Ethereal Chronicles

Graveholt Castle stood in suffocating silence, entombed within the swollen embrace of a newborn woodland. Great oaks, ancient and immovable, barred the crumbling walls, preventing passage in or out. They devoured all sound and light, erasing the open fields and bright rivers that had existed only weeks before. The townspeople too had been digested, thanks to the foolish choice of a young royal named Alaric.

…

Alaric was, to all who knew him, the most handsome and sought after of the royal children. But even greater than his rank, it seemed, was his appetite for women.

It so happened that on a sweltering summer afternoon, as he rode through the bare fields between his home and neighbouring kingdom, he came across a young woman seated at the central river, submerging her legs in its cooling current. Her hair was a deep, burning red, spilling in a long fan across the grass behind her. Unable to resist the promise of such a chance encounter, Alaric dismounted his steed, intending to offer the well-practiced charms he had given so freely before.

“Fair maiden, what is your name?” he called, his voice breaking her from her daydream.

She did not answer. Rising to her feet, she cast him a single glance; brief, luminous and devastatingly beautiful. The look only deepened Alaric’s infatuation. Seeing that she meant to leave, he reached for her wrist as she passed, intending to ask again, but she slipped effortlessly from his grasp. By the time he steadied himself, she was gone, and he did not see her again that day.

Alaric encountered her a second time only a few days later, this time closer to the grounds of the castle. She sat upon the grass with a young fawn resting languidly in her lap, the small body rising and falling with quiet contentment. She stroked its soft fur, murmuring gentle words meant for its ears alone. Sunlight wove itself through the golden strands of her hair, and the curve of her smile left Alaric awestruck once again.

With little regard for the startled baby which sprang from her lap at his approach, Alaric called out to the maiden once more, blind to the disappointment that darkened her gaze as she looked from him to the unsteady creature fleeing across the grass.

He crouched before her, insistent. “Your name is all I ask,” he said. “Some small, kind word.”

As before, she offered no warmth in reply, simply rising to follow the fawn.

Irritation tightened Alaric’s chest, and he caught the cuff of her sleeve as she passed him. “I asked you a question,” he murmured, his voice losing its honeyed edge. “Unless you are some dumb, mute thing, you ought to answer me.”

To this, the girl raised a single brow. With a swift motion she snatched her arm from his grasp. Then, without so much as a backwards glance, she fled, as delicate and untouchable as the fawn which she had cradled.

Anger and rejection dampened Alaric’s awe, leaving behind a raw, starving lust. He swore that he would not suffer the maiden’s indifference a third time.

The following night, he stole from the castle under cover of darkness, wandering into the wild places which she seemed to favour. His steps carried him to the forest a little while from the town, and he pressed on until the trees grew so thick they drank the moonlight before it could touch the earth.

When doubt eventually began to settle, he accepted defeat, and resolved to return home. But before he could move, a faint trickle of water brushed against his hearing, soft whispers that beckoned to his left.

Just beyond a thicket of tangled thorns, visible only to those who searched with intent, lay a great lake. It shimmered with a stange, silvery radiance, as though lit from beneath the surface.

And in the shallow waters of the lake, the beautiful maiden danced, moving to music that he could not hear.

Alaric did not call out to her as he should have, but instead strode into the space. His boots shattered the lake’s sacred shimmer as ripples fractured the silver light. Before the maiden could retreat, he seized her by both arms, and brutally raped her.

Once it was done and Alaric, blind to his evil, fastened his garments, the woman finally spoke.

“A curse upon you,” she said, her voice resonant as it echoed across the water. “A curse upon you and your bloodline for what you have done.”

She spoke it with such terrible certainty that unease carved itself into Alaric’s stomach. For the first time that night, something colder than desire stirred in him. He turned from her without reply and left her, standing in the shallows.

Alaric did not speak of his crime. And he did not need to, because soon, the forest began to speak for him.

…

The next fortnight passed with a taste of filth in the air and the growing pressure of something vast and watchful. From the castle windows the forest loomed, darker, denser than ever before, and nearer than it had any right to be. It seemed that with each passing day, its ragged edges crept closer to the town.

At last it became unmistakably clear that the woodland had swollen to the outskirts of the kingdom. The night it reached the first row of homes was filled with splintered screams while great groans rolled through the darkness, as though the trees themselves had wrenched up their roots to take enormous, destructive steps.

The thunder of this ordeal roused the King and Queen from their beds, who clung to one another with the fear that some foreign army had laid seige to their kingdom. They did not understand that their enemy was far older than armies, and far less merciful.

When the King stepped into the open air of their balcony and peered into the night, he found no blaze of battle or clashing of steel. His eyes were met with nothing; no town sat before him, just a vast expanse of newborn forest, the trees hovering as though they had stood there for thousands of years.

This is how Graveholt Castle came to be so isolated.

Those who remained within the castle knew little beyond the terrifying truth that the forest had somehow swallowed the kingdom. And it had not yet ceased its growth, the strange, insatiable hunger creeping ever closer, inch by inch, towards the castle’s stone walls.

Prince Alaric, still blind to the full weight of his crime, gazed upon the trees with ignorance, dismissing the words of the half forgotten woman from his mind. But his conscience, unable to forget, kept him awake into the late hours of the night. From the darkness came faint, desperate pleas for reprieve, stretching from within the trees in distorted cries and commands for retribution.

When the forest’s roots pressed within mere meters of the castle walls, the King dispatched his finest soldiers to hold it back at dawn. Twenty-six men, led by their commander, ventured into the shadows of early morning, hands gripping their blades as they each took a tree and struck with all the strength they possessed.

It was slow work. The iron groaned against unyielding bark, which seemed to shudder and groan at every blow. When finally the skin began to give way, several men stumbled back, hollow-eyed and silent. For with every strike, the trees began to bleed thick, scarlet sap that bubbled and frothed as though from an open wound.

The commander, hardly able to believe his eyes, shifted closer to touch the crimson sap with a single finger before recoiling, retreating to lock himself away until further notice.

He did not leave his room for several days, not even at the urgent orders of the King as fear and desperation gnawed at the royal court. But the commander would not emerge, because the morning after he locked himself away he had awoken in a great deal of agony.

The sunlight had been blocked so harshly by the towering trees that his room remained plunged in near-total darkness. Fumbling for a candle, he lit it to examine the finger he had dared to touch, and gasped to himself. The flesh throbbed with a radiating, unnatural pain.

From the skin that had touched the tree sap, something brown pushed just above the surface. Clenching his teeth, the commander pressed and pulled, but the object only grew with each tug. What began as a splinter soon thickened and writhed, forcing him into a frenzied panic. He tore at the sore flesh around it, desperate to free himself from it, but the broken skin exposed a gnarled layer of bark. The more he ripped, the bloodier and more twisted the wooden layer became, until his entire arm was stripped bare and oozing, branded for his intrusion.

The King left the matter for one more day before he ordered the door to be forced open. Four heavy bashes shattered it, and as it fell to the ground a foul stench poured from the room. Some men stood frozen. Others turned and retched onto the floor, unable to look again.

Near the window where a splinter of light illuminated the patch in which he stood, was the commander’s body. Split down the middle, it made space for the bloodied trunk of a tree which erupted from his insides like a sprig from fertile soul, fused with his blood and entrails in an unholy, unnatural fashion.

Meanwhile Alaric’s mind frayed with mounting torment. In the passing days he began to see shadows of movement and whispers of presence. Most often it was her; the slight, familiar form of a woman flitting through the castle like a memory in flesh.

One night she came to his chambers, a vision of perfect beauty amid the surrounding chaos.

“Offer your life as retribution,” she said. “Do so, and this nightmare will end. No one else needs to die.”

“It is unfortunate what happened between us, but I will never submit to you.” Alaric spat at the ground before her.

She regarded him through glassy, unblinking eyes as a small, knowing smile touched her lips.

“You will,” she murmured, before her figure caught in the candlelight, and disappeared from sight.

One by one, the soldiers who had touched the cursed trees were discovered, no longer as human men but grotesque hybrids of flesh and wood. The commander’s room had been shattered by the monstrous tree born from his corpse, which tore through the roof and thrust its roots into the unwilling rooms below. The castle groaned beneath the relentless weight of oak after oak, which sprouted from littered corpses. Even those not infected by the forest were ending their own lives in a panic, which in turn gave rise to new growths.

After the death of his mother the Queen, Alaric sought the nymph one final time.

She appeared to him as he sat before his bed, his face streaked with tears, her gaze devoid of pity.

“Well?” she asked.

“Take me,” Alaric whispered.

Without a word, the wood nymph approached. Her lips met his in a kiss that sowed thorned roots into his heart, spreading through his veins and bones. Pain wracked him as arms and legs twisted and gave way to branches and leaves. When the transformation was complete, a lone, thorned rose bush stood in his place as a monument to his cruelty.

The castle never returned to its original state. It remained as it stood in a state half natural, half man-made, and entirely monstrous, under the domain of a new ruler, the nymph Queen.