Blackrot: a Twisted Fairytale

As the young man warmed his bones by the cottage’s stove, the elderly woodsman ladled two bowlfuls of porridge for them. Both their stomachs groaned in eager protest, but this unusually lean winter demanded that they ration what little they had.

“Are you sure I can’t convince you to stay, Cináed? Young folks shouldn’t be wandering out to the Blackrot, especially alone,” the woodsman said.

“I don’t have a choice,” Cináed said resolutely. “I must find them.”

“This is not your burden, Cináed,” the woodsman calmly explained, swirling his spoon through his porridge with his bony, rot-stained fingers. “They knew the risks, and they have paid the price of the Rot.”

Cináed stopped eating as his stomach turned. “But it is my burden, woodsman. You know as well as I do that this winter is harsher than most. The Thinwood has been stripped of anything edible and burnable. The Aldermen have considered ripping the last trees out by their roots if it means we last the winter.”

Cináed clenched his fist and held back a tear in his eye. “My father and several other men went into the Blackrot a week ago, each and every one of them capable foragers and huntsmen! They had hope that the wood could be redeemed! I can’t give up on them, I mustn’t give up on them.”

The woodsman shook his head, mashing his spoon in his porridge gloomily. “It was not hope, boy, it was desperation. Your father was far from the first -nor the last- to be lost to the Rot. Generations of foolish people have sacrificed themselves in the vain hope of restoring it… or using it. The Blackrot changes you, makes you a different man. Things dwell there among the whispering pines and sickened brambles that would make meat of the most hardened men. Take it from an old man who knows; an old man who has paid his price.”

The woodsman ran his sickly black fingers through his thinning hair. Black veins ran across his neck and shoulder like spiderwebs.

“I refuse to believe that. He's still alive, I know it,” said Cináed defiantly.

The woodsman stared into the young man’s eyes, tutting his head. “There is no dissuading you, boy?”

Cináed shook his head. “I must find him. I must bring them home. We need them… I need them… Will you help me?”

The woodsman sighed. “My days of exploring the Blackrot are long since gone. I am old, my body is stained with the black of years spent under its boughs. I am blessed to have survived my vocation for so long. But you are young, so you at least deserve a chance.”

The woodsman gingerly stood, refusing Cináed’s offer of help. He hobbled to a chest at the opposite end of the room and opened it. He reached inside and pulled out a small oil lantern and an ax. He carefully grabbed a flask of oil and filled the lantern.

All the while he spoke. “The Blackrot is a place of darkness, Cináed. The sun will never pierce its boughs. Things grow there, wicked things, creatures of such malice and contempt that even the sheer mention of them will drive men to tears. Every woodsman needs an ax, but a woodsman of the Blackrot needs his lantern even more. They fear it, you see, the fire…”

He handed the lantern to Cináed, placing his hand on his shoulder. This close, Cináed could see clearly that the woodsman’s eyes were both stark white and run through with dark veins. The pale orbs looked into his soul earnestly.

“... as long as you are within the wood, the lantern must remain lit! Promise me, Cináed! The lantern must never go out!”

Cináed steeled himself with a dry swallow. “I promise.”

The woodsman patted him on the cheek. “Good. Now be a good lad and finish your gruel. You’ll need your strength.”

The two finished their meal in the firelit silence of the cottage. Not a word more needed to be said between them, but each of their gazes held their own conviction. With a terse farewell, he thanked the woodsman for his hospitality and instruction. While his stomach was certainly quieter, Cináed’s mind raced as he trudged along the snow-dappled fields and fresh wooden stumps of the Thinwood, his eyes plastered on the dark overgrown expanse ahead. Clumps of eerie pine and gnarled oak jutted into the sky like grotesque sentinels, their trunks overrun by all manner of ivy and fungus. The ground beneath them was choked with dry, toothy brambles and ferns of unusual size. Despite what should have been a lush verdance, the forest ahead looked diseased, blackened and parched, rotted. Cináed took a deep brave breath as he forged ahead along the thin dirt path toward the forbidden wood.

Where the path met the boundary of the Blackrot, Cináed stopped. The sudden stench of fetid decay assaulted his nostrils. He turned and gave one last look to the village in the far distance, taking in one last merciful gulp of clean air. With a sigh, he stooped down and fumbled with the lantern on his pack. Slowly and methodically - and perhaps with a bit of well-deserved hesitation- he double-checked that the lantern’s oil reservoir was full before he lit a match. He gingerly lit the lantern’s wick, and watched as the tiny flame within flickered to life. Time was ticking and there was no turning back. He stood, closing his eyes, and laid a first step into the Blackrot.

Each and every step he took thereafter was anxious. He gripped the ax in one hand and the lantern in the other, the knuckles of both fists turning white. Above him, the tenebrous boughs of the Blackrot stole the sunlight from the woods below. Cináed knew it was morning, but the woods around him seemed bathed in perpetual twilight. Indeed, even a short way into the wood, it was becoming difficult to see beyond the glow of his lantern. Cináed followed the path before him, careful not to snag his trousers on the brambles and ivy that seemed to crawl ever closer over the trail. He swore he heard a twig snap.

“It’s just vines,” Cináed whispered to himself, “and the black wood. There is nothing to fear.”

Total silence was his response. Cináed cast wary glances to his periphery, turning the lantern about him as the fetid verdance of the Blackrot cast sinister shadows among the undergrowth. Clumps of parasitic vegetation and fungus clung to the trees in the mockery of birds, and tall bushes lurked at the edge of the lantern light as grim simulacra of fauna. Cináed was unnerved by the dark pantomime as the only voice in the forest was his. With a deep breath, he carefully willed his feet forward into the encroaching dark.

Cináed was not sure how long he walked for. With neither sun nor star, it was difficult to tell time by anything other than feeling. He felt that he had certainly been there less than a day, he could not imagine being lost here a week or more. In an effort to distract himself from his grim circumstance, he poured his effort into his search. He strained his eyes against the shadow in order to find any trace of his father or his fellow woodsmen. He found nothing.

But it was only when he stopped to gain his bearings that he realized he was utterly and hopelessly lost. As he spun back around, he realized the trail behind him was unfamiliar. The bend was in the wrong direction and the hillock from whence he came was now covered in mossy birch and bramble. Everything was wrong.

In a moment’s panic, he quickly stepped backward and heard the unmistakable crunch of glass beneath his boot. He looked down to see the shattered glass globe of an oil lantern, a lantern much like his own. It and its parent lantern laid at the feet of a massive tangle of thorny vine and fungus. There was something odd about it, he noticed, as he moved the lantern to better cover the bush in light. It was not a bush. There was the unmistakable brown of bone picked free from its flesh, human bone. There entrapped in the vine’s embrace was a whole articulated human skeleton, locked viciously in a pose evocative of sheer terror. Sprouting from between its jaws was a column white fanning oyster mushrooms, giving the grim impression of a solidified scream.

Cináed felt sick to his stomach. The bones appeared unsettlingly fresh, perhaps only after a couple weeks of decay. But that pose, that frozen moment of horror, it did not make sense how a man could be arrested in such a moment and covered by thorn and fungus that quick. Cináed was horrified and confused, but he did not have much time to ponder the situation before he heard a rustling behind him. He turned to face the sound, ax raised.

What he saw stole his breath and struck terror into his heart. Before him was the enormous skull of a red deer wrapped in sickly sweet-smelling flowering bramble, the thorny vines twisting and constricting the many tines of its antlers. Its brown skeleton hung inside a tight sheathe of black vines, fungus, and moss. Languid tendrils of bramble stretched off the beast towards Cináed, assaulting his nostrils with its fetid perfume. Cináed held his ax futilely above his head in shock as the deer thing loomed close; but as he swung his lantern around instinctively, the deer bounded away to the edge of the light and the tendrils retracted back into its rotting frame. Cináed was so shocked that the deer corpse moved that he fell backward over a root stretching across the path.

In that moment of terror, a realization hit his mind. He tucked into his fall just as the lantern was going to hit a rock jutting out of the dirt. He let out a pained cry as his shoulder struck the rock instead and the oil lamp was spared. He sat up in the dirt, watching as the rot deer stalked him from the edge of the shadow. The empty orbital sockets of the beast eyed him menacingly, hungrily. Cináed attempted to close his hand around the haft of his ax when he found only dirt and sharp glass. He winced as the glass bit his palm and spied an errant vine dragging his only weapon off into the forbidding undergrowth. Cináed’s other hand wrapped tighter around the lantern’s handle, keeping the beast in the light. It was then he realized what happened to the man behind him. His lantern went out.

Cináed steeled himself with a breath and plucked the glass from his palm. He took a moment to clean and dress his hand before regathering his things and holding the lantern tight to him. This was his only lifeline now. As the deer covered his only retreat, he forged ahead.

All along the winding trail, each step was fraught with new peril. Cináed regarded every tree and shadow with new suspicion. Indeed, some moved, and some whispered as languorous breezes rustled their boughs. Every minute or so, Cináed would swing the lantern behind him, never disappointed to see that the rot deer was never far behind. Whenever the trail forked, the deer was an ever present reminder he could not turn back. There was only forward, now.

After what felt like endless hours of walking, Cináed’s eyes struggled to adjust as light pierced the boughs above. Ahead was a clearing bathed in the light of day. Renewed hope filled Cináed as he bounded out into the field. The clearing was expansive. A shallow depression sloped downward into a meadow surrounded by the Blackrot. In its center was a hill crowned by a massive oak tree, its gargantuan roots framing a small cave from which a dulcet light glowed. Cináed could tell by the sunset sky that night was fast approaching. He gave the deer in the treeline one last glance before he trudged across the field and toward the cave. He could not rest out in the open with that thing watching.

The cave was warm and welcoming. Past the entryway, Cináed could stand comfortably in the airy space within. Will-o’-wisps fluttered high in the ceiling among the roots of the oak. At the far end of the room was a small spring, in front of which was knelt a young woman dressed in a black gown with her back to Cináed, weeping.

Cináed was shocked to see a woman there. He felt concerned for her, being the first living person he had seen since stepping foot into the malicious Blackrot. How long had she been here, he wondered.

He cleared his throat. “Excuse me, miss. Are you alright?”

The woman did not move at all except for a small upward tilt of her head.

“Why have you come?” She asked dejectedly through her tears.

“I am searching for my father,” he said. “He and his men came this way.”

The woman slowly quieted her weeping, bowing her head in contemplation. When she spoke again, her voice sounded sweet but hoarse, seemingly unpracticed. “You won’t find him. They’re all gone.”

Cináed swallowed dryly. “I refuse to believe that. I will find him. I won’t be alone, I can’t be…”

“Alone…” the woman repeated.

Cináed bowed his head. “You’re alone here, too?”

“Forever and always,” she replied.

Cináed slowly approached, sitting beside her with his lantern at his side. He noticed her dark hair framed red eyes and cheeks stained with sorrow. She could not have been much older than him by his reckoning. He felt he needed to be there.

“Well, you are alone no longer. I am Cináed.”

The woman looked up at him, her head tilted to the side. Her eyes were still glistening. “Darragh.”

Cináed smiled. “Darragh. You don’t have to be alone anymore. I am here now.”

“Not… alone?” She asked with eyes that seemed that they had forgotten everything except sorrow.

“Not alone, not anymore,” he said, a comforting smile upon his lips.

“Not alone… your lantern…” she said between careful breaths.

“Perhaps we could help each other…” he continued.

Darragh smiled. “Your lantern is out.”

“What?”

For a moment, the beauty and vigor returned to Darragh’s face, just before all the color drained from her eyes, turning them milky white. Black veins crawled across her skin that turned into rotting vines. A sorrowful smile lay plastered on her lips.

“Your lantern is out.”