her words a whispery edge and dragged her smiles towards her throat. Her favorite maroon sweater was unraveling, and her jeans boasted almost as many scars as the legs underneath them. When she rode her bike to the closest town for supplies, the people there talked to her like she was older. And she nodded along with what they had to say, because in some ways, she was.  

        Shiloh looked older today, leg bouncing so fast it reminded her of the hummingbirds she sometimes saw in town. Not so much the ones here. By the time the forest called them in, they had only enough energy to die.  

        “What’s wrong?” Mags asked, her tone flat. She spoke hard when she was scared, like she could pick up the words and use them as a baseball bat if she had to. Shiloh bit his lip, and Mags tried softening. “What is it?” 

        “The mountain lion,” he said.  

        Mags fought the urge to clench her jaw. “Did it attack you?” 

        “No!” he rushed. “No, Mags, it’s dead.” 

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