The Wildest Woods

by S. K Munt

  ‘This is it!’ the girl cried, sitting up and grinning at her followers while wearing a rhapsodic expression. ‘This is my lake! This is going to be our home!’

  ‘What?’ Martya Rice ambled towards her, and although your narrator and Cairo Kingslater remained frozen in place, like two stone gargoyles manning a gate, those that had had their hopes raised by Larkin’s powerful declaration dashed between them as they raced towards her, ignited by her enthusiasm and conviction regardless of the fact that there was no evidence to support her claims.

  ‘How could you know that?’ Lady Lucida demanded, picking up her skirts and huffing past, her dark eyes darting everywhere. ‘Surely you don’t believe that those ruins are liveable?’

  ‘No, but there was a grand building here once, which means the ground beneath it will probably support others!’ The snow-crusted angel got up off the ground, and your narrator smirked to see that her hood was now weighed down behind her graceful neck with ice. ‘There are areas cleared on the edges of the lakes that will be large enough to plant fields upon, unlike the other lakes that were forested to the water’s edge, and the water here must be fresh because look-’ she turned to the east and gestured to something indistinct that had caught her eye through the eastern range. ‘I see two or three smaller waterfalls over there, feeding in to this lake from those mountains!’ She turned around, holding up her hands to the range behind the frozen lake, snow raining out of her hood every time she moved suddenly, making a few people laugh. ‘So all we have to do is wait out the next few months until winter has passed and see if the summers here are moderate enough to support-’

  ‘Why wait for summer?’ a rich, familiar voice suddenly declared from between Cairo and your narrator, and just like that, Larkin froze with her back to them all. ‘When you have made me almost powerful enough to bring summer to you?’

  Their leader’s arms were still upraised, but the flame of the torch had dipped and started sparking, and her knuckles were white around the rod with tension, telling them all that she didn’t need to turn around to know whom had just addressed her. Telling them-us- that she really, really didn’t want to turn around; period.

  I’m not ready for this… the girl’s thoughts were staticky as she tried to summon the strength required to turn and face her mother. Am I? Oh god… oh God…

  Your narrator had frozen too, and what could only be described as a hot shiver ran through him as he turned to face the pirate captain, but found himself staring across at Satan’s lovely profile instead. He didn’t know how she had appeared or how long she’d been standing there for, but he did manage to witness seeing Bastien Birch flicker- no morph- into view beside her, taking form from fog before resting a hand on her bare shoulder, above the ribbon-trimmed edge of her Victorian-style gown before whispering:

  ‘You always have to make a grand entrance, don’t you? Just to scare the heck out of everyone?’

  Satan lifted her nose, but her eyes danced with amusement. ‘I’ll not be judged by a man that just literally sparkled into sight, Raphael.’

  ‘Bastien.’

  ‘My point was made, regardless of which of your aliases I made it to,’ Satan sniffed gently, and Bastien surprised your narrator by rolling his eyes, which was even more out of character for him than his daughter’s gleeful prancing had been.

  A hush had fallen over everyone else though- a hush so complete that the mind-reading Nephilim boy could not hear the thoughts of the children through it. But as though they all shared the same reflexes and thoughts, The Sequestered and the pirates turned as one, gravitating to look toward the devil like water being pulled to the moon. Even those at the very back of the pack had seen and heard her, and it was then that your narrator realised that although Satan was standing directly beside him and within earshot of her daughter, Martya, Bastien and Kingslater, her voice had resonated across the valley with equalised pitch and clarity- as omnipresent as the woman herself was.

  And as beautiful. Satan’s hair was coiled in onyx springs that bounced with every step that she took, and gleamed with so much health that each curl reflected the light of the snow, giving it the illusion of being constructed from dark glass rather than fibres. Her skin was radiant, firm and plump, not pale but tawny and dewy, and her lips and cheeks flushed with blood and heat. Her body was more ‘womanly’ than her daughter’s was, and one could see by the way that she carried herself that she was proud of her stature, and rightfully so. Her pale green gown hugged an ample backside and full hips but had been tapered in a mermaid shape to emphasise how slender her waist and her long legs were, and her delicate, glittering heels made them look even longer. She was almost six feet tall and willowy, but because her shoulders were so broad, her full breasts seemed to cover a bewildering amount of space.

  Wow... your narrator thought, wiping snowflakes off his eyelashes so that he could see her more clearly, and with a curved smile, Satan tilted her face so that she could invite him into her hypnotic gaze without actually tearing her eyes off her daughter in order to do it.

  ‘Why, thank you Samuel McIntyre of the ill-fated seas…’ she sent the words into his head, and they were painless but weighed down with meaning. ‘You’re pretty easy on the eye yourself…’

  A turbulent mix of excitement and dread bubbled through your narrator when he realised that Satan had heard everything that he’d said or thought about her during that journey, despite the fact that she hadn’t given any clue that she was strong enough to listen in while hibernating in Hell at all. He tried to think of something clever and charming to say in self defence, but before he could, Satan’s daughter spun around again, torch carving an arced path of bright golden light through that foggy grey air, and just like that, Satan’s focus shifted again, zeroing in on her only living child in a heartbeat and leaving the mind-reader feeling relieved.

  ‘You can do that?’ Satan’s daughter demanded, bypassing any sort of salutation or pleasantries in favour of pushing forward. ‘Melt some of the ice away?’

  ‘We can do that,’ Satan said, and although her breath did not mist in the air like everybody else’s did, the snow beneath her feet began to melt away with every step that she took, so that by the time she was only a few feet from Larkin, she was standing on an emerald carpet of thick, lush grass that looked like a streak of paint across that bleak landscape. People oohed and ahhed, but Satan’s daughter’s eyes did not budge from her mother’s eyes as she closed in on her. ‘I could transform this entire area into a summery paradise that was twice as beautiful as the original Eden, and the palace that replaced it ever was! But only if you work with me, darling,’ she came to a halt a few feet away from her daughter and then lifted her hand with the grace of a dancer before extending it to her, ‘only if you take my hand, and compliment my abilities with yours.’

  The golden angel looked down at the hand, then up at her mother, but did not take it, and a few people winced in offence. ‘Why do you still need that kind of help? I’ve done everything you asked me too, haven’t I? Sam has sworn to me that they have all started believing in you!’

  ‘You have, and I am thrilled with the progress you have made, especially with The Sequestered.’ She turned slowly then, looking to where the pirates had grouped together and were gaping at her, and her perfect nose wrinkled a little. She looked back at her child. ‘But the size of a miracle that I can perform is completely and utterly dependent on the faith of those demanding one, and the strength of those willing to help,’ Satan said softly, looking around more. ‘I have seen your projected fantasies of what this area might look like as a paradise in your mind, but your imagination is so great that it surpasses what I am capable of at this time, especially while the pirates remain so horrified by my arrival. If you want a more temperate climate, less snow and flowing freshwater, I can provide that easily enough. But if you want all of it…well, you’re going to prove that you trust me enough to lend a hand, by taking mine.’

  ‘How can you doubt my trust i
n you?’ the girl asked, looking incredulous. ‘I have marched these poor people to the end of the earth for you! What of that?’

  ‘You complied with my terms because you didn’t have any other ideas!’ Satan protested, ‘and because you didn’t think that you had anything left to lose!’

  ‘Perhaps that was the case in the beginning, but that has changed!’ her daughter cried. ‘I genuinely want to help them now, and I genuinely believe that you are the one that they need to start praying to!’

  ‘But what about your prayers, daughter of mine?’ Satan demanded. ‘What about how many times you’ve thought: ‘Oh God help me!’ over these past few days?’ She shook her head as Larkin cringed. ‘You’ve spent the last few days leading these people yes, and you have thanked me for every time you’ve believed that I have intervened... but you denied me first, making it clear that you didn’t know how you felt about any of this, least of all, me! And in addition to that, you’ve spent the majority of your journey trying to think of a way to help these people without involving me at all!’ Larkin’s pale face flushed. ‘That’s not infallible faith, is it? That’s grasping at straws! Had God offered up one, how do I know you wouldn’t have given him your hand and without hesitation?’

  ‘I would not take God’s hand any faster than I would yours! I hate him for not having offered one before now, and my feathers are proof of that!’ the girl snapped, and her father blanched. ‘But I will not be chastised for doubting you and your intentions, either! Perhaps you have a perfect course chartered in mind for me to navigate my life along- but you had another one in mind before I was born too, and look how that plan turned out!’

  ‘It turned out better than you can currently conceive of, but although I understand that you cannot step outside of yourself for long enough to see that right now, you have to understand that you cannot blame me for the choices that you made that steered you off course!’ her mother returned. ‘Isn’t it just like a human to demand free will, and then cry foul when exercising it gets them into trouble?’

  ‘Isn’t it just like a deity to claim responsibility for every stroke of good fortune and happiness that a human experiences, but shirk the responsibility of all the unfortunate consequences while labelling it ‘fate’?’ the girl retorted back, and everybody shrank back a little leaving your narrator, the Shepherd, the pirate captain, the hunter and the academic girl on the inside ring, while the twin Nephilim sisters jostled their way through to their leader with shining eyes. ‘How can you praise my intelligence, but then condemn me for not questioning your motives?’

  ‘I don’t! I’m just telling you that I need you to shelve your fears and smarts right now and exercise faith in me instead, because only once it’s provided to me, can I meet your needs in return!’ Satan stepped forward more and rested her hand on Larkin’s, the one that was holding the torch and we all gasped as a flume of fire erupted from it, shooting some twenty metres high into the sky. ‘I know all that you fear child, and I understand why you fear it- but you have to understand that I fear it too!’

  ‘You fear what, exactly?’ Larkin’s voice was cracked and brittle, and suddenly I could see past her stiff upper lip, and to the vulnerable tremble in her lip beneath it again. ‘Failure? Being stuck in Hell forever? Disappointing a whole bunch of people that are dependent on you? Trust me- I get how that feels!’

  ‘No! I fear proving to God and all of his followers that they were right to distrust me! Of proving how much better off the world was, because I was stripped from it! Of proving that blighting me off the face of the earth was a fair punishment for one minute’s lapse in judgement, despite how many millions of minutes I’d lived piously for before then-’ Satan’s voice cracked, but she whirled around to face us all. ‘Yes, I want control of the earth, but I’ve only wanted that since God made it clear that Heaven was his priority, and earth was the afterthought that he never finished! But this world and the people on it are my highest priorities- I can finish what God started when he envisioned the perfection of the human race, I know it!’ Satan held out her hands helplessly as she spun back to face her child. ‘But I cannot do that unless you believe I can, don’t you see? So tell me that you believe in me! Tell me, and I will make it so!’ She rested both of her hands on top of Larkin’s where she was still gripping the torch, eyes velvet, voice hoarse as she whispered: ‘Tell me that you believe that the name Satan is one that could be rejoiced one day rather than reviled, my angel, believe it, and it will be done!’

  The girl swallowed hard, and then shook her head, but then looked around quickly before looking back to her mother and asked: ‘I’m standing here, aren’t I, mother? As Larkin Aztaroth- the girl that has given you every drop of faith that she has left, and has taken your name though she is still too afraid of herself to offer her hand?’ Her throat moved as she swallowed hard. ‘My faith might not be substantial right now- but it is all yours, and never will be God’s if you watch over these people as both you and God ought to have watched over me from the beginning!’

  ‘You’ll forgive me?’ Satan asked hoarsely. ‘If I give you all you dream of now, will you forgive me for all the ways that I have failed you?’

  Her daughter swallowed hard. ‘I will, so long as it’s understood that I will only allow bygones to become bygones, mother.’

  Satan made a small noise then, almost like a sob, and your narrator saw her rest more of her weight on Larkin’s hands as she bowed her head to the snow. The pirates and the refugees began to whisper around him, as amazed as he was to see that the devil had just been somewhat flattened by a kind word and such a lukewarm declaration, but he did not take his eyes off Satan, which was how he was able to see the single, significant tear slip down Satan’s face, roll off her jaw and then fall to the snow. Not a bloody tear- a crystal one! As pure as a human’s, and almost impossible for someone without a soul to produce!

  Your narrator did not see where the tear landed, but he heard the hiss of its gentle impact, and then suddenly, a ripple, not unlike that created by a pebble being thrown into a great lake- began to cause the snow to shiver and roll back from that spot, revealing more green grass beneath, as thick and luxurious as Satan’s showy path had been but on a much grander scale. There were gasps as the snow retracted from where that tear had burned through the ice, peeling back slowly and gradually to reveal more and more land, but the shivering substance dissolved as it shifted, not accumulating the way a watery wave would, but becoming one with the low mist before that began to withdraw from the devil’s reach too.

  The whispering sound became an excited one then, especially when the chill in the air- that frigidity that had been inescapable for so long- began to recede in tandem with the snow and mist, and when that bloom of green passed under your narrator’s feet, he was rendered breathless by the sensation of heat and warmth that rose up from the earth beneath it. He spun, as so many others did, turning to watch the winter retreat from the valley, and brought his hands to his mouth to muffle a moan of astonishment when he saw the trees shiver, thicken, become brighter as what looked like morning light swept across the plain that we were standing on and illuminated first the foothills, then the forests, then the mountain tops that encircled them, making your narrator’s breath catch in his throat.

  Devil be with you! Where is all of that cold going?

  The devil is with you, Satan shot into your narrator’s head then, and dear ol’ Calliel is about to have the wildest, most hard-earned winter in history!

  Your narrator would have laughed, but he didn’t even want to blink lest he should miss even one second of the miracle that he was obligated to record, so all he managed was a crooked smile as he twisted to look back the way they had come, to where the river was defrosting. Everyone had been astounded to see hints of green and gold in the last valley, but people began to sob with joy as every colour that mother nature had in her palette began to emerge from those fields, grasses, plains and eventually, the sky. When the clouds and mists had rec
eded enough for it to be revealed above them, your narrator grinned to see that it was not powder blue or even blackened by night, but streaked with wisps of amaranth, gold, treacle and lemon- a testament to the fact that sunset had only just commenced even though it had felt like night had been falling all day.

  Wildflowers began to shoot up out of the earth and bloom around clusters of rocks next, and then, just as the scents that were suddenly surrounded them started to invade your narrator’s senses, making him feel dizzy and overwhelmed, he heard a telling crashing sound and spun to the right to see a flume of water start whooshing over the lip of the mountain ridge not far from where they stood before fresh, white water began to tumble over the mountain, taking a path that it had worn in the past, but had not utilised in an age.

  ‘A waterfall!’ someone cried in delight, as someone else exclaimed over flowers. ‘A running one! My…. Goodness!’

  No one had said a word up until then, but the moment those first exclamations broke the ice, a dozen others began to shout out in chaotic chorus and your narrator turned back to face his friend, grinning like a damned fool. But Satan’s daughter had turned in the opposite direction to watch winter’s retreat… and was now clutching her heart with one hand and covering her mouth with the other as the ice coating the lake dissolved before her entranced eyes, leaving brilliant, turquoise water behind.

  It’s happening! She thought. Everything I imagined of paradise is coming to life, and it’s all because of Satan!

  No, your narrator said to her, moving forward in the hopes of basking in her delight, the likes of which he would never feel again until he had his soul. It’s all because of you, don’t you see? Your faith in her worth holds more weight than that of one hundred others’ combined!