Chapter 1 – The Child and Her Graveyard

The Child knew of only one wolf.

She never told anyone about him, and she didn’t know his name, nor did she know much about where he’d come from. In fact, at the age we come to meet her, Ignus had never actually seen the wolf, but she’d always known when he was near, though, like a telepathic tug of sorts.

The Child and the wolf both lived on The Farm.

The Farm itself was a dichotomy of light and dark; full of trees that could talk and animals that whispered secrets through the shadows of the night. There were places one could only pass-through during day light hours, and others that were so stagnant, so infested with darkness, that, even when the sun sat at the crown of the sky and its rays were at their strongest, the light of day was still unable to chase away the monsters that lurked there.

Child Ignus danced on the edges of such places, for the darkness was familiar to her. To the child, shadows weren’t things to be feared, they were portals; old friends, areas of unseen exploration that waited patiently to be uncovered, like lost souls that begged for warmth, for touch, for light and for love.  

The shadows saw the child in a similar light. They saw her love, her laughter, her joy and her compassion, and they wanted it all, they starved for it, so they’d weave their tendrils through her mind, they’d groan her name during the darkest hours of the night and make nests for themselves within her chest.

The child, so open and so pure, allowed them to do so, for she had not been taught how to give without self-sacrifice, had not been taught the true value of her light, had not been taught the art of growing loving thorns through the garden of her heart.   

So, as the years passed, the child’s footsteps grew heavier, her chest more twisted, and her insides started to rot.

It is here, at this point of suffering, that we meet young Ignus for the first time, and it is here I shall commence the telling of the story of when the child and the wolf made their first acquaintance.

Or so Ignus thought.

Unfortunately, it is not a cheery story. It is, in fact, mildly traumatic and entirely shrouded in shadows, but don’t fear, after the darkness comes the light…if we so choose it.

On the day of their supposed first meeting, Ignus stood at the start of a stretch of concrete road. Bedraggled strands of grass clawed up through its cracks, and the concrete was stained with patches of oil, making a scruffy patchwork of its face.

The end of the road disappeared down the gullet of a thick forest. The forest’s branches were always restless, constantly tickled by a phantom breeze. The shadows between the trunks of its trees seemed to move, and, as the child drew closer, they loomed up over head, arching round to close off the way that she’d come.

The Child knew that to take another step along the path would lead her across a threshold, and it would create something she’d be running from for the rest of her life, but the forest urged her on, and fate tugged gently at the end of an invisible string.

So, with the hands of the wind pushing against her shoulders, and the darkness of the Old-World tugging at her dress, the child took another step, and it was there where her story truly began.

Deep within the darkness of the forest, each step the child took moved her into deeper shadow. The forest grew still, no longer restless, as if its leaves were suspended by the hands of fate herself. Even the birds sat motionless, and they peered down at the child from their perches of twisted branches, their songs having all but ceased.

All was quiet. All was still.  

The child paused and glanced behind, but the path from where she’d come had all but disappeared.

“Forward it is.” The child whispered to herself, afraid but sure, as if she’d travelled that road before.

Onwards Ignus walked, and tried to peer further along the track as she went, but it had dissolved into the darkness. The tree trunks she passed morphed into twisted statues that formed haunted shapes, and their gnarled fingers grasped towards something they’d never reach, features frozen mid howl, mid agonised cry. The world around her became hollow, stale and stagnant. No wind moved the air; it was utterly still and dangled like a hanged man.

Something groaned from the depths of the darkness, a bereft, unearthly sound, and Ignus felt her heart kick up several notches, fear a twisted knot in her chest. She strained to hear through the thundering of her heart, but was rewarded with absolutely nothing.

The silence was swollen with it.

The forest robbed the child’s ability to hear first, then it blinded her, the light of the sun no longer able to penetrate such thick shadows. The darkness used Ignus’s blindness to play tricks on her eyes, and it taunted her mind.

Though the child saw nothing but shadows, one stood out more than the rest, for it was monstrous and hulking. It slipped between one trunk and the next, and, though she couldn’t pinpoint its form, the shadow left behind a path of darkness, thick as treacle. That darkness oozed into the foliage, like ink spreading through water.

Ignus had felt fear before, for it was something of a constant companion, something so familiar to her she wasn’t entirely sure how to exist without it. So it wasn’t fear that froze the child, it wasn’t fear that gave her pause for the first time on her journey, it was terror; the kind of stuff so cold it burned, the stuff that coiled like a pit of snakes in her gut, and made her legs hollow and breathing near impossible.

That kind of fear, that kind of terror almost sent her sprinting back the way she’d come.

But she didn’t.

Because that was the kind of child Ignus was.

“I am so afraid.” She whispered to the trees.

What of, my child?

They’d asked.

“I don’t know.” A pause. “Everything.” Came her reply.

The forest answered in the form of the shadow she’d seen earlier as it gathered its edges from the darkness; seven feet of hulking void, made of darkness and fear itself, skulking just out of sight, then slipping deeper into the undergrowth.

“Show yourself!” The child cried, for she knew the shadows held less power when they stepped out and into the light.

To her dismay, the shadow answered her call, raising the hairs on the back of her neck and turning her blood to ice.

The child felt it creep up behind her, hulking and monstrous. She heard its breath, rasping and hungry, and though she didn’t have the strength to turn and face it, the child knew it had taken on the form of a wolf, for the wolf had spent years skulking about the edges of her dreams, causing her to wake with a scream in her chest and sweat a cold coat upon on her skin.

She could recognise its presence blind, could feel it even when her back was turned.  

The child could do nothing but sink to her knees and crawl, for her legs had stopped working. She clawed her way through dirt and grime with her eyes squeezed shut and tears cold on her cheeks. All the while she prayed that the wolf would not follow, for she had forgotten that the shadows held no power when you face them.

A crawl turned to a desperate scamper, and from there she found her legs again, and broke into a sprint.

The child barrelled through thicket and scrub, not caring as branch after branch dove for her skin, snaring clumps of her hair and the fabric of her dress. Each breath became a dagger, but she kept on running; away from the wolf, and away from his terror.

Despite her desperation, the child was still wise enough to know the rules of the physical world did not apply to the forest. There was no use in trying to find direction, because once you entered the eldritch domain, it was up to the trees as to where they spat you out and swallowed you up again, so it was fortunate then, that the forest loved the child dearly, and it held her close to its leafy heart.

The wind urged her forwards, and the branches opened portals, guiding the child this way and that. They led her to the places where the shadows reluctantly gave way to a soft glowing green, to the spaces where the sun claimed a little more territory, trickling down through a rapidly thinning canopy.

Eventually, the child was spat out and into a clearing. Light exploded around her, and Ignus bent double, gulping down lungsful of air. With legs that were weak and trembling, the child tried her best to stand and take in her surroundings.

 She was in a vivid ocean of grasses and the air was decorated with the scent of wood fires, of the first dew drops in spring, and, maybe, just a hint of cinnamon.

Coincidentally, those were all Ignus’s favourite smells.

Fluffy creatures glanced up in her direction as the child attempted to still her trembling hands and slow her pounding heart.

“I am safe.” The child whispered to herself and turned to face the forest. “Thank you.”

A gust of warm wind brushed her cheek in response, and, with the imminent danger gone, Ignus realised how exhausted she’d become; running is a tiring process for someone with such little legs, and the clearing coaxed her down, down, down into its soft bed of grasses.

She flopped onto her back and caste her eyes to the sky.

There, in the refuge of her clearing, the clouds were a delicate shade of burnt orange.  

The child reached up towards the sky and pinched a tuft of cloud between her fingers. The cloud didn’t seem to mind relinquishing its spot in the sky, and it sparkled in her grasp. Ignus released it and let it drift back towards the blue. She watched as a bird trailed sparks and flames as it flew, dodging the small tendril of cloud on its path back to the sky. The creature was a phoenix bird, the child realised, and, until then, Ignus had only ever read about them in books, but there, the birds were in abundance.

Her father would consider them a pest, Ignus thought, and would shoot them out of the very air in which they soared.

Ignus had never really understood that; the human need to destroy beautiful things.

She heard something rustle close to where she lay, but the sound was far too tentative to be a wolf’s paw, so Ignus beamed when she turned and saw a small, fox-like creature meander its way towards her.

Ignus held her breath as the creature placed a tentative paw on her lap, eyes questioning, and when the child didn’t protest, nestled itself in the cradle of her dress. The Child tried to stay as still as she could so as not to frighten her confiding new friend.

It was a warm day, and the sun was a kiss upon her skin, the breeze a caress. Ignus stroked between the creatures’ eyes, and soon it was asleep. She smiled as the fox snored, its weight a heavy comfort in her lap.

Safety. That was what Ignus felt as she basked in the golden afternoon of her clearing. There, held by the emerald grasses and surrounded by a circle of trees, Ignus knew she was safe from the world, and as long as she could find a way back to her clearing, everything would be okay in the end.   

What the child was yet to learn, though, is that safety is something we create for ourselves, and it is not the same as comfort. Safety is the pause between breaths; it is the choice to seek peace instead of chaos. Safety is hard won; it is scavenged for with tooth and nail. Wars are fought for it, children slaughtered for it, and, as this child lay bathed in the scent of orange blossoms and cinnamon, the wolf prowled just beyond the clearing, weaving his shadowy path through darkness of her choices, watching, waiting.