Chapter Text
The forest has always been something that Catherine avoided.
The easiest explanation would be that it’s just something that never appealed to her, never caught her attention the way it seemed to draw her peers in. The concept of getting lost, especially in the winter, was also something that never particularly appealed to her for obvious reasons.
The small, rural logging town she’d grown up in was safe enough for her. She’d wake up, go about her day, and come home without anything more than a passing thought regarding the woods. Mainly centred around ‘I hope a deer doesn’t jump in front of my car’.
But there’s also an odd… alluring nature to the forest that pulls at her, pulls at everyone in this isolated town. It’s something instinctual, inexplicable, and a bit frightening, but seldom addressed. The only thing people say for certain is ‘don’t whistle at night’.
Catherine doesn’t put much weight on the words of muttering elderly folk smoking and rocking in their chairs on their rickety front porches, but even she avoids whistling at night.
People have vanished among the spruce and birch for years. And each time, some old geezer would nod solemnly and grumble about their one prevalent superstition. But this time, one of Catherine’s coworkers has vanished.
They were a younger person, some big-city punk newcomer named Dakota, who wanted a slower, more modest lifestyle. Apparently they’d been born on the Whiskeyjack Cree Reservation, a nearby settlement about half an hour out. After moving to the city for school, they’d come back and planned to settle into a lazy routine. But several days after starting their job, their car had been found dumped several miles north of town, along a gravel oil road.
Catherine’s fingernails bite into the steering wheel of her old Sunfire as she drives down the highway towards her family home. Whether it was yet another Indigenous disappearance that’ll be swept under the rug, or another incident in which the trees bared their flashing teeth, it’s a tragedy.
Wind whips at Catherine’s car as she fights to keep it steady on the icy road. Ghostly snakes of snow and debris dance over the pavement and black ice, and she has to squint and lower her speed. With a frustrated sigh, she concedes that early spring is indeed her least favorite time to drive, and that she might just ask to get put exclusively on day shifts so she doesn’t have to drive home at 5am.
The road curves, the ditches growing deep enough for pitch-black shadows to pool in their bellies. And when two gleaming eyes flash at her from the inky blackness, Catherine gently feathers the brakes in case a deer decides to pick the worst possible time to cross the highway.
When her car’s headlights hit the creature, however, her heart stutters in shock. All icy-road driving lessons forgotten, Catherine slams on the brakes. Her car swerves haphazardly side-to-side as she pulls onto the shoulder.
Heart racing, Catherine shifts into park and crawls over the console to clamber out of the car on the passenger’s side. The air isn’t as cold as it looks, and the wind isn’t nearly as biting. But something else sinks its teeth into her very soul—the sight of staggering human footprints in the ankle-deep, crunchy snow. She knew she’d seen someone.
Her mind flashes back to the details of what she’d seen—it looked like a grimacing man in a red jacket, shuddering in the ditch. He’d been clasping his left shoulder like it was injured, and hunched as if he were about to faint.
Wind brushes her hair away from her ears, whispering indecipherably.
A pained voice lilts from somewhere just inside the trees. “Help.”
Before Catherine can think much of it, she’s making her way into the forest. Pushing lashing branches and underbrush out of her way, she fights her way through the dense foliage after the footprints. Thorns poke through her jeans, leaving stinging pinpricks in their wake. But she doesn’t falter.
Something like the lack of inhibition brought by alcohol muddles her brain. Vaguely, she recognizes the sensation of someone grabbing her wrist and bringing her hand to her mouth.
Under the cotton fluff addling her mind, her conscience screams at her to fight against it. She knows nothing good happens to those who whistle in the woods at night. But she’s not in control, and the drunken haze of her brain forces her to do what she doesn’t want.
In a state of near-hypnosis, she whistles.
The second she does, the haze clears and she almost vomits. Eyes wide, she glances wildly around for anything that might’ve been drawn here by the whistle. Nothing.
That doesn’t mean she can rest easy.
Once again, a rattling gasp whispers through the trees. Catherine sets her lips in a line.
Damn her sympathetic nature. She continues following the footprints.
But the further she follows the tracks, the more that same odd haze starts to seep into her brain. And her panic seems to be almost completely non-existent.
Somewhere, under the fog that seems to be muddling her mind, Catherine knows that something is wrong here. Her body feels like it’s moving through water, her mind full of cotton, and she couldn’t stop even if she wanted to.
The sky’s just starting to go from black to deep blue, the tired slowly warming the earth, and Catherine finds herself approaching a half-frozen stream. A couple inches of water bubbles lazily through the snow, and it’s not hard to hop over it after the footprints.
The second she crosses the stream, however, she stops. Blinks a few times. She glances behind her to see that the path she’d broken through the forest has knit itself shut with alder branches again. Her own footprints, as well as the stranger’s, have vanished. But somehow, the alarm bells that should’ve been ringing in her mind remain silent. Or muffled, at the very least.
Turning back around, she continues following the footprints. Not much else to do, at this point. She doesn’t know where to go to return to her…
…did she drive here?
As Catherine walks, some details about herself, her past, become ever-foggier. Yet her worry remains muzzled.
What kind of car did she drive? A Civic? An Elantra? No, that doesn’t seem right.
A dull ache begins in her legs. She ignores it.
What did she do for work?
Cath…Cathy? Pushes aside a cluster of raspberry bushes. That’s her name, right?
She steps through the branches, and both her name and the confusion in her mind vanish. Before she can feel the terror of forgetting, her foot catches some loose terrain under the snow and she yelps, slipping down a steep incline towards a slough. Icy cold soaks her clothes as she hits the stagnant water, chilling her to the bone and leaving her teeth chattering.
She clambers out of the water, cursing all the way, and hugs herself on the bank. As she does, she becomes aware of something very, very off.
Her winter boots are left haphazardly in the snow on the side of the slough that she’d fallen in from. But her feet aren’t cold. Her jeans are also incredibly uncomfortable. She glances down.
Two cloven hooves and tawny animal legs are what await her.
She chokes back a scream, staggering back as though she can jump out of them. But they follow her as she slips and falls back in the snow.
“What the—” She starts, voice shaking.
“Ah, damn, I knew I smelled another one.” A strange voice sighs behind her in the dark.
She whips around, eyes wide, and catches sight of a red-haired woman dressed in a thick fur coat, just barely illuminated by the moon. At first glance, the woman seems to be nothing out of the ordinary. However, once the nameless woman gets a look, there’s a lot of both subtle and obvious things that put her on edge.
For one, the woman’s face is a little too long and angular to be considered average. Her blue eyes look more animal than human, and her mane of curly red hair seems to wreath her head and disappear beneath the collar of her coat as if it’s growing from her body as well. She starts towards Nameless with sympathy in her expression. And as she does, Nameless catches sight of a thick, red and white tail swaying behind her.
“I’m sorry you ended up here. But you’re not alone, you know?” The dog woman says softly, comfortingly, and extends a hand.
The back of her hands are covered in soft black fur, her joints and hands large and bony, and dull claws extend from where her nails should be. But Nameless takes her hand, desperate for some sort of explanation, and stammers, “Wh–what happened? I can’t remember anything, and now I’m… I’m like this.”
The woman’s smile fades slightly on her freckled face. “You’ve been bewitched by the forest, just like the rest of us. No matter how you try, you’ll never be able to escape it.”
Nameless swallows, fighting the urge to vomit. “That’s…. that’s insane, there’s no way that’s possible.”
The fox woman sighs, running a misshapen hand through her hair. “It’s… a lot. I’ll explain later, but for now, what name can you find for yourself?”
“I…” Nameless thinks for a moment, racking the archives of her brain until a word vaguely resembling a name makes itself known in her mind, “...I think I’m Pomni.”
The woman hums lightly, “That’s cute, honestly. Mine’s Raga.”
Pomni nods, but she’s completely drained of life.
What am I?
Her breathing quickens.
What happened?
“Thinking about it obsessively won’t help,” Raga sighs, “you can’t afford to panic right now.”
Whatever that means, Pomni doesn’t know. All she knows is that Raga is guiding her somewhere, and Pomni herself is absolutely freezing.
They follow the slough for a time before the water reaches its limits. Once they do, Raga and Pomni ascend the slope on the far end of the water and make their way deeper into the woods. It’s still dark, but just light enough to see the notches on the birch trees. The forest seems a little less hostile with Raga here, but Pomni can’t find it in herself to relax. Instead, she bites her lip until she tastes blood and tries to keep herself moving.
Eventually, their route seems to dip down again, and Raga glances back to ensure Pomni’s still following her. With a smile at Pomni, she continues on her way.
They push their way through a wall of brambles and emerge into a small, cozy clearing shielded from the sky by a tangle of branches overhead. A massively wide, dead tree with a rotting hole in its center towers off to the far left, and despite the season, multicolored flowers bloom on its leafy branches.
Raga steps into the hollow tree, which Pomni hesitates in front of momentarily. She glances back over her shoulder. Setting her mouth in a line, she turns back and steps through the hole.
As she does, something on her head bangs against the ceiling and she yelps. Reaching up, she finds what seem to be antlers crowning her head. And they’re tangled in the vines decorating the roof of the tunnel.
Cursing viciously under her breath, Pomni shakes her head and claws at the plants holding her hostage.
“Well, isn’t that funny as hell.” A male voice drawls from further down the tunnel.
Pomni grits her teeth. “Whoever you are, go away.”
“Hey, I’m just sayin’, it isn’t every day you see… What are you, some kinda deer girl? Yeah, some deer girl getting her antlers stuck in the ceiling.”
“Leave her alone, Jax.” Raga’s voice snaps moments before the fox woman approaches to help. “You good, Pomni?”
Pomni slips past Raga into a very warm, very large room. The walls are all carved wood and intricately-laid stone, and softly-glowing lanterns illuminate the space almost dreamily.
Pomni takes a breath. “Yeah.”
With a smile, Raga removes her coat and reveals that the mane Pomni had suspected of being there, is actually there. Red fur creeps down under the collar of Raga’s blue patchwork dress, and up her arms from the backs of her hands to the hems of her short sleeves.
As she hangs it on a wooden coat rack, Pomni turns to glance at the man who’d mocked her.
He’s somewhere between human and hare, with large ears atop his head and a flat human face split by a too-wide grin. Lavender-grey fur frames his face, and dark, shifty eyes peer at Pomni mischievously. He wears a furry-hooded parka over a purple-and-white shirt and overalls, and long, fluffy rabbit feet poke out from the matching rabbit legs hidden by his pants.
His grin seems to widen and he tilts his head slightly. “You whistled at night too, huh, Pomni?”