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The woods had always held her heart, not with gentleness, but with the suffocating closeness of things both half-feared and half-adored. Their darkness unnerved her, their sounds unnamed and unnatural. Yet their density offered the only peace she had ever truly trusted, a shelter not born of comfort, but concealment.
The moss beneath her feet glowed green in every season, as if time held no dominion there. She thought that beautiful.
She had always sought beauty, even where it seemed misplaced or defiant. It was no accident, then, that forget-me-nots had become her favorite flower. They bloomed, unabashed, in the deepest, darkest reaches of the forest.
There came a day she returned, not to seek beauty, but to answer something far more merciless in its calling.
The summons arose from within, absolute and relentless. It was not longing but obligation. A quiet compulsion. She was to walk the woods again and gather what had once been hers: not in wholeness, but in pieces. Shards of a life that had shaped her when she had no say in the shaping.
And so the forest had waited.
It breathed in rot and rain and bark left to soften into soil. It whispered of things buried too long, Within its thickets moved the recollections she no longer dared to name, feral things with the shape of deer or nymphs or something wilder still, something that had once known her.
You would not have seen her, had you been watching. You might not have known she was there at all. But she wore red this time.
Not the red of affection or adornment. Not a color meant for romance. It was the red of something older, blood remembered after too many years asleep. The kind that does not stain clothing, but kinship. The kind that names a lineage.
Thorns caught at her dress without mercy, as though they meant to delay her. Branches clawed at her arms, not out of rage, but protection. Not for her but for what lay ahead.
And then, the hunters came.
She did not summon them, not truly. But when the memory surfaced, so did they, passing through the trees like an early fall wind.
They were men, though only just, cloaked in dusk, their faces veiled in bone and shadow. Not cruel, but joyous in that fevered way known only to those who have never questioned the righteousness of pursuit.
The dogs ran low to the ground, intoxicated by instinct, their pace precise and silent. Steel caught the dying light in the underbrush. The hooves did not thunder; they pulsed, a rhythm older than language, older than prayer.
They did not follow her, but what stirred because of her.
And though she had walked alone all her life, this path no longer answered to her tread. It belonged to them now, to the hunt, to the fire behind their eyes, to the instinct awakened not by her presence, but by the quiet inevitability of her return.
She had disturbed something long dormant, not the past itself, but the scent it leaves behind; not longing, but the old, metallic ache of blood remembered.
She wondered what the hunt might catch, whether it would be a young fawn, trembling in the underbrush, or some silvering stag, too wearied by years to run once more. And if it came upon her, would it blink up with wet, pleading eyes, or would it rise to meet her, silent, certain, and drag her, without sound or resistance, into that which has no name and never required one?
She could not say.
She knew only this:
To cross into memory is to loose the hounds.
To seek what shaped you is to summon what broke you. And what rises to meet you may not resemble the truth you hoped to find, but the truth that has waited to find you.
To reclaim what was once yours, you must first endure what it has become. And not all memories consent to return. Some flee. Some hide. Some leave their ribbons knotted tightly around your throat.
But the most ruinous recollections of all do not run at all. They rise from the thicket like a judgment long withheld, step into the clearing, and say nothing.
Because they do not need to.
You will know them, by the weight they carry, by the cost you once paid, and by the part of you they never gave back.
